Movie Box Review

Here's some welcome if unsurprising news:  F/X has renewed JUSTIFIED for a 4th season.  The show, now at the midpoint of Season 3 (the finale airs April 10) drew a 0.9 last week in 18-49s, which isn't Walking Dead crazy high, but is still a very solid number for a scripted cable series (outscoring such prominent shows as Royal Pains and Psych), and up a bit from last year.  

While the show isn't quite at last season's creative level--replacing a spectacular villain like Margo Martindale's Mags Bennett is no easy task--Justified is still one of the smartest, most entertaining crime shows on the air, with terrific lead performances from Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins as his sometimes homicidal frenemy Boyd Crowder.  It would be too bad, though, if the recent news that Natalie Zea (who plays Raylan's ex- and sometimes not-so-ex-wife) has taken a network pilot means she'll be bolting the show.  Luckily, with cable production schedules being what they are, that's not necessarily inevitable.

FX's Elmore Leonard-inspired crime drama JUSTIFIED really hit its stride in its second season last year, and now it's back, trying to build on that very solid success.

WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  The redoubtable Mags Bennett (Emmy-winner Margo Martindale) has gone to her grave, and so has her corrupt sheriff son.  (Her other son, the more psychotic Dickie (Jeremy Davies), is in jail.)  Along the way, Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and his ex-girlfriend Ava (Joelle Crowder), who's now married to Raylan's frenemy Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), were both shot.  Boyd intended to kill Dickie for shooting Ava, but Raylan arrested Dickie instead.   Also, Raylan's ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea), with whom he's back together on an unmarried basis, is pregnant.

WHERE WE ARE:  Justified is in no rush to jump into its third chapter, and the season premiere, written by series creator Graham Yost and Fred Golan, and directed by Michael Dinner, eases its way in, serving mostly to introduce a new set of villains.  They're led by Robert Quaries (Neal McDonough), a smooth but ruthless representative of the Detroit Mafia who sees opportunities in Raylan's part of Kentucky.  Also on hand is Fletcher "Ice Pick" Nix (Desmond Harrington, from Dexter), who has his own version of the kind of game Javier Bardem liked to play in No Country For Old Men.  And at least temporarily, old bad guy Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns) is part of the black-hat team.  

A crime show that manages to find a truly great villain sometimes dispatches the character at its own peril--just look at Dexter, which has spent 2 seasons trying to recover from the loss of John Lithgow's chilling Trinity--and few villains in recent years have been as terrifying and nuanced as Martindale's Mags Bennett.  (The next show to face this challenge will be the Gus Fring-less Breaking Bad.)  At first glance, Quaries seems like a much more standard piece of bad-guyery, all expensive suit and corporate-type strategy despite his hidden pistol; a representative of the 1% rather than Mags' 99%.  But Justified has earned every benefit of the doubt, so we'll see if he develops some shading.

More promising is the down-home story.  The show has taken the interesting tack of having Raylan come back from his shooting a little less than his best, and even though we know in the end he'll come through, it has the effect of making him warier and more vulnerable than he's been before.  Meanwhile, Boyd has already manipulated himself into a position to take revenge on Dickie Bennett (the fact that Raylan didn't see that coming is another sign that he's not the man he used to be), and Ava has proven herself an extremely worthy surrogate for Boyd during his jailhouse absence.

Justified is a great sleeper of a show, demonstrating weekly that a rural setting and genre storyline don't preclude incisive writing or smart plotting, and its ensemble cast has some of the best chemistry on television. It's a pleasure to welcome Raylan and company back.

Possibly because the Golden Globes take place in much less proximity to the Emmys than they do to the Oscars, and thus aren't the crucial part of network gamesplaying that they are for the movie studios, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's TV awards have always tended to be more adventurous and genuine than the ones they give to movies.

The Downton award was cause for celebration, as were the 2 major wins that Showtime's HOMELAND took for Drama and Best Drama Actress, to the spectacular Claire Danes.  Ditto for the universally lauded Peter Dinklage from GAME OF THRONES.  

Most of the other acting awards celebrated shows that are more uneven, but the performances themselves are beyond reproach:  Matt LeBlanc's wry work as "himself" in Showtime's EPISODES, Jessica Lange's campy yet fully-committed turn in FX's wacky AMERICAN HORROR STORY, Idris Elba's riveting dark homicide detective in BBCAmerica's LUTHER, Kate Winslet's superbly textured portrayal of HBO's MILDRED PIERCE, and Kelsey Grammer as the uncompromisingly grim antihero of Starz's BOSS.  HBO's ENLIGHTENED and Laura Dern's lead role are acquired tastes that this viewer hasn't acquired, but one has to respect both the work and HFPA's willingness to honor it.

One question, though;  does anyone know what NBC will be airing the night after the Super Bowl?  After watching tonight's telecast for 3 hours, I find myself completely unaware of what they may have on tap.  Just wondering...

THE LEAGUE is no longer the best sitcom on TV that no one's ever heard of.  The show has become consistently, increasingly popular, so much so that it's no longer riding in the ratings on the coat-tails of its FX lead-in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.  League's numbers in the 18-49 demo are up around 30% from last year, and it's already been renewed for a 4th season.

This is a happy development, as The League remains one of the rudest, funniest shows on TV.  It's a combination of 3 different comedy subgenres:  the Seinfeld/Curb Your Enthusiasm cleverness of multiple, seemingly random storylines that manage to converge by the end of the half-hour (Jeff Schaefer, who created the show with his wife Jackie Marcus Schaeffer, is a Seinfeld/Curb veteran), the Judd Apatow school of "giving shit to your buddies" humor (Seth Rogen even showed up as a guest-star this season), and the improvisational mumblecore style of indie film (cast regulars Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton--also married to one another--are writer/directors of indies like The Puffy Chair, Cyrus and The Freebie as well as actors).

The League rotates around the yearly travails of a fantasy football league, and although recent episodes have

moved far afield from that topic (including the season's highlight, a Thanksgiving episode featuring Jeff Goldblum and Sarah Silverman that may have been the filthiest, funniest half-hour ever to air on TV without any serious four-letter words or nudity), the 1-hour season finale, written by the Schaefers, returned to the main storyline, which is as always the battle among the friends to win the Shiva trophy and avoid the dreaded loser's Sacko and the year of constant humiliation that comes with it.  In the course of the hour, the scandal of the league's fraudulent draft finally came to light thanks to Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi)'s daughter's class project, Ruxin (Nick Kroll) suffered a minor and quickly-healed stroke, Kevin scored some meaningful victories, and best of all, Ruxin's sociopathic brother-in-law Rafi (Jason Mantzoukas) made an appearance to attempt a mercy-killing on Ruxin, repeatedly threaten Andre (Paul Scheer) with knife violence and make several seductive moves on Ruxin's unimpressed nurse.  Unfortunately, there was no further news on Taco (Jon Lajoie)'s plan for Neckflix, which would send subscribers (stolen) ties to allow for an endless rotation of neckwear, and actually didn't sound like such a bad idea.

The League has a lot of funny writing and/or improvising (a great little scene in the finale had Taco insisting that Ruxin take a business dinner--which he used as a verb--with him to discuss his insane "business" TacoCorp, leading to a splended foray into the kind of trendy restaurant where you eat in the dark--complete with night-vision goggles), but more than anything it's a showcase for its wildly talented cast, who make the nastiest, most scheming, insulting and downright awful of friendships seem very close to lovable, with Aselton's Jenny--Kevin's wife and a member of the League--maybe the most underappreciated female lead on television.  The show sometimes struggles to work in its product placements (Bud Light, anyone?), as well as its football-related cameos, but those become part of the joke as well. 

The arrival of football season is always welcome, but not least in recent times because it means The League is back on the air.  It's great to see that this little-show-that-could, as it turns out, really can.

When you watched the tableau of the all-dead Harmon family in the season finale of AMERICAN HORROR STORY merrily trimming the tree while a Christmas carol played in the background, did you think "Oh boy, I can't wait to see what terrors await them next season!"  Or "How long will Violet really resist the charms of her psychopathic mass-murderer beau?"  Well, dream on, because we've seen the last of the Harmons and their Murder House.

Horror honcho Ryan Murphy revealed today that next season (and in each succeeding season), the entire plotline, location and set of characters will be changed, so we'll be in an entirely new haunted locale.  (Supposedly there's a clue as to where Season 2 will take place somewhere in the last 3 episodes of this past season.)  It's possible that a few original cast members will show up in Horror 2.0, but if they do, they'll be playing different characters, with no relation to the ones they played this season.

It's an unusual move that basically requires the show to relaunch every season, with the title and general theme of spookiness in the US the only returning elements.  But it promises to keep the show fresh-- and how many more residents of Murder House could we have watched, anyway?  

Murphy says details of Season 2 will be announced in February,.

You have to give AMERICAN HORROR STORY the credit of its crazy, crazy convictions.  Ryan Murphy and his gang of producers followed through on where the last few episodes appeared to be going, and the result will be a second season presumably very different from its first.

It didn't take long for the picturesquely titled season finale "Afterbirth," written by Supervising Producer Jessica Sharzer and directed by house helmer/Co-EP Bradley Buecker, to eliminate the last living adult member of the Harmon clan, as Dylan McDermott's paterfamilias Ben was hung from the second-story landing in a fake suicide engineered by dead and ever-more-bitter ex-girlfriend Hayden.  (Incidentally, given Kate Mara in this series and her sister Rooney in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a helpful piece of advice would be to avoid pissing off any of the Mara girls.)  

The systematic deaths of the show's protagonists, however, was not the bleak conclusion one might have expected it to be.  On the contrary, the episode then segued into a deranged variation on Beetlejuice, as the "good ghosts," led by the Harmons, helped out the new owners by scaring them out of the house before they could suffer any lasting damage.  Since no one was actually getting hurt, this was all quite funny, especially when Ben and Vivien both slaughtered each other, practically winking as they said--quite honestly--"You can't imagine how long I've wanted to do this."  (I hate to ask a question that might require something to make sense, but just where the hell did dead Vivien get that cello?  Surely the Harmons' belongings were cleared out of the house before the new family moved in?  Never mind.)

And the bizarre tone didn't end there, because American Horror Story somehow managed to arrive at something very like a happy ending.  It turned out that Vivien's first baby, who seemed to be stillborn in last week's episode, had actually let out a cry before dying, which qualified him for ghost-hood.  This meant that Vivien could be his eternal mom, and the entire reunited dead family, Ben, Viv, Violet and baby, plus newly-appointed godmother Moira, all decorated a Christmas tree together as "The Little Drummer Boy" played on the soundtrack.  Yes.  Really. 

Next season, this Happy Household Of the Living Dead will apparently be combined with more than a little helping of The Omen, because Vivien's other baby, the half-demon one that was the result of Tate's ghost-rape, turns out to be quite the handful.  Constance managed to grab possession of the babe after Ben's untimely demise (since no one knew Violet was dead, she said the teen had run away with her baby brother), and she'd been proudly raising little Michael next door.  In the "3 Years Later" flashforward that ended the season, however, she discovered that Mikey had committed his (first?) bloodthirsty murder, joyfully slashing his babysitter's throat. 

And... scene.  Say this for American Horror Story:  it packs more story, unhinged and illogical as it may be, into a single episode than The Walking Dead manages in a season.  Who knows what will be added to the mix next year:  Superheroes?  Gargoyles?  CG talking animals?  A spectral Napoleon Bonaparte?  Guest appearances from the cast of Glee?  One feels like anything is possible, and while that's not a recipe for coherence or basic sense, it's certainly been consistently watchable so far.

FX's AMERICAN HORROR STORY held up quite well in its second airing last night with a 1.4 in 18-49s, dropping only about 15% from its premiere (even though it faced new competition from the return of USA's PSYCH, which did a 1.0).

That's may not be Walking Dead level success (the zombies did 2.4 in their second episode, and eventually got to a 3 for the season finale), but it probably means plenty more hours to come of crazily illogical, movie-referencing violence and general creepiness.  Can't wait for the crossover with Glee!  

Ratings for last night's premiere of AMERICAN HORROR STORY on FX are promising, if not overwhelming.  The show's 10PM initial airing was watched by about 2 million people 18-49, which should equal something like a 1.5 rating in that demo; when the night's 2 rebroadcasts are added, the number goes to 3.2 million people or around a 2.4 rating.

A couple of comparisons:  if rebroadcasts are included, this is slightly up from last season's Sons of Anarchy average on FX, which had about 3 million 18-49 viewers, but in an apples-to-apples comparison of the 10PM airing only, it's somewhat lower.  (However, as FX was quick to note, even the 10PM broadcast alone was higher than the 1.5 million 18-49s who watched the first broadcast of the Sons premiere, since that show built its audience over time.)  Comparing it within genre, though, the news is a bit less happy:  the first broadcast of the Walking Dead premiere on AMC was 80% higher than Horror Story's, with 3.6 million 18-49 viewers. 

Of course, Walking Dead went down a slight 10% in its second episode, an unusually good hold from a hyped premiere--and then continued to build after that.  If Horror Story can follow the same trajectory, FX will be happily horrified.  

The first inkling of just how deranged AMERICAN HORROR STORY is going to be comes with one of the early "normal" scenes.  The location isn't the haunted house, so we're away from the girl with Down's Syndrome who tells people they're going to die in there, the brutally murdered identical twins, the body parts and fetuses preserved in jars... I could go on. But at this point in the story, we're at the private high school where teen Violet (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, who played the younger version of her sister in the recent Higher Ground) is merely smoking a cigarette where it's prohibited, and the local mean girls don't approve (one of their grandmas died of lung cancer).  Yet even this scene is staged with such intense, hyped-up rage that you might think a massacre is about to take place.  The message is clear:  Abandon restraint, all ye who enter here.

"Restraint" isn't a word associated with Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Brian Falchuk in any case (Murphy also directed the pilot)--whatever their strengths and failures, both Nip/Tuck and Glee have been all-in propositions, veering wildly from serious drama to wild perversity often in the course of a single episode.  Letting Murphy and Falchuk loose in the horror area is like granting them a license to kill, mutilate, and generally rampage.  American Horror Story, with its oddly emblematic title ("American" as opposed to what, exactly?  A Portuguese horror story?) embraces all the leeway the genre provides; watching it, you can almost feel Murphy and Falchuk exulting: Where has this genre been all my life?

On the most basic level, American Horror Story has a classic set-up:  the very troubled Harmon family moves from Boston to Los Angeles, where they buy a house with a history of terrible events.  (The gay couple who owned the house previously died in a murder/suicide, and that's just the beginning.)  Vivien (Connie Britton) had suffered an awful late-term miscarriage and hasn't been, psychologically or physically, the same since; after that, her psychiatrist husband Ben (Dylan McDermott) cheated on her with a 21-year old, Vivien walked in on them, and while the couple has remained together, they're completely estranged.  Violet is an outcast who hates LA and cuts herself, but she finds her life livened up when she meets Tate (Evan Peters), one of Ben's patients, who has elaborate fantasies about wreaking Columbine-type vengeance on his schoolmates and is also suicidal.  Plus there's the next-door neighbor Constance (Jessica Lange), mother of the Down's Syndrome woman who "has a way" of getting into the house even when all the doors are locked; Constance has some as-yet unclear involvement with whatever terrors the house contains.

There are many influences here, but the predominant one seems to be The Shining.  Like the novel and especially the Kubrick film, there's the general idea of a family's psychosexual dysfunction being absorbed and amplified by the evil spirits of their dwelling (just as Jack Torrance saw a beautiful, naked woman in place of a rotting corpse, when Ben looks at the elderly housemaid Moira, he doesn't see Frances Conroy, but rather the young, very sexual Alexandra Breckinridge).  More specifically, there's the suggestion that Ben will be coaxed by the house into trying to murder his family, which is apparently what happened to previous owner Larry Harvey (Denis O'Hare).

Luckily for American Horror Story, the genre doesn't require too much in the way of logic, which is typically a weak point for Murphy and his team.  On the other hand, it's very unclear how they're going to sustain this premise beyond a few episodes--after a certain point, there are only so many repellent, terrifying incidents the family can undergo before they'll seem like complete idiots for staying in the house.  For now, though, the show is quite compelling in its crazed way (it certainly isn't dull).  It's also graced by some terrific acting.  Even though Vivien is hardly comparable to Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights in terms of depth or fullness, Britton brings the same kind of commitment and intelligence to the role, while McDermott, Farmiga, O'Hare, Peters, Conroy and especially Lange offer effective creepiness.

It remains to be seen whether American Horror Story will offer anything beyond superficial scares, let alone a coherent story or meaningful theme.  But the horror genre is, if nothing else, a flexible one, and cheap thrills can be satisfying too, if they're well done.  So far, the show is off to a darkly entertaining start.

The days when cable networks cowered from the might of the broadcast networks' promotional machines and stayed away from Fall premiere season are over, and FX today announced start dates for its own Fall shows, in the weeks immediately before and after the broadcast official premiere week of Sept 19-25.  

Tuesday Sept 6:  SONS OF ANARCHY at 10PM

Thursday Sept 15:  IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA at 10PM

Wednesday Oct. 5:  AMERICAN HORROR STORY at 10PM.  This is one of the most high-profile projects of the Fall, produced by Glee's Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk.  They're keeping the storyline under wraps, but the strictly A-level cast includes Connie Britton, Jessica Lange and Dylan McDermott.

Thursday, Oct. 6:  THE LEAGUE at 10:30PM.  One of the little-known gems of the cable comedy world, an semi-improvised, semi-mumblecore, often hysterically funny comedy that centers on a fantasy football league.

 

At this point, it would be fairly shocking if the NFL and its players didn't settle their labor dispute in time to have a full pro football season.  (That sound is NBC falling to its knees in relief.)  One issue that seems likely to remain unresolved in the new labor agreement is the NFL's initial demand for 1-2 additional regular season games, which the players resisted.  Since--at least for now--the season will remain 16 games long, reports are that the league, which already airs Thursday night games in November and December on its self-owned NFL Network, may attempt to gain $600-700M of new revenue in another way:  by pulling 8 more games from Sundays and, perhaps as soon as next season, sell a first-half package of Thursday games to another network.  (There's even the possibility that the new network will be offered a full season package, although that would damage the league's attempt to build up the NFL Network as a valuable commodity.)

While ESPN would probably participate in the bidding, they already have Monday night games and carry college football on Thursdays.  The speculation is that more serious bidders might include Versus (now part of the NBC-Comcast empire), TNT, FX, and Spike.  All of those networks have far wider national coverage than the NFL Network, which during last season's games was available in about 50% of the country.  Even with those limitations, last year's games were doing 18-49 ratings in the low 2s according to TV By the Numbers; that number would likely rise steeply if a larger network carried games.

Thursday, of course, is one of the most important nights of the week for broadcast networks, partly because movie studios heavily advertise their weekend releases that night.  Every network showcases its heavy hitters on Thursdays:  Big Bang Theory on CBS, Grey's Anatomy on ABC, The Office on NBC, the upcoming X-Factor on FOX.  If the new football games do a 4.0 18-49 rating or higher, which certainly seems possible (ESPN sometimes does a 6-7 rating with Monday games), that would equal the night's biggest hits--and probably end up higher than any of them, once football's toll on the existing shows is taken into account.

Football has a downside from a broadcast network point of view:  although the ratings are great, the cost (these games could run $75-100M each) is equally enormous.  But this is where cable networks have a huge advantage over broadcast:  along with earning advertising revenue, a cable network, like ESPN, can pass costs along to subscribers in the form of higher monthly fees.  A good deal for everyone--except the broadcast network competition.

Click below for reviews of tonight's premieres:

Is WILFRED more than a one-trick puppy?  We'll see.  It joins the FX line-up of off-center comedies (Louie, The League, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) with a promising pilot, offering an original spin on a familiar plotline.

Based by David Zuckerman (who hails from the Seth MacFarlane writers' rooms of Family Guy and American Dad) and Jason Gann, and based on Gann's Australian series (created with Adam Zwar) of the same name, Wilfred is basically the one about the wimpy loser who's never taken a stand in his life and his new friend, a wild man who does all the wrong things and yet may have a valuable lesson to teach about living life to its fullest.  (Think any buddy comedy with Vince Vaughn.  Hell, think The Producers.)  Except this time, that wild man is actually a dog.  And the wimp may or may not be hallucinating him.

In the US series, Ryan (Elijah Wood) has failed as a lawyer, disappointed his family, and as the pilot begins, is attempting suicide.  But the pills don't work; instead, Ryan sees his next-door neighbor's pet Wilfred (Gann) as an Australian in a dog suit.  Wilfred smokes (weed and cigarettes), drinks beer, lies non-stop, and also has the bad habits of a canine, like rubbing himself on any available woman and digging holes in the yard (albeit with a shovel).  The show doesn't make any attempt to explain why this is happening; it's just Ryan's life. 

The pilot works all this out quite cleverly, and the performers are game.  Gann also played Wilfred in the Australian show; his matter-of-fact attitude sells the central joke.  Wood, a long way from Middle Earth, is quite funny as an ordinary guy who can't figure out if he's completely insane or on the road to some kind of psychic renewal (or both).  The other major character is Wilfred's owner Jenna (Fiona Gubelmann), who's mostly just attractive in the initial episode.