Movie Box Review

CW has announced the line-up for its 2011/12 regular season finales, as well as a late-season premiere:

First to exit will be ONE TREE HILL, which winds up its 9 seasons on April 4 with a 2-hour special.

On April 17, RINGER will be done for the season (and maybe longer).  Starting April 24, its timeslot will be filled by the new LA COMPLEX, which sounds like the return of the return of Melrose Place:  a group of Hollywood wannabes all live in the same apartment building, and no doubt suds fly.

The remainder of the network's shows end in mid- to late-May.

May 10:  THE VAMPIRE DIARIES and THE SECRET CIRCLE

May 14:  GOSSIP GIRL and HART OF DIXIE

May 15:  90210

May 18:  NIKITA and SUPERNATURAL

May 29:  LA COMPLEX

May 30:  AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL

PARENTHOOD is sort of the Bizarro version of a broadcast network drama:  it shines when addressing the kind of tiny moments of human interaction that just about every other show on TV can't be bothered to notice, but it sometimes falters when attempting the Big Event Episode that's bread and butter for most series.

Last night's season finale, unfortunately, was an example of the latter.  The episode, written by showrunner Jason Katims and directed by Executive Producer Lawrence Trilling, centered around the long-postponed and now very sudden wedding of Crosby (Dax Shepard) and Jasmine (Joy Bryant), but also tried to wind up, or at least advance/twist, almost all the other storylines of the season.  It was a lot to do in an hour (or what's left of an hour after commercials and promos), and much of it felt rushed and undeveloped.

The problem was evident from the episode's start, when Crosby's and Jasmine's respective current romantic interests (Courtney Ford and D.B. Woodside), both made into real human beings over several previous episodes, were dismissed in an opening montage where almost all the dialogue was drowned out by a background song.  No time!  

What followed, though, was Parenthood at its best , a messy, believable all-hands-on-deck fight between brothers Crosby and Adam (Peter Krause) because Adam had gone behind Crosby's back to negotiate the sale of their jointly-owned recording studio.  The differing priorities of the brothers and their resulting tensions had been so well built-up over the course of the season that the explosion felt very real, and the fact that it was happening in front of the entire family managed not to seem at all gimmicky.

After that, the show had to settle down to the grim business of dealing quickly with all the season's accumulated storylines, which led to some unusually clumsy dramaturgy.  Julia (Erika Christensen) and Joel (Sam Jaeger), who had just suffered the heartbreaking failure of a failed adoption when the birth mother (Rosa Salazar) changed her mind after the birth, were informed, out of the blue, that children are sometimes available on a moment's notice when mother's give up their rights in emergency situations, so we knew that would happen before the episode was over--which it did.  (Although the show tried to throw a bit of a curveball by making the adoptee much older than the baby we were expecting.)  Kristina (Monica Potter) had a heart-to-heart with niece Amber (Mae Whitman) to tell her she couldn't be both employee and girlfriend of the city council candidate they both work for--and within minutes, Amber was delivering the same message and being assured that all was well, she could keep her job.  No sooner had Sarah (Lauren Graham) broken up with Mark (Jason Ritter) than he showed up at the wedding and proposed to her.  (Although if both Parenthood and the new Ritter/Katims pilot are picked up for fall, that marriage won't be happening.)  Most awkwardly of all, Adam suddenly changed his mind about selling the studio in a contrived (non) best man toast at his brother's wedding.   (As to which, by the way--if the studio is worth $2M+, as it clearly is, the brothers' financial issues should ease whether they sell the place right now or not.)

Even below-par Parenthood is far better than most network 1-hours.  The show juggles an enormous number of characters with--well, usually with remarkable grace.  The cast, which also includes Craig T. Nelson (whose character amazingly survived the episode without any heart palpitations), Bonnie Bedelia, Sarah Ramos and Max Burkholder, is as well-meshed an ensemble as any on television.  Katims and his writing staff are superb at showcasing the subtle connective tissues of family life.  

Parenthood is located squarely on NBC's bubble, with ratings that would surely get it canceled on any other network, but (especially in the last couple of weeks) in the not-so-bad range for the Peacock.  If network branding and identity still mean anything, the series, even with its occasionally flawed episodes, should be granted the opportunity to continue telling its first-rate tales of ordinary people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, in the end, is all you needed to know about TERRA NOVA:  in its entire 2-hour season--and very possibly series--finale, dinosaurs were sighted for a grand total of about 2 minutes.

Remember the original promos for Terra Nova, the ones that played on FOX for months while the show kept getting postponed?  The ones that promised a Jurassic Park experience in your living room, week-in and week-out, with blockbuster-movie level computer-generated dinos?  Well, after the big-budget series pilot, that show didn't exist.  What Terra Nova turned out to be instead was a story about good guys living in a colony walled off from some very disorganized bad guys (revolutionaries?  corporate dupes?) and prehistoric creatures that were more often talked about than seen.  (And when they showed up, they turned out to be the CG equivalent of cardboard cutouts.)

The Shannons, aka World's Most Uninteresting Family, were the leads, bested only by Skye, The World's Most Harmless Spy and, later in the season, by Lucas Taylor, The World's Most Insipid Villain.  Lucas was the son of Commander Taylor, who as played by Stephen Lang was the only one in all of prehistory to be a little bit interesting.  Lucas had been built up in early episodes as some kind of freaky insane genius who knew how to solve the mysteries of time travel and passage between universes, but he turned out to be the anti-Carrie Mathison, a pouting post-adolescent madman who became duller and more banal the more we saw of him, obsessed with daddy issues and what happened in Somalia.  Having him as Terra Nova's chief antagonist was like making a huge-budgeted superhero epic where the villain was Biff from Back to the Future.

There were so many awful moments in the finale that it's hard to choose just one:  daddy Commander not realizing his crazy son wanted a hug for the very first time just so he could stab dad?  The fuss about Jim Shannon vanishing through an unknown portal to the past, possibly lost in unexplored parts of the planet... only to have him turn up behind the nearest tree?  The idiot bad guy who thought he'd been injected with deadly microorganisms because someone told him so?  The big "mystery" for a purported next season of a 18th-century ship turning up in the desert (seen Close Encounters much?)?  Maybe it was the way every one of the villains believed Jim's ridiculous fake deafness and limp even as Jim was running all over the compound and having conversations with everyone in earshot.

Whether Terra Nova comes back next season will ultimately be determined by factors of no interest to mere viewers:  overseas sales, the network's slate of 8PM development, the possibility of reduced network license fees.  What the finale proved conclusively, however, is that the show deserves to be left in the distant past.