Resident Alien Review (SyFy)

A pretty stereotypical alien (Alan Tyduk) crashes in Colorado and is diverted from his original plan of destroying the Earth. In the opening scene, he kills doctor Harry Vanderspiegle and morphs his unseemly-looking body (closely resembling 1950s serials) into an alien. His plan? Patiently wait it out in Vanderspiegle's isolated cabin while retrieving the parts needed to repair his ship. He even watches Law and Order for months on end to learn English in case he needs to interact with anyone. 

The glitch? Because Vanderspiegle was a doctor, he's summoned for an emergency forensic call when the local doctor gets murdered and he has to fill in. Before long, he is forced to take up the position full-time (until a new doctor can be hired) and must survive social interaction with the locals while trying to cover his tracks for murder and fixing his original ship. Also on his to do list: Show up on time for work and blow up the Earth.

More than anything else, Harry resembles Chance from the novel 1979 film "Being There" in that he's a complete blank slate. One couple with marital issues thinks that he's not a murderous alien but rather a key to saving their marriage, the mayor (one half of the aforementioned couple) thinks he's a trusted therapist, the nurse takes him to be a trusted friend, a libidinous bartender looking for Mr. Right thinks it could be him and the lost goes on. 

Even Vanderspiegle's ex-wife doesn't realize her ex-husband is much different in character and wants to give their marriage another chance. The mystery over whether he is moved by his new friendships and encounters with the humans of Patience, Colorado enough to not destroy humanity? This is a question that keeps us wanting because Harry's character arc is as rough as sandpaper. There's a great use of the unreliable narrator trope in that his words are frequently juxtaposed with his actions on camera. Similar to the way the characters in Patience might see him, he's not particularly easy to gauge. 

The show takes a few episodes to pick up but it has a really strong expanded universe and takes on a number of issues with admirable subtlety There's a Native American nurse (Sara Tomko) who touches upon First Nations issues (her father is played by Gary Farmer who is from the Cayuga nation); a former Olympian (Alice Wetterlund) who has battled the depression that often comes when an athletic career at the highest levels comes to a close; and a lonely sheriff (Corey Reynolds) who learns to appreciate his (Elizabeth Bowen) deputy the way one would a significant other. There's also a couple (Levi Fisher and Meredith Garrelson) that has marital issues that are played with impressively subtle tones. Their marriage is portrayed with such nuance that the audience sees it the way a friend might see a crumbling marriage from the outside. 

Most importantly, the show is never limited by its science fiction roots. It aims to entertain on a deeper level.

The Romanoffs Review

Getting into a good anthology show can be satisfying but also undermine the reason I want to use my time budget on TV instead of movies or other forms of passive entertainment. Television is an opportunity to follow a story as it unfolds over several distinct episodes. Instead, an anthology with little strain of connection can feel like I’m watching a lot of abridged movies without the satisfaction of being able to tally it up towards the list of films I watched (I’m a film nerd like that, don’t judge). In short, even if a series has state-of-the-art storytelling, it’s the connective tissue that makes an anthology feel worthwhile.

“The Romanoffs” tells a series of extremely long vignettes of disparate parties who are related to one another through shared lineage to the famed Romanoff dynasty.  One of the keys to this connectivue tissue is the very en vogue idea of white privilege expanded to look at a sort of aristocratic privilege that intersects with history in a very interesting way as it relates to the Romanoff family.

The Romanovs (Weiner chose to name the substitute the "ff" in place of the "v" to connote phoniness) were gunned down at the end of the Bolshevik revolution in uncertain enough terms that many people (most notably Anastasia) have claimed to be descendants of the royal family. In an interview, Weiner discussed the show as one "about people who used to be great."

He expands a little more:

In a weird way, it used to be completely untraceable and you could brag your way into a kind of status, especially in the United States, where there is no royalty.

There was a guy who ran a restaurant here in Los Angeles called Romanoffs, which was a big Hollywood hangout, and he claimed to be related to the family but was not. There are 200,000 people in Russia alone who have this last name. It’s not like everyone in the family was killed that day, but the number of people who claim to be from this family and the number of people who actually are is a bit disparate. But we all have that when we go looking for our roots, right? The things these stories have in common is that they’re about inheritance and adoption—am I special, am I adopted. 

In one of the episodes the false allure of dynasty is treated literally: Andrew Rannells plays a shifty piano teacher who, in fact, steals the Romanoff story from one of his clients.

The individual stories are pretty unacceptably long (see previous complaint about not wanting to watch full-length movies that don’t count as full-length movies) but they are all uniformly of a very high caliber so far and that’s very hard to pull off. None of them rely on soft comedy (of the kind that creates so much categorization confusion at the Golden Globes). They all hook you very early on with conflict that’s easily readable but elusive enough to elicit curiosity and draws you in through a loose foreshadowing. 

If the episodes start off strong, their undoing is often their ending. It was initially tempting to write that this series is similar to the “Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror” in that the stories rely on twists but there’s quite a range here. The first three episodes play out well along those parameters with sharp turns at the end that shape the meaning of the story and justify the decisions to stick it out to the end. After, that, however, we have an episode with Amanda Peete that feels like the natural conclusion to the story. The Radha Mitchell episode set in Mexico City ends on a bit of a fourth wall break as a number of historical figures march across the plaza like "Chariots of Fire." It seems like in this case, that there was a void where the twist should have gone.  The Andrew Rannells story (one that is often cited as the worst episode of the series), the twist is a moral step backwards and leaves us with a sense of dissonance as it fades to the credits. The last episode I saw (with Kathyn Hahn) didn’t have as much of a twist so much as but a visual cue (the husband making eye contact with the unfortunate baby they rejected for adoption) is a potent image that allows us to foreshadow what’s to come.

As someone who’s seen very little “Mad Men”, I’m struck by the power of the story telling both on the script and in the visual language. The running times are unacceptably long which strained nearly every story but there’s a worthy seed of ambition in nearly every episode. The only outliar on the ambition front is the Amanda Peete episode where a stressed-out single mother mulls over whether or not to reveal her true birth father to her daughter. The episode has a great sense of tense energy for such a mundane set of events, but it seems like the sole outliar in terms of being about something bigger.

One of the great ways to interact with the show is to look for the historic easter eggs. Here are two great guides by Refinery29 and The Week,

"Documentary Now!" Review through Season 2 Episode 5

Documentaries are generally a pretty esoteric cinematic experience and co-creator Fred Armisen's comedy is also pretty esoteric. As a result putting those together is going to lead to something that's not easy to appreciate or particularly funny every time out of the gate.

While the premise's novelty-- re-imagining popular documentaries with a comic bent -- was enough to get it through the first season, the show usually sinks or swims based on how funny the episode is.
With the exception of Michael Moore, Spike Lee, Morgan Spurlock, or Werner Herzog, very few documentaries have ever surfaced to the national consciousness. As a result, many viewers (including myself) are not going to go to know of the original source either, so the comedy often has to stand on its own in a way that most direct parodies don't.

Despite these challenges, co-producers Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers and BIll Hader do an admirable job of working comic magic out of wayward references.

"The Town, A Gangster, a Festival" approaches the brilliance of Christopher Guest's films (what I'm sure is an influence on these guys) in terms of attention to detail. A whole world is colored in by oodles and oodles of funny characters. This should cater to the wheelhouse of a writing staff-- all SNL alumni  -- where creating characters who can display a memorable quirk within a minute or two of screen time is a prerequisite.

Without the advantage of the large ensemble format, the show faces a harder challenge with generally only two people front and center. The show can sometimes work brilliance here but some episodes have also fallen flat. Among the most brilliant entries are "Kunuk Now" and "Globesman" as both are hilarious based on stand-alone comic characters and broad reference(the primitive Eskimo in the former, the 1950s image of masculinity and the corporate salesman in the latter) rather than a specific cinematic style. "Kunuk Now" tells the story of a kooky producer who jumps production in Alaska and an intellectually-challenged Eskimo who single-handedly creates all our modern ideas of cinematography. "Globesman" takes the squeaky clean image of the 1950's and turns it into a portrait of sheer obnoxiousness.

Among the other episodes that work somewhat well, "The Blue Jean Committee" is an exaggerated character portrait of two men whose lives have gone in opposite directions since fame. It distinguishes itself by being perhaps the only episode in the series with sentimental value (the final hug between the two tugged at my heart strings). Armisen is a music obsessive and his effort falls flat in the similarly themed second season episode "Test Pattern" which feels derivative: It mines similar nuances of "Blue Jean Committee" in mining similar nuances of concert culture without giving us a reason to care.

"Dronez" also roughly works without any source material as it provides a never-ending supply of dumb people and juxtaposes them with an incredibly dangerous situation.

Others like "Juan Likes Rice and Beans" and "The War Room" are middling: They work based on the hyper-specific which will vary. In the case of the former, I saw "Jiro Likes Sushi" which helped me enjoy it at a fuller level.

The rest of the episodes, including the series premiere, fall painfully flat based on hyper-specificity. But that's the risk one takes when they follow their passion and there's a lot to admire by how often they succeed..

Modern Family: Phil's Sexy Sexy House

Though it's still reliably watchable and well-made, it's hard to make the case that Modern Family is still innovating enough in its seventh season to be rightfully called great TV. It's not a knock because the show is doing exactly what it was designed to do:  Produce consistent and interchangeable episodes so that it can make a killing in syndication. 

At this point, it's rare for Modern Family to surprise us but this was certainly one such episode for a couple reasons: 1) The show's deft handling of Hailey and Andy and 2) the classic comedy of errors plot that was elevated by a very game Phil Dunphy at its center.

Steve Levitan and company smartly decided in the first season not to shoehorn the extended Dunphy-Pritchett-Delgado-Tucker clan into every plot because it wasn't realistic, but the advantage of numbers can make a comedy of errors like "Phil's Sexy Sexy House" stronger.

Make no mistake: "Phil's Sexy Sexy House" isn't really a team effort. Mitch and Cam are acting as typical as ever, Sexy Claire has been done in this exact capacity before, Luke (hallelujah: the writers have given him a beer plot rather than a girl plot) is forgettable, and Alex's plot is such an afterthought we never even see them sneak into the house.

Instead, all these characters just add to the absurdity of Phil's aloofness. Seven seasons in, Phil Dunphy is an extremely durable comic character. Ty Burrell's commitment to the character's aloofness and his endless pursuit of dork-related activity rachets his presence up to eleven. 

As far as Andy and Hailey were concerned, Adam DeVine is underappreciated for the convincingly endearing brand of dorkiness with which he infuses Andy. For Hailey, it's a creepy case of "like father like love interest" but for a popular girl who was started out on the shallower end of adolescent TV characters, her relationship with Andy has been a tangible source of growth which is why their relationship has had a surprising amount of meat and bones.

Hailey and Andy make a "mistake" here but the episode provides enough wiggle room to make it a lapse in judgment as far as the future is concerned. The show has so far managed to portray a missed connection here with real-world grounding. The emotional and logistical costs of cancelling an engagement that is already in progress, is portrayed through Andy's explanation that his love has strengthened for Beth once he decided he was engaged to her. It sounds like an open doorway to a runaway groom scenario but it's also a sensible explanation and one hopes that the show doesn't abandon that practical middle ground. 

The other ploys didn't really do much. I really had no idea what Jay and Gloria were doing and I didnt care. Manny has had so many love interests at this point, he's cycling through girls with the speed of a Seinfeld character and he's not even halfway through high school. Just think: There must be a well over a dozen girls at his high school who can form a club based on romantic contact with Manny. Considering he's not the dreamiest guy in his class, how many romantic options can there be left for the guy? Can we at least get one of the old girls back?

About a Boy pilot review

Nick Hornby, the author filmic inspiration (if you're not a book reader*) of "High Fidelity" "Fever Pitch" and "About a Boy" is like a wittier 21st century version of Douglas Sirk. Most of his characters seem to exist unapolagetically outside conventional society. We have people on suicide watch ("Long Way Down"), late bloomers whose idiosyncratic obsessions take the place of normal relationships ("High Fidelity" and "Fever Pitch") and "About a Boy" which is about a guy whose life exists entirely in terms of leisure and running mundane errands as shown in this clip from the 2002 filmic adaptation:

He lives off the royalties of a song his dad wrote so he never meaningfully earned any income and sees human relationships in curiously absent ways. He has some interest in dating and makes the admittedly foolish mistake of thinking single mothers are low-effort and high-reward. His plan to meet single mothers backfires when his first date results in a hanger-on and her son who get the whole gang in trouble on an outing to the park. Although his dating scheme is foiled, he ends up  forming an unconventional but meaningful friendship with the 11-year-old kid and that's how we have our titular story.

The American TV adaptation's pilot features most of the movie and book's plot in the opening episode which is somewhat of a necessity and not much of a concern because there's a lot more fun to be had. David Walton plays the lead and it's disappointing that he doesn't present us with a character significantly different from his California sun-dried womanizer in "Bent." Hugh Grant is by no means a great actor but he bought a sort of aimless whimsical charm to the role. In the film (and book) his lies to the eventual love interestish character about his child were fairly minimal and he makes an honest effort top backtrack on his lies. Walton is unapologetic and, frankly, quite sleazy. There's no middle ground in terms of whether to root for or against him. 

The degree to which the character (ok I'm just going to look it up) Will contributes to society is also changed here. Instead of the son of a song writer who sits around collecting royalties, Will at some point did something to earn money himself. He's a musician who's suffering from the dismantlement of his band but wrote a hit song once and lives on the royalties. The con about this is that as an ex-musician Will is considerably more cliched whereas Hugh Grant's Will was truly a unique creation. On the other hand, this scenario provides something more for Will to strive for in terms of his maturation: Reclaiming his friends and former band mates in addition to the regular sitcomey stuff (dating, career, etc.).

One clear strength of the TV show is the relationship between Fiona and Will which was relatively unexplored in the film. Toni Collette is a highly underrated gem who always brings something to whatever film she's in but she was underused in the 2002 film. Minnie Driver, one of those actresses who was famous some time ago but you can't remember if they're even still alive, has the potential for a great career reinvention here with a solid character role on TV. 

As for Dakota, the object of Will's desire in the first episode, she was only intended as a plot device to get Will and Markus together but it might be interested to see her pop up again. I certainly wouldn't wish to see a romantic relationship blossom between the two but I'd want to see her pop up at some inopportune moment and make his life miserable.

It's hard to say if it's going to be a good show, but the source material is good enough that it's worth sticking around.

*I'm really not a book reader. I just like Nick Hornby novels

Bunheads and TV History's Biggest 2nd Episode Curveball

Bunheads caught my attention because it was free on itunes. At first glance, it looked female-centered and slightly tween-oriented. I initially thought this wasn't too far off from the Gilmore Girls demographic which wasn't my cup of tea.  [Ed. update: It turns out show runner Amy Sherman also created Gilmore Girls]

But, again, it was free and the female lead was somewhat charming as Brett's love interest on Flight of the Concords. 

Good thing I jumped at the beat, because I found the show to be surprisingly interesting.  It's one of those love stories where the girl finds the boy repulsive at first but is gradually won over. Only in this case, this all happens within the first two acts and the girl already drunkenly married the guy before she got around to being convinced he was right for her.  

The girl in this case (Sutton Foster) is Michelle. She's a Vegas showgirl who once aspired to be a dancer. The guy is the wonderful Alan Ruck. It is rare to have a series where a couple falls in love after they get married and that's an interesting twist. It also helps that Alan Ruck and Sutton Foster are able leads and sold the moments.  

Following a great pilot episode, we fast-forward to Episode 2 and 

ALAN RUCK DIES!!!

What?!

What were they thinking?? For one, I have trouble buying a coincidence of the magnitude that a woman marries someone who dies the next day. For another, the pilot introduces the premise of the show. If you get anyone on board your show enough to want to tune into week 2, how can you then destroy the entire premise and make it a different show without risking losing that audience? Lastly, this is triply bad because it was a good premise they initially had, Alan Ruck is a great actor, and his character was a good character. I could see them killing off the romantic comedy equivalent of a red-shirt ensign but Alan Ruck?? 

And one episode in? Could they not have waited a few more episodes? Killing off a character can be a very unexpected twist, but not Episode 2. It would have made a good season finale, for example. 

The focus shifts to a sort of small-town comedy a la "Northern Exposure" or "Local Hero" and is also about a woman finding herself. The relationship shifts to Michelle and a mother-in-law played by Kelly Bishop who are strangely bonded by legal circumstances and the sharing of a loved one for 24 hours. The show also centers around four perky high school girls who are ballet students of the mother-in-law. Some of the show's most entertaining moments come from the quartet because they have such clashing personalities but they are practically glued to the hip. I'm not sure why but I think co-dependent pseudo-families of people are at the center of good TV (see It's Always Sunny, Cheers).

As is, the show still works past Episode Two but I maintain it's a bad move and would have been a better show. 

Misfits

Oh, the disappointment in watching a highly-regarded program just to get in on the cultural zeitgeist and discovering said show hits me the wrong way. I watched three and a half episodes from the first season of Misfits which is a pretty sufficient amount of time to decide you hate the show and don’t want to see it again.

Is the show awful and everyone’s* blind to it? Am I the one that’s off?

Misfits is one of the pioneers in the trend of content distributed through an online TV-watching platform.

The show is supposed to be in the vein of a superhero-genre-meets-ordinary-world show akin to Heroes. The superheroes, in this case, are five juvenile delinquents in the UK and the show is set during their period of community service.

The superheroes, however, are not just unusually ordinary. Their adolescent angst is in full force and some of them might easily be classified as depressed. Watch people brood over what they see as a bleak existence is generally not something that will appeal to your average TV viewer looking for some escapist fare. However, this perhaps more honest approach has been done well a few times before (I’m thinking “Weeds” as the moderately good example and “Party Down” as the holy grail of this subgenre).

In most cases, however, depressed characters don’t bring a profound realism. In this case, the characters aren’t just depressed. They are depressing to watch. Not to mention, somewhat bland and unremarkable: I’d be hard-pressed to argue that the five characters are more substantive or well-rounded than your average one-hour CW drama.

I could see how the characters might have been intended to be more. Simon, the shy one, spends all his time brooding about what must be something significant, but the hints of something greater never manifested into anything interesting in what I saw. Similarly, Nathan the loud and obnoxious one, is occasionally fun but mostly just obnoxious and loud (I’d give Nathan's obnoxious/funny ratio a 95/5 split and that’s still generous).

Lastly, if I haven’t written much about the superhero aspect of the show, it’s because it doesn’t dominate much of the screen time. Characteristic of the UK version of The Office, the show doesn’t center around people doing work so much as sitting around on talking when they’re supposed to be on the clock. Again, this tends to work better with interesting characters and interesting conversations.

With the Incredibles, Heroes, Watchmen, and Sky High playing on the Disney Channel every other week, simply deconstructing the Superhero genre is nothing novel anymore. One needs to have good characters and this show isn’t it.

Once Upon a Time....

“Once Upon a Time” is an interesting show to watch in a vacuum (what I call watching a TV show or a movie without having read any reviews, reading commentary, or internet message boards). So many questions are popping up that I can’t turn to the convenience of the internet for: Does Regina know that she’s an evil queen? So the bail bondswoman’s stated reason for being in town is to stalk the kid she gave up for adoption ten years ago against her mother’s wishes? Is that the crazy guy from Prison Break as the town sheriff?

ON TO THE REVIEW:

Once Upon a Time is a show about the residents of modern-day Storybrooke, Maine, who previously inhabited the world of familiar fairy tales before being banished by the evil queen from the Snow White story.

In the modern-day world, that evil queen goes by the name of Regina Mills (Lana Parrilla) and she is the town's mayor. The narrative is complex and highly confusing which is due to the fact that the plot is dictated almost entirely by Regina's 10-year old adopted son, Henry. The other characters all have amnesia and somehow he is the only one to have figured this all out.

Thus, the story is told from two conflicting perspectives and that's a very interesting scenario that the show delivers on. From the point of view of everyone else, Henry is a troubled child with a big imagination and from the POV of Henry, these are lost fairy tale characters who haven't figured out their true identity.

Because Once Upon a Time jumps back and forth between Storybrooke and the actual fairy tale world (I'd estimate the screentime is split 70-30 between the two universes with Maine getting the 70%), the show is on the side of Henry and we know it's only a matter of time before the rest of the town starts seeing things from his point of view. This is the central conflict and that's reinforced by Henry's belief that the characters will all be happy when they discover their true nature. Thus, it's a show of characters awakening to their true nature and works on that level.

This also makes Henry the guy who's always right. He's also a giant exposition machine. The person who he's doing most of his expositioning to is Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison). Swan is a cynical 30-something bounty hunter who discovers in the pilot episode that she is Henry's birth mother.

Emma's a key figure in the story, but the reasons that she impulsively uproots from Boston to Storybrooke after the pilot episode aren't particularly well hashed out. There's not really a strong case for why she's there. Emma's concerned that Regina doesn't have her son's best interests at heart but, then again Regina doesn't want her to take an active role in the kid's life ten years later and Emma has no rights to do otherwise. It's a good thing the show's fantasy, because if we looked at Emma's rationale from a realistic ethical or legal standpoint, we might not really be on her side at all.

Regina is eventually revealed to be somewhat malignant, but the show starts off with some genuine thematic confusion as we're left wondering why we should be behind a woman who voluntarily gave up her kid in a closed adoption process, and is now upending everyone's life on a hunch that the boy's adopted mother isn't all she seems. This is made iffier by the fact that Emma reconnecting with her son is one of the key conflicts in the story. If you can discount the clunky set-up (the key to enjoying much of this show), it's not such a bad story either).

Besides, the pilot at least establishes Emma's motivation, although somewhat weakly. The "why" of what Emma's doing in Storybrooke, is more of a "Why not?". One of Emma's key characters traits is that she's being rootless and having close to no support system (she's adopted herself).

The show's biggest strength is that it works both as an overarcing storyline, and as a series of entertaining one-off episodes. The fairytale land sequences are having diminishing returns with me for each episode, but it frames the story well.