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Showing posts with label medical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medical. Show all posts

THE SKED SEASON FINALE REVIEW: "A Gifted Man"

1:12 AM | Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,





When A GIFTED MAN came onto the scene, it had all the high-class auspices a new series could want.  The pilot was directed by Academy Award-winner Jonathan Demme, was written by Susannah Grant (Eric Brockovich) and had a cast that included such strong actors as Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Ehle, Margo Martindale (who, by the time the series premiered, had won a spectacularly-deserved Emmy for the previous season's Justified) and Pablo Schreiber; its main changes post-pilot were to add ER/SVU veteran Neal Baer as showrunner, and bring another bright talent, Rachelle Lefevre, to the cast.  The basic concept--high-powered Manhattan surgeon is haunted by the chatty ghost of his do-gooder ex-wife, and gradually becomes a better and more charitable man--combined the medical genre with "A Christmas Carol" in a way that seemed promising.


And yet... Gifted Man never really worked, and now it's a longshot for renewal by CBS.  Returning to the show for its last episodes of the season, one could see that despite the tepid reception and low ratings, very little about the show had changed since its debut.  Every week, Michael Holt (Wilson) would face twin medical crises, one at his posh uptown offices and the other at the free clinic his ex-wife Anna (Ehle) had founded, where he was now reluctantly providing his services (reluctant, that is, until the case of the week passionately engaged him).  At some point, Anna would show up and chatter commentary on Michael's continued emotional blockage, invariably provoking "Huh?  Who you talking to, Doc?' reactions from those standing nearby when Anna appeared.  And although they bickered, Michael would share love-that-cannot-be looks with the unhappily married Dr. Kate Sykora (Lefevre), who had replaced Anna at the clinic.  

The season finale didn't go out of its way to be terribly extra-dramatic.  When Michael encountered the woman who had inherited Anna's transplanted heart, and the woman died in a car accident, there may have been the suggestion that the final loss of her heart might send Anna away for good, but it was kept vague.  And the possibility of Michael and Kate becoming an actual couple (they had kissed in the previous episode) was put off for another indefinite time, as Kate and her husband decided to work on their marriage some more.

Gifted Man wasn't--isn't--a terrible show, and in fact not worse than some of the procedurals safely ensconced on CBS' air.  It's limited, though, by its supernatural conceit, because it turned out that there wasn't much for Anna to do except kibbitz for a few minutes in each episode.    The show might be better off jettisoning Anna if it somehow survives to a second season, and becoming a straightforward medical show.  But one can't argue all that strongly for it--despite its pedigree, there's nothing about A Gifted Man that's become distinctive or memorable.  It's probable that shinier pilots will come to light during pilot season, and Gifted Man's talent will survive to work another day somewhere else.

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THE SKED'S MIDSEASON RETURN: "Grey's Anatomy"

1:18 AM | Labels: , , , , , , , , ,



Even diminished from the powerhouse it once was, GREY'S ANATOMY is the foundation of ABC's drama schedule, and its return to the air after a nearly 2 month absence should lift the network's Thursday considerably.

WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  Things were grim when we last visited Seattle Grace.  Cristina (Sandra Oh) had, unknowingly, operated on Teddy (Kim Raver)'s husband--and presided over his tragic, unavoidable death on the table.  Avery (Jesse Williams) had carelessly left an object in a young mother's body that had shredded her heart.  (And while Teddy desperately tried to save the woman's life, the rest of the staff withheld the news of her husband's death from her.)  Meanwhile Meredith (Ellen Pompeo), having just learned that she and Derek (Patrick Dempsey) weren't going to be allowed to adopt the baby they'd been caring for, was caught with Karev (Justin Chambers) in a horrific accident in which the ambulance carrying them and the (other) baby they were trying to save was hit on a blind curve, overturning them and totaling the car that crashed into them.


WHERE WE ARE:  The 2012 premiere picked up just where the midseason finale had left off, and things didn't get markedly more cheerful.  The oldest daughter of the car crash family had to watch not just one but both of her parents die in front of her eyes at the hospital (in a rather too convenient plot turn, she had just turned 18 in the hours since the accident, and so was able to order life support turned off for her dad).  Various teams of regulars worked on the survivors while Meredith tried to comfort the girl.  While all this was going on, a blatant but irresistibly dramatic contrivance found Teddy insisting on having Cristina to assist her in trying to save the woman with the shredded heart--cheerfully enjoying their operating table camaraderie, oblivious to the other doctors watching the ghastly spectacle from the gallery, having no idea that her husband was dead and Cristina had performed the operation.  

Even eight years into its run, with many of its original characters gone and its ratings a memory of what they used to be, Grey's is still a powerfully slick piece of entertainment.  Shonda Rhimes' sense of pace and ability to alternate light and dark storylines is far more effective here than it's ever been on Private Practice, exemplified here by the episode's final, however implausible, happy ending for Meredith and Derek after the hell they'd gone through in the preceding hours.  The cast continues to perform at a very high level:  although Meredith Grey is still technically the show's center, Sandra Oh's Cristina has long been doing the heavy dramatic lifting on the series, and this episode gave her and Kim Raver a showcase, for much of which Oh had to make her miserably mixed emotions clear under a surgical mask, able to act with only her eyes. 

However downsized its ratings may be, Grey's sole dramatic competition on the ABC drama schedule is the new Once Upon A Time, which got off to a strong start but has been stung by its own hiatus and some questionable scheduling moves by the network.  Like ER in its time, Grey's should continue on its network's air for as long as economics permit.

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THE SKED'S MIDSEASON RETURN: "Private Practice"

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Thursday night brought a mother lode of returning serialized dramas to broadcast TV, with both ABC and CW returning to duty.  Let's start by looking at ABC's 10PM PRIVATE PRACTICE, airing a fresh episode for the first time since a 2-hour special on November 17.

WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  As usual, there was all manner of trouble for the Santa Monica doctors.  Pete and Violet (Tim Daly and Amy Brenneman) were in the midst of a marital break-up; Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) had just emerged from a brutalizing bout with drug addiction and rehab, which included her breaking the heart of Sheldon (Brian Benben); Cooper (Paul Adelstein) had just discovered that he had a son with a one-night stand that he never knew about, somewhat to his wife Charlotte (KaDee Strickland)'s chagrin,;and Addison (Kate Walsh)'s continued determination to have a baby, now by adoption, was widening the cracks in her relationship with Sam (Taye Diggs).


WHERE WE ARE:  Private Practice has always been the weak sister to Grey's Anatomy, which of course is also produced by Shonda Rhimes.  The show lacks the narrative engine of the young doctors' ambition on Grey's, and it has a tendency to punch its metaphors, and the analogies between its patients' predicaments and those of their doctors, with a clumsy unsubtlety, as in this episode where the "rules" that govern a menage a trois trying to have a mutual baby (one woman's egg implanted in the other) fall apart, all too squarely echoing the rules Violet and Pete are trying to set in their separation, and the rules Cooper has to start enforcing with his new son--and in case the parallels weren't clear enough, we got a scene where all the doctors talked about how the menage's issues reminded them of their own.

Nevertheless, the show wisely didn't try to push the suds further than usual for its midseason debut, instead providing a fairly typical episode.  There was some big news, notably the episode-ending conclusion (or so it seems) of Addison and Sam, but mostly the developments were incremental.  Enough unspecified time had gone by since the last episode that Charlotte, the show's Bitch With A Heart Of Gold, was ready to let Amelia perform surgeries again, and Pete and Violet had officially broken up, but there was no special melodrama.

The trouble with Private Practice this season is the same one that afflicts many soaps when they get to their 5th season:  after a while, all the show can do is rotate its romantically-involved characters and relationships.  (Now that Addison and Sam are done, presumably the show will play the card of putting her with Benjamin Bratt's Jake, as has been inevitable since he joined the cast.)  Storylines like Cooper's newly-discovered son feel awfully close to shark-jumping, and how many times can Addison be bitterly disappointed in her drive to have a baby? (In this episode, a birth mother so admired and respected Addison that she gave her baby to a church couple instead.)   It would be best for all concerned if the series could start pointing its way to a definite finale, the way cable shows have increasingly been able to do--but Private Practice's rating, hovering around 2.5 in a fairly stable way that's down only about 10% from last season, as opposed to the 25% nosedive Grey has taken (although Grey's average rating is still almost a point higher than Practice's) makes it a valuable performer for the network, and likely to keep spinning its wheels for a while to come.

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THE SKED'S PILOT + 1 REVIEW: "Hart of Dixie"

2:36 AM | Labels: , , , , , , , ,



A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear their ugly heads.  The results can include changes to tone, pace, casting and even story.  Here at THE SKED, we're going to look past the pilots and present reviews of the first regular episodes of this year's new series as well.


Previously... on HART OF DIXIE:  Dr. Zoe Hart (Rachel Bilson) is your basic hard-driving, super-ambitious young New York doctor, a bit puzzled by the fact that an elderly solo practitioner from the wilds of Bluebell, Alabama, Dr. Harley Wilkes, who had approached her with hearty compliments at her medical school graduation, has stayed in touch ever since, repeatedly asking her to join his practice.  When Zoe is rejected from her cardio-thoracic fellowship and told she needs to develop some bedside manner, she goes down to Bluebell, only to find out that Harley is dead and has left her his half of his practice.  It turns out there's a reason for this--as she discovers at the end of the pilot, Zoe is actually Harley's illegitimate daughter.  She decides to stay in Bluebell, and quickly makes the acquaintance of many of the notable townspeople, particularly mayor and former NFL star Lavon Hayes (Cress Williams), bad-boy bartender Wade (Wilson Bethel), with whom she promptly hooks up, and good-guy lawyer George (Scott Porter), who inconveniently is engaged to high-strung belle Lemon (Jaime King).  In case Lemon wasn't going to hate Zoe anyway, she's also the daughter of Brick (Tim Matheson), who shared Harley's practice and wants nothing more than to drive Zoe out of town.


Episode 2:  The biggest change in HART OF DIXIE from its pilot doesn't hit until the end of the second episode:  Nancy Travis, who played Harley's nurse and Zoe's mentor in the medical practice, was also Tim Allen's wife in the Last Man Standing pilot, and her contractual obligations to that show were in 1st position to this one, so this episode marks her exit.  (Her departure isn't handled particularly well, with an unconvincing "Hey, sorry I didn't tell you I was leaving town" scene at the end of the episode.)  It's unclear how or whether her character will be replaced.

Apart from that, the first regular episode of the series, written by series creator Leila Gerstein (Josh Schwartz of Gossip Girl, Dixie's Monday mate on the CW, is a producer here but doesn't write) and directed by pilot director Jason Ensler, is more of the same.  The show has one definite asset:  Bilson, who's as appealing and likable a lead actress as there is on TV.  Luckily, the show's concept forces her to be in virtually every scene of the series.  And there are moments when Gerstein achieves a version of the kind of Gilmore Girls charm the show seems to be reaching for.  But it's not reaching hard enough:  every episode can't, in the same backwards-condescending manner, require Zoe to appreciate the down-home warmth of Bluebell and its inhabitants, while she proves to them all that, while a New Yorker, she's also a human being.

The episode introduced a new continuing plot point, which is that under Harley's partnership agreement with Brick, Zoe will have to bring in enough patients to cover 30% of the total practice revenues, or Brick can buy her out.  Since at the moment everyone in town except Lavon, Wade and George has contempt for her, this will be a challenge, but considering that the show's storyline will require it, we can expect she'll manage to meet the obligation.  The medical story of the episode had Zoe agreeing to hide the MS of Lemon's cousin so that the cousin could take part in the Founders Day parade, even though doing so meant Zoe had to wreck the parade herself and bear the town's wrath (showing, again, that Zoe really does have a good heart).

The dynamic of Hart of Dixie is basically the same as that of A Gifted Man, except with a little more soap and humor, and no ghosts.  If the show is to survive, it'll have to start finding plots that go beyond the original premise, and make more of the supporting characters than the stick figures they currently are--one of the reasons Northern Exposure worked for years, with essentially the same storyline, was that the ensemble was so strong.  For now, Bilson's charisma and the geniality of the proceedings is enough to justify giving Hart of Dixie a little time to--like its lead character--try to find its better self.

Original Verdict:  Change the Channel

Pilot + 1:  Could Recover
 

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THE SKED"S PILOT + 1 REVIEW: "A Gifted Man"

1:28 AM | Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,


A lot can happen between the creation of a TV pilot in the spring and production of episodes for the regular season:  a writing/producing team is hired, audience focus groups weigh in, networks and studios (which may have had their own turnover in the off-season) give plenty of notes, both helpful and otherwise, and critics begin to rear their ugly heads.  The results can include changes to tone, pace, casting and even story.  Here at THE SKED, we're going to look past the pilots and present reviews of the first regular episodes of this year's new series as well.

Previously... on A GIFTED MAN:  Dr. Michael Holt (Patrick Wilson) is a brilliant, prosperous and narcissistic New York neurosurgeon.  One day he runs into his ex-wife Anna (Jennifer Ehle), who he hasn't seen in years, and they talk at length about her new job as Medical Director for a free clinic.  Soon after, Michael is shocked to discover that Anna had been dead for 2 weeks when they had their reunion, and in fact he's being haunted by her ghost.  A very demanding ghost, too, who keeps reappearing to insist that Michael rediscover his better instincts and help the poor at her clinic--which, reluctantly, he begins to do.  

Episode 2:  The series has had a bit of shuffling since the original pilot:  the character of Michael's down-to-earth sister (Julie Benz) has vanished, although the word is that she may recur every so often.  Meanwhile, the healer Michael visited in the pilot to have Anna removed from his life has been made a regular, played by the very hard-working Pablo Schreiber, who in the past year has been cornering the market on NY-produced shows, with roles on Lights Out, The Good Wife, Weeds and now this.


The big question, though, after the Gifted Man pilot was how the series would balance the three main elements of its story:  the patients at Michael's fancy uptown practice, his new unofficial post at Anna's clinic, and the Blithe Spirit scenes of his haunting by Anna.  The answer seems to be that he'll do an awful lot of commuting.  

The first regular series episode, written by Executive Producer/Showrunner Neal Baer and Daniel Truly and directed by Jonathan Kaplan, is much more a conventional medical series than one about the supernatural, as Michael shuttles back and forth every few minutes between his office and the clinic.  Uptown, there's the case of an old friend's wife who finds out in quick succession that she's unexpectedly pregnant with her first child and has a massive brain tumor--she can't have needed chemo treatments while pregnant, so does she lose the baby to save her own life?  Meanwhile, at the clinic, a lovable little Haitian immigrant boy is diagnosed with sickle-cell anemia, and the resulting tests prove that his single father isn't actually his biological dad at all.  Both plots are resolved in the most sentimental way possible, as the pregnant woman's tumor hemorrhages and Michael manages to save both her and her premature child, and urged by Anna's ghost, Michael convinces the boy's father to take his son back no matter what the biological facts might be.

When A Gifted Man is telling stories like this, there's nothing very interesting about it at all.  And the dynamic between Michael and ghostly Anna is so far one of sheer repetition, with Michael resisting doing the right thing because it's too much effort for no financial return, and Anna shaming him into doing it anyway.  Playing a begrudging hero is blanding Patrick Wilson out and makes Jennifer Ehle seem downright smug; there's an attempt to liven things up with smaller, more colorful roles played by Rhys Coiro and Raul Esparza, as well as Schreiber, but despite the excellent casting (Margo Martindale, who just won a titanically deserved Emmy for her work on Justified, is also around as Michael's assistant), the center of the show is far too flat and tame.  

A Gifted Man didn't do much in the ratings on its debut, and with this content, it's hard to see how it's going to win wider audiences over. By choosing to be the safest version of itself, it's responsible for putting itself in the TV ER.

Original Verdict:  If Nothing Else Is On...

Pilot + 1:  And Only If You're Desperate For a Medical Show

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THE SKED PILOT REPORT: The CW's "Hart of Dixie" - PREMIERING TONIGHT

12:13 PM | Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Disclaimer:  Network pilots now in circulation are not necessarily in the form that will air in the Fall.  Pilots are often reedited and rescored, and in some cases even recast or reshot.  So these critiques shouldn't be taken as full TV pilot reviews, but rather as a guide to the general style and content of the new shows coming your way.

HART OF DIXIE -  Monday 9PM on The CW:  Change the Channel

HART OF DIXIE has one of those premises easy to encapsulate in a single sentence:  "Cristina from Grey's Anatomy stars in Northern Exposure--only in the South."  After all, Northern Exposure and Grey's are both solidly entertaining shows, so why shouldn't this work?  As it turns out, for lots of reasons.


Hart comes from Josh Schwartz's production company; he's the mind behind The OC, Gossip Girl and Chuck, but he's only a producer on this one and not the writer.  The script is by Leila Gerstein, who's been writing on Gossip Girl, and the difference in voice is obvious.  Our heroine, Zoe Hart (Rachel Bilson, herself a Schwartz veteran as one of the brightest presences on The OC) is a hard-driven young doctor who fully intends to become a leading cardio-thoracic surgeon in New York, just like her emotionally distant father.  When things go badly in the big city, she (implausibly) decides to dump her entire life and answer those postcards she's been getting since her graduation from medical school, joining the practice of the general practitioner in Bluebell, Alabama who's been sending them since he watched her deliver the class valedictory address.  In the ways of TV pilots, it turns out the GP's assistant (Nancy Travis, who'll have to be recast, since she plays Tim Allen's wife on Last Man Standing) has continued to send out the postcards even though the old doc recently died.  But guess what?  The deceased mysteriously left his half of the practice to Zoe in his will.  (I know, you've already guessed the only possible reason he'd do that, but let's not spoil it.)

Bluebell is a town that seems to pride itself on featuring the highest possible number of Southern cliches.  There are the belles who parade around town in Confederate-era gowns and who are led by the lovely Lemon (Jaime King), who's really the meanest of mean girls and whose name really is Lemon (for a more complex version of this character, wait for Bryce Dallas Howard in the upcoming film of The Help)--and hey!  the mean girl is also the daughter of the crotchety doctor who owns the other half of Zoe's new practice, and wants to drive her out of town!  There's also the local electric system that can't keep two bungalows lit at the same time.  And let's not forget the Mayor's pet alligator.  By the end of the pilot, Zoe's met her 2 potential love interests, one a hunky lawyer (Scott Porter from Friday Night Lights) who (oops) is engaged to the mean girl, the other a hunky bad boy (Wilson Bethel).  After initially wanting to run back to New York, she delivers a baby and darned if she doesn't realize that she can become a better human being and a better doctor by staying in a small town.  And she's found out the dead old doc's secret, cementing her place in Bluebell.

As obvious as all this is, with the right writing and production it could be entertaining enough--it's not as though the premise for Northern Exposure wasn't silly.  But Gerstein's script doesn't have any of the self-mocking, knowing humor that usually enlivens Schwartz's shows; it just unravels its cliches, good-natured but simple-minded.  Bilson is an extremely appealing actress, yet not so much an obsessive cardio-thoracic surgeon (try to imagine her playing Cristina in Grey's and you'll see the fundamental miscasting).  The supporting cast, even Porter, comes off as bland, with the exception of Cress Williams (also from Friday Night Lights!) as that Mayor, who has a sense of humor and his own secret.  And the pilot is an extraordinarily ragged piece of work, stitched together with enough voice-over narration for an entire season of Gossip Girl, and capped with an awkward Big Speech of exposition.     

All hope isn't lost for Hart of Dixie.  The CW has given it the slot behind Gossip Girl on Mondays, and none of the competition (the revamped 2 1/2 Men and Mike & Molly on CBS; House on FOX, and reality competitions on ABC and NBC) is aimed at its target young woman audience.  Now that the pilot and its burden of premise are out of the way, it'll just be a show about a cute young doctor in a small town, and maybe it can gather itself together.  If the series is going to be watchable, though, everyone involved, from the top down, has a lot of work to do.

 

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THE SKED'S BUSTED PILOT THEATRE: "Weekends At Bellevue"

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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. 

The Sked's Verdict:  Worth Another Look

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

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THE SKED CABLE REVIEW: USA's "Necessary Roughness"

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Premieres Wednesday 10PM on USA:  Change the Channel

NECESSARY ROUGHNESS departs from the USA Network formula in several ways:  our heroine Dani Santino (Callie Thorne) is the mother of teenagers, she doesn't work undercover or take on wacky identities, she has no extraordinary abilities other than empathy, and her wise-cracking best friend isn't around enough to count as a sidekick (in the pilot, she's played by Amanda Detmer, who's now a regular on ABC's fall sitcom Man Up).  While it's nice to see the network stretching its usual rules of engagement, the result sadly doesn't have much bounce.


Dani is a psycho- and hypno-therapist; 17 years ago, she had the opportunity to continue her education and start a serious psychiatric practice, but she became pregnant and downscaled professionally to raise her family.  She now sees patients in her home, helping them to stop smoking, lose weight and the like.  When she finds out her husband (Craig Bierko) has been cheating on her, she files for what turns into an ugly divorce, and then she happens onto the chance to become team therapist to pro football's NY Hawks.  (The show, although set in New York, is shot in Atlanta, and it's not one of the more convincing city-for-city substitutions.)  The team has plenty of players who could use her help, because their personal problems are affecting their game, as well as a love interest for Dani (trainer Marc Blucas) and an enigmatic team "fixer" (Scott Cohen).  

The premise of a shrink to professional athletes is a promising and topical one, and the Necessary Roughness pilot, written by the team of Liz Kruger and Craig Shapiro, quickly trots out the tropes you'd expect:  her first patient, TK King (Mehcad Brooks), is jewelry-laden and arrogant, with anger management problems; he hangs out in strip clubs with his posse while getting into drunken fights.  The show takes all this more seriously than you'd expect from an USA show (even the hypnotism is played straight), and Dani's cure for TK turns out to be simplistic and sentimental.  Meanwhile, she has standard-issue problem kids (Hannah Marks and Patrick Johnson), and a mother (Concetta Tomei) who's almost a clone of Sharon Gless in Burn Notice. 

Although Thorne is more than capable of sharp humor (for seasons, she's been craziness itself as Denis Leary's mistress on Rescue Me), the script for Necessary Roughness's script has very little snap.  The pilot plods through Dani's family problems and the wait for TK to listen, really listen, to what she's saying so he can start catching passes again.  (The 75-minute length of the pilot doesn't help.)  The only intriguing character is Cohen's fixer, mostly because he's pretty much left in the shadows. 

Necessary Roughness has a great lead-in from USA's hit Royal Pains, so there's little doubt it'll get sampled in its premiere, and in Thorne it has a star who's likable enough to hold onto an audience--if the writers can provide her with the material.  Right now, Dani isn't very distinctive, and the problems she's solving feel banal.  USA may have sacrificed its trademark tone, but not to attempt something original--it's turned itself temporarily into Lifetime.

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