Lowering the Bar

So I decided to let this one go – Raising the Bar's an ok show, but once a few eps start clogging your DVR and you're not inspired to watch 'em, it's time to free up space. Much of the show's buzz, such as it is, conerns Mark-Paul Gosselaar's hair. Which I think is part of the problem – while it was one thing to have a big hair story in the middle of the show (see: Felicity... no really, see Felicity) but I'm not sure that you want your lead topic about a pilot to concern how horrible the main character's hair is.

Once you get past Zack's shaggy locks, and aside from some strange stylistic touches (particularly the fact that some scenes open with characters fading into the landscape), you'll find a fairly run-of-the-mill lawyer show. A host of hunks and hotties on both sides of the bench go head-to-head in the courtroom and the bedroom. Ok. It's not as over-the-top quirky as the David E. Kelley stuff, not as ripped from the headlines as the Law & Order stuff, not as aggressively aggravating as Shark, and so on. It could've been launched as "Lawyer Show" and would've have about the same impact. Or perhaps "Scraggly-haired Lawyer." Regardless, it's pleasant but certainly non-essential watching. Enjoy. Or don't. Won't matter much either way.

I called it!

So, no reason to watch the actual show, I guess :)

Mr. McCain Goes to Washington?

I normally leave the political discourse to some other guy, but this crossed over into my bailiwick, so thought it was worth a post. Worth a watch – it's a bit long, but finishes strong. I don't watch a lot of Letterman anymore (my late night DVRing consists of Daily Show and Colbert Report) but in this case... well played, Dave.

9021no, but yes to 33401

Ok, I'm done. Last night's 90210 wasn't particularly awful or anything, but it seems like this show has found it's level... which isn't particularly interesting. Some people hook up, some people fall down, some people were on the original show – I simply could not care less. The only compelling thing about the new class of West Beverly high is guessing whether the combined weight of the young cast is over a thousand pounds. And the initial novelty of seeing Kelly and Brenda (and, ok, Nat... I guess) has long worn off, to be replaced by the unsettling realization that it's really just Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty – nothing about them feels much like the original characters. So it's time to say goodbye to Hollywood and welcome to Miami...

...well, West Palm Beach, actually, but the reference worked better the other way. Anyway, Priveleged is an incredibly winning piece of fluff that's worth a watch. It's about Megan Smith, a Yale grad with literary dreams who's eking out a living in Alphabet City instead. Fired from her tabloid job, she stumbles into a career tutoring the spoiled rich twins of a cosmetics magnate played by Anne Archer. Ok, so it's a little reminiscent of a judge decreeing that you have to be someone's butler, suspend your disbelief a bit and you'll find something fresh, funny and totally worth it. Lead actress JoAnna Garcia is legitimately quirky – by which I mean she's an interesting puddle of believeable contradictions, not a haphazard assemblage of things the showrunners felt were funny. Instead, she's kind of channeling Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada. Regardless, watching her juggle the goofball twins and her iffy family history is breezy, bubbly hour that's way better than its lead-in. I've given 90210 four or five episodes to establish itself, but was hooked on Priveleged in four or five minutes. The first three eps are online, but it's not the deepest dish in the drawer – you could prolly catch up with next week's show. Enjoy.

Hell and Back

Both shows may have climbed their way out of the pit with their season premieres. Smallville's more of a metaphor – the show's been a hit and miss mess for several seasons – while Supernatural took it a bit literally, with one of the Winchester boys clawing out of his own grave before the credits rolled. So let's look at 'em in order...

Smallville: Clark actually summed it up at one point by saying (and I'm paraphrasing) "I'm clinging to a past that never really existed." Couldn't be truer – for every step toward Clark's super future, they'd take several back into the land of "meteor freak of the week." But kicked to the curb in last week's opener were Lex, who we won't see moping around his mansion endlessly swirling his sifter of brandy and Lana, who'll stop getting thinner and shriller as she abandons running some sort of shadow government something and instead opts for guest star status. In place we've got the Junior Justice League (Green Arrow, Aquaman and Black Canary) as series regulars.

Supernatural: For a show that looked like an abject disaster (two hunky brothers take on a buncha demons), it's turned out to be terrific. In last season's finale, the elder brother Dean got dragged down to hell by the proverbial hounds. Unsurprisingly he rises in the opener (lead actors don't stay dead for long) but it's a tease toward a much larger story – turns out he wasn't summoned by a demon, but ripped out of hell by an angel... because God's got work for him to do. It's impressive – Supernatural keeps exceeding expectations, and this latest story setup is no exception.

So Supernatural's heavenly and things are looking up in Smallville – Clark may just be super, man. Seems like a decent jumping-on point for Small and Super's worth catching up on. Enjoy.

The Last Two Words on SNL I'll Prolly Ever Write

Sink and Swim

The NeXt-Files

Hollywood goes back to the well pretty often, and the results are often pretty, well, bad. The new Knight Rider is a waste of time, people are up in arms about the upcoming take on Life on Mars and the jury's out on the 90210 reboot. So while Fringe comes with a pretty solid pedigree (created by J.J. Abrams of Lost, Alias and Felicity fame), it also carries the baggage of looking like nothing more than an X-Files update. But in a world where even The X-Files can't update itself successfully, that might not be so bad.

And fortunately, it's pretty damn good. Fringe wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve, but also with its tongue slightly in its cheek. There are similarities to a Mulder/Scully relationship with the two leads, but this time she's the believer and he's the skeptic. And the show launches with echoes of a Lost-like airplane disaster, but with notably different twists. So it ends up being much less of an X-Files clone and much more of a spiritual successor.

The plot (so far – it's pretty clear that we're going to encounter layers and layers of story) concerns a female FBI agent named Dunham who stumbles across a case that the CDC can't handle – victim's skins are crystallizing, turning translucent as they die. When the symptoms start to hit closer to home, she turns to the lone expert in what's called "fringe science," i.e. stuff that seems almost supernatural but has some foundation in reality. Unfortunately, that lone expert – Walter Bishop – has been in an asylum for decades, and only accessible to next of kin. Enter Pacey from Dawson's Creek, playing Bishop's son Peter, a high-school drop-out with an incredibly high IQ... and gambling debt. They team up to delve into the fallout from Bishop's 1970s-era experiments to uncover "the pattern," a series of unexplainable phenomena that seem to be connected to a mysterious corporation called Massive Dynamic.

Whew.

So yes, it's fairly X-Files and yes, it's a lot to swallow, but so far it's pretty tasty. Dunham and Bishop cook up solid chemistry, the scientific oddities they're encountering are interesting and it's shot with style – including the oddly entertaining touch of Panic Room-style supers that seem to actually cast shadows on the scene they're explaining. Hopefully Abrams and co. can learn from the shows they're following and avoid drowning in overly intricate backstory – based on Lost, I'd say they've got a leg up. We'll have to see where it goes, but based on this pilot I'm ready to follow. If you missed last night's premiere, it encores on Sunday night – give it a watch.