It took a couple seasons, but here's the first of the blatant House knockoffs. Take an underutilized character actor, have him play an incredibly skilled, but socially maladjusted professional - instant hit. The only problem with this approach is that it depends almost entirely on the actor. Hugh Laurie is almost good enough to offset whatever other missteps the show makes (note the word "almost" - the back-to-back arcs featuring Chi McBride and Sela Ward were enough to drive me away), but the same cannot be said for, say, Jeff Goldblum (whose House-knockoff we'll review closer to air date).

Fortunately, the producers of Shark had the good sense to cast James Woods. I'm sure there are other who don't like James Woods as much as I do, but I'm willing to watch James Woods in just about anything as long as he's an asshole and berating people. Fortunately, a significant portion of Shark involved an assholic Woods berating his staff.

The premise is kind of flimsy. Woods (whose character is, in fact, named Shark) starts off as a high-priced defense attourney who suffers a crisis of conscience when he gets a very guilty client off on a spousal abuse charge, after which said client kills off his wife. After a little wallowing, he ends up running an elite unit of the Los Angeles' District Attourney's office working with high profile media cases. Which is to say, the legal equivalent of House's elite unit of diagnosticians.

What's really impressive is that this show is virtually the same in its "behind the scenes of high-profile media cases" as Justice, which completely failed to hold my interest in any way. Maybe I'm just easily entertained, but having some James Woods to fall back on makes even a trite legal drama enjoyable.

Topics: dramas, television

Did anyone else read Alas, Babylon when they were in jr. high? I'm pretty sure that was one of the books I selected at random during the semester when I got sent to the library instead of having to go to gym class, and that book both terrified and delighted me. It was written back in the day when nuclear war was more likely to simply decimate urban populations (as opposed to the global annihilation I grew up with) and depicted a small Florida town cut off from the outside world by nuclear war. As one might expect, things get bad pretty quickly (although they do become less racist, so I suppose that's a plus).

As a socially awkward (and largely misanthropic) teen, I was very fond of any of the "survivors of global apocalypse" books like The Stand) (which, I suppose, led nicely into the teenage draw towards apocalyptic zombie flicks). That combined with ongoing fear of nuclear holocaust made Alas, Babylon a pretty cirtical element of my adolesence.

All of which goes a long way towards explaining why I have high hopes for Jericho despite a severely flawed pilot. Granted, the pilot has a lot of ground to cover, so it's perhaps reasonable that things are strained a little bit. It's got to introduce Skeet Ulrich (the prodigal son of the family), his family, an ex-girlfriend, the local police department, assorted townspeople, and a bus full of schoolkids. And then introduce a nuclear war and the first rounds of local panic.

As a result the show's a little overstuffed and resorts to some sort of hamfisted narrative twists to cram everything in in forty-eight minutes. That said, it's certainly got some nice casting elements to recommend it. Skeet remains about the same as he always is - a slightly lethargic version of Johnny Depp. Gerald McRaney continues his Deadwood-intiated work on eradicating his Major Dad image with a nice bit as town mayor. Shoshannah Stern seems to have transitioned off of Weeds to do this, which was perhaps a bad decision show-quality-wise, but it's nice to see her getting work. On the less positive side, the show features Sprague Grayden, whose arrival on Joan of Arcadia signalled the rapid decay of that once-good show. I'm not sure whether to blame her for it, but the temptation is strong. Hopefully, she'll be able to redeem herself here.

Rating: B (Worth watching if you like nuclear war)

Topics: television

Let's get the basic stuff out of the way quickly. I don't really like Aaron Sorkin's previous shows. I know this is heresy to serious TV snobs, but Sports Night did nothing for me. I really tried very hard to watch West Wing since our friend Peter James Smith was a semi-regular, but I just couldn't do it. I'm not sure if it's his "snappy" dialogue that turns me off or his general resistance to plot, but his shows just bug me.

That said, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip wasn't that bad. The cast (who I was predisposed to dislike, since it contained such dreadful screen presences as Amanda Peet and D. L. Hughley) actually worked reasonably well together, and almost everyone seemed to handle the patter reasonably well. Plus, it's got Carlos Jacott and Evan Handler in smaller roles (who have built up a significant reserve of goodwill in my book from their work in assorted Noah Baumbach films and It's Like, You Know... respectively), so that's always a plus.

What really bothered me about the pilot, however, was the insertion of Sorkin-related transcontextual information into the main character of Matt Albie (played by Matthew Perry). The main thrust of the pilot centers on Albie being forced to return to television, since a long-running drug problem and recent positive test for drugs made it impossible for him to get insured to work on a feature film. Now, not only does this plot hinge on a fairly obscure element of film financing, but it seems to explicitly identify Albie as Sorkin (both being a high-profile TV writer who was run off a show after a high-profile drug bust and has been unable to make a transition into feature films).

Which would be fine if the pilot episode didn't contain dozens of lines stating, without qualification, just how talented Albie is. Once we get the outright identification of the Albie character with Sorkin (who is writing this script, remember), the repeated insistences of his own brilliance get a little hard to take. And now, a month or so after watching the pilot, all I'm left with is the idea of Sorkin, bitter and possibly fueled by crack, hammering away at his beloved Macintosh with line after line about just how brilliant he truly is.

Topics: television