The Pusher and The User: WEEDS and NURSE JACKIE Premiere on Showtime Tonight

It’s Ladies’ Night on Showtime, with the return of Weeds and the premiere of Nurse Jackie. Weeds is sharp, brutally funny, and well-acted, and…we have a hard time watching it. Mary-Louise Parker is terrific in her role as widow-turned-marijuana dealer Nancy Botwin, but Nancy’s choices put her children in such horrific, dangerous situations that we have a hard time not wanting to call Social Services on a television character. Still, the lecture Nancy’s brother (the terrific Justin Kirk) once gave Nancy’s youngest son on…growing up…with a banana peel…is still one of the funniest things that television has produced recently, so if you can stomach the bad parenting, tune in.

Nurse Jackie, on the other hand, finds Edie Falco snorting Oxycontin to keep herself sharp enough to keep her patients out of danger. This pilot is by turns acerbic, heartbreaking, snide, touching, and clever, and it opens by quoting TS Eliot, so I fell a little in love a little too quickly. Falco is so good (and this is coming from someone who could not handle The Sopranos and therefore never really understood the acclaim for its leads) I almost want to hand her the Oxy myself. She’s joined by a solid supporting cast that includes Peter Facinelli (Damages, Six Feet Under, Fastlane), Anna Deavere Smith (The West Wing, The Practice), and Merritt Wever (Matt and Danny’s PA on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip). I’m terrified thinking that Nancy Botwin’s kids are going to end up in the emergency room, to the point where I’m not sure I can watch her show, but I’d feel a lot better knowing they were going to end up under Nurse Jackie’s tough, tender care.

Weeds season premiere tonight at 10pm Eastern and Pacific, followed immediately by the series premiere of Nurse Jackie, both on Showtime.

THE LISTENER: That’s Not the Color of His Parachute

Susannah and I were recently talking about the set-up and structure of serial storytelling. It makes sense that we see so many cop and doctor shows, because cops and doctors are so much more likely to stumble across a dramatic situation than are, say, retail workers or pickle-dehairers. Sure, we occasionally get a show set in, say, the White House or a pie shop (and even then the latter is in many ways about solving crimes), but it’s generally easier to get a conflict that can be resolved in 42 minutes rolling with a cop or a doctor at the helm.

So it’s no surprise that The Listener focuses on a central character (Craig Olejnik as Toby Logan) who is a paramedic, as his job can bring his psychic talents–oh, did I mention he’s a psychic paramedic?–to bear on cases where people are already in trouble. One of the problems with The Listener–in addition to the fact that it’s neither terribly well acted nor designed–is that our psychic paramedic isn’t content being a psychic paramedic. Instead, he has to be a cop, too. It’s one thing to assume that Toby can solve cases more quickly than the cops because he can hear people’s thoughts, but it’s hard to swallow the idea that Toby can solve cases more quickly than the cops because he thought to look up some records on the computer. I’d prefer to see the show about the psychic retail worker who solves cases by hearing people’s thoughts while they’re struggling into the wrong size in the dressing room, but if we get The Listener instead, could we at least get a paramedic who wants to be a paramedic? If I get in an accident in his general vicinity, I’d prefer to think Toby Logan is more worried about my vital signs than about reading my thoughts to solve the mystery of who took my baby Babybel cheeses out of the communal work refrigerator.

THE GOODE FAMILY “Pilot”: I Can’t Be Seen Here–I Work in Academia!

You have no idea how many times I’ve uttered those very words.

Which, you would think, would make me part of one of the target audiences for ABC’s new animated comedy The Goode Family, which pokes fun at those lefty, sprout-eating, sandal-wearing hippies who organize their lives by asking “What Would Al Gore Do?”. I may not be much into sprouts, but it’s possible I own a reusable grocery bag. Presumably, another target audience would be people who have put a sticker in their back truck window that shows poor, bastardized Calvin urinating on Al Gore.

Unfortunately, The Goode Family offered little for either group to laugh at. Watching goody-two-shoes lefties awkwardly stammer over what ethnicity to call a neighbor is less funny than it is…awkward. The oneupsmanship in the in the uber-conscious health food store seemed to take forever and led to a punchline that had little punch. The episode seemed to hit a better stride when dealing with the relationships among the family members, so perhaps the lack of funny was merely the awkwardness of a pilot. Based on creator Mike Judge’s previous work (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead), there may be some comic gems hidden underneath the easy stereotypes, but with So You Think You Can Dance on opposite, who wants to spend the time rooting around in the carefully tended compost pile for those gems?

MENTAL “Pilot”: I Refuse to Turn That “E” Around

They say that drowning is just suffocating from breathing the wrong thing. People drown surrounded by oxygen because their lungs can’t convert that oxygen out of the water. It feels like we’re drowning in the television landscape right now, waiting for the summer season to start–everyone is still broadcasting, but we can’t convert the oxygen out of reruns of of Law and Order: Teriyaki Glaze or new and icky reality offerings (really, CW? Hitched or Ditched? Really?).

Fox hopes to come to the rescue with Mental, the tale of an unorthodox psychiatrist and the ways in which he enlightens both patients and his more orthodox colleagues. The network hopes they have the next House, but Mental just comes off as cheap in every way (it is kind of interesting to think about how the network is filming it on the cheap in Colombia, but it’s too bad the cheap shows through). It’s a cheap knockoff of the House formula, with a quirky lead hired by a hot female administrator and surrounded by underlings who are both appalled and intrigued by the way the lead’s nuttiness solves the case in 44 minutes or less. Unfortunately, Chris Vance, British though he may be, is no Hugh Laurie. His colleague is a cheap knockoff of Marcia Cross and Jaclyn Smith (Jacqueline McKenzie, much better elsewhere, like The 4400). His underlings are cheap knockoffs of Orlando Bloom, goatee version (Nicholas Gonzales), and Rashida Jones (Marisa Ramirez). The effects meant to give us a peep into the head of someone suffering from hallucinations looked like they came straight out of a Hulu ad. The lighting makes everything look so flat and cheap I wnated to kick at the flimsy walls while wearing pointy-toed shoes, just to see if I could kick right through. Even the title sequence is a cheap ripoff of Numb3rs, with the “e” in Mental flipping around, presumably to represent the lead’s quirky outlook. Perhaps worst of all is the show’s cheap take on mental illness–the pilot had a schizophrenic healed in 72 hours by the magic power of art.  Marvelous. While I’m hoping subsequent episodes are better, I can’t be sure the cheap life jacket Fox has thrown me will hold out long enough to see if that happens.

GLEE “Pilot”: Questioning Your Commitment to Sparkle Motion

Fox gave us a little taste of high school choir dramedy Glee last night after American Idol, and let’s be honest: that was good strategy. I loved the darn thing. Loved its guts. Any show with an a capella version of “Moonlight Sonata” and a huge choir’s worth of kids in polka-dot 50s dresses belting out “Rehab” has so got me on its side.

I do wonder, however, whom Fox is targeting with this show. The numbers, particularly among young viewers, don’t look huge but don’t look bad, which gives me hope. Maybe there really are millions of other people out there who, having  just been surprised on a cross-country flight that Delta’s entertainment system includes Spring Awakening (it’s the bitch of flying), screamed “It’s WENDLA!” when Glee’s version of Tracy Flick graced the screen (Lea Michele is a wonderful balance of ego and vulnerability here). Maybe the young people understand the greatness that is Journey. Maybe everyone else who watches Fox has a congenital inability to change the channel if they trip over Camp (hey, where is Fritzi these days? Ooh, she’s Stacey Pilgrim! That’s so cool! Ooh, she’s also in Twilight. That’s so not cool). Maybe millions of other viewers howled laughing when Tracy Flick, upset at the possibility that having the kid in the wheelchair take the lead on “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” was meant ironically, snapped, “There’s nothing ironic about show choir!”…and then had to wonder if they would have understood the irony of show choir when they were her age or if they were in fact Tracy Flick. Were there enough of us rocking that boat in high school to support what, given the music rights, will have to be an expensive show?

Here’s hoping so, because even with some of the creakiness pilots tend to have (the musical theater kid in a Marc Jacobs jacket [Chris Colfer] gets thrown into a Dumpster by jocks? I’m shocked), this was a hoot. Presumably, we’ll be following the adventures of whether financially-challenged teacher Will (Matthew Morrison of Broadway’s The Light in the Piazza, Hairspray, and Footloose) can support an expanding family while paying for glee club, whether his shaky marriage can withstand both his wife’s spending habits and the adorableness that is fellow teacher Jayma Mays (Heroes, Pushing Daisies), whether star QB Finn (Cory Monteith [Kyle XY]) can bridge the jock/singer divide, and whether our plucky band can win the championship. As long as they sing and dance the whole way (to Journey songs!), I’ll likely follow them down the yellow brick road. You can make the wait until fall shorter by catching the pilot on iTunes (free, at least for the moment) and Hulu.

SIT DOWN, SHUT UP: That Title Is Just Begging For It

Remember a couple of years ago when Aaron Sorkin, multiple Emmy winner, created Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and staffed it with Emmy winner Bradley Whitford and Emmy nominee Matthew Perry? And everyone got all excited about it, and then it wasn’t nearly as good as previous Sorkin efforts like Sports Night and The West Wing? And people were so offended by this they handed out pitchforks and torches (or, as Chi McBride would suggest, plastic forks and glowsticks) and called for a UN Commission on Studio 60 atrocities and demanded their money back for TV that they got for free? When, in retrospect, the show swung between a little annoying and sometimes okay (with the occasional terrific Christmas episode) and wasn’t actually an affront to humanity, and in the end it was probably just something a little lesser that Sorkin needed to get out of his system before going on to better projects?

Fast forward to 2012, when we’ll think back to multiple Emmy winner Mitchell Hurwitz (creator of the brilliant Arrested Development) adapting a popular Australian comedy into a new animated show about a hapless high school called Sit Down, Shut Up, partnering with multiple Emmy winner Josh Weinstein, who wrote episodes of The Simpsons like “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” and “Lisa versus Malibu Stacey”. We’ll remember them staffing it with genius Emmy nominees with AD connections like Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Henry Winkler. We’ll recall their adding the Emmy-nominated wonder that is Kristin Chenoweth. And we’ll remember coming to the conclusion that maybe Hurwitz and company just needed to get this out of their systems before they could move on to better projects. In the future, when this happens, we won’t look back on the show and say, “Eh, it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as bad as we thought it was at the time.” No, we’ll look back and remember that Sit Down, Shut Up was so bad it made us wish Fox had kept Do Not Disturb on the air instead. When we saw–and were appalled by–the pilot, we wanted to give it another week before passing judgment, just out of loyalty to the many talented people involved. But it’s…it’s really bad, full of grotesque and dirty jokes that just aren’t funny and are set to flat, unattractive animation. We love so many of the people involved with Sit Down, Shut Up so much that we’re going to resist the urge to tell them to sit down and shut up, but…we’ll catch them in their next outings, thanks.

CAPRICA: Is This The Transylvania Station?

The backdoor pilot for Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica is available today at a retailer near you or your web browser, but a few hundred of us were lucky enough to see it last night at the Paley Festival in Los Angeles. Co-executive producer David Eick held a ceremonial christening of the show by pulling out a flask and doing a tequila shot on stage (he persuaded producing partner Ron Moore to do the same, and even let host Seth Green in on the swigging action, although in fairness he seemed reluctant to share quality tequila). Did this little bit of protective magic help create television magic?

I think it might have. This was a pilot, and as such has some of the weird little quirks pilots tend to have. There are some dangling questions that may or may not ever be addressed and some points where the suspension of disbelief required to get the exposition in means you’re going to have to squint a bit (a 16-year-old cracks the code of how the human brain works. Of course she does). But on this level, Caprica actually fares better than many pilots, introducing the main players with an emotional economy and setting up a world oozing with gorgeous design work and knotty problems.

Those problems might be the crux of the issue when it comes to where Caprica is going. One of the things Moore, Eick, and (the wonderful) Jane Espenson were emphatic about in the post-screening panel was the need to “destroy” Battlestar Galactica–to make Caprica its own entity (Moore even pointed out that in doing so, they expected to lose some of the BSG audience while gaining new fans). In many ways, they’re successful in doing this–the look of the show is intentionally different from BSG, saturated with light and bright colors and sparkly things (director Jeffrey Reimer of Friday Night Lights fame is freed of the faux-documentary conceit that worked so well on BSG but would be awkward here). Has Bear McCreary added a prominent English horn to his orchestra of doom?*** Have the writers actually created a Tauron language? The pilot lacks the urgency Battlestar‘s had, but that’s purposeful as well–this is both the beginning and the culmination of a decades-long decline rather than the first breathless race for survival after apocalypse. There’s obvious room to grow and explore here, and that’s exciting.

On the other hand, while I like the pilot a lot, the things I was most excited about exploring were all laced into the parent show’s mythology. The idea of BSG as a post-9/11 response to tragedy is almost canon now, but Caprica is really that idea as it played out in our society, with an opening terrorist bombing that raises questions about religion and protest and corruption. The grotesque virtual nightclub that serves both as the meeting place for the genius teenage maybe-not-terrorists and as their catalyst for wanting to clean up the world has as its descendent the icky strip club where Bill Adama and the Tighs worried about retirement. A big, juicy part of the fun is the fleshing out of the Colonial worlds, with Tauron mourning rituals and Caprican classism. I can’t stop being fascinated by the idea that no flowers grow on Tauron–why on…Caprica would you settle a planet where no flowers grow? Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that such a place grows a complicated system of organized crime instead (Esai Morales is pretty terrific juggling all of those worlds as he loses most of his own).

Caprica‘s underlying philosophical approach is straight out of the Cylon lore we’ve just spent half a decade watching, as well. Daniel Greystone’s (Eric Stoltz) attempt to reconstitute the monotheistic daughter who was killed in the bombing by recapturing the best avatar ever and downloading her into a cybernetic body just makes him Frankenstein by way of Steve Jobs, but it loops us back around to every question we ever had about the Eights and the Sixes and everyone else who downloaded–what makes a soul? Does having the ability to create and destroy life also confer the right to do so? If consciousness exists after bodies quit, what is death in the end? Caprica takes these questions head on, and it’s a lot of fun–but it’s fun they’ve been preparing us for for five years on another show, and for all they want the prequel to stand on its own, I wonder if it does–if it’s nearly as engaging without the framework already in place to build those questions on. We can’t unring that bell, of course, so it will be interesting to see if Caprica draws people new to the universe with similar levels of appeal it will have for the already-converted.

While I hope newbies will give it a try, I’m going to continue swimming around in the set-up fun. Watching Greystone download his daughter’s consciousness and then realize he’s downloading it into a Centurion induces goosebumps, but watching said Centurion’s visual scanner turn red as the robot becomes Zoe brings all of the big questions this universe engages crashing into one swirling horror show, but one that’s hard to look away from. Heck, a mean Caprican bigwig even has octogonal lenses in his glasses. I miss BSG for its world and its characters, but I also miss it for what it had to say and what it had to ask. While I wonder whether Caprica is a perfect candidate for the BBC approach we’ve mentioned before (two 13-episode seasons, maybe), I’ll be looking forward to taking another ride on the carousel.

***Edited on 04/27/2009 to add: Has Bear McCreary added an English horn to his orchestra of doom? Yes, indeedy, he has. Ha! Most excellent, as is his blog entry concerning Caprica’s new themes–check it out.

HARPER’S ISLAND “Whap”: C-I-L-L The Bridal Party

While contemplating the sad fact that the brilliant season finale of Life was probably the brilliant series finale of Life, I got to wondering again about whether short series–the kind of format the BBC uses for series like Life on Mars–are really the wave of the future. We’ve asked this question before, but CBS’ new mystery show Harper’s Island is the first series in a long while to embrace the shortened format on purpose rather than because the story is being cut short by cancellation. This “tune in for a few weeks only” format works like gangbusters in reality television, where attention spans are extra short (I freely admit I have completely lost the American Idol thread this season–are they still singing?), and it works overseas–why couldn’t it work for CBS or NBC?

Is Harper’s Island a good test case for whether this format will work well on American television? Well…maybe. It’s got a solid built-in countdown hook, with the Ten Little Indians conceit of a new murder each week. Viewers might tune in just to see who is left standing, like they do for Big Brother or Survivor on the same network. The first murder was just plain nasty–I mean that as a compliment–and there were some nicely creepy moments. I know I’m easy when it comes to scares, but they should have cut down that murder tree a long time ago. And it has Jim Beaver, who classes up any joint.

On the other hand, my very first reaction to the whole show was, “Ooh! I hope Harry Hamlin kills all the rich people!” He…won’t be. In the Interesting Character Derby, then, we are left with Plucky Tragic Heroine Whose Mother Was Killed In The First Murder Spree And Whose Name I Cannot Remember (played by Elaine Cassidy), Kinda Cute Working-Class Groom Whose Name I Cannot Remember (the always welcome Christopher Gorham), Cheeky Outsider Trying to Propose Whose Name I Cannot Remember (Adam Campbell), and Creepy Little Prescient Girl Who Tries to Fry Snails with A Magnifying Glass But Whose Name I Cannot Remember (Cassandra Sawtell, recently seen tormenting Shawn and Gus on Psych). Oh, and Jim Beaver. A cast full of interchangable pretty people is not a good sign, although I suppose it is a classic horror trope. If you’re a classic horror-suspense fan, Harper’s Island might be worth a visit. The rest of us will be hoping the drama gets pumped up beyond the body count (and that Harry Hamlin will rise out of the water weilding a chainsaw), or we’ll be sailing away. Thursday nights at 10pm Eastern and Pacific on CBS.

PARKS AND RECREATION “Pilot”: Few Have the Will to Prepare to Win

So sayeth Bobby Knight, current Guitar Hero pitchman and poster on the wall at the Pawnee, IN, government offices. Leslie Knope, however, has the will to prepare to win–the question is whether you want to watch her try.

I’ve been accused of attending town hall meetings merely for the entertainment value. This accusation is 100 percent true. I have even stopped at the store to get peanut M&Ms on the way to the aforementioned town hall meetings because all entertainment deserves snackies, and they don’t sell popcorn or Cracker Jacks in public forums (they totally should–they could fund new parks!). I think my favorite memory from one of these meetings was seeing an old man screaming, “Stifle! STIFLE!” at a sitting Congressman. Good times. Parks and Recreation is going to have a hard time topping that kind of hilarity, even with Loudon Wainwright III threatening to list Laura Linney’s shortcomings.

But it might get better. Parks and Recreation is famously from a lot of the same people who make the US version of The Office, and it shows–the same documentary style, the same earnest kinds of characters. In fact, P&R is very much what The Office would be if Toby Flenderson really, really cared about Dunder Mifflin and Michael Scott had a poster of Bobby Knight hanging on his wall. P&R has something else in common with The Office–the pilot wasn’t particularly funny. There, I said it–the pilot for The Office didn’t have a lot of laugh out loud moments. Neither did Parks and Recreation, but it did have snarky coworkers, obtuse bosses, and a lead character who will kill herself trying to change the world with her smile and a hard hat. With a similar pedigree, a similar setting where the mundane becomes the ridiculous, and a similarly talented cast (Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones, Nick Offerman, and yes, NBC, I would date Aziz Ansari, thanks for asking), why not give Parks and Recreation a chance to blossom into something in the same ballpark as The Office? I actually did laugh out loud at the idea of do-gooder Leslie drunk-faxing people fruit roll-ups, so I’m willing to come back for another serving next week. The second episode of The Office? Was “Diversity Day”. If P&R can come up with something that uncomfortable and funny, they’ll be fine. Fingers crossed they don’t fall into a big hole instead.

THE UNUSUALS “Pilot”: Will It Be Fruit, Or A Skittles Reduction?

Several reviews have compared ABC’s new cop show The Unusuals to M*A*S*H, that’s pretty apt–from the quirky characters to the snarky dispatcher voiceover, The Unusuals is clearly a direct descendant of that groundbreaking dramedy.

While I don’t think anyone expects The Unusuals to come anywhere near M*A*S*H‘s decade-plus run (based on initial ratings, it may not last this season), my question is whether it can grow beyond the pilot. Many pilots struggle like they’re marching through quicksand, trying to establish characters and settings. The Unusuals is more fun than that, setting up a wacky NYC (where not everyone is white! Clutch your pearls, people) and an amusing set of characters. But this pilot also feels like it burns through a lot of character revelations in a short time, and it makes us wonder what hey have left to reveal from week to week. In just the first half hour, we meet characters who are trust fund babies choosing to pursue vice detective careers (an always welcome Amber Tamblyn), police officers so paranoid they sleep in a bulletproof vest (Harold Perrinieau), and the boring guy–he’s just dying of a brain tumor and might be the pivot for some magical realism (Adam Goldberg). Oh, and then there’s the guy whose partner is killed (Jeremy Renner). He sleeps in the back of the diner he runs off hours (where he makes the aforementioned Skittles reduction when he runs out of fruit). Also, he used to be a professional baseball player. But he’s just one of the guys now.

They were a fun group to spend an hour with, and with the murder of the bad-cop-who-wasn’t-all-bad behind us the show might be able to turn to cases as unusual as the characters (such as the serial cat killer who wanders the city wearing suspicious gloves). The Unusuals is worth checking out a second week, but it remains to be seen whether the show has burned through all its charm. Using the photocopier-as-lie-detector gag Homicide perfected years ago isn’t promising. Adam Goldberg cheating death is. Wednesdays at 10pm Eastern and Pacific on ABC.