Movie Box Review

The atmosphere on this week's SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was far more relaxed now that last week's Lindsay Lohan Extravaganza Express has left town.  That didn't make it a great episode--SNL is lucky to manage 1 or 2 of those in a season--but it had its share of laughs.

Jonah Hill was a good choice for the post-Lohan edition, an assured host with strong comic timing.  (Unlike Lohan, he was given lead roles in sketches throughout the show.)  To his credit, he never overtly plugged his 21 Jump Street opening next week, even though that's certainly the reason he was there.  By sheer will, he pulled about every laugh available out of the sketch about a 6-year old who talked like a Borscht Belt comic, and he was also sharp in a Planet of the Apes bit about a talking ape who wouldn't shut up.  On the other hand, he wasn't immune to reading his sketches with his eyes glued to the cue cards, and he had a bad habit of cracking himself up, breaking so badly in the J Pop America Fun Time Now piece that he was practically incomprehensible.

Breaking seemed to be going around this week:  no less than Kristen Wiig, the consummate professional, almost lost it while playing Paula Deen on Update.  And of course Bill Hader wasn't able to keep it together as Stefon (he never is), but you really couldn't blame him:  this week he had to describe a club "opened at gunpoint in a Lady Foot Locker," and an Irish pub that features Heprechauns, which of course are Leprechauns with Hep C.  

If Stefon was the running character it was good to see again, J Pop has already run its course, ready for a long break, at the very least.  This week's political sketch was about Rush Limbaugh and not the Republican primary candidates, which was a relief.   Pretaped pieces were a mixed bag:  the opening monologue piece about Hill being insufferable since his Moneyball nomination was fun, but the SNL Digital Short with Hill being hit by tennis balls in the other balls over and over and over again was interminable.

The episode had a bent for the oddly conceptual:  Andy Samberg playing Sarah Palin as a deliberately bad Tina Fey impression, an extremely long sketch in which Liza Minnelli Tries To Turn Off A Lamp (Wiig wasn't at her best as Liza, who sounded a lot more like Wiig's dingbat theatre star on the show's Password parody than the real thing), which for all the world seemed like a 12:55PM sketch that had gotten lost at 12:35, and then the actual 12:55PM sketch, which started as an anniversary joke and turned into a Coolio singalong. In all, an unmemorable but decent enough week.

The show is off until April 7, when it returns with Sofia Vergara as host.

WHERE WE WERE:  Contra Security, a wacky high-tech firm run by the extravagantly enigmatic Oz (Christian Slater).  Contra tests the security measures of its clients by cracking them wide open, staging mock break-ins, robberies, and similar hijinks.  Its roster of idiosyncratic experts include hacker Cameron (Bret Harrison), gadget guy Cash (Alphonso McAuley) and, for the moment at least, lock-picker Melanie (Odette Annable).

WHERE WE ARE:  A somewhat different version of Contra.  BREAKING IN's behind-the-scenes story was at least as interesting as anything that happened on the show.  It aired initially with the giant lead-in of American Idol, and scored not-bad ratings in the mid-2s.  When FOX moved the show away from Idol at the end of the season and gave it Raising Hope as a lead-in, the number plummeted to 1.3.  So one's feeling about the ratings of the show sort of depended on how much one was squinting when looking at them.  In the (sort of) end, FOX didn't renew the series when its network option was up in May.  But Sony Television, which produces Breaking In, didn't give up, and when the cast options were expiring at the end of June (it's typical for cast options to extend beyond the network's, in case the studio can place the show somewhere else with a little extra time), it had talked FOX into splitting the cost of extending the deals for a few more months, so FOX could have a chance to reconsider.  Which, in the (real) end, it did, renewing the show for a midseason run that began tonight--and giving it the hit New Girl as a lead-in.

It's safe to assume that part of the pitch Sony made to the network was a shift in the creative elements of the show, and so the cast of Breaking In 2.0 isn't exactly the same as last year's.  The disguises expert who was part of the team is gone, as is Melanie's buffoonish fiance. And Melanie herself, for that matter, will only recur in some of the remaining episodes (Annable had meanwhile taken a role on FOX's House).  The bigger news is that Contra would have new ownership, with Oz selling the company to a conglomerate personified by the new character of Veronica (Emmy Award-winner Megan Mullally, who's been added to the cast), and her assistant Molly (Erin Richards).  

The season premiere, written and directed respectively by series co-creators Adam F. Goldberg and Seth Gordon, was mostly concerned with setting up the new premise of the show.  Since every single FOX promo had made it clear that Veronica was the new boss, the first half of the episode was unintentionally tiresome as it introduced her as the new perky and annoying assistant to Oz she was pretending to be.  Once the reveal finally took place, the focus was on the Contra employees, so there was still no clear picture of who Veronica is actually going to be.  (Presumably the producers and network are fully aware that having both Mullally and Slater sharing a screen squeezes an awful lot of hamminess into a very small space.)  The Molly character was only briefly introduced, so other than being British and (naturally) acerbic, her role isn't defined yet either.

The basic dynamic of last year's Breaking In was that every week, Cameron and the others would leap to conclusions about what their assignment was and what Oz was really plotting, and every time, it would turn out that Oz was fiendishly playing mind-games with them and was actually 3 steps ahead.  Presumably with Mullally around, that's going to be somewhat different.  The other major thread was Cam's not-quite requited longing for Melanie, and with Annable playiing a limited role, that's not going to be the same this season either.  So the show is going to have some fundamental changes to its DNA.

As for tonight's episode itself, it was at best mildly funny:  Cash's pranks are rarely as clever as the writers seem to think, there was little opportunity for the pop culture jokes that usually abound (apart from an extremely forced Breakfast Club bit), and the script had to do a lot of heavy lifting to contrive both Mullally's arrival and Slater's continuing presence.  Breaking In was far from memorable TV before--we'll find out in the next few weeks if the changes have made it any less disposable.

COMMUNITY returns to the NBC schedule at 8PM on Thursday, March 15.

WHERE WE WERE:  Greendale Community College, of course!  Where the school mascot is a Human Being and the Dean (Jim Rash) is to be seen in outfits intended for any and all genders and species, a place of air conditioning repair secret-police cults, magic trampolines, a statue of famed alumnus Luis Guzman, and the occasional paintball massacre and zombie uprising   In short, the altogether strangest and most surreal place of higher learning in television history.  Where a motley gang of study buddies (Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Chevy Chase, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Yvette Nicole Brown, Donald Glover) and one wannabe (Ken Jeong) bicker, protect, scheme against and occasionally hook up with one another, while pop culture references rain down unrelentingly on all their heads.

WHERE WE ARE:  Still Greendale.  Any fear that Community's time off the NBC schedule was spent altering the show's unique DNA can be quickly laid to rest.   The March 15 episode "Urban Matrimony and the Sandwich Arts," screened at tonight's PaleyFest salute, lacked writing and directing credits, but was thoroughly in keeping with the Community all of us--well, a tiny, tiny portion of us, but so far enough to keep it on the air--love.

Actually, "Urban Matrimony" is a little different from most Community episodes, in that something actually takes place with effects that will presumably go beyond the given episode:  Shirley (Brown) and ex-husband Andre (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) decide to remarry.  While this causes the expectedly unexpected, as Britta (Jacobs) discovers her deeply hidden inner wedding planner, Abed and Troy (Pudi and Glover) determine that they need to be "normal" for the occasion, and Jeff (McHale) has to give the toast (always remember:  a toast that starts "Webster's Dictionary defines..." is the Jim Belushi of toasts), it also gives rise to some genuine emotion, and a less abstract superstructure than the show sometimes provides.  Meanwhile, Shirley and Pierce (Chase) pitch a college sandwich business to the Dean.  Also, there's a cameo appearance from one of the series' most especially beloved recurring characters, which I won't spoil. 

Community is what's good about NBC's wretched standing in the ratings.  On any other broadcast network, it would have been canceled halfway through its first season, but terminal ratings at CBS or ABC still allow for renewal at NBC. (In fact, it did just as well in its timeslot this season as its replacement, the television royalty that is 30 Rock.)  It's a show that, for better and worse, the bulk of the network audience will simply never get, nor want to. Let's face it, either you care to watch a half-hour of television devoted to a conceptual joke about the 1981 cult-indie classic My Dinner With Andre, or you don't. 

There will always be ups and downs to Community, as gasp-inducing inspiration is followed by tiresome eccentricity for its own sake.  (Or as show creator/showrunner Dan Harmon put it at PaleyFest, sometimes the show goes very far up its own ass.)  But that inspiration stuff is awfully heady, and network television would be a markedly less accredited place without Community.

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.

  

We're not on the tabloid beat at SHOWBUZZDAILY, but when Lindsay Lohan put herself in front of the cameras tonight on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, she made herself fair game.  It would be heartwarming to be able to report that with tonight's appearance, she's finally taken the first real step of her professional rehabilitation, but sadly that wasn't the case.

It's impossible not to notice that Lohan only vaguely resembles the young woman from just a few years ago, both in terms of her affect and her very appearance.  Either her hair or wig is bleached blonde, and whether her current face is the result of chemical or surgical changes (to untutored eyes, her cheeks certainly appear to be augmented), or just the aftereffect of some very hard years, she's currently unable to move her features in a natural way, and thus appears disturbingly frozen.  This is a problem for someone who needs to be able to express emotions nonverbally as part of her everyday work.

It was obvious that Lorne Michaels (who's known Lohan since he produced Mean Girls) and the SNL writing staff went out of their way all evening to take it as easy on Lohan as they possibly could.  She never took the lead in any sketch, usually delivering just a few lines in bits featuring others.  So she was an ensemble member on "Real Housewives of Disney," one of the background dancers in a sketch with Fred Armisen in drag, a sidekick in a radio DJ bit, the house-sitter watching Kristen Wiig as her employer go crazy, and so on.  In this week's installment of "Scared Straight," she played herself, but Kenan Thompson as her co-convict had the bulk of the lines.  Even her monologue was dominated by the other cast members, while she played straight woman.  Lohan only took part in one of the pretaped segments, not appearing at all in the SNL Digital Short.

Even so, it was clear she was having problems keeping up.  Lohan's eyes were glued to the cue-cards (which didn't keep her from blowing her lines), and you could see her at times looking to someone off-camera, seemingly giving her stage directions.  All of this combined for a performance that wasn't very funny.  (Jon Hamm got more laughs from his 30 seconds of cameo appearances than Lohan did for the whole show.)

It didn't help, to be sure, that this was one of the most woeful SNLs of the season.  Usually election years are great for the series, but SNL seems to be about as excited by Mitt Romney as most Republicans are, and the political sketches have been dragging SNL down all year.  Other skits featured the umpteenth return of "James Carville" and "Snooki," as well as a "Psychic Awards" sketch where--well, you've already guessed the joke.  Apart from a general lack of wit, things seemed to be going less than smoothly backstage:  the show, which usually only reruns taped bits when absolutely necessary, needed to do it twice tonight, and another segment that was clearly intended as a Jason Sudeikis "runner" (a recurring bit that airs intermittently throughout the episode) ended up with both its segments airing back-to-back.  . 

A mediocre or worse SNL is hardly news, though.  This was meant to be the night when Lindsay Lohan started to claw her way back up from the pit in which she's dug herself, but while it's good news that she got through the evening without any notable disaster, she's still got a long, long way to shovel.

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.

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.

Previously On... THE WALKING DEAD:  Our erstwhile humans spent many, many episodes on a farm owned by cranky vet Hershel (Scott Wilson), while they searched for the missing Sophia (Madison Lintz).  There were lots of lengthy conversations about the meaning of life in a zombie-infected universe, and whether it was worth going on--let alone having a baby, as it turned out Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) was going to do.  Meanwhile, her husband Rick (Andrew Lincoln) revealed that he knew about the affair Lori had been having with the increasingly Travis Bickle-like Shane (Jon Bernthal) while Rick was believed dead.  Glenn (Steven Yuen) found romance with Hershel's daughter Maggie (Lauren Cohan).  And then it developed that Hershel had been keeping a barn full of Walkers, including Hershel's wife, and even feeding them to keep them "alive," because he believed that one day there might be a cure.  When Shane found out about the Walker barn, he started with the slaughtering, and at the very end of the fall finale, we discovered that--guess what?--Sophia was in there too, and had been for all the many, many weeks we'd all been on the farm.  Rick shot her in the head, so that this plotline could finally, mercifully end

And Now:  This week's episode picked up exactly where the fall finale left off, but it marks a key transition in Walking Dead's history:  after a season and a half under the leadership of Frank Darabont (best known for theatrical films like The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption), the show is now being run--after Darabont exited under circumstances still not completely explained--by Glen Mazzara, a TV vet with stints on shows like Hawthorne, Crash, Life and The Shield. 

So goodbye to windy expositioning, and hello to lots of gooey zombie bang-bang, right?  No more Boardwalk Empire-style measured pace, it's time for a nonstop horror joyride, yes? 

Well, not so far.  The ratio of dialogue to action in Walking Dead makes its massive success a continuing mystery.  We're still on that damn farm, and the first two-thirds of the episode, written by Evan Reilly and directed by Clark Peters, is still pretty much the characters debating the morality of Shane's actions and life in general.  Hershel gets depressed, and when Maggie tells Glenn she loves him, he doesn't say it back.  Awwwww.  The only fun is when Andrea (Laurie Holden), transporting a pick-up truck loaded with shot-up zombies, has to nonchalantly retrieve a fallen severed arm from the road.

In the episode's second half, we do get what could be a big event:  Lori gets into a car crash, and while she's certainly still going to be alive, that could put her pregnancy in danger, and should eventually also make for zome Walker action.  However, all of that will have to wait for future episodes:  this one let her crash and never came back to her for the next 20 minutes.

Instead, we spent the last section of the episode in a bar where Hershel, who it turns out was an alcoholic who had sworn off the stuff when Maggie was born, had gone to drown his sorrows.  Rick and Glenn go to bring him back, and 2 strangers, led by Dave (Michael Raymond-James) show up.  This leads to a very Tarantino-ish sequence where the 5 men chat with seeming amiability and we just wait for the shooting to being.  That does eventually happen, and it's a fairly well written and extremely well acted scene (too bad Dave won't be making a return appearance), but not exactly a cure for the show's doldrums.

The Walking Dead, for all its success, is intense without being all that interesting, more grim and talky (and not even good talk) than exciting.  AMC could well say "If it ain't broke...", because it's the biggest hit the network has ever had, putting the sacred Mad Men and even Breaking Bad deep into the shadows.  It would be nice, though, if under its new regime, the series could move a little faster, and have more of a plan, than its zombies do.

FOX's new series TOUCH got off to a very good start in the ratings with a "preview" episode last week (having American Idol as a lead-in didn't hurt), and certainly indications are that it could be a solid hit when it makes its series debut on Mondays next month after Alcatraz is done for the season.  To these eyes, though, it looked to be as boneheaded a TV series as any in recent memory.

Touch was created by Tim Kring, who gave us Heroes, which became a very odd network TV phenomenon:  the hit that never really was.  Heroes started off like gangbusters, and visions of spin-offs, merchandising bonanzas and feature films danced in NBC's desperate head.  Then the show came back for a disastrous second season (remember the medieval Japanese storyline?  the multiple versions of just about every major character who kept turning up?), and it never recovered; Heroes limped along for another couple of seasons, but its downward trend was irreversible.  Touch doesn't feature super-powers per see, but it already shows clear signs of the kind of confusion and soft-minded preference for mysticism over plot logic that doomed Heroes.  

Touch brings Kiefer Sutherland back to TV, this time playing Martin Bohm, a baggage handler at JFK who manages to be as ineffably grim and determined as Jack Bauer used to be.  Martin's wife died on 9/11, and he's raising son Jake (David Mazouz) on his own.  (One of the pilot's weirder conceits is that although Martin can barely make ends meet, he and Jake live in a multi-million dollar 3-bedroom Manhattan loft because his stockbroker wife left it in trust for Jake--hopefully that included funds for yearly maintenance and property taxes.)  Jake is really the show's focal point, a magical autistic who sees the hidden, mysterious patterns in the universe but who can't or won't speak or otherwise directly communicate with other human beings--including, generally, by touch.  (He does, however, narrate the series, although mercifully not with the voice of Helen Mirren a la Glee.)   As Martin is told several times in the course of the pilot, it's his job to protect Jake and decipher the meanings of the patterns Jake finds, so as to save whoever is due for rescue that week.

To call the plot of Touch convoluted and contrived is less an insult than a factual description.  In the pilot, Jake fixates on numbers that reveal a trail to 9/11 and the fireman who discovered his mother in the World Trade Center, a winning lottery ticket, a phone booth in Grand Central Station, a missed train, a school bus crash, and the miraculous saving of its passengers.  A B/C story that doesn't seem directly related to Jake similarly unites the British parents of a dead child, a Baghdad boy who aspires to be Chris Rock but whose search to find a pizza oven for his father forces him to become an unwilling suicide bomber, an Irish amateur singer who's also a helpful cell phone carrier employee, and Japanese prostitutes.  Note:  I didn't make any of that up.

Touch is sort of an Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu movie (Babel, 21 Grams) for dummies--intercontinental strands of story forced into unconvincing connections.  All Touch has is plot, because with Jake not communicating and Martin mostly spitting out intense pronouncements through gritted teeth, there's nothing in the way of characterization.  The only other substantial regular character is Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Jake's social worker, who's briefly officious but who, by the time the pilot is over, has already acknowledged and embraced Jake's strange powers.  (Since Danny Glover is listed as a regular, one assume that in future episodes, his single scene as a sort-of scientist who appreciates Jake's abilities will be expanded.) 

The Touch pilot was directed by Francis Lawrence, whose feature films include I Am Legend and Water For Elephants, so it's certainly slick enough, but it has no substance beyond its glib New Agey everything-is-connected message.  Perhaps the Highway to Heaven-plus-autism formula will connect to audiences for years to come; for some of us, though, the overblown daffiness of the enterprise severs the connection from the start.

FX's Elmore Leonard-inspired crime drama JUSTIFIED really hit its stride in its second season last year, and now it's back, trying to build on that very solid success.

WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  The redoubtable Mags Bennett (Emmy-winner Margo Martindale) has gone to her grave, and so has her corrupt sheriff son.  (Her other son, the more psychotic Dickie (Jeremy Davies), is in jail.)  Along the way, Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and his ex-girlfriend Ava (Joelle Crowder), who's now married to Raylan's frenemy Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), were both shot.  Boyd intended to kill Dickie for shooting Ava, but Raylan arrested Dickie instead.   Also, Raylan's ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea), with whom he's back together on an unmarried basis, is pregnant.

WHERE WE ARE:  Justified is in no rush to jump into its third chapter, and the season premiere, written by series creator Graham Yost and Fred Golan, and directed by Michael Dinner, eases its way in, serving mostly to introduce a new set of villains.  They're led by Robert Quaries (Neal McDonough), a smooth but ruthless representative of the Detroit Mafia who sees opportunities in Raylan's part of Kentucky.  Also on hand is Fletcher "Ice Pick" Nix (Desmond Harrington, from Dexter), who has his own version of the kind of game Javier Bardem liked to play in No Country For Old Men.  And at least temporarily, old bad guy Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns) is part of the black-hat team.  

A crime show that manages to find a truly great villain sometimes dispatches the character at its own peril--just look at Dexter, which has spent 2 seasons trying to recover from the loss of John Lithgow's chilling Trinity--and few villains in recent years have been as terrifying and nuanced as Martindale's Mags Bennett.  (The next show to face this challenge will be the Gus Fring-less Breaking Bad.)  At first glance, Quaries seems like a much more standard piece of bad-guyery, all expensive suit and corporate-type strategy despite his hidden pistol; a representative of the 1% rather than Mags' 99%.  But Justified has earned every benefit of the doubt, so we'll see if he develops some shading.

More promising is the down-home story.  The show has taken the interesting tack of having Raylan come back from his shooting a little less than his best, and even though we know in the end he'll come through, it has the effect of making him warier and more vulnerable than he's been before.  Meanwhile, Boyd has already manipulated himself into a position to take revenge on Dickie Bennett (the fact that Raylan didn't see that coming is another sign that he's not the man he used to be), and Ava has proven herself an extremely worthy surrogate for Boyd during his jailhouse absence.

Justified is a great sleeper of a show, demonstrating weekly that a rural setting and genre storyline don't preclude incisive writing or smart plotting, and its ensemble cast has some of the best chemistry on television. It's a pleasure to welcome Raylan and company back.

Previously... On ARE YOU THERE, CHELSEA?:  "Chelsea Newman," aka the fictionalized Chelsea Handler (Laura Prepon) works in a New Jersey sports bar, knocking back drinks and men, and trading barbs with co-workers and family alike.

Episode 2:  If it weren't for hour-mate Whitney, Chelsea might be the least sexy show ever to be obsessed with sex.  Between sister Sloane (the real Chelsea Handler) complaining about her "hurt locker" (her TV husband is a soldier in Iraq), fictional Chelsea's continuing banter with bartender Rick (Jake McDorman) about why they haven't hooked up ("you're just too big," snigger snigger), and the storyline that found Chelsea--mistakenly believing her new boyfriend finds baby talk erotic--reaching for his "rattle," it was enough to make a viewer opt for The Disney Channel.

The relentless and unfunny sex jokes in the show's second episode (written by Co-EP Robin Schiff and Brian Gallivan) were bad enough, but the really unappetizing aspect of the show was its classic network gambit of wanting to have its sex cake and eat "real feelings" too.  The main storyline concerned Sloane's old boyfriend coming into the bar and, since Chelsea had always had a crush on him and Sloane is married, Chelsea deciding to date him, despite Sloane's telling her not to.  This led to Sloane, having found out not only what's going on but that the old beau preferred sex with Sloane, misleading Chelsea into that baby talk fiasco.  What unforunately followed was Sloane having a "serious" talk with Chelsea, where she somberly explained that all she wanted was for Chelsea to find true love (that was why her high school sex with the ex was better back in the day), and Chelsea, deeply moved, saying that that's what she wished for too.  Watching the scene, you could almost read the network note telling the producers that the characters needed to care about each other.  And when you're doing a show about recognizable human beings, like Parks & Recreation or How I Met Your Mother, that's a valid thought.  But when your whole reason for being is to be rude, boisterous and dirty, affixing a "they really love each other" coda to an episode is like an exploitation movie covering its tracks with a scene of "redeeming social content":  cynical and unfelt.

Also unpromising:  the introduction of Natasha Leggero, quickly recycled from NBC's Free Agents, as a new waitress at the bar who's an ex-girlfriend of Rick, so she can can cause trouble for any budding Rick/Chelsea relationship.  (Network Note:  "Chelsea needs an adversary.") The character appears to be at least a recurring if not a regular in waiting, and although Leggero was the best thing in Free Agents, Chelsea doesn't need another brainless narcissist in that bar.  

Previously... On ALCATRAZ:  San Francisco cop Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones), whose partner was recently killed, finds herself embroiled in a mysterious case in which an Alcatraz inmate from 40 years ago, apparently long dead, has turned up not having aged a day and committing new murders.  Rebecca learns that all the Alcatraz prisoners who were supposedly transferred to San Quentin when the prison closed in 1963 actually vanished, and now they're popping up, on violent missions no one can understand.  By the end of the hour, she's joined the top-secret Federal task force investigating the crimes headed by enigmatic Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), himself a former Alcatraz guard.  Also on the team are scientist Lucy (Parminder Nagra) and multi-tasking geek Alcatraz historian/comic book author Diego (Jorge Garcia).  Also:  Rebecca learns that her own grandfather was the back-from-the-dead Alcatraz prisoner who was involved in her partner's death.

Episode 2:  The first hour of Monday's 2-hour premiere was the original pilot, with the second hour the initial regular episode.  Somewhere during the process of producing the season's episodes, Executive Producer Elizabeth Sarnoff, a writer on uber-producer JJ Abrams's Lost who co-created the series with Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, and who served as showrunner, was removed for the traditional "creative differences."  It's not clear when or whether that change will be reflected in the tone or content of the show.

Episode 2, written by producer Alison Balian and directed by another Lost veteran, Jack Bender, demonstrated the limitations of the show's concept.  The series is, not unlike Abrams's CBS series Person Of Interest, trying to meld a procedural with a continuing (and in this case somehow supernatural or sci-fi) storyline.  But the nature of the concept, in which every week's criminal comes from the same pool of former Alcatraz prisoners, allows for a limited amount of variety.  And the fact that the show is going to be very tight-fisted with its mythology (in this hour, there was no new information until a big reveal about Nagra's character in the last 30 seconds) means that there's very little to chew over.

Like most procedurals, Alcatraz so far has little appetite for characterization:  Rebecca is gritty and determined, Emerson Hauser is aloof and clearly knows more than he'll admit, Diego is humorously neurotic and brilliant.  We'll see if the episode's news about Lucy means some additional insight into her, but more likely any knowledge will be hoarded and parsed out along many episodes, since Rebecca and Diego don't yet know what we do about her.  The individual episodes are professionally executed but not particularly interesting (this hour involved a sniper with OCD who killed people because his mother had chosen to live with his teen sister but not him), and since the criminals don't seem to know themselves how they were transported from the 1960s or who sent them, there's little to glean from them.

Alcatraz has an intriguing concept, but so far it's mostly unmemorable.  The show will need to find something to engage viewers if it hopes to sentence them to a long sentence in front of the set.

Previously... On HOUSE OF LIES:  Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) and his "pod" of associate management consultants (Kristen Bell, Ben Schwartz, Josh Lawson) travel the country, putting out fires for their high-powered clients while enjoying their lack of principles.  

Episode 2:  The second episode, written by series creator Matthew Carnahan, suggests that House of Lies won't be putting much effort into continuing storylines.  The idea seems to be more of a procedural approach, with a crisis-of-the-week solved by the regular characters.  This week, the Pod went to Phoenix, where they brokered a deal between the local NBA owner and his estranged wife that was clearly inspired by the McCourts and Dodgers in LA.

The  "plot," as such, was undeveloped and not particularly engaging, just another opportunity for Marty to prove he's the smartest guy in the room.  What was more interesting was spending considerably more time with the other Pod members.  Doug (Lawson), despite his Harvard degree, proved himself a fumbler with the ladies, as evidenced by an extended cameo encounter with Cat Deeley as herself that ended embarrassingly for Doug.  Clyde (Schwartz) is the fast-talking, more aggressive hustler.  And Jeannie (Bell), also no winner romantically (in this episode, she thought an old college friend was pursuing her, when actually he was just a headhunter offering her a job), has an ambiguous relationship with Marty, who killed the new job offer and wanted her to know it, somewhat to her satisfaction.

Those are all decent threads to be picked up as the season progresses.  On the home front, it turned out Marty's hate sex with his ex-wife/competitor (Dawn Olivieri) wasn't a unique event, but something they seemingly do regularly.  And the storyline featuring Marty's ambivalently gendered son (Donis Leonard, Jr) continues to feel like a refugee episode from Glee.

House of Lies, with its constantly scheming protagonists, is a good stylistic match with Showtime's other Sunday shows Shameless and Californication.  Compared to them, it lacks emotional depth and, seemingly, much interest in having any.  It does have a sparkling cast, however--Ben Schwartz was particularly effective in this episode--and that, along with a certain verve, may keep it at least moderately entertaining.

Pending the return of The Voice and NBC's high hopes for Smash, THE OFFICE is the closest thing hte network has to a successful television show.  As the series greets a new hour-mate in Up All Night, let's take a look at how it's conducting its business.

WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  Andy (Ed Helms) is boss, Robert California (James Spader) is uber-boss, Steve Carell is missed.  

WHERE WE ARE:  I don't think anything on television this season has been as painful to watch as The Office's fall from greatness.  The ratings, while substantially down, haven't completely collapsed--it was still NBC's highest-rated non-football series this fall--but the show itself is a depressing facsimile of the series that ran for 7 years.  The twin decisions to bring in Spader and put Helms's character in charge have hurt the series far more seriously than anyone could have imagined.

This week's episode was actually something of a reprieve, in that it broke up what had become a monotonously grim pattern:  Robert California tortures Andy, then in the last minute or so the rest of the office lets him know they really like him.  This time, California's target was Dwight (Rainn Wilson) who's far more capable of withstanding the enervating power of James Spader, while Andy's hare-brained adventure of the week was silly but not disastrous. 

The A and B storylines were completely separate this week, and neither took place in Scranton.  In the main story, Andy's desperation to fill in the $800 gap between the quarter's paper sales and what he'd promised California leads him and the rest of the office to follow Oscar (Oscar Nunez) to a Philadelphia gay bar where Oscar's team is competing in a trivia contest with a $1000 prize.  The joke is that Andy breaks the group up into an A team, a B team and one just having fun, and when the supposedly high-powered group of Andy, Jim (John Krasinski), Darryl (Craig Robinson) and Ryan (B.J. Novak) flail, it's the loser team, with Kevin (Brian Baumgartner), Meredith (Kate Flannery), Kelly (Mindy Kaling) and Erin (Ellie Kemper) that scores the win.  Some of the questions they get right are obvious gags (Kevin knows the maximum number measured by household scales, and movies with Mr. Skin-identified nude scenes), but others are more delightfully random (Erin's knowledge of boating).  

Part of the reason the A story is able to be fun is because the Prince of Darkness is over in the B story, where Dwight has gone to Florida to visit Robert California in his lair.  There's a manager's job open in another Dunder-Mifflin division, and California had made the mistake of casually saying Dwight should stop by to discuss opportunities.  At this point, we know what all the Robert California storylines are like:  he patronizingly, passive-aggressively makes those around him feel like idiots, then explains why he's doing it for their own good.  In Dwight's case, he refuses to meet with Dwight himself, then misleads Dwight into thinking that he'll meet with the COO and instead pushes him on to Gabe (Zach Woods), who works alternate days in Scranton and Florida and who, even to Dwight's incomprehension, chooses to describe himself proudly as the company's toilet.  Eventually Dwight forces his way into California's condo, where he fails to get the job he wanted but still feels good about himself.

Dwight, with his infinite delusions and overreaching ambition, is more of a worthy antagonist for Robert California than miserable Andy, so this story, while not particularly funny, avoids unpleasantness.  But the bigger question for The Office is how it managed to get into its current narrative holes, and whether it can get itself out.  After half a season of cringe-inducing, static storylines, the show is squandering the massive goodwill built over its prior seasons.  The problem isn't just Andy and Robert California:  among others, Jim has never been less interesting than he is this season, and the confusing, half-hearted way the show has dealt with the Andy/Erin non-romance has cut Erin's character off at the knees.  

The Office is starting to feel like life in a real office, dreary and insufferable, and there's a reason no one pays to watch that.  The show needs to find itself a new direction before it goes the way of the rest of NBC's primetime schedule.

This week UP ALL NIGHT was promoted to NBC's version of the big leagues, where many felt it belonged from the start.  It's switched places with Whitney and been given the benefit of The Office, NBC's one genuine lead-in, for the Thursday 9:30PM slot.   Let's take a look at whether it merits the step up.

WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  Reagan (Christina Applegate) and Chris (Will Arnett) somewhat neurotically raise Amy, their first baby, while Reagan juggles her job producing her best friend Ava (Maya Rudolph)'s afternoon talk show and Chris, a lawyer, serves as stay-at-home dad.

WHERE WE ARE:  Whether deliberately or not, Up All Night's first episode in its new time slot was either uncharacteristic or a sign of how the show is planning to change.  The slightly-outdated New Year's Eve episode barely mentioned Amy, and was almost wholly about the grown-ups.  For a show that's been so closely tied to stories about child-rearing, this felt fairly revolutionary. 

The other noticeable difference between the show now and the way it began is the continuing moderation of Ava as a character.  Originally, Rudolph was cartoonishly broad as what everyone stoutly denied was a caricature of Oprah Winfrey (who Rudolph used to play on SNL), and it caused Up All Night's tone to feel distinctly schizophrenic, since the at-home scenes with Applegate and Arnett were mostly built around more low-key observational humor.  While Ava is still by far the show's brassiest character, the writers have made an effort to draw her in more human dimensions, especially since introducing Jason Lee as Kevin, an ordinary-guy steady boyfriend for her.

This has made the series easier to take, and a better fit with The Office.  The only downside is that the more even tone is leading to some awfully banal storylines, as in tonight's episode where the New Year's Eve festivities devolved into Reagan and Chris railing at each other for the little ways they annoy each other (Chris thinks his Borat voice is funnier than it is, Reagan becomes a cutthroat competitor at Trivial Pursuits), while Kevin felt resentful that Ava doesn't go out with him in public because she's ashamed of him.  These are the kinds of storylines that Modern Family finds ways to do much more deftly (coincidentally, ABC's hit had its own storyline this week about the competitiveness between Claire and her dad), partly because every character on that show is so well defined.  Despite the great charm and skill of Applegate and Arnett, Reagan and Chris are still fairly thin as characters, and turning down the volume makes that more evident.  (The show could also use some more supporting characters beyond Jennifer Hall's production assistant, although Hall got the welcome chance to show some new sides to her character in this episode.)

Up All Night is a superior half-hour (god knows it's superior to Whitney), well written and performed.  Given NBC's current state of being, it'll be a longterm player for the network, unless it somehow ruins the Office hour entirely.  The question it'll face as it moves forward is just how much substance the series has when it's not being that show about yuppies raising a baby.

Previously... on THE FIRM:  Mitch McDeere (Josh Lucas), having relocated with his family to the Canadian part of Washington DC, 10 years after the events in the book and movie, has associated his scrappy small practice with a new but equally evil big firm that's particularly interested in him because of an accused murderer he's representing.  Also, the son of the Memphis gangster he brought down 10 years ago is on his trail.

Episode 2:  Like the pilot, the 2d episode spent very little time on the continuing storyline.  The show is apparently going to ape the structure of Damages, with an overexposed flashforward sequence at the very beginning and end of each episode bookending the main action, which in this case took place 5 weeks earlier.  Those scenes, and a single sequence in the body of the show, concerned the new murder case; there was no mention at all of the gangster's son.  

This left the vast majority of the episode for the case of the week, which was both ludicrous and boring.  The son of a wealthy client was accused of having something to do with the disappearance of his girlfriend, and it turned out he really had (accidentally) killed her--but before Mitch could convince him to confess, a serial killer who had forgotten he didn't kill the girl (no, really) said that he'd done it.  Mitch, in a breathtaking conflict of interest, represented both men.  Initially, he had the serial killer freed because he knew the man didn't kill his other client's girlfriend, then had him arrested again when he (Mitch) discovered the bodies of the woman the man had killed.  As with the pilot, series creator Lukas Reiter bears responsibility for this script.

Oh, and little McDeere told her teacher mom that another girl in the class was cheating, and mom figured out how to punish the girl without letting her know the daughter had ratted on her by making her tutor other children.  So there was that.

The Firm continues to be implausibly bad in every way--visually cheap, dramatically colorless, and lacking in any characterization or absorbing continuing story.  NBC would be better off airing the low-cost license agreement for the series than the show itself.