Movie Box Review

In comparison to ABC's GOOD CHRISTIAN BELLES, Glee is as macho as The Expendables--if Vin Diesel and The Rock had joined the cast.  There's female-skewing, and then there's having the remote send an electric shock up the arm of any guy who tries to tune in.  If they did an episode of this series and replaced the actresses with the cast of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, it's not clear that anyone would notice.  I'm surprised they haven't already announced that the show's repeats will be airing on Bravo.  Oh, I could keep going... but you get the point. 

And there's nothing wrong with a show that skews narrowly, something I say as a devoted fan of Fringe, Treme and Friday Night Lights.  I'm in the group that thinks The Wire may have been the best series that's ever aired anywhere, and for all its acclaim, no one ever watched it.   The audience for extreme campiness may be delighted with Good Christian Belles, and if there are enough of them, ABC will have a hit--in which case, they'll be more than happy to ignore those of us who find the show hard to endure. 

Based on the novel by Kim Gatlin (entitled "Good Christian Bitches," which was the series title until morals groups found out about it), Good Christian Belles tells the story of Amanda Vaughn (Leslie Bibb), a rich mean girl when she grew up in Dallas, who then moved with her high school quarterback husband to LA.  There she had 2 kids and a more peaceful life, which abruptly comes to an end when her husband dies scandalously, having lost all their money, among other things.  Penniless, Amanda and her children move back home, where they have no choice but to live with her mother (Annie Potts), and Amanda has to get a job.  Worse, Amanda has to reacquaint herself with the girls she terrorized in high school:  Carlene (Kristen Chenoweth), a shining example of the plastic surgery road to success; Cricket (Miriam Shor), a tightly-wound businesswoman who doesn't know her husband's secrets; Sharon (Jennifer Aspen), who's put on a few pounds; and the only semi-bearable one, Heather (Marisol Nichols), a real estate agent who believes in the possibiilty that Amanda's changed over the years. 

The pilot is basically a succession of scenes where the girls clownishly and repeatedly attempt to drive Amanda and her family out of Dallas (while adopting butter-wouldn't-melt-in-their-mouths attitudes to her face), while Amanda shows her pluck and gumption in refusing to be intimidated.  As the title indicates, there are endless displays of the ladies' hypocrisy in being churchgoing Christians while relentlessly scheming to ruin her life.  Writer Robert Harling was previously known as the author of Steel Magnolias, Soapdish and the script for The First Wives Club, so it's not like there's any surprise at the broad, unsubtle tone of the humor here, interspersed with occasional "heart."  (The show is also produced by Darren Star, of Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place fame.)  

Bibb is the only one in the cast who gets to play a human, and she's an appealing actress.  But givng Chenoweth a role like this is basically like handing over a fifth of bourbon and the keys to the family car; Chenoweth can be wonderful when she stays under control (as on West Wing and--sometimes--Pushing Daisies), but clearly she was cast here for her willingness to go over the top, which she does.  The rest of the cast mostly joins her; Alan Poul, who's directed episodes of Six Feet Under and Swingtown, is capable of eliciting nuance from his actors, but that wasn't the idea on this one.

Good Christian Belles is reminiscent of other extravagant ABC comedy-soaps like Big Shots and Dirty Sexy Money, neither of which found audiences.  Although the show's midseason scheduling hasn't been announced, certainly the network has any number of places to launch it, behind Desperate Housewives, Dancing With the Stars, the Modern Family/Happy Endings hour, or Grey's Anatomy.  Whether people will choose to stick with it is another question, but to be fair, Good Christian Belles isn't a mess or a failure, exactly--it seems to be exactly the show the network and producers wanted to make.  I guarantee this:  within 15 minutes you'll know if you're in love or can't escape fast enough.

AWAKE -  Midseason on NBC:   If Nothing Else Is On...


NBC's AWAKE is sleepier than it sounds.  Its premise is certainly intriguing:  Detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) is the driver in a terrible accident, with his wife Hannah (Laura Allen) and teenage son Rex (Dylan Minnette) in the car.  When he returns to consciousness, he finds himself straddling two separate existences, one where Hannah was killed and Rex is alive, and the other where the reverse occurred.  When he goes to sleep in one life, he instantly wakes in the other.  Both appear to be entirely real--he continues to carry out his job, solving separate (but with clues that are somehow linked) crimes with different partners (Steve Harris and Wilmer Valderrama); his partner in one world exists as a cop in the other.  Also, he attends psychiatric sessions in each world with a different shrink (Cherry Jones and B.D. Wong), each of whom tries to convince him that his or her reality is the true one.


So what's going on?  Well, Awake isn't saying, because that would be the end of the show.  In the pilot, written by Kyle Killen (unfortunately best known for writing two recently ambitious failures, Lone Star on TV and The Beaver in theatres), we simply watch Britten bounce from one plane of existence to the other, missing whomever's deceased in that reality, attending his therapy sessions and doggedly working at his job.  Where his wife is alive, she knows that he "dreams" of their son; in Rex's world, there's an attractive potential love interest in his son's tennis coach (Michaela McManus). In both worlds, Britten is a very sad man.

It must have all made for a great pitch meeting, but on screen Awake doesn't add up to much.  Unlike alternate reality movies like Sliding Doors or Groundhog Day, there's no overall story arc to the different realities, at least none that's revealed in the pilot.  (There's a hint that Michael might be more responsible for the accident than he can admit, but it doesn't go very far.)  Rather, Awake is reminiscent of ABC's shortlived 2006 Day Break, where Taye Diggs had to keep living the same day over and over until he could change what would happen, or what the movie Source Code would have been like if we never found out what was going on with Jake Gyllenhaal.  Technically, it's not that dramatically stagnant, since Britten will have new crimes to solve and his personal life will move forward in each reality, but those things alone aren't very satisfying.

Awake isn't helped by the muted style with which it's been made.  Director David Slade (he did the last Twilight movie, and before that the vampire-fest 30 Days of Night) keeps everything very low-key; there's an almost hushed tone to the therapy scenes.  Frankly, the material didn't need or deserve that level of respect.  Isaacs is an excellent actor (he's probably best known as Papa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, but he did superb work on Showtime's Brotherhood), and no supporting cast that features Cherry Jones lacks for firepower.  But rather than the two worlds seeming real in Awake, neither quite does; each of them feels somehow sketchy and undeveloped.

NBC hasn't yet announced where they'll place Awake on their schedule, and it's going to be a tough show to slot:  a serious, slow drama that isn't likely to skew young.  Perhaps in later episodes, Awake will find a way to introduce more compelling storylines and variations on its theme; for now, it's two parallel versions of "not that interesting."

Read more about TV's new shows at THE SKED PILOT REPORT.

In this season of paired projects (Grimm and Once Upon A Time, The Playboy Club and Pan Am), it makes sense that we have two series produced by JJ Abrams:  CBS's fall Person Of Interest and FOX's midseason ALCATRAZ.  Of the two, Alcatraz has by far the more potential, but it's a ragged piece of work that'll need quite a bit of improvement before it hits the air.

Alcatraz posits the idea that in 1963, when the Bay Area maximum-security prison was shut down, the inmates were not transferred to other facilities--instead, they vanished off the face of the earth.  The mass disappearance was kept secret by the government, and only now, almost 50 years later, the criminals are beginning to reappear, not having aged a day and on mysterious missions to kill contemporary people for reasons even they don't understand.  Spooky!  And worthy of the co-creator of Lost (Alcatraz is written by Elizabeth Sarnoff, a Lost producer, along with Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, both junior writers on Kyle XY).  So far so good.

Alcatraz loses its grip when it tries to build a series structure around the premise.  For the millionth time, we're back in the storyline where a gritty local detective (Sarah Jones as Rebecca Madsen) starts investigating the murder committed by one of the reemerged convicts, and despite being warned off by mysterious federal agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), she doggedly pursues the crime, until she proves herself instrumental in tracking the killer down and by the end of the pilot, she's been added to the task force.  Naturally there's a quirky expert (Jorge Garcia--hi, Hurley!) and a intense techie (Parminder Nagra), and naturally there are vague hints that Rebecca and her uncle (Robert Forster) may have more connection to what's really going on than they realize.  It's all terribly routine, and the rudimentary dialogue doesn't add anything to the pilot's by-the-numbers plotting, not to mention the problem of balancing between the time spent with our heroes and with the guest star villain, who's part time traveler and part cipher.

The casting is also lacking.  Jones is very pretty, but not exactly ideal as an up-from-the-streets cop, while Neill's done this kind of untrustworthy authority figure countless times, most recently in Happy Town and Daybreakers.  Garcia has earned a giant amount of audience goodwill, but they might as well have called his character (a professor who creates his own Alcatraz-themed comic books) Hurley and be done with it.  Nagra, who was a solid part of the latter-year ER ensemble, gets little to do.  In the pilot, none of them mesh into much of an ensemble, and the direction by Danny Cannon, a CBS procedural veteran, has a minimum of visual panache.  

WORK IT is getting on the air.  I say this because if you're ever unfortunate enough to watch this thing, you may want to repeat that statement over and over as you stare, in sheer wonderment, at how low network standards can sink.  Every season has a series that's jaw-droppingly "What were they thinking?" awful, and folks, this year Work It is that show.

Exaggeration, you say.  Overstatement, you presume.  Well, the opening scene of this theoretical comedy has a joke in which a man's prostate exam is compared to Jodie Foster's gang rape in The Accused.  And hey, as far as I'm concerned, no subject is off-limits for comedy--if I heard that Louie CK's act had some edgy bit on gang rape, I'd at least give it some consideration.  But in the context of a multi-camera network TV sitcom, how did anyone think this was going to be funny?  For more hilarity, how about a guy who's lost his job and is supposed to go shopping, quipping without euphenmism that he'll put the nectarines where his balls used to be?  Again:  on Rescue Me, that might fit with Denis Leary's brand of bitter dark humor.  But for the guffaws of a live studio audience?

Work It is based around the familiar trope of guys who have to masquerade as women for some pressing reason:  in Some Like It Hot, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis were hiding from gangsters; in Big Momma's House and its sequels, Martin Lawrence was an undercover cop; in Bosom Buddies, Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari were after cheap rent.  Work It takes its cue mostly from Tootsie, where Dustin Hoffman could only get work when he became an actress.  Similarly, here Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco are former Pontiac salesmen who are unable to find any sales jobs--except at a drug company, which only hires women (because, we're told, when the company employed men, "the doctors didn't want to nail them."). 

Let's put aside the legal risks of that policy, not to mention the idea that any doctor would want to nail the frightening "women" our heroes become--that stuff goes with the genre.  But while the great cross-dressing comedies are actually terrific romances, stories with great affection for their biologically female characters (Marilyn Monroe, Jessica Lange, Donna Dixon), Work It comes close to flat-out misogyny.  As the jokes above suggest, the comedy here comes from a place of fear and distaste toward women.  It's a puzzlement how writers like Andrew Reich and Ted Cohen, whose careers include senior writing positions on Friends, could be responsible for gags like Koldyke, in his job interview, referring to his supposed body parts as his "teats," or discovering that while men eat hero sandwiches for lunch, women eat only salads; women also, it turns out, belong to book clubs, can have any grudge assuaged with an expensive handbag, and don't know the first thing about cars.   

It's not the actors' fault--they go about their cartoonish paces professionally enough (although it's sad to see Rebecca Mader from Lost stuck as the mean girl at the drug company).  That goes for Beth McCarthy Miller's direction as well.  The material is the culprit here; they're collateral damage.

ABC hasn't announced where they'll place Work It on their midseason schedule (presumably it'll substitute for one of their regular sitcoms to avoid reruns, the way Mr Sunshine was slotted into Cougar Town's spot last year).  Wherever it is, though, you may want to check if your brand of DVR has an "Avoid At All Costs" setting.

 

Visually, PAN AM is a treat.  Just to be clear, this is the primetime series set in the mid-1960s that doesn't feature Don Draper or Playboy bunny tails.  While no series could possibly surpass the fetishistic accuracy of Mad Men (even though the Pan Am pilot is set in 1963, one of the songs on the soundtrack was composed for the Doctor Dolittle movie in 1967--it would give Matthew Weiner a coronary), Pan Am has a sleek, elegant look filled with terrific period detail; watching it, you feel like those plane sets could actually take off.  With Tommy Schlamme behind the camera (he's done all of Aaron Sorkin's shows, among others), Pan Am also moves rapidly and absorbingly through its mid-air paces.

In the dramatic region, the show hits more air pockets.  The script is by Jack Orman, who was showrunner of ER for years and has more recently written for Men Of A Certain Age, but who has less of a track record as a series creator.  The storylines are what one of the old Airport movies would have been like if no planes ever crashed:  mostly, a lot of tangled stewardess romances.  So we get the gorgeous Laura (Margot Robbie) who ran out on her own society wedding to make a life for herself; Laura's sister Kate (Kelli Garner), who's always been jealous of Laura and none too thrilled she has to share the spotlight with sis again; Colette (Karine Vanasse), who's French and unlucky in love; and Maggie, played by the cast's biggest name--Christina Ricci, in her TV series debut--but the sketchiest character, a political liberal who puts on stewardess garb for the sake of world travel.  (At least initially, the 2 pilot characters don't make much impression.)  Strangely mixed in with these suds is a story about one of the girls being recruited by an intelligence service to carry on mid-air espionage (John LeCarre it's not).

There's certainly potential to make something more of Pan Am's premise; a bit of dialogue toward the end suggests that behind their Barbie-doll exteriors, we should see these stewardesses as indicative of the new directions women will take as the 1960s unfold.  For now, though, it's pretty weak, uncompelling stuff.  While it's understandable that ABC wasn't interested in tackling the subtle, difficult tone of a Mad Men, at this point Pan Am doesn't even have the vitality of The Playboy Club's melodramatic pilot.  Luckily, the show's visual glamour and brisk pace should keep it aloft for a while as it tries to find itself.

ABC has given Pan Am a good spot on the runway, following Desperate Housewives on Sunday nights.  While it certainly won't touch NBC's football in overall 18-49s--assuming there's football this fall--it should appeal to the Housewives audience (the promos will look like a dream), and although Mitch Metcalf's Sunday projection shows it losing a chunk of that crowd and falling behind the aging CSI: Miami in the timeslot, it has a chance to do better--if it can figure out its own aerodynamics.

PERSON OF INTEREST -  Thursday 9PM on CBS:  If Nothing Else Is On...


It doesn't pay to spend too much time thinking about PERSON OF INTEREST; the sheer idiocy of the premise will just distract you.  It's all a means to an end, and since that end is fairly entertaining, it can be overlooked.


For sticklers, here's the story, as devised by Jonathan Nolan (aka brother of Christopher and co-writer of several of his films, including The Dark Knight).  Reese (Jim Caviezel, known mostly for being Mel Gibson's Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) is a former super-duper government agent and assassin; any resemblance to Jason Bourne is far from accidental.  Something terrible happened to Reese's girlfriend around the time of 9/11, and Reese quit the service, becoming a drunken homeless guy with a really impressive reclusive-novelist beard, yet still fully capable of subduing an entire subway car of creeps.   One day, Reese is approached/abducted by Finch (the King of Enigmatic, Ben Linus--um, Michael Emerson), a mysterious billionaire who created and has access to a government system that gives him the Social Security numbers of people who will shortly be involved in violent crimes--as perpetrator or victim, Finch doesn't know.  He proposes to feed the identities of these people to Reese, so the ex-spook can stop the crimes before they occur.  After the usual reluctance, Reese agrees to become Finch's agent, and there's your show.

Like I said, thinking about all this too much will give you a headache (Interest is produced by JJ Abrams, and it's like his Alias, another fun and ultimately mindless romp where things went boom)--and the show's depiction of our national surveillance system is like an AM talkradio rant come to life.  Really, it's a jerrybuilt structure that will perrmit Caviezel to investigate and solve a criminal situation every week, pursued by the requisite dogged cop (Taraji  P. Henson), who knows something is up with that strange homeless guy.  Also, presumably we'll get more about Reese's and Finch's mystery backgrounds parsed out over the course of the series, although at first glance Reese's doesn't seem too thrilling.   

High-tech and other serialized details aside, Person of Interest is basically an action show, and the pilot as directed by old hand David Semel (the Heroes pilot is among his credits) goes through its paces very efficiently.  Caviezel, his godly duties behind him, is a believable super-spy, and Emerson can put twelve shadings on pronouncing the word "Hello."  Also, the fact that Reese doesn't know week to week whether he's protecting an innocent or pursuing a villain is a nice twist on the genre.

CBS has shown huge confidence in Person of Interest by giving it their prime Thursday 9PM timeslot. Although competition is fierce in the hour (The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Bones, Secret Circle), none of them are flat-out action-adventures like this one, and Mitch Metcalf's Thursday projection has it in a robust second place, just a couple of ticks behind Grey's for the lead.  However dumb, it's an effective show that could interest plenty of CBS viewers.

Poe's spin on a supernatural procedural, while different, can't find its way to being fun or compelling.  Like most--although not all--of its busted pilot brethren, the show that emerged from development was nevermore worth putting on the air. 

The Sked's Verdict:  The Network Was Right

Had it managed to become a full-fledged series, PARTNERS might have been a decent fit with ABC's other female-oriented crime shows like Castle and Body of Proof, but based on the pilot, its only points of distinctiveness were probably too gimmicky and contrived to work.  

The title characters Mattie (Scottie Thompson) and Jess (Annie Wersching) are, of course, partnered as police homicide detectives, but that's not all.  In Edward Bernero's script (he was longtime showrunner on Criminal Minds and co-created Third Watch), they're also--unbeknownst to all--half-sisters.  But wait, there's more.  Their mother is in prison for having murdered Mattie's father, which is also apparently unknown to the entire police force.  And as we find out at the end of the hour (I don't think there can really be a spoiler alert for a busted pilot), actually--unbeknownst even to Mattie-- Jess was the shooter, protecting her younger sister from the molestation she herself had suffered.  

That's an awful lot of baggage for an otherwise routine cop show.  And "routine" is the right word, because the pilot hardly puts the show's best foot forward plot-wise, relying on the oldest "twist" in the murder-mystery book:  if a married man's mistress is murdered and it turns out he didn't do it, who else would have had a motive to kill his lover?   Exactly.  Add the usual cliches of hero cops leaping into action without backup, doubting but ultimately supportive superior officers, and miraculously obtained warrants, and you have a show that's familiar for all the wrong reasons.

The only bright spots in the pilot are the two stars:  Thompson was the highlight of NBC's short-lived Trauma, and Wersching was a key part of 24's last 2 seasons until the sin of having sex with Jack Bauer led to her character's immediate death.  Even though the sisters are unoriginal (Jess is happily married and follows the rules; Maddie is rebellious and devoted to the single life), the actresses are good company.  Not good enough, though, to make Partners worthwhile.

Partners, which was produced in-house by ABC Studios, could actually have had a chance to live on a cable network, but presumably USA, TNT and Lifetime had full slates of their own and/or couldn't make the economics work.  No great loss:  the Partners pilot didn't have the look of a show with much potential to be memorable.

IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS.  In fact, Mark Gordon's company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point that it was in fact ABC and passed on the project.  Even as ersatz Bruckheimer/CBS fodder, the pilot wasn't very good.



John Glenn's script (he wrote the silly but successful Shia LaBoeuf vehicle Eagle Eye), centers on an elite FBI squad--it's always an elite squad--organized to stop identity theft and related crime.  The members cover pretty much all the crucial cliches:  steely leader (Angela Bassett), by-the-rules guy who's skilled but a bit of a fuddy-duddy (Orlando Jones), single woman computer genius (Bree Turner), liaison to the "young people" (Jay Paulson)... and, of course, the reckless, intuitively brilliant agent (Colin O'Donoghue) who drives By-The-Rules Guy crazy and who has something to hide.

The pilot cheats--as, no doubt, the series would regularly have done as well--by choosing as the villain an identity thief who's completely insane, a multiple murderer with a very personal motive for his crimes, which probably isn't the norm for this particular kind of illegality.  This allows for a certain amount of story breadth, although hardly any of it is convincing.  Director Gary Fleder provides the required high-tech war room set  with many computer and video monitors, and quick flashback cuts to the various crimes, but none of it can make the pilot seem less generic than it is.

The cast does its job.  Bassett is an actress of enormous strength who nevertheless needs something to play (she was quite good as the senior doctor toward the end of ER's epic run), here she's just used for her air of authority.  At least she was used for something, which put her one up on the other actors--Turner's part is limited to the kind of singleton quips that make you wince for the actress.  Only O'Donoghue is given any kind of storyline, and that one is fairly dumb.

IDENTITY's biggest problem was that it didn't have one--the pilot feels like the script itself should have carried the subtitle "A Busted Pilot."  The chance for identity crimesolvers to have their own primetime network TV series will have to remain on hold for another season.

We've gotten this far without using the word "ghastly" to describe any of the busted pilots from this year's development season, but that streak is about to end.  HELP WANTED, which was produced by Warner Bros for NBC, is unaccountably bad.  Partly that's a function of its awful timing:  it's a sitcom about a company that helps laid-off employees find new jobs, and while any subject can be funny if done well (and Up In the Air tackled similar subject matter brilliantly), squeezing laughs out of that very topical misery would require some finesse--which is not exactly this fiasco's strong point.

At every step, Help Wanted chooses the broadest, dumbest form of comedy.  Our heroine Mary (the usually very talented Sarah Paulson--one of the few bright spots of Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip--here desperately unfunny) had quit her own job at an outplacement agency when she slept with the boss and he didn't leave his wife for her.  This experience seems to have struck her directly in the IQ, since in the pilot she appears to be very close to an actual imbecile; she smiles, laughs, talks and even walks inappropriately.  (If Mary Richards had died, she'd be rolling in her grave.)  Mary has started her own company with the help of prissy Joss (James Adomian) as office assistant, and therapist Ken (Tim Meadows) to counsel the clients.  Ken is apparently meant to be colorfully crazy as only TV shrinks can be--he suffers from Seasonal Affect Disorder--but he comes off as far more rational than anyone else on screen.  

The contrivance count increases when one of the first ex-employees Mary has to deal with turns out to be Brad (Adrian Pasdar), who had a one-night stand with Mary, which in the pilot is treated as an event on the scale of a Victorian Age loss of virginity.  By the end of the pilot, of course, he's joined the company and his painful will-they-or-won't-they-again byplay with Mary would have been part of the series.  Meanwhile, the laid-off clients that the company is trying to help are treated as buffoons (you don't cast Jennifer Coolidge as a guest star when you're looking for subtlety), and one can only hope that these characters will find somewhere else to go for career advice.  (Maybe the actors, too.)

Why is Help Wanted so stridently bad?  Hard to tell.  The writer was Kari Lizer, a seasoned sitcom veteran of shows like Will & Grace and The New Adventures of Old Christine, so there wasn't a lack of experience here.  Paulson, Pasdar and Meadows are all talented actors, and director Craig Zisk has handled nuanced shows like Weeds and Nurse Jackie successfully (although he's done very little multicamera comedy, which may not have helped).  This might have been a case of a bad idea made worse by the network and studio--certainly it wouldn't be the first time that's happened.  In any case, the show is just a lousy mess, and its makers will hopefully go on to better forms of employment.

For the most part, actors only get one shot in a given pilot season.  Since the lion's share of network pilots are produced during the same narrow Spring window--allowing them to be picked up and announced at the Upfronts in May--and since actors who play regular characters on a pilot have to give the network exclusivity on their series services for at least several months, once actors are cast in a particular project, that's their only chance for a series until the next pilot season.  (Cable does allow for some off-season possibilities.)  And since, for many actors, the possibility of getting a regular paycheck that can go on for years is a career-transforming event, the fact that a year might be squandered on a show that's going nowhere--with only one fee received for pilot services--is a serious risk.

These thoughts occur while watching Jesse Bradford, Bonnie Somerville, Judith Light and Tom Arnold do their best in the busted pilot OTHER PEOPLE'S KIDS, which was produced for ABC by its home studio.  Did the script by Hunter Covington seem like a good idea at some point?  It's hard to see why--Bradford plays Adam, a young guy (he co-owns a taco truck with a partner played by Malcolm Barrett) who's involved with Michelle, a divorced woman (Somerville) with 2 kids.  (The script makes an issue about their older woman-younger man dynamic, but Somerville is only 5 years older than Bradford, so it's not like her cultural references are FDR and Tommy Dorsey.)   Adam is determined to win the hearts of Michelle's children; her son's main purpose is to serve as a running gag by eating every object put in front of him; her daughter wants nothing to do with Adam.  Since the show has no intention of becoming a black comedy where Adam and Michelle's daughter really loathe each other (which might have been fun), hilarity is supposed to be supplied by Michelle's ex-mother-in-law (Light) and her boyfriend (Arnold), who for no accountable reason prefer Adam to their own son.  (All through the pilot, I thought the twist was going to be that they were really scheming on their son's behalf and pretending to like Adam, but no.)  This pair also does what are supposed to be charmingly eccentric things, like eating Japanese food in kimonos and playing steel drums.

Other People's Kids isn't totally unwatchable--Covington was a junior writer on My Name Is Earl, and the script has some sense of craft--but it's creaky and obvious.  (That actually doesn't make it appreciably worse than some of the new sitcoms ABC is putting on the air, but it's no better than those are, either.)  The only sparks come from the cast:  Bradford and Somerville really are a likable couple, and Arnold plays weird quite well.  (Although the less said about the kids, who seem to have stepped off a reality show, the better.)  For their pains, those talented actors will have to wait till another development season gets going for their next try at TV's brass ring.

Peter Tolan, who with Denis Leary created Rescue Me, knows something about the comedy that emerges when when men try to assert their masculinity in the most idiotic ways.  So you can understand why FOX developed COUNCIL OF DADS, which was meant to bring that kind of tone to a family sitcom.  Alas, what ended up being produced was like some kind of strange spawn of Rescue Me, a Disney movie and one of those pictures like The Protector where an assassin has to bumblingly take care of children.



The premise of Council was at least a new spin on the family genre.  Catherine (Diane Farr) would have been raising her two kids as a single mom after the death of her husband Michael, but Michael made a back-up plan:  he designated 4 of his friends as a collective of paternity, each supposedly bringing a particular strength to the council.  Marty (Kyle Bornheimer), Michael's oldest friend, is the "fun" dad; trainer Randy (Rick Gomez) the jock; therapist Jerry (Patrick Breen) the one the kids can talk to about their feelings; and business partner Bill (Richard T. Jones) can help with schoolwork.  (They're like a less tuneful seven dwarves.)  Meanwhile, Michael's father Buck (Ken Howard) hovers jealously over the group and intrudes at will. 

Naturally, all of the "dads" are morons who constantly compete over who will be the dominant one of the group, but whether it was the inability to make sex jokes and use dirty words that hindered Tolan in thix context, or if he was just off his game, none of it is funny.  The pilot has Randy and Marty fighting about who can make the best model car for Michael's son to use in a contest, with Buck ridiculing them both, and the big joke is a draw between the guys taking off their shirts to reveal their unathletic bodies and wrestle each other, and Marty dripping blood everywhere from his cut finger.  The actors don't distinguish themselves, although it's always nice to see Farr (who recurred as a Rescue Me firefighter for a season).  The Russo brothers, who are behind the camera for some of the best Community episodes, keep the action going, but can't contribute much else.

Peter Tolan is a real talent, and no doubt after Rescue Me goes to its rest in another couple of episodes, he'll go on to other great work.  Council of Dads suggests that the all-ages-admitted sitcom isn't the genre where he'll do it.

It was widely rumored in the weeks before the networks announced their new schedules at the Upfronts that WEEKENDS AT BELLEVUE was destined to hit the air on FOX.  In fact, even its timeslot was supposedly set:  Mondays at 9PM, following House, where it would serve as a compatible mate (both are medical shows) and as heir presumptive if this turns out to be House's final season.  But in the way of so many pre-Upfront rumors, this one wasn't true.  FOX's schedule is tough to crack, because they have such limited real estate with no 10PM shows and chunks of time given over to American Idol and now X-Factor.  In the end, it was decided that House would share its night with Terra Nova in the Fall, and Alcatraz at Midseason (see my Pilot Reports on those shows), and Weekends at Bellevue went away.  (Dept of Full Disclosure:  in another incarnation, I worked on some of the early business deals for this project.) 

Watching the Bellevue pilot, it's not hard to see both why the show received serious consideration, and probably why it didn't make the cut.  In format, the script by Lisa Zwerling (based on the book by Julie Holland) is familiar to the point of routine:  young, beautiful, gutsy, troubled Ellie Harlow (Lauren Ambrose) has just arrived at Bellevue Hospital in NY to supervise the weekend shift at the famous mental ward.  She has a sharp but caring boss (Janet McTeer), 2 potential men in her life (one stuffy and sarcastic, the other cool and studly), and a matching pair of naive young interns to teach.  Each week new patients with colorful disorders come into the ward, and only brilliant Ellie can figure out how best to treat them; but Ellie herself has dark issues (she periodically risks death--by jumping off a yacht, driving without headlights, etc.--all because her mother committed suicide) and she's just barely started to delve into them.  So far, so simplistic.

What isn't routine about Weekends At Bellevue is Lauren Ambrose's performance.  She could have singlehandedly make Bellevue a show worth watching:  it's not easy to pull off these characters who are supposed to be intuitively masterful, disconcertingly charismatic and secretly tormented, all at the same time, but Ambrose does it (she's currently the best thing on Starz's very mixed-bag Torchwood reboot). She makes Ellie fascinating to watch, and by extension, the show becomes quite compelling.  She's not without assistance:  despite the conventional trappings, Zwerling's script is fairly smart and fast-paced, and Jack Bender's direction puts real spark into the walk-and-talk sequences.  And in the small but pivotal role of Ambrose's boss, there's Janet McTeer, a great actress who would have made a marvelous pairing with the young star.

FOX seems to have gone for the more easily promotable option in choosing Alcatraz over Bellevue (picking Terra Nova for the Fall was a no-brainer):  a spooky procedural rather than another entry in the well-worn medical genre.  That logic can't be faulted, and Alcatraz certainly has potential.  It's a shame, though, that we'll never get to see--now that the actors' options have expired, and Ambrose is rumored to be playing Fanny Brice in the Broadway revival of Funny Girl--what Lauren Ambrose and Janet McTeer could have done with this show.