Movie Box Review

Despite ABC's attempts to claim otherwise, REVENGE is more "hittish" than true hit.  Although it premiered with strong ratings in the low 3s, it's since come down to numbers in the mid-2s, usually beaten by CSI in their shared Wednesday 10PM timeslot.  But these days, a 2.4-2.5 rating at 10PM is nothing to take lightly, especially compared to other ABC drama entries like The River, Pan Am and (based on its premiere) GCB, none of which could crawl much above a 2.  So while series creator/showrunner Mike Kelley said all the right things at today's PaleyFest session devoted to the show about how he hopes the series comes back for a 2d season, and that there are no guarantees in this business, Revenge has an excellent chance--barring an April/May collapse--to be back.  

The Revenge gathering was notably less boisterous than last night's Vampire Diaries craziness (amusingly, a new caution had been added to the pre-panel introductions today asking fans not to rush the stage when the session was over), as befits its more affluent, and dare I say somewhat older, audience.  Nevertheless, there was enormous enthusiasm for the show's antagonists, vengeful Emily Thorne (Emily Vancamp) and her nemesis Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe), as well as the show's resident hunks Daniel Grayson (Josh Bowman) and Jack Porter (Nick Wechsler) and Emily's oddball partner in vengeance Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann).  Apart from them and Kelley, participants in the panel included producer Marty Bowen, and performers Henry Czerny (Conrad Grayson), Ashley Madekwe (Ashley Davenport) and the series ingenues, Christa B. Allen (Charlotte Grayson) and Connor Paolo (Declan Porter).  

Only the first 15 minutes or so of the next unaired episode (which won't be seen till April) were screened, and there weren't a lot of full-scale spoilers, although Kelley allowed a cast member to confirm that a terrible thing happening to one character in that 15 minutes was the doing of another character (which had been set up in some dialogue in the portion that was screened). What Kelley did provide was a surprisingly detailed blueprint of how the rest of the season is going to play out structurally. So, STRUCTURAL SPOILER ALERT: 

The episode that was partly screened, Episode 17, will continue where the previous episode left off, with Daniel in jail for Tyler's murder (if you don't know who Tyler is, catch up) and the preparations for his trial.  Then the show will jump forward several months from September to December, and Episodes 18-19 will cover Daniel's trial, up to and including the verdict.  (The prosecution case will take up "2 minutes" of Episode 18, and from there on the focus will be on Daniel's defense.)  Episode 20 will be something different for the series:  an hour set entirely in the past, dealing with the period in 2002 when Emily was still trying to decide if her father's version of his arrest and conviction was true and when she was meeting her future targets for the first time.  Episode 20 will also include sequences flashing even farther back, to the beginning of the romance between Victoria and David Clarke (Emily's father--pay attention).  Then Episodes 21-22 will lead up to a season-ending cliffhanger, and also set things up for what would be the main storyline of Season 2.  Kelley provided little information about what this would be about, except to note that Daniel Grayson will no longer be the passive character he's mostly been so far, and that the enigmatic Takeda will figure into these episodes.  Kelley added that the plan for next season would be to follow the same structure as Season 1:  a central storyline occupying the first 13-15 episodes, aftermath episodes for the following 4-6 weeks, then an hour or 2 resolving some issues and setting things up for the future.

The panel was mostly breezy and light-hearted, although Stowe made it clear that while she's having a good time playing Victoria, she takes her character very seriously.  (She and Kelley have collaborated on an as-yet unseen backstory for Victoria.)  Most questions were about the storylines, for which Kelley's go-to answer was "If it's not impossible, it could happen."  (This included a query about whether Emily's father might actually be alive.)  The only complaint any of the actors seemed to have was that their respective stories didn't allow them to interact with some of the other characters as much as they'd like (Nolan with the Graysons, Ashley with Emily, etc).  The panel did clear up, though, that there's no way Nolan will turn out to be Emily's brother, however sibling-like their relationship may be.

Coming up at PaleyFest--deep breath, please--on Tuesday night:  the return of MAD MEN.

 

When the PaleyFest panels end, cast members often linger for a bit to sign autographs and otherwise make contact with the fans.  Therefore when the moderator says "Thank you" and the lights go up, there's usually a movement of audience members toward the stage.  But "movement" doesn't do justice to the full-scale rush that greeted tonight's salute to THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, a rock-concert level scramble that left onlookers ducking out of the aisles.

To some extent, that kind of response isn't a surprise:  Vampire Diaries is in its 3rd year as the unquestionably biggest--well, only--hit on CW, and the viewers who watch that network are younger and in better shape than those of the others.  Because of its genre and demographic, Diaries is also regularly underrated, almost never given full credit as one of the smartest, wittiest and most narratively satisfying serialized dramas on the air. 

The evening began with a screening of this coming Thursday's episode, the first back after a hiatus.  At the request of series co-creator/showrunner (with Kevin Williamson) Julie Plec, its climactic revelation won't be spoiled here, except to say that it's in keeping with the grand story twists that have marked this show from the beginning, and sets the stage for a new conflict to play out over the rest of the season.  

After a brief (inconclusive) discussion of said twist, the main part of the panel began.  Apart from Plec, most of the major cast members were in attendance:  Elena (Nina Dobrev), beloved of vampires and constantly stalked; brother vampires Stefan and Damon (Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder); Alaric (Matt Davis), who started as a vampire-hunter and is now Elena's guardian and a veritable vampire bud; witch Bonnie (Kat Graham); and relatively new vamp Caroline (Candice Accola).  

These folks have been together on a hit for years, and they're a loose, talkative bunch (the moderator mostly just had to toss in a question every so often and let them go).  Any spoilers were more in the nature of hints:  before the season is over, Elena will have to make "a" choice (but not necessarily "the" choice) between the brothers, we haven't seen the last of Klaus and the Original Vampires, it's possible that we'll meet Elena's parents in a flashback.  Plec was noncommittal about whether the show would ever consider following the L.J. Smith novels and making Elena into a vampire, or when evil Katarina, Elena's vampire doppelganger (just go with it) would make a return appearance.  Dobrev got the evening's biggest laugh when she wondered aloud why Gossip Girl got to film episodes in Paris and they were stuck in Mystic Falls.  Somerholder was appropriately Damon-ish caustic much of the time, but like his character, he could become surprisingly heartfelt, notably when he talked about how he'd survived the brutal audition process for the show.   Audience squeals greeted any mention of the Elena/Stefan/Damon triangle (and for those more interested in the tabloid side of things, Somerholder placing his jacket around Dobrev's shoulders made their night.)  

The Vampire Diaries airs in the toughest hour on television, the 8PM slot that's home to the deadly battle between American Idol and The Big Bang Theory, and yet its ratings have barely budged.  Beyond that success, it's as smoothly and effectively run as any series in primetime.  Young audience tastes change--Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a legend now, but when it left the air, its ratings had preceded it--and Diaries' status won't last forever.  Nonetheless, it should have plenty of frenzied audience response still ahead of it.

There's something infectious about watching the people behind a brand-new TV hit enjoy their success, and at tonight's PaleyFest salute to this year's break-out comedy hit NEW GIRL, the pleasure of the cast and producers bubbled over.  

To an unusual extent that the panelists acknowledged themselves, the dynamics among the cast members and writers seemed not unrelated to the relationships in the show.  By the time creator/showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether had finished kicking off the session and introducing the episode being screened, it came as no surprise later on when star Zooey Deschanel summarized her character Jess by saying she was equal parts the 13-year old versions of herself and Meriwether.  Similarly, the good-natured snarky bickering between Jake M. Johnson (Nick), Max Greenfield (Schmidt) and Lamorne Morris (Winston) could have been outtakes from any given episode, and there seemed to be a gray area between where the actress Hannah Simone left off and her character Cece picked up.

Everyone concerned spoke several times of the show's efforts to deepen and develop the characters as the show goes on, and it turned out that the screened episode "Injured" (which airs tomorrow night) was a standout example of this principle in action.  "Injured" may be the first episode of New Girl that takes place entirely outside of the apartment all the characters except Cece share, and it centers on Nick rather than Jess.  In the course of the episode, Nick has a health scare, and the tone of the episode resembles the bittersweet 50/50 more than New Girl's usual carefree celebration of character eccentricities.  More interestingly, the episode has a very loose, casual feel akin to an F/X comedy.  Not incidentally, "Injured" was directed by Lynn Shelton, whose reputation is in semi-improvised indie relationship comedy-dramas like Humpday and the excellent upcoming Your Sister's Sister--whether "Injured" was actually partly improvised or just very well scripted (by J.J. Philbin), it shows New Girl starting to put some distance between itself and its cutely charming roots.  

There were little in the way of spoiler revelations in the course of the evening--as producer Jake Kasdan noted, the series has few enough continuing storylines, they didn't want to ruin any of them--except that Dermot Mulroney and Jeanne Tripplehorn will appear in an arc (Mulroney as a Jess love interest), and that shippers hoping for the seemingly inevitable Jess/Nick coupling will have to wait for a while.  

With Glee fading, New Girl is now at the center of FOX's Tuesday night, with an audience slightly smaller than CBS' 2 Broke Girls but with far more pop cultural and critical cachet.  The show has plenty of time--years, undoubtedly--to work out how and where they want the series to go.

ABC's ONCE UPON A TIME is one of the few no-question-about-it hits of the current television season, and the gathering at today's PaleyFest session, while enormously enthusiastic, was less raucous and more comfortably pleased than last night's crowd for Community.  (If Community's fans sometimes had the air of an Occupy rally that had actually won something, the faithful for Once were more like the fans of a sports team that usually makes it to the playoffs.)  Even moderator Matt Webb Mitovich was hard-pressed to treat an upcoming Season 2 as anything other than a certainty, and creator/showrunners Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz made it clear with their responses that they're already looking forward to the continuing arc of a successful show.

All season long, Once Upon A Time has very cleverly--much more so than some of us expected--accomplished the trick of creating 2 overlapping and parallel universes for its story.  One is a fairy tale kingdom where Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin), Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle), Beauty (guest star Emilie De Raven) & the Beast (who happens to be Rumpelstiltskin),Jiminy Cricket (Rafael Sbarge), Prince Charming (Josh Dallas), and of course an Evil Queen (Lana Parilla) are among the characters living their fantastic lives.  The other is Storybrooke, Maine, where it turns out that the Queen, now the Mayor (Parilla again) has cursed all the fairy tale inhabitants to a dreary, change-less everyday existence without any happy endings.  But all that begins to shift when the somewhat mysterious Emma (Jennifer Morrison) comes to town, having discovered she's the birth mother of the Mayor's adopted son (Jared Gilmore), who has a book of fairy tales that's convinced him of what's actually going on.  The ingenuity of the conceit is that each episode cuts back and forth between the worlds, and what happened in the fairy tale land informs the characters and storylines in Storybrooke.

The potential pitfalls on such a complicated, multilayered project are infinite, and while the show has been dramatically absorbing and lots of soapy/supernatural fun so far, eventually things will have to be explained and concluded--making it a little scary that Kitsis and Horowitz hail from Lost, since we all know how well that one worked out.  For now, though, it's a well written and performed weekly pleasure.  (And, incidentally, despite pre-season comparisons, in an entirely different league from NBC's far less ambitious Grimm.)

The PaleyFest panel began with a screening of tonight's episode, which mostly bypasses the main series mythology to tell the story of Leroy, a janitor in Storybrooke but better known as dwarf Grumpy in his other identity.  Although there are a few B story steps forward on the Queen/Mayor's plot against David, the town's Prince Charming, the episode is more charming than essential.  (It does, however, provide a nice overlap of Once Upon's land with the Whedonverse, as Grumpy's true love is played by Whedon vet Amy Acker.)  The first act of next week's episode was also screened, enough to let us know that it will center on waitress Ruby (Meghan Ory) and a Big Bad Wolf.

In the Q&A, Kitsis and Horowitz provided little in the way of meaningful spoilers.  (Remember, they're from Lost.)  The most specific tidbit was that both Charming and Rumpelstiltskin will find their way to Jiminy's Storybrooke psychologist's couch this season, and that Barbara Hershey will appear as the Queen's mother.  Apart from that, it was all fairly hint-y:  for example, before the season is over, we'll know why the Queen hates Snow White and what the mototcycling stranger is doing in Storybrooke.  We may also not have seen the last of the Sheriff, dead in Storybrooke but not in fairy tale land.

The cast, almost all of whom attended the panel (the only notable absence was young Jared Gilmore), and all of whom have steady paychecks to look forward to for quite a while, seemed to be having a good time, although from the sound of it, Vancouver (much rain, cold winds and snow) has its limitations as a shooting location.  There was also some discussion of the "green stage" used to accomplish the show's seemingly vast sets in the fantasy sequences:  the actors stand on an almost barren soundstage, only able to know what the room around them looks like by checking the director's video monitor that has the pre-vis artwork (that will later be added via CG) loaded on.  It's apparently all too easy to walk through invisible walls--which, as it happens, is a worthwhile metaphor for the risks of serialized and mythological TV writing, as well.  Only the future will tell if Once Upon A Time can satisfyingly stay within its boundaries..

Nest up at PaleyFest, the season's other unarguable hit:  New Girl.  

For those who don't know, PaleyFest is a yearly 2-week program sponsored by The Paley Center For Media in Los Angeles, in which every night (or occasional weekend afternoon) is devoted to saluting a particular television show, usually a mix of the season's brightest new series and a few older shows.  Each presentation begins with a screening--often of a yet-to-air episode, although sometimes a "greatest hits" piece--and then features a panel discussion with the creator/showrunner and most if not all of the cast, starting with a moderator's queries and then with questions fielded from the audience. 

In the annals of PaleyFest, few audiences can have been more jubilant than the crowd at tonight's salute to COMMUNITY.  When the show was placed in the festival's line-up, it had been pulled from NBC's schedule, and it was unclear just when--or, really, if--it was going to return.  Now it's set to come back at 8PM on Thursday March 15, and in fact the midseason premiere episode was screened tonight (and we have a review).  

All of the cast was present for the evening's festivities except Chevy Chase (a subject raised briefly in the Q&A and quickly deflected) and Donald Glover, as well as creator/showrunner Dan Harmon and Executive Producers Russ Krasnoff, Garrett Donovan and Neil Goldman. 

The evening was mostly joyous and funny--this cast doesn't need writers to get laughs.  In fact, Greendale's Dean, Jim Rash, is as of last week an Academy Award-winning writer himself, as co-screenwriter of The Descendants.  (What may or may not have been Rash's actual Oscar was brought out, and even the PaleyFest videographer got into the spirit of the evening's comedy, cutting to the Oscar from time to time seemingly on his/her own initiative to provide the occasional visual punch-line.) The chemistry among the group seemed genuine and unforced, to the extent that an event like this can truly reveal such a thing. 

What was most interesting, though, was seeing just how seriously Harmon takes what often seems like a series put together on an abstract, conceptual, episode-by-episode basis, rather than one with a consistent plan.  Asked about the effect Community's stay in network limbo would have on the dozen episodes left to air this season, Harmon spoke of the darkness and uncertainty that was meant to affect the characters this season in any case, and how that may have been heightened by the mood of the production as episodes were created without any idea when they'd air.  Notwithstanding this, Harmon and Krasnoff were cautiously optimistic about Community's chances to be brought back for a 4th season.  (Objectively, the series has one thing going against it--The Office, Parks & Recreation, 30 Rock and probably Up All Night have to be renewed from NBC's point of view, which leaves Community as the possible Thursday sitcom without a seat--and one going for it:  Sony, the studio that produces the show, is just a few episodes away from a fully syndicable number, and would likely be willing to make sacrifices in the network license deal in order to get there.)  However, Harmon more than once spoke of his vision of the show as the 4-year journey of Jeff to earn his BA degree, which may mean that next season would in any case be its last.  He promised the final episode would not involve Abed and a snow-globe.

There was little in the way of spoiler talk:  a Law & Order parody is coming up (the old Law & Order, Harmon stressed), John Goodman will be returning, there's an all-Dreamatorium episode that even the actors aren't quite sure they get, an episode in which the whole gang plays a video game, and oh yes, at some point in the finale the Dean wears a mask and a costume that McHale didn't describe, but said may be the funniest thing in the history of television.  

It was a fun 90 minutes spent with a very happy group of actors and producers (well, Harmon seemed to be about as happy as he gets), before an equally happy audience.  Fittingly, it ended with an audience member asking if she could hug Danny Pudi--and him jumping off the stage to rush into the crowd and grant her wish. For a moment, it was PaleyFest as a Taylor Swift concert.