Category: Television-Fiction

Posts about TV shows.

Zero Hour is right

ABC’s new primetimer, Zero Hour, would be a better fit for Saturday morning on a kids network. The dialogue is painful, at one point having a character use the phrase “crap storm” in a serious statement. The casting has the most glaring swing-and-miss possible in a primetime drama: Its lead character. Anthony Edwards isn’t the only one, the priest played by Charles Dutton replicates Whoopi Goldberg’s appearance in 666 Park Avenue signaling that here we have an unserious television show.

Edwards is too soft to play the leading role in a conspiracy thriller. But don’t fault him. The character is so poorly constructed that he never has a chance. Hank Galliston is the editor of Modern Skeptic magazine, an amazing coincidence then that his wife is kidnapped after buying a clock built by a secretive religious sect as part of a plan to prevent the end of the world! Galliston’s skepticism is on full display after an international fugitive kidnaps his wife when he refuses to trust and barely cooperates with the FBI. He loves his wife so much – as evident in their one scene together – that he travels to the ends of the Earth to find her but not so much that he’s willing to set aside his core belief in distrusting the FBI. You know, like all men who love their wives.

Galliston would be more compelling if he was an accomplished and legitimate news reporter instead of a fringe conspiracist. An investigative reporter with real investigative skills could still have a healthy dose of skepticism while bringing some intelligence and legitimacy to counter the show’s tendency to mirror a Dan Brown novel. I don’t think you can have a successful show that dives headfirst into that realm the way Zero Hour does, at least not on prime time network television. Common sense tells you there needs to be some balance for the storyline to have a broad appeal. I don’t understand how the show’s creators or the network wouldn’t realize such a problem and fix it.

Maybe they knew the show wouldn’t be around for very long. That could also explain why the plot advances at a comical pace. There’s some dots on a watch? BAM – they must be a constellation! A madman blew up our car and flew off in our airplane leaving us stuck in the middle of the arctic? Cut to commercial so a helicopter can drop us on a roof in Manhattan. Ridiculous. A college journalism professor used to emphasize to students that they should show readers a story instead of telling it. Zero Hour never got that lesson. It tells viewers so much and requires so much dissonance that they are right to roll their eyes. We complained for seasons on end that Lost was going too slow, and at times we were correct to do so. Zero Hour shows maybe going slow isn’t such a bad thing.

“How long has it been for you?” Widmore’s question to Locke in The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham came to mind when Galliston found the standing woman in India who was protecting one of the secret clocks. Widmore’s line came in season five so it wouldn’t be fair to compare its weight to that of a line in the second episode. Instead I’ll use it to lament what Zero Hour isn’t able to achieve. The “snake in the mailbox” at the end of the premier was intriguing and had the episode been better it would have had an even bigger impact. The intimation at the end of episode two that the end of the world might be already happening right before our eyes is the kind of thing I could go for, but the show hasn’t done anything to show that it can back up the intrigue.

Zero Hour probably didn’t deserve ABC’s boneheaded decision to premiere it on Valentine’s Day. Doesn’t matter, though. It could premiere after the Super Bowl and not get renewed. What should be a dark mystery is instead a light and airy adventure that might entertain 10-year-olds. At least they won’t know enough about Anthony Edwards to be disappointed to see him associated with this embarrassment.

 

 

 

What I’m watching

By day of the week and live/DVR status.

Sunday:
Revenge. Live.
Was watching 666 Park but that got canceled. DVR.

Monday:
The Following. DVR.
Revolution was Mondays but I dropped that.

Tuesday:
Nothing

Wednesday:
Nashville. DVR.
The Americans. Live.

Thursday:
Was watching Last Resort but it ended. Live.
Person if Interest. Live.
*Zero Hour will air on Thursdays, it’ll be iPad-only until it proves itself.

Friday:
Fringe but that’s over. Live.

Saturday:
Nothing.

Revenge needs a date

In the spring of 2007, Damon and Carlton did something few executive producers do with their television show: They told ABC they wanted to end it. They needed to assure Lost fans – and themselves – that the ever complicated story would some day achieve a satisfactory ending. ABC obliged and gave them 48 more episodes over three seasons to bring the epic to a close.

Halfway through its second season on the same network, Revenge feels like it is going through the same uncertainty. The clear presentation of Emily Thorne’s mission to take revenge on the family who framed her father as a terrorist has given way to a blurry mix of storylines that has viewers frustrated. Ratings have been consistently down since the return from its holiday break, and while that is in part due to the NFL playoffs the decline can’t be dismissed.

To ensure viewers they won’t be seeing Revenge’s equivalent of Sawyer and Juliet cracking rocks on Hydra Island, the minds behind Revenge need to sit down with ABC and decide how much longer their show will be on the air. Creator and Executive Producer Mike Kelley has to already have some plan for how the show will end, if he can get a firm answer on when that will happen he and his team can plot out how they will get there. Season three of Lost was panned at the time, and in many ways it deserved it particularly during the fall portion of the season. But if you re-watch it now it actually contained episodes that moved the story as swiftly as any before or after. Hopefully working out an end date for Revenge can provide the spark its laborious second season needs.

To the season itself, I think it is fair to assert that Revenge hasn’t been as good as last year. Part of the reason, I believe, is because the show hasn’t adapted well to a change in the way its episodes are built. Much of the first season gave us Emily’s takedown of the week as she went after people who played a role in the framing of her father. It was a great structure for telling all the back story behind Emily, Grayson Global and what happened to David Clarke. But it could only last for so long. The characters are established and new details only come as the show needs them.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the show has to be worse, but it does mean we are less surprised when one Grayson turns on another and less swept away by the luxury and excess of the Hamptons lifestyle. The writers have yet to figure out a way to replace the thrills those dramatics gave us last year, and the show suffers.

Whereas last year the smart, surprising and Machiavellian characters drove the plot, this year it feels like the needs of the plot are driving the characters. Nolan Ross is a prime example. He’s gone from a key player in Emily’s plan (thanks, we learned, to his close relationship with her father) to an unmanned drone deployed as the story needs him. First for Daniel’s takeover of Grayson Global. Then he abandoned all business sense in naming the vastly unqualified Padma as NolCorp’s CFO. It was wildly out of character for him to do something that ill-thought-out to his company, but the story needed her in place to find a piece of software Nolan was hiding.

Conrad is another case of a character seeming to lose his purpose. After being charged with Gordon Murphy’s murder and released, Daniel ousted him at Grayson and the Initiative dumped him. So, naturally, he’s plotting a political career. Why? I don’t know. It isn’t in concert with anything he’s done as a character thus far so presumably the plot needs him to run for office for some reason. So he is, with Ashley as his chief advisor. You know, the chief advisor who he slept with when she was dating his son. Uh-huh, riiiiight.

Meanwhile the really intriguing aspects that closed season one have played out flat. The finale’s shocking revelation that Emily’s mother is still alive was a complete dud. Instead of her mom being a dynamic character who can drive the story she is a psychological mess who did virtually nothing for the show and hasn’t been seen for months. A total waste of a character. The mysterious Initiative has been equally disappointing, although that might be changing now that we know its plan is to create and then profit from a disaster in New York City. Still, it doesn’t feel like one of those secretive world dominating conspiracies that only exist in televisions and movies (as far as I know). If both were better characters (literally or figuratively) the story would be making up for some of what it has lost.

Other aspects of this season’s story just aren’t interesting. Emily’s partnership with Aiden isn’t anything and his pursuit of his sister is totally irrelevant. In fact, the two of them making out in public after pretending to split is totally out of character for Emily, she is never that careless. It took way, way too long for Jack selling the bar to the Ryans to work its way around to Conrad’s usefulness. With new characters on the way such as Conrad’s ex-wife (not Victoria, his other ex-wife) there’s a chance yet we could get something interesting.

It might sound like I haven’t enjoyed this season, but I have. I have always been more open to the patience it takes to let a serial drama unfold (probably thanks to years of grooming from daytime) so these less-than-spectacular story lines haven’t turned me off. Revenge still serves up good excitement from week to week. I expect it to continue to ramp up the drama as it races toward May.

Second Resort

I can save Last Resort.

My mildly-scathing take on why Last Resort won’t get a second season earned me a lot of criticism, particularly from fans who thought it was unfair to criticize the show for avoiding story lines when it ultimately had only one year to tell them. The reality is I wasn’t criticizing Last Resort for not resolving them, I was blasting the show for not pursuing them. We all understand a show is going to leave loose ends when it gets canceled in mid-season. Last Resort’s writers committed the mistake of not even creating loose ends.

This week’s penultimate episode rushed viewers to the mind-blowing end of the coup attempt in Washington that was supposed to clear the way for the Colorado’s friendly return to US shores. Shocking is the only word to describe the way the coup ended, and it shows that despite their storytelling failures the minds behind Last Resort know how to thrill an audience.

The big frustration I expressed in last week’s piece was the amount of dramatic material we weren’t seeing but had to be occurring in order to provide the plots we did see unfold. That frustration grew after Speaker Buell committed suicide on his rostrum. There’s no way the show can wrap up the Colorado’s fate and do justice to the story behind the man walking up to whisper in Buell’s ear. That’s too much for 42 minutes. I got to thinking how Last Resort really held two co-dependent dramas in one show. In one storyline, a United States submarine deals with the consequences of refusing a questionable order to launch a nuclear missile strike against Pakistan. In the other, a fight for control of the US government breaks out after the covert murder of a United Nations weapons inspector in Pakistan. Each plotline reacts to developments in the the other but can standing largel on its own. That’s when an idea hit me that could save the show.

“What if they brought Last Resort back, but the opposite?” What if, instead of episodes dominated by the Colorado, we get episodes – set concurrently with the season we already saw – focused entirely on what led to the mysterious fire order and the subsequent attempt to overthrow the president? Leading into the finale, we know that the US executed a weapons inspector in a plan to launch nuclear war on Pakistan, files on a cloaking technology are stolen to protect the knowledge of the Colorado’s location at the time of the order, a coup is planned and unravels at the last minute resulting in the confession and suicide of the man who would have been president. Most mysteriously, the suicide comes after a man in the appearance of a security agent interrupts the Speaker right before he declares himself the president.

See what I’m getting at here? Bring Last Resort back for a second season in which Marcus Chaplain and the Colorado are only relevant to the extent that their actions are necessary to explain what is happening in Washington. Make Last Resort into a political thriller (the likes of which ABC is already succeeding with in Scandal) about a corrupt president and the effort set out to depose him. Just like Chaplain and his crew had to decide between following orders and doing what they believed was right, Kylie Sinclair and Admiral Shepard can be shown in their crisis of conscience that leads them to go against their country’s government. The coup attempt obviously had a faction within it that doubted its course, just like the split that developed between Chaplain and the COB. Tell that story. There are enough similarities between the storylines to tell the second one in a completely different setting than season one but still maintain the core elements that let you know you’re watching Last Resort. And because it is happening at the same time as what we saw thus far, taking a season to tell the story won’t make us miss anything on the submarine. There may even be opportunities to add new material that boosts the Colorado’s story.

After the faux season plays out, the show would be ready to bring the two storylines back together in a third season. With a new audience and more practiced leadership, we could see the aftermath of whatever is set to happen in next week’s final episode.

Obviously, this is pure fantasy. Last Resort’s finale is in the can and set to air next Thursday. With all indications being that it will be a true ending, the show can’t be un-ended and re-launched. But maybe, juuuuuuust maybe, ABC will have a change of heart, pull the finale and give us a second Last Resort.

The Last Resort

This view of ABC’s soon-to-be-sunk Last Resort is so over the top in its praise of the show it reads like it was written by the show’s PR department. Last Resort is not “brilliant” – far from it – and it doesn’t have strong female leads. I could go along with saying it deserves a look from another network, but with all indications being that the writers had enough time to film a legitimate ending, it doesn’t seem likely.

Last Resort had a premise with loads of potential. How did it go wrong and not even make a full season?

The pilot was, in a word, fricking outstanding. Out. Standing. The submarine – the USS Colorado – under the command of Marcus Chaplain defied orders to make a nuclear strike on Pakistan due to Chaplain’s concern over receiving the message thru a secondary protocol that is only supposed to be used when the government has failed. When the apparently-not-failed government threatened to destroy his ship, Chaplain retaliated by firing a nuclear missile at the nation’s capital. The writers let several dramatic minutes pass before the nuclear warhead detonated…200 miles off the east coast. A commanding speech to the world by Chaplain near the end of the episode solidified him as the dramatic center of the show. Andre Braugher fulfilled the role with great deftness as the definitive authority of his boat dealing with an extreme crisis of conscience. Braugher is not the reason Last Resort failed.

Once the pilot ended and the show’s plot had to be unwrapped, the writers went at it like a greedy punk kid at Christmas, tearing through the story so haphazardly that they destroyed their present. This was its downfall.

There had to have been a reason the order to fire on Pakistan didn’t come through the standard chain of command. That’s a political intrigue. Viewers love political intrigue. Had the United States government been decapitated? The writers didn’t seem to care. They sent the show on a boring chase for some military tech developed by a powerful national defense family. How relevant that was to why the sub got questionable orders to fire a nuclear missile, I was never really clear. The tech figured prominently in getting the boat out of one life threatening situation and seems to have been forgotten about since. It was like watching Dogan in the temple all over again.

Finally, in the first episode of its four week sprint to eternity we got some hint of what happened leading up to the pilot. The president ordered an assassination on a United Nations weapons inspector which would be followed by the rogue order to launch nuclear war. Awesome! Why would a president do that? Was he being blackmailed? Was he a traitor? Was there an effort to stop it? How might that have played out? How did something like that affect the people involved? I have no idea. We have no idea. Maybe we will find out over the final three episodes, and I hope we do. But it’s too late. That’s just too much to leave out of a primetime show. It puts enormous pressure on what does make it into each episode. Last Resort couldn’t hold up.

The plan to manipulate LC Sam Kendall’s wife into turning him against Chaplain was obvious but still so poorly done as to be annoying. I completely expect a military wife to be fully devoted to her husband and vice versa, but you still have to earn it with me as a viewer. Last Resort didn’t. I’m not even sure it tried. Failing to invest in it was evident when their eventual reunion failed to deliver an emotional punch. (Desmond and Penny, anyone?) Her sudden death was surprising, but even that was undone by the end of the episode. Two characters in love don’t make a primetime love story. Two characters viewers love make a primetime love story. We were never made to love Sam and Christine.

Last Resort’s best storytelling may have come in the episode in which one of the sailors was tried for raping a woman from the island. Chaplain put Lt. Grace Shepard in charge of the case and by the end we learned that she is a rape victim. Powerful stuff that illuminates a character. We didn’t get much of that background for the other secondary characters even though it is all sitting there waiting to be told.

What did the French researcher leave behind live on this island and look for rare Earth minerals? How did the island’s despot come to power? How did a young woman come to run her own bar? Why is one of the sailors spying on her own country? If you enjoy good television, wasted potential like this should leave you seething. Much has been made of Shawn Ryan’s run of bad luck that now includes Last Resort. It ain’t bad luck. Hollywood should take out a restraining order against him on behalf of good material. He and anyone else responsible for how this story was told ought to have their keyboards confiscated by time travelers who can ensure they never touch them again.

Well then what did Last Resort have right that I enjoyed it enough to be disappointed? I think it did the drama exceptionally well. The trap of a show about a submarine is spending too much time threatening to sink the sub. Last Resort avoided that, creating dramatic situations that were intense and entertaining even in the absence of great character-based storytelling. Give the show credit for that. I would even say that alone could have been strong enough to overcome the show’s faults. Saying so only makes it that much more disappointing that they couldn’t put storytelling and drama together. They could have made the kind of show people hang on every spring and can’t wait for every fall.

Some have said Last Resort was too masculine and that it faced stiff Thursday night competition. Both probably carry a kernel of truth. Both are minor reasons compared to its overall failure to develop a better story. So, sorry, Yahoo Contributor Network bro, Last Resort didn’t take any chances, and that’s why it’s about to get dry-docked.