The Week In TV 12/02/2012
30 Rock, Season 6, Episode 6: Hey Baby, What’s Wrong?
A curiously over-long episode that, one suspects, might have been a lot funnier if it was cut back to its regular half hour format. 30 Rock has always been suspicious of Valentine’s Day sentiment, but this episode veered a little too close to misanthropy for comfort, especially on a show that, in its prime, always celebrated warmth over sneers. The most successful story was Liz and Criss’ seemingly doomed trip to IKEA, imagined here as a great test of any relationship, and so it proves for Liz, whose frustration at not finding the right table spills over into arguing with her boyfriend. Because of the way the show has tended to treat Liz’s love life, and the succession of cruelties it has laid at her doorstep in this department, I feel like I’ve got more invested in this particular relationship than any of the previous ones. Thankfully, after an unexpected meeting-of-minds with Lutz (“realisations are the worst!”), Liz hurries home to apologise, only for Criss to be cooking her dinner, their fight no particular big deal to him. Less successful was Tracey and Frank’s schooling of Lutz in the way of the scumbag, a story that produced almost no laughs and which turned Tracey into a mean-spirited, unfunny version of the character we used to love. Marginally better, but still rooted in cruelty, was Kenneth explaining to Hazel that she should learn to accept the indecencies performed to her as and NBC page before Hazel take a complete about turn into Single White Female territory, applying lipstick to Liz in bed and vowing to steal her seemingly perfect life. There were a few laughs to Jenna’s sudden stage fright at her first live performances on America’s Kidz Got Talent, but, again, it was a story that didn’t need this much padding, and Jack’s newfound affection for Avery’s mother felt like a story we’ve seen a hundred times before, however pleasing it is to see Mary Steenburger do comedy. ”Hey Baby, What’s Wrong?” wasn’t devoid of laughs, but it was almost completely devoid of sentiment, and that’s a problem the show needs to address.
Alcatraz, Season 1, Episode 5: Guy Hastings:
A stronger episode than we’re used to seeing from JJ Abrams’ latest, simply because it uses all its parts rather than leaning too heavily on either the police procedural elements (still a snooze) or its increasingly lengthy flashbacks. This week sees the return not of a former inmate, but a guard, Guy Hastings (played by Jim Parrack, True Blood’s Hoyt). Turns out he was Ray’s superior on Alcatraz back in the day, and that Ray only joined as a guard so that he could look after Tommy, and that now – in the present – Ray is aware of his brother’s whereabouts, but that he’s not revealing it for whatever reason. Now, some of this is deliberately hazy – and if there’s anyone who can sell ambiguity well, it’s Robert Forster – but the show still feels needlessly muddy. It’s pleasing to see the writers use Ray’s relationship to Madsen, and her fractious relationship with Hauser was well utilised this week, but this is still background television.
Fringe, Season 4, Episode 12: Welcome To Westfield
An episode that felt more like a forgotten episode of The X-Files or The Twilight Zone than even some of Season 1, “Welcome To Westfield” nevertheless managed to extract real tension and emotion from its familiar premise by tying it into the season’s primary story arc. After several cars and an airplane suddenly lose power over a stretch of highway, the Fringe team are sent out to investigate. Stopping to get pie at a nearby two-horse town, Westfield, to sample their famous rhubarb pie, Peter, Walter and Olivia find themselves unable to leave. The residents of Westfield are merging with their Earth-2 counterparts (first psychologically, and then physically). Those not affected are holed up in the high school, as the town gradually collapses in on itself. The key interest here was Olivia’s apparent merging with the Olivia of Peter’s timeline. Indeed, she begins the episode dreaming of herself in bed with Peter, and later in Westfield remembers a case they worked on together that Walter has no memory of. Interestingly, this seems to have little to do with the Westifield case (she’s not merging with Fauxlivia), but something more insidious and longer-lasting. She even ends the episode moving in to kiss Peter as if it’s the most ordinary thing in the world, clearly expecting him for their regular Friday date night. It certainly promises big things for the future if Olivia is going to suddenly inundated with memories of her other existences. Is Peter somehow subconsciously extracting “his” Olivia from this one, just as his presence warms Walter up considerably in one of the episode’s most moving, unspoken moments when it becomes clear that Walter doesn’t want his “son” to leave, however much they might be committed to returning him to his own timeline. If nothing else, Season 4’s strange twist on the show’s universe has reaped numerous, interesting questions about the permutations of its characters’ identities, something that has been well-served by its ever-excellent cast.
Glee, Season 3, Episode 12: The Spanish Teacher
A peculiarly under-stuffed episode this week, and a fairly effective one at that, albeit with the writers taking some circuitous routes to achieve its results. An episode focusing on Will is rarely a good idea for Glee, since it’s a show that still seems to believe in him as a great inspirer of men, a wonderful teacher, and an all-round great human being. So it was nice to pull back from that a little and see him as a washed-up nobody, somebody whose dreams of stardom were cut short and who settled for becoming a Spanish teacher because it was the only teaching spot available, despite the fact that he can’t speak any Spanish. It’s the Will occasionally glimpsed way back in Season 1, but who has been absent ever since. Will’s mad scramble for a tenured position at McKinley that arrived out of nowhere actually provided a decent enough dramatic impetus for the character to look at what he’d achieved with his life, ultimately ceding his role as Spanish teacher to Ricky Martin’s surprisingly pleasing guest appearance as night school tutor and former tooth model, David Martinez. The storyline was also notable in providing us with the first piece of character development on the Will and Emma front. Discussing the show’s disposition in putting the cart before the horse seems like a moot point, but wouldn’t it have been nice to see this (albeit rather neatly resolved) bit of discord between the pair before we were asked to engage in Will’s proposal to her? In painting Will as a less than perfect figure, as someone with good ambitions, but whose blind optimism leads him to become a bad teacher – as Santana points out to him – is much more interesting than the man who writes nebulous “themes” on a white board each week and basks in the glory of a bunch of students who “don’t know any better.” The writers took a similarly circuitous, bizarre route in giving us the most believable Sue Sylvester the show has seen in some time. Turns out Sue had her eggs frozen back in the 70s, and is now looking to become a mother. Whilst her rivalry with the synchronised swimming coach was fun in the moment, but will become irritating later on, the show’s mining of Sue’s maternal instincts bore more fruit than you might expect, not only in her quip-heavy but ultimately depressive discussion with Emma, but also her final moments with Becky, one of the few relationships that Glee has treated with any consistency. What helped enormously was that both these stories had room to breathe, with only the Sam/Mercedes/Tinker from Friday Night Lights love triangle and Rachel’s engagement to Finn featuring in the sidelines, and both of these are continuations of long-running (or, three episodes, in this show’s parlance) storylines. There were no big emotional moments, and the musical numbers were fun rather than spectacular, but “The Spanish Teacher” extolled a level of competency in its writing that’s been close to invisible this season.
Gossip Girl, Season 5, Episode 14: The Backup Dan
Aftermath episodes are often better than the big event preceding them, and so “The Backup Dan” proved, although anything would be better than the series nadir that was “G.G.” After running out of her wedding with Dan’s help, Blair tries to catch a flight to the Dominican Republic in order to get a divorce. When this doesn’t work, she’s forced to hole up in an airport hotel whilst we wait for the rest of the cast to catch up with her. Having two sets of characters, both Chuck/Serena and Louis and his mother trying to find the whereabouts of someone whose location we already know doesn’t make for especially interesting viewing, but at least this episode saw a bit more of the usual Blair Waldorf spark, as she rails against poorly-dressed tabloid fans and her shabby hotel suite. For a show that, in the past, has drawn so heavily (and fruitfully) from the likes of Edith Wharton, an unhappy marriage of convenience shouldn’t feel especially out-of-place, but Gossip Girl has always worked in clever substitutions, whereas this particular turn of events can’t help but feel too literal.
Revenge, Season 1, Episode 14: Perception
One week to go before the engagement party we witnessed in the pilot, “Perception” was all about getting the characters where they need to be for its explosive showdown next week. Determined to uncover the truth about why Amanda left, Jack finds one of Treadwell’s tapes and – following an emotional plea from Amanda to return the tape to her, and Nolan’s desire to give his friend some closure – watches it. Naturally, it’s the one tape with the most incendiary secret, that Charlotte is Daniel Clarke’s daughter, and that Victoria and he were having an affair. This all leads rather nicely to Jack bursting in on a Grayson family dinner to tell everyone what he knows, alienating Victoria from her children yet again, providing Conrad with another axe to grind after his father (and founder of Grayson industries) threatens to dispose him in light of the scandal, and leaving Charlotte devastated. What’s most interesting about this particular denouement is that it’s brought about by two small acts of kindness, as Nolan refuses to erase the tape so as to give Jack the answers he’s been searching for, and, after seeing Charlotte’s emotional reunion with her father, Emily decides to keep the secret of Charlotte’s real paternity to herself. It’s these relationships that make the show more than just the story of one woman’s revenge, and more of how one person’s perception of events can have far-reaching consequences. Revenge realises that it’s not enough to make us believe Emily to be in the right in her campaign against Victoria, but also to give her a more human side as well, in her relationships with Nolan, Jack and Daniel. And this leads nicely into the episode’s twist, that promises Emily has someone on her tail who knows exactly what her plans are. Is it Tyler? Some heretofore unmentionable name from her shady past? Who knows, but watching our heroine on the back foot for once should be interesting.
Ringer, Season 1, Episode 12: What Are You Doing Here, Ho-Bag?
For a show that increasingly feels like it’s going nowhere fast, Siobhan revealing to Henry that Bridget has taken her place was a big step forward. Of course, this being Ringer, there was a whole lot of misdirection and narrative dead ends before we reached this point, with two entirely pointless meetings with Henry before Siobhan is ready to come clean. This week also saw the return of Bodaway and Agent Muchado, two characters that featured prominently in the show’s opening episodes, but who have gradually faded from the show’s fabric, as much more pressing matters such as Bridget’s relationship with Juliet and putting her failed marriage back together (!) meant that the show’s plotting went from incoherent but quickfire, to even more incoherent and markedly glacial. Hopefully, now that Siobhan has a confidante, we can finally learn what her true intentions are, something Ringer should have given us much earlier than its twelfth episode. It’s fairly obvious at this point that the show isn’t going to get any better, but there’s a listlessness to it that borders on entertaining, if never quite for the reasons its writers are aiming for, and if never quite tipping over into really engaging with its characters or the situations it presents them in.
The River, Season 1, Episodes 1-2: Magus and Marbeley
The renaissance of found footage horror was bound to find its way onto TV eventually, and here director of Paranormal Activity Oren Peli brings us The River. Set in the Amazon basin, it involves a son, Lincoln, and his mother, Tess, trying to track down his missing father, Emmett Cole, a TV personality who, it would appear, has been messing around with some dark magic in the forest. Surprisingly, the found footage-style filming works pretty well, producing a fair few jumps out of a somewhat ludicrous premise involving trapped spirits and some dubious Latin American mysticism. The pilot does a reasonable job in introducing its medium-sized cast, an arrogant producer, loyal engineer, his whipsmart daughter, Lincoln’s childhood friend, Lena, and a cocky cameraman. The characterisation is pretty broad, but that’s often the case this early on in genre shows, and the second episode, which deals with the spirit of a drowned girl trying to connect with her dead mother, is more successful in showing what the show will be like week to week. There’s something interesting underneath it all, and it’s pleasing - in the wake of Alcatraz - to see a show this eager to build its own mythology from the ground up, but it’s too familiar and hokey to generate much excitement.
Smash, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot
Smash might not be the best new show of the TV year, but it’s certainly going to be the one receiving most of the attention. A grown-up drama about Broadway that also functioned as a musical itself, it’s already being billed as “Glee for adults.” It’s a smart marketing strategy, especially considering how many older viewers tuned into Glee during its sourer first season, before the show sort of collapsed in on itself. Smash is also fortunate in having a fair amount of recognisable names in its line-up, including American Idol runner-up Katherine McPhee, Anjelica Huston, Jack Davenport and Debra Messing, and is being given a big push by NBC, a network with precious few drama successes under its belt, and its two big comedy hits (30 Rock and The Office) nearing their respective ends. But how good is it? Well, pretty darn good, actually, if not entirely unwrinkled. McPhee plays Karen, the wide-eyed innocent ingénue pursuing her dreams of stardom. It’s a familiar character type, but McPhee’s deceptively light performance keeps you on side, even when stardom seems to beckon in the wake of a new Marilyn Monroe musical being written by partners Tom and Julie (Christian Borle and Debra Messing). Tom, especially, wants to reward beloved (and talented) chorus member Ivy (Megan Hilty) the role, but his vain, difficult director Derek (Jack Davenport, home to most the episode’s biting one-liners) has his money firmly on Karen. What Smash’s pilot episode has going for it is that it doesn’t condescend to its audience; rather, it throws you in at the deep end. We might be familiar to the musical format thanks to Glee, so when the characters burst into song – both as imagined fantasy numbers, and within the show’s structure itself – it doesn’t come as a big surprise, but the world of Broadway is considerably less familiar, and one which Smash plunges us into much in the same manner that ER plunged into the world of emergency medicine, or Friday Night Lights did into American football. So whilst the rapid transition from concept to production of the Marilyn musical feels hurried, the world the show inhabits feels genuine and exciting. It also helps that whilst the writing tends towards broad strokes in places – particularly the competition between Karen and Ivy, the latter of whom is clearly the better choice for the part – it does recognise the need to flesh out its characters a little more than the storylines they’re stuck in appear to be positioning them. And so Karen isn’t quite as earnest as she appears to be, and Ivy isn’t some bitchy prima donna, and Anjelica Huston’s smoothly patrician producer Eileen Rand is undergoing her own emotional turmoil in the wake of a nasty divorce. The only story that doesn’t ring quite true is that of Julie’s attempts to adopt a child which – aside from bringing back bad memories of those later seasons of Will & Grace – bear all the hallmarks of a storyline that will drag everything else around it down. As for the musical numbers, Smash has one bona fide Youtube spectacular in McPhee’s rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” an obvious staple of this sort of show, but one which she nonetheless knocks out of the park, and the original numbers (and this, in itself, marks a refreshing change from the increasingly Top 20 styling of your average episode of Glee) are breezily competent, if not exactly rabble-rousing. Smash has the potential to be great, but it’s not quite the saviour its network wants it to be just yet.
Spartacus, Season 2, Episode 3: The Greater Good
Spartacus might just be one of the tightest shows around at the moment in terms of its storytelling, which feels well-constructed and concise even when it’s presenting us with its many superfluously entertaining sequences of sex and death. This week, the former slaves find themselves split down the middle, as Agron lies to Crixus that Naevia is dead (as told to him from the lips of a dying slave-trader). The deception is quickly revealed by Nasir (one of the show’s most interesting and ambiguous new characters), but this does little to quieten the grumbling from Spartacus’ ranks that everyone be sacrificed in the search for one woman. As Spartacus argues, if one person’s life is worth nothing, then nobody’s is, which might ring a sort of rabble-rousing truth, but it doesn’t stop half his followers leave him for Vesuvius, where they hope to gather troops. The search for Naevia leads to the mines, and a spectacular action sequence in which Glaber’s men - informed by Ashur, who was in turn informed by a beat-down Oenomaus - where Spartacus’ men were headed. Crixus finally finds Naevia at the end of the long network of underground tunnels, only to be set upon by soldiers and captured. That this all ties neatly into last week’s reveal of Ashur, and Lucretia’s own power play within the ludus ensures that nothing feels wasted here. The character work is similarly succinct yet plausible, as Nasir and Chadara’s conversation about their respective places within the group, or Mira’s brutal slaying of the slave-trader, proved. This is a show that for all its bells and whistles, is remarkably well-written, smoothly performed and executed with an increasing confidence in the wider world it finds itself in.
Switched At Birth, Season 1, Episode 16: Las Dos Fridas
A lovely, restrained episode this week that finally tackles the issue of race in a mostly subtle and interesting way. The catalyst is the arrival of Kathryn’s mother, Bonnie, whose over-eager response to meeting her “real” granddaughter seems to nullify the previously close bond she had with Bay. Now Bay’s bad grades and “artistic temperament” can be ascribed to her Puerto Rican heritage, argues Bonnie in a particularly hard conversation she has with her baffled daughter. Up until this point, Bay has never had to consider her cultural heritage, and it brings her straight to Regina, whose gentle assurance and advice leads to a bonding moment that’s been a long time coming and which the show wisely keeps low-key (no montage of them making art together, here). What’s most interesting about this plot point is that Bonnie isn’t your typical tyrannical mother (although there are elements of this stereotype in Kathryn’s fear of criticism and John’s antagonism at her involvement in his business plans), but someone whose tough-talking manner belies a delicacy of opinion that even John and Kathryn haven’t considered. As Bay attempts to address what her newfound heritage means to her, Kathryn admits that this particular concern hadn’t even crossed her mind. Bonnie, on the other hand, understands that Bay sees herself differently now, and whilst her racist assumptions about Daphne’s life on the “wrong” side of town are the type of callous remarks that lead Kathryn to reject her mother by episode’s end, her ability to address some of the more culturally sensitive issues raised by switch (even if she does so in a sensitive manner) clearly strike a chord with her granddaughter. Also interesting, but more clumsily handled, was Daphne’s return to her old neighbourhood, prompted by the appearance of an old school friend who assumes that Daphne has changed now that she lives in Mission Hills. As Bay stands to investigate a culture she never knew she was a part of, so Daphne is threatened by the loss of hers. The introduction of such a broadly-drawn character (naturally she clashes with Simone, who accuses her of stealing her watch) feels heavy-handed, a way to force the mirroring of Daphne’s situation with that of Bay’s, and one which could have been far better addressed back when Tyler was still part of the show’s ensemble. Thankfully, in spite of its initial stumbles, the conflict is still an interesting one, and one in which Daphne finds solace from her grandmother, to whom identity is who you know yourself to be, not some tag that can be wiped out by a change of address. I won’t discuss the Toby/Simone stuff, because it’s mostly a drag, but, as ever, the family stuff at the centre was emotive and even-handed.
