Thursday, October 15, 2009

Fall TV Round Up - Part 1: The Bad

We're at that place again where I can rant, fawn, and make O.o faces at certain shows. We'll start with the BAD.

NURSE JACKIE (ShowTime), HAWTHORNE (TNT) and MERCY (NBC) are all the same. Down to what happens in their first episodes and the characters in them. Seriously. The main character is a Nurse Who Knows Better Than the Doctors. There's the token Gay Latino Man. The New Young Nurse Who is Warm And Fluffy (in sharp contrast to the jaded, capable star of the show). There's the One Doctor Who is On the Nurses' Side. The Voice of Reason Nurse. And the Evil Administrator. These shows are so derivative they've almost boiled down their premises into the most pure form. The Essence of Derivation, if you will.

Joining the new crop of medical fail are TRAUMA (NBC) and THREE RIVERS (CBS). I would personally like to off every single character on TRAUMA. They all suck. And the stories are boring. There's this rule in theater where the audience has to care about your characters before you can start asking us to care about their problems. The writer's room should have studied that. It's boring, trite, and I would like a helicopter to land on them all.

I'd say THREE RIVERS is this season best new medical drama, but that's damnation by faint praise and I say that mostly because it has a rich look to it. But the acting is horrible, the storytelling stilted, and I don't think the writers know what message they're trying to send. Which spells death.

Leaving the medical field behind, we have...

HANK (ABC) is going to go quietly into the night. Which is a pretty big accomplishment as Kelsey Grammar is known for his incessant chatter.

BORED TO DEATH (HBO) lives up to its name. I usually give shows at least three episodes, because first episodes are HARD *pout*. But I couldn't even get through the second episode of this with it playing in the background as noise. It was that bad.

EASTWICK(ABC) is one I want to like so badly. I love Paul Gross. He is a brilliant actor, and I had the biggest crush on Fraser from due South for so long. (He's been married for longer than I've been alive and I DO NOT CARE, that's how much I would jump on that.) But I think he's wasted as Mr. van Horne (or Satan is just badly written), as is Lindsay Price--whom I adore--who sticks glasses on her face in order to be 'the plain one.' Seriously, glasses haven't equaled unhot nerdiness since the mid-90s. Or whenever Urkle went off the air. Additionally, Rebecca Romijn manages to suck the life out of every scene she's in. This show also leads me into a side rant about the proliferation of rape on television, particularly in sci-fi/fantasy genres, which includes the shows DOLLHOUSE (Fox) and STARGATE: UNIVERSE (SyFyllis), but I'll save that for another post.

3 comments:

Rachel said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rachel said...

:) I love your analysis.

I watched the first 5 minutes of an episode of Trauma. Some "hot" paramedic is on her morning run and happens across an accident involving a car and a motorcycle. So she runs over the motorcyclist who'd been thrown from his bike and roughly flops him over. Now, I'm no doctor, or even a paramedic, but isn't the first rule of trauma that you don't move someone? Because of that potential for neck/back injuries that you can aggravate into paralysis by jerking them around? The lawyer in me hates these shows as ambulance-chasing lawsuits waiting to happen.

Did someone in Hollywood wake up and decide that bad ER-remakes were the moneymakers this season?

Al said...

@Rachel

Yeah, I do remember there being a lot of bad medical things that even I was going...please to not be doing that! Pretty sure if I were a real medical professional I would never watch a medical show ever.