July 27, 2008

We Now Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Column…

After getting distracted with the Emmys and the early looks at USA’s shows, it’s time to get back to business. And hey—there’s actually stuff worth watching on TV now!

Burn Notice (USA) — Ah, Patrick Fabian. I do love how he’s become TV’s go-to guy from smarmy jackasses, but it’d be nice to see him play a nice guy once in awhile. Burn Notice doesn’t role that way, however. Instead of playing the victim of the week, he plays a smarmy jackass who cons people into investing in a Cuban nightclub that doesn’t exist. Michael intervenes on behalf of a hapless fool who borrowed his investment money from loan sharks, hoping to earn enough to pay for his cancer-stricken mother’s medical bills.

I would call this episode inconsequential, in that the main plot allows the show to do what it does best: champion the little guy against absurdly rendered (not to be confused with “cartoonishly evil”) criminals, letting Michael and his friends use their spycraft to solve problems, etc., etc. However, the subplot with roguish diplomat Waseem took this episode from good to great. In its first season, my only complaint—and a minor one, at that—was that the “who burned me?” subplots generally appeared in scenes at the top and bottom of the show, isolated from the actual story. This season, it appears they’re attempting to incorporate the stories more deeply into the episodes, which I applaud.

They could have easily written Waseem as a cheap stereotype, but they played up his self-preservation instinct. He’s not violent or prone to vengeance, as he could easily have been when Michael started screwing with him; instead, his calm rationalizations provided a better foil to Michael than the usual gun-toting low-lives and humorless spies. I doubt we’d have any need to see him again, but I’d love it if they brought him back.

Flashpoint (CBS) — The newest cop show to hit CBS has all of the ridiculous, over-the-top violence of its other procedurals with none of the mindlessness. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but it does a lot right that other cop shows get so, so wrong.

Let’s start with the characters. Like every other procedural, the writing emphasizes the crimes and the techniques they use to keep them from escalating into something worse. In shows of this ilk, the characters do not have personal lives unless they intersect directly with the crime of the week. A skateboarder is killed—good thing a random lab tech is a secret skateboarding expert! My favorite are the CSI episodes where the motives for the crimes bear a superficial resemblance to a personal problem a character faces, and the resolution is, “At least you didn’t kill anyone!” It took me by surprise that our first true interaction with the members of Flashpoint’s SRU took place…in a suburban home, and that the domestic subplot existed for little more than character development. Character development. On a police procedural. On CBS.

Even better than that, the pilot episode actually attempted to explore the emotional toll the job takes on a professional sniper. It showed us the moral gray area instead of the pure, good-versus-evil righteousness of a cop shooting a criminal. In fact, one of the show’s best qualities is its Boomtown-style subplots showing how these hostage situations occurred in the first place. Can you imagine? Empathy for criminals on network television? They’re not justified in their actions, but at least we understand their actions.

Apparently, it’s a pseudo-hit out of the gate, so I don’t need to urge viewers to watch. I will go on record as saying this is the best cop show on network TV. If D’Onofrio returned to Criminal Intent full-time, that might change, but until then…

The Middleman (ABC Family) — How is a show with so much subversive sexual humor on a channel with “family” in the name?

Based on Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s comic book, The Middleman spoofs just about every conceivable facet of pop-culture, new and old, while fashioning itself as a spy thriller that’s one part Alias, three parts Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. A few episodes have aired by now, enough to acknowledge that it does a good job of combining comedy and pathos—though it spends most of its time firing all comic cylinders.

The show follows Wendy Watson (Natalie Morales), a struggling artist, after a mysterious agent known only as The Middleman (Matt Keeslar) enlisted to aid a secret government project that exists to solve “exotic problems.” To paraphrase the Middleman himself: all that crazy stuff happening in sci-fi and horror movies? It’s mostly real. This opens the door for more spoofs per episode than anything since the Zuckers-Abrahams-Zuckers heyday. But don’t let the “ABC Family” label fool you—other than the Middleman’s borderline-Dudley Do-Right persona, very little about this show is family-friendly.

To put it another way, imagine we’re living in the not-too-distant future and a confused filmmaker stumbles across a script for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that includes the dialogue and action from both the cheesy movie and the bots’ commentary, and he went and filmed the script with the characters saying all the absurd words that are put into their mouths by the MST3K writers. That’s kinda like The Middleman.

Monk (USA) — Last week, Monk cast Brad Garrett against type in a great villain role. This week, Oscar nominee David Strathairn filled the villain role. Sometimes unknowns work a little better in these mystery shows, but Monk is casting well-known but legitimately good actors—the “star” persona doesn’t supersede the work they do.

In this case, Strathairn plays a creepy chess genius who murders his wife and passes it off as a suicide. I could mock the overuse of chess metaphors in the mystery genre, but even Philip Marlowe played one-man chess out of books, so I won’t complain much. They did employ one of those “Monk gets obsessive” gags that sometimes work but often overstay their welcome, where Monk is so obsessive about keeping his chess pieces centered that he can’t make a move. It’s kind of funny—I would have thought chess would appeal to Monk. It’s a game where everybody moves on a square grid and pieces have a limited set of predictable movements.

Psych (USA) — I don’t know if I should congratulate or call bullshit on this week’s episode. Like most Psych episodes, I enjoyed it and laughed a lot, but I don’t know what to say about the endless barrage of John Hughes references. This is the reunion for the class of 1995, not ‘85. From the pop-culture reference standpoint, it’s 10 years out of date. Then again, I graduated in 2000 and am as intimately familiar with those Hughes movies as the cast and writers of Psych, while more contemporary attempts to capture that same spirit (with a grungy Gen-Y spin) like Empire Records and She’s All That have been largely forgotten…

…but not completely, since they stunt-casted She’s All That star Rachael Leigh Cook as Shawn’s old crush. I didn’t know what to expect from this, but she fit in so well, I kinda hope they bring her back on a recurring basis. Cybill Shepherd, on the other hand… I love her, but they haven’t done a good job of meshing her with the ensemble, and she’s not exactly exhibiting the comedy chops that made her previous series’ so popular. I don’t blame her so much as the material they’ve given her—once again, she exists as a prop to give Shawn and Henry conflict. I don’t have a problem with deepening their characters, but they haven’t allowed her to add anything interesting to the mix.

Robin Hood (BBC America) — I go away for a couple of weeks, and all hell breaks loose.

Robin Hood still has regular moments of ridiculousness and stupid behavior (Gisborne, I’m looking at you!), but the past few episodes have upped the ante in significant ways: the Night Watchman has been exposed (to Gisborne, at least), Gisborne gets his first taste of power and blows it, Robin finds himself guarding the Queen Mother (this was a bizarre, Dan Brown-esque plot twist that I’m not sure I liked, but it did quell my nagging concerns that only Robin knows or cares about the Black Knights’ plan to take over England) and most importantly, the trapped gang ends up doing a fancy version of Truth or Dare (minus the dares). This episode single-handedly provided more insight in the supporting characters than most of what came before it, so I applaud them for finally digging deep into what these people are thinking and feeling while Robin spends all his time tussling with Marian and the Sheriff.

Allan’s arc over this period has also been fairly interesting. His disillusionment with Nottingham started early, and the gang rebuffed his desire to rejoin. It took an act of courage to really get that across. He stopped caring about getting back in their good graces; he just wanted to save the lives of his friends, no matter how they felt about him. He also wanted to save Marian, whom the Sheriff and Gisborne carted off to the Holy Land. We ended with Robin and the Merry Men planning to follow them, so I imagine next week’s season finale will give us a bit more insight into what Robin and Much experienced fighting the Crusades.

D. B. Bates is a film critic and television viewer who has often shouted at fictional characters who probably wouldn’t listen to him even if they could hear him and existed in reality. Interested in explaining to D. B. the many ways he got it wrong? E-mail him.

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