Category: Television-Fiction

Posts about TV shows.

This bridge goes somewhere

I had The Bridge all figured out.

Detective Sonya Cross is weird. Not goofy weird. Borderline psychopath weird. Her world is black and white. There are rules, there is breaking rules. It is against the rules to let an ambulance take a dying man thru a crime scene, so she tells the man’s wife to turn around. She can’t notify a husband of his wife’s death without starting her investigation, asking for his cell phone and about infidelity. She asks him in his own home if he would like a glass of water, multiple times. She thinks this is expressing emotion. She apologizes if she lacked empathy as he kicks her out.

Sonya Cross can’t process other people’s feelings. Her partner’s wife makes her dinner, she tells her it tastes bad. She tells a crying mother her daughter must remain in custody because she is on drugs. Later, when the girl’s father is killed, Cross interrogates her as if she isn’t in shock from seeing her father’s tongue pulled out thru a slit in his throat.

Cross has a sex life but no love life. Late one night she gets dressed, goes to a bar and asks the first man she talks to if he wants to have sex with her. Her style is submissive, as if she is fulfilling a role she thinks she is supposed to play even though she doesn’t understand why. The next morning she walks into the office and matter-of-factly tells her boss, “I had sex last night,” to which he replies in a way that sounded like this is a repeat occurrence. A few days later her conquest shows up at the police station to get her number and she reflexively responds, “I can’t have sex with you here,” right in front of her partner and her boss.

What’s the point of my amateur psycho analysis? I couldn’t understand why The Bridge made her this way. The show has enough mystery and drama to function just fine with its main character being normal. What about the show needed her to exhibit such a bizarre personality?

Then it hit me. The show features Cross and a Mexican detective trying to solve the case of a murder victim placed on the bridge between El Paso and Juarez. Half the body is in Mexico, half in the United States. Their investigation leads to a mission-oriented serial killer. My theory after a couple of episodes was that Cross is the killer. Based on her weirdness I posited she would experience complete psychological breaks and commit these horrible murders without even realizing what she was doing. Imagine Dexter with a split personality.

Under my theory they would investigate deeper and deeper. Nothing would make sense. Then, like a bolt from the blue, her boss would realize what was wrong with this strange young cop he mentored for so long. Talk about a snake in the mail box, what a great twist that would be! It had to be the reason they made her the way she is!

WRONG. Sonya Cross is not the killer. Her personality is the result of her sister being brutally raped and murdered when she was 15. She proves she is capable of emotion sitting in prison with the mentally disabled killer, holding his hand and crying as he draws childlike pictures of her sister with black eyes.

The first time I tried watching The Bridge I didn’t make it 10 minutes. Cross was that annoying. I gave it another shot, though, and I’m glad I did. It’s not a great show, but it’s a very good one. Diane Kruger does an excellent job as Cross and Demián Bichir is enjoyable as her partner from Juarez. Ted Levine plays her completely Texas boss who is mentally ready to retire. Annabeth Gish, who I think is just the best, plays the wife of the dying man in the ambulance. Her story unfolds separately from the murder investigation but it becomes clear that the two storylines will intersect at some point as the show nears the end of its first season.

I used On Demand to catch up with The Bridge’s first 10 episodes. Judging by the ratings I am not alone in watching it on delay. According to The Hollywood Reporter  its most recent episode gained a whopping 67 percent increase of viewers when DVR was taken into account.

With ratings like that, characters that are enjoyable and a good set of storylines, The Bridge is a solid addition to your TV lineup. Its full season is available thru Comcast’s On Demand so you can catch up as it reaches its last three episodes of the season.

Motive and Mistresses

The smash hit band of the summer! 

Actually those are the titles of two shows that aired on ABC over the summer season.

Motive is a Canadian series about two detectives solving murders in Vancouver. There are no standout performances from the cast. It doesn’t have any of the hallmarks you would look for in a great television show. Motive makes its mark in the way it presents its story.

Most whodunnits are about finding the bad guy before it’s too late. Motive gives you the killer and the victim each week in the opening scene. Viewers know this but the detectives don’t, so the show plays a little bit of a game with you. As you watch the detectives try to find the killer you are trying to figure out the killer’s motive, hence the title. I can’t think of any other show I watch that gives you the viewer a different reason to watch the show than the characters within it are experiencing. It draws you in to make you feel like you are solving the case along with them.

Like I said, nothing outstanding from the actors but nothing bad either. The chemistry is good, the dialogue is sharp and the stories are pretty tight. It’s a textbook procedural, so much so that the season finale was indistinguishable from a regular episode. But regular episodes are fun to watch for the different way they are presented. If you have Netflix or Hulu Plus, Motive is a nice simple show you can watch without feeling compelled to watch five more.

Mistresses

When you put four attractive women in a show, call it Mistresses and market it for the sex appeal you are inevitably going to get comparisons with Sex and the City. I would compare them like this: If Sex and the City was about sex, Mistresses is about consequences. Only one of the four sexcapades her way thru the season but it’s rarely gratuitous and always part of exploring her faults. That’s the purpose of sex in Mistresses: It exposes faults.

The premiere episode showed the conflict each of the four would face as their sex lives fail them. Karen slept with a client, Savannah can’t get pregnant, Joss can’t carry on a meaningful relationship and April is getting back into dating after her husband’s death. Unlike SATC they deal with their problems like adults whose decisions hurt other people. It’s a mature show in this way.

There is some good acting, most notably the chemistry between Alyssa Milano and her husband, played by Brett Tucker. Their scenes are the best of the series. It’s good to see Yunjim Kim back on American TV, but her performance is pretty ordinary. Jes Macallan is perfectly cast as Savannah’s sexually liberated sister. Shannyn Sossamon plays her client-turned-girlfriend. I don’t have anything to say about that other than Sossamon’s first child is named Audio Science Clayton.

The season finale appeared ready to go completely off the rails but righted itself in time to end with a cliffhanger that I totally bought. The show definitely earned itself a second season. I have an idea forthcoming as to a great way that could unfold.

What you see with Mistresses is what you get. It less opaque than a show like Longmire. It is more like Motive. You don’t have to put much thought into it to enjoy it. In that way these two shows are perfect for the summer. In the fall or even the spring season they might not make it. When there’s nothing else on, both work just fine.

Feeling for Revenge

It was really hard to come up with something to write about Revenge. I re-read a piece I wrote after the season finale and re-watched the two-hour episode to get in the right mindset to think about what will be a make-or-break third season.

I got nothin’. Even though I really liked the finale and believe booting Michael Kelley was the right thing to do I can’t come up with any emotion for the season that premieres Sunday, September 29. Why not?

Maybe it is due to the teaser ABC released showing Emily being shot in the abdomen. She gets shot, but does she really? She doesn’t appear to bleed, in fact the impact appears to give off black residue as if it hits some kind of matrimonial Kevlar. I grew to loathe these teasers during Lost because they are put together by marketing departments with the goal of making you watch the show, not writers with the goal of giving a glimpse of what will happen.

I am not up for being teased and misled. Maybe someone wants Emily dead, maybe someone wants someone else to think Emily is dead. We will find out. What is not happening, we can be absolutely sure, is that Revenge is not killing off its main character. Trying to make us think it might is insulting to our intelligence.

Maybe there is a silver lining here. After Emily appears to fall off a yacht the narrator says, “and that’s just in the first 60 seconds.” A lot of people met the second season with discontent as the story meandered in too many directions, but I think the show really started to slide halfway thru its first season. A reminder of how the show began: The first scene of the series premiere was Emily and Daniel’s Labor Day engagement party and what appeared to be Daniel getting shot on the beach. The rest of the episode and first half of the season was a flashback of everything that happened from Memorial Day until the party. Everything worked perfectly for Emily’s plan as she took out one enemy after another. Of course it did. For the show’s purposes, all of it already happened. Some of it was a little far fetched, a little too perfect, but we bought it because it had to have happened for the engagement party to happen.

Once the show caught up to that first scene, things changed. It didn’t have that anchoring moment to build up to anymore. The story had to be told in real-time, and it really began to falter. My hope is that this teaser is a sign the new showrunner will model the first season’s structure and, by extension, get back much of what it lost. If not that then at least a different creative way to shake up the show.

It lost more than its storytelling prowess, though. Its characters sagged. Nolan lost all of his mojo after falling for dear dead Padma and ended last season in jail for the blackout and bombing at Grayson headquarters. Actor Gabriel Mann said Nolan gets his sex on in season three, so presumably his time in jail doesn’t last long. Good. The whole Padma storyline and his sudden rivalry with the hacker Falcon need to be two things the show jettisons from its lackluster sophomore season.

The same goes for Victoria. She was neutered by Conrad becoming the one who plotted Fauxmanda’s downfall and death and further diminished by his run for governor. The show needs her to be the cunning, protective mother she was in season one. The son she gave up for adoption came back in the finale, how will that affect her? Will she be as protective of him as she is Daniel and Charlotte, or will the humiliating way he was exposed knock her off her game entirely? Let’s hope the show has a real purpose for him, the last thing it needs is a useless new character.

Conrad is the governor. He takes a spill in the teaser as if he is having a stroke. That would be cheap. I really feel the show bungled The Initiative’s presence last season. Now that he revealed his role in it to Victoria and Daniel, is it over or will it ascend to a bigger role with the governor and the head of Grayson Global in its confidences?

What about Daniel Grayson? Will he accept what Conrad did and what it means for him? What does it mean for him? It is time for the young Mr. Grayson to become more than Conrad and Victoria’s son. He deserves to fully establish himself as his own person, and the show needs him to. Ousted showrunner Michael Kelley is rumored to have wanted to shorten Revenge into a 13 episode run similar to most cable serials as opposed to the 20-plus episodes of most network shows. He lost that fight, so his successors will have to rely on deeper characters to fill all that time if they intend to reduce the amount of sprawl in the storyline. A better Daniel character can help them do that.

And, no, I still haven’t forgiven them for killing Declan.

ABC, Michael Kelley and most everyone involved with Revenge admitted it went awry in season two. Hopefully that recognition and the new lead writer will get a once a very enjoyable and saucy primetime soap back on track.

I guess I did find an emotion: Hope.

Profile this: Why do I like Criminal Minds?

Earlier this year I wrote a long piece about the show Profiler that used to air on NBC, labeling it as Criminal Minds before its time. In the piece I laid out some thoughts on Minds as it compared to Profiler:

Criminal Minds is a more mature show than Profiler. That could be due to CBS having perfected the criminal drama format. It turns out these shows like suburban model homes, and that’s not a knock on the shows or suburban model homes. Okay maybe a little bit. This Business Insider piece from two years ago explains how they do it (even though it was prompted by a Minds spinoff that didn’t last the season). Each show benefits from the others’ successes, and Profiler never had that benefit on the NBC of the late 1990s. Not to say it would have lasted longer if it had, just that it existed on more of an island than Criminal Minds does today.

Even with that help, I don’t think Criminal Minds is perfect. Minds is set up in a way that removes as much of a viewer’s need to think as it possibly can. Dr. Spencer Reid does most of the hand holding as the team member with an eidetic memory – basically he knows everything. That’s awfully convenient. Every development in the show is revealed through dialogue, usually as a series of questions, discussions and realizations by the BAU team. Very little is actually shown. You can close your eyes and listen to it for an entire episode without missing much of anything. Profiler was more artful than that. I’d love to see a breakdown between the average amount of time in each show without dialogue. My bet would be Profiler comes out on top. And that’s why it’s my favorite of the two. It could also be why it didn’t last half as long as Minds.

I remember mocking Criminal Minds to people who didn’t like the way Lost spread its stories out across entire seasons. “If you don’t like it, Criminal Minds would be happy to have you.” At that point I’d never seen the show and hadn’t gotten into any of CBS’s other criminal procedurals. I saw episodes of CSI and NCIS and wasn’t intrigued by either of them. I’ve since seen NCIS: Los Angeles and believe it to be one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen. So I am comfortable labeling myself as not into the big eye’s primetime staples.

Then one Sunday night I was bored watching Sunday Night Baseball and landed on a Criminal Minds rerun on Ion Television. I don’t remember what the episode was or why it caught my attention. It may have been just curiosity about what Y&R legend Shemar Moore was up to. Whatever the reason, I watched the whole thing. And the next one. And the next one. Pretty soon it was midnight, and I had a new television addiction.

I went to bed under a cloud of confusion. How could I have liked this? I’m not supposed to, I’m a Lost fan. We like deep storylines and complex characters, not this lazy whodunnit crap. I am a sophisticated television viewer, damn it!

It was a rough night.

I kept watching Minds on those Sunday nights when ballgames weren’t entertaining. I started catching it other times that it was on. The more I watched it, the more I found myself drawn to it. No, not just drawn to it, appreciative of it as really well done television. Over time, especially since it became much easier due to DVR and unemployment, I caught almost every episode Ion and A&E show on reruns, meaning up thru season seven. Toward the end of last season – its eighth – I started watching it on its original Wednesday night broadcast.

That is quite an ascension on my television ladder. No show has gone from catching up on reruns to watching live. I need to explore how this show reeled me in, what it does well and – because I have an emotional stock in it – what I’d like to see it do better.

That post will come soon. In the meantime, you can see some of it in my thoughts ahead to this fall’s premiere.

Thinking ahead: Criminal Minds

This will be my first season watching Criminal Minds in-season having only seen it on Ion and A&E reruns. I made the decision to watch last year’s season finale because 1) I knew it is the kind of show you can jump into mid-stream without feeling lost (pun…intended); and 2) I heard they were going to kill off one of the team. Unfortunately that turned out to be a bit of an oversell as it was Strauss who bit the bullet at the hands of Hans Solo. Not really what I was expecting and, frankly, kind of a cop out. I generally do not subscribe to the theory that killing off a character is gimmicky but in this case it clearly was exactly that.

Because Crim is a procedural there isn’t much to think about before the season. If there is one thing I would like to see it is that the writers would crimp into Garcia’s data mining abilities. She is every bit the electronic snooper that Harold Finch is on Person of Interest but her methods are simply a means to an end for Criminal Minds. I want to see this for two reasons. First, the more I watch the show the more “hand of God” her work seems. Her ability to pull up exactly the right person through the most exacting and bizarre search parameters is often too much to be believable.

Here is an example. In season seven, episode 11 Hotch asks Garcia to find everyone in a region with an IQ higher than 120. Then she is cross referencing Zodiac Killer researchers with high-level chess players. I mean, come on.

How they might throttle her back can be found in the second reason: The NSA spying revelations resulting from Edward Snoden’s stealing and subsequent leaking of government documents. Garcia only acts when the BAU is chasing an unsub as opposed to the NSA’s blanket surveillance but the limitless pools of data she is able to tap into and the relative ease with which she does it make an easy comparison. I would love to see a case where her work incorrectly identifies an unsub and leads to her being sidelined or severely crippled in what she is able to do. How the team does its work without her would be interesting to see. Except for when she was shot (by Longmire’s Bailey Chase, no less) she has been one of the show’s most constant characters, right up there with her dark chocolate, Derek Morgan. Let’s shake it up a little.