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Showing posts with label river. Show all posts
Showing posts with label river. Show all posts

THE SKED'S TUESDAY NETWORK SCORECARD

11:26 AM | Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,





FOX's 4-sitcom Tuesday excited no one.

FOX:  I HATE MY TEENAGE DAUGHTER and BREAKING IN made unimpressive returns to the schedule.  Daughter could claim a decent retention of its RAISING HOPE lead-in, and it also won the head-to-head sitcom battle at 8:30PM--but really there's nothing good about a 1.6 premiere.  Breaking In had less excuse, falling to an ugly 1.7 from NEW GIRL's strong 3.0 lead-in, which was the highest number on any network last night. And even though Raising Hope handled its shift to 8PM well, it aired against an ABC repeat last night, so future results may not be as strong.


ABC: The network actually aired some good programming last night, to little avail.  COUGAR TOWN had a funny half-hour directed by Courtney Cox, and for Bill Lawrence fans, it had the additional pleasure of a guest appearance by Scrubs' Sarah Chalke.  After that, THE RIVER finally delved into what's supposed to be the show's central mystery--just what happened to Dr. Emmett Cole--which allowed Bruce Greenwood to appear in more than snippets, in a creepy hour directed by Michelle McLaren.  For their troubles, the show got matching lousy 1.5 ratings, 4th place for their slots.  (Cougar Town at least had the excuse that it rose from its repeat LAST MAN STANDING lead-in, but as its cast members continue to flock to 2d position pilot deals, that doesn't matter much.)  The evening ended with a terrible 0.9 for a BODY OF PROOF repeat that was beaten by primary election coverage on NBC.

NBC:  THE BIGGEST LOSER fell to a season and possibly a series low, dipping below a 2 for the first time.  At 10PM, a DECISION 2012 special scored a not-embarrassing-for-a-news-special 1.0.

CBS:  All repeats, which were still enough to win all but the 9-9:30PM half-hour of the night.

CW:  90210 returned after a month off with a fine (CW level) 0.7, but RINGER dipped to a 0.5 after that.

Tonight's only new arrival is REVENGE FOR REAL, which ABC will use to sucker in Revenge fans rather than air repeats.  The network is giving it a bit of a lead-in with a new HAPPY ENDINGS (although that show's rating will be lowered by having a repeat MODERN FAMILY as its own lead-in).  NBC airs new sitcoms at 8-9PM, and apart from that, only the unscripted shows on all the networks are original.


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THE SKED'S PILOT + 1 REVIEW: "The River"

1:32 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 THE RIVER:  A small boat called the Magus heads up the Amazon, in search of vanished TV nature series host Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood).  The crew is a mix of Cole's family and friends--wife Tess (Leslie Hope), son Lincoln (Joe Anderson) and Lena (Eloise Mumford), the daughter of his trusted cameraman--and a TV crew headed by Clark (Paul Blackthorne) that's documenting the search.  Also along are mercenary Brynildson (Thomas Kretschman) providing security, and the boat's engineer (Daniel Zacapa) and his adolescent daughter Jahel (Paula Gaitan).  There are plenty of tensions among this group as they follow breadcrumbs of clues they find in the videotapes Cole has left behind.  And along the way, at every stop they encounter all manner of supernatural phenomena.  The entire show is supposedly edited together from the footage shot by the documentary crew itself.



Episode 2:  Although The River aired as a "2-hour premiere," it was actually the original pilot with the first regular episode appended.  The building blocks of exposition and mythology having been established in the pilot, that second hour gives a good picture of what the series is planning to be.  Clearly it'll be quite a while before the Magus finds Emmet Cole, and some of the show's episodic adventures will only tangentially involve the search for him.

In the 2d hour episode, written by Executive Producers Michael Green and Zack Estrin, and directed by pilot director Jaune Collet-Serra, some kind of magic CG bug flew into Jahel's mouth and temporarily possessed her with Cole's spirit (and Bruce Greenwood's voice).  The spirit tried to talk the group into going home, but of course then there'd be no show, so they ignored him/it and pressed on.  Something the spirit said seemed to indicate that Cole was still alive but being held in captivity, which set the Magus to this week's part of the Amazon.  Cole wasn't there, but they did find the ghost of a dead colonial family's child.  The site where the girl drowned was surrounded by dolls who sometimes came alive, and since the dead girl missed her dead mother, in her loneliness she took Tess as a substitute.  (This storyline oddly echoed The Woman In Black, which opened in theatres last weekend.) 

The hour had a few creepy moments, but it never made the use that it should have of those dolls, which didn't do much more than open their eyes and stare (limited series CG budget?).  Watching Leslie Hope get pulled under muddy water was a good deal less frightening.  The episode also made clear some of the limitations of the show's concept.  Since the show-within-the-show is being filmed by a professional TV crew, the "found footage" gimmick doesn't mean much (unlike, say, the ingenious use of technical imitations in Paranormal Activity 3), because it all looks like any other TV show except for the shaky hand-held camerawork used to accentuate panic in the action sequences, and there's already overuse of genre cliches like images suddenly cutting to static or flaring in the face of the supernatural.  Also, the conventions of series television mean that the regular characters aren't in all that much mortal danger until we get near the season finale, which lessens any suspense, and thus far, the relationships between those characters are none too scintillating.

Since the hunt for Emmet Cole is a very loose underpinning for the series at this point (this week we got a B story suggesting that it's Lena, not Lincoln, who's the "chosen one" that will have to fight evil to rescue Cole), each episode of The River will mostly have to fend for itself, based on the strength of that week's story.  This episode was medium-scary, and the show will have to do better if the repeated scenes of people stumbling through jungle or looking off the side of the boat and exclaiming "What the hell was that?!?" aren't to get tiresome.


Original Verdict:  Potential DVR Alert

Pilot + 1:  Beware of Shaky-Cam Seasickness

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THE SKED: ABC MIDSEASON - UPDATE: "Pan Am" Crashes; "Cougar Town" Diminishes

4:12 PM | Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


UPDATE:  The other shoe is falling on COUGAR TOWN, and it's not a good fit:  ABC has cut the show's order from 22 episodes to 15, and will announce its timeslot at the TCA in January.  Deadline says it may be put into the Tuesday 8:30PM slot behind LAST MAN STANDING, which would be a mismatch of historic proportions.  Rebel Network (see below)--your time may be coming!
 

ABC has announced a slate of midseason premieres, and what's missing may be more notable than what's there.  There was no mention of the returning COUGAR TOWN on the schedule, nor the new (and based on its pilot, exceptionally promising) sitcom APT 23, not to mention Shonda Rhimes' Washington drama SCANDAL.  Vulture says that according to their inside source, Cougar Town will in fact be on the air on February or March, so for now at least we can hit "Pause" on our plan for a new rebel network that starts out with Community, Cougar Town and the return of Arrested Development.  


As for what the network did announce:

SUNDAY:  As had been anticipated since the Upfronts, ABC will give GCB (which is really GOOD CHRISTIAN BITCHES but the Parents Television Council won't let the network say so) the post-DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES slot on Sundays 10PM starting March 4, and then hope it can be the successor to that show's fading audience.  The last show to get a shot at that throne, PAN AM, was given only one extra episode, bespeaking scheduling needs rather than any real encouragement.  Although the show isn't officially dead, ABC's development season would have to be awfully bad for it to come back.

MONDAY:  No changes, but the next cycle of DANCING WITH THE STARS will debut March 19, giving The Voice plenty of time to settle into its Monday slot on NBC, since it starts the night after the Super Bowl.

TUESDAY:  Say goodbye to the awful MAN UP!--and now say hello to the even more dreadful (based on the pilot) WORK IT, a cross dressing comedy that may even now be making Billy Wilder's gravestone weep.  It's inheriting the post-LAST MAN STANDING slot to cement ABC's Tuesday 8-9PM as the worst comedy hour on television.  At 9PM, CELEBRITY WIFE SWAP will have a 5 week run starting in January, then the effectively creepy THE RIVER will take over for 7 weeks until the DANCING WITH THE STARS results show returns to the hour.  BODY OF PROOF only received an extra order of 3 episodes, so the 10PM slot will open up early in 2012, meaning that may be where Scandal (or whatever currently inhabits Scandal's slot) will go.

WEDNESDAY:  You don't mess with what's working:  no changes.

THURSDAY:  In the troublesome 8PM slot, WINTER WIPEOUT will run Jan-March, and then THE MISSING, which looks to be Ashley Judd as Liam Neeson in Taken, takes over.

FRIDAY:  SHARK TANK replaces the 8PM hour of EXTREME MAKEOVER in February.

SATURDAY:  If Cougar Town and Apt 23 go here, I'm starting a boycott.  (They won't.)

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