The Presidential Debates

I grew up in the forties and fifties, which means I learned to love train wrecks in movies like The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). So naturally I could not avoid making a batch of popcorn and watching the three Presidential Debates (written by Hillary Clinton, Donald J. Trump, and others). I have not written on the debates since 2008, when I had an item on the Vice-Presidential Debate. Biden’s writing and delivery was much better than Palin’s, as was Clinton’s this time around.

Clinton was obviously well-prepared and organized, and Trump wasn’t. He seemed to think for the first debate he could wing it, but it made him look like an amateur. There is something to be said for professionalism in writing and performance .

Clinton’s instinct, like Biden’s eight years ago, was to get Trump to self-destruct, which he did. Although he got better in the debates. The “judges” scoring the debates like a boxing match for the Los Angeles Times actually gave a couple of the opening rounds of the third debate to Trump. To use one his favorite words, Trump did not have the stamina for an hour and a half debate.

NCIS

NCIS decided to replace Tony Dinozzo not by one, but by two (so far) new characters. The first is Special Agent Alex Quinn, played by the always-welcome Jennifer Esposito. She has been a teacher of incoming agents, so several of our team have dealt with her before. She is also an adult, closer in age and status to Gibbs, which means she will be able to stand up to Gibbs, assuming Mark Harmon lets the writers do that. It could bring some added zip to the show. There might even be a romance between Gibbs and Quinn, again assuming Harmon allows the writers to do that. Harmon is very protective of his show and his image in it.

The most interesting of the two so far is Nick Torres, an ex-agent who has been so far undercover that everybody had lost track of him. He is more psychologically damaged than any of the other regular characters on the show, which the writers can use to make the show a little darker than it has been than in its previous seasons. Assuming Harmon allows it…

Modern Family

Modern Family is still able to handle multiple storylines for its three families with great ease in 22 minutes. It’s not as easy as they make it look.

Supergirl

Supergirl is back, but has moved from CBS to CW, which may be a better fit for it, since CW has more comic book shows. It also means its ratings have gone down, since CW generally draws smaller audiences. But the ratings are good for CW.

One thing I liked about the show last year is that we never saw her cousin, Superman. They emailed each other from time to time. I was afraid if he showed up, he would take over the show. The writers brought him on for the first two episodes, and it was not the disaster I was afraid it might be.

In the first episode, “Adventures of Supergirl,” (teleplay by Andrew Kreisbergn & Jessica Queller, story by Greg Berlanti & Andrew Kreisberg), the Supers have a nice conversation about the difficulties of balancing being Super people and everyday people. It helps that the show has cast Tyler Hoechlin as Superman, as opposed to some of the blocks-of-wood recent actors in the theatrical films. He was only in for the first two episodes, but he may be back. He is very much in the Christopher Reeve mold, which is what I want in a Superman.

On the other hand, they seem to be phasing out Calista Flockhart as Kara’s boss Cat Grant, and dropping Kara’s romance with James Olsen. Cat was a fabulous character and counterpoint to Kara, and Flockhart had a lot of fun. James has been promoted to managing editor so at least he’ll be around.

Masters of Sex

Masters of Sex slid onto the air with no hype and not much advertising. I suppose Showtime figured it has its audiences, who tend to be smart and can figure out when it’s on, but I don’t think they should have risked it in the world of hype surrounding the fall season.

It is still a beautifully written show, although if you want something livelier than two or more people having an interesting conversation about sex, you might not like it. But it is easily the most adult show on television.

For example, in the third episode of the new season, “Coats or Keys” (written by Amy Lippman), Masters, Johnson, and Betty end up at a party given by Art and Nancy, the two new researchers hired by the clinic. It is one of those legendary sixties parties where the guys pick a coat out of the pile of women’s coats and get to go off to wherever they like with the woman the coat belongs to.

Johnson ends with Art, but they just talk on his bed. Art and Nancy have an open relationship, but he is not as enthusiastic about it as she is. Johnson gets a wonderful speech on how a woman working for a powerful man can end up in a romantic relationship with him.

Masters of Sex at its wonderfully nuanced best.

Quantico

Quantico has fallen into repeating its first season. Now Alex and Ryan, having trained as CIA agents, are sent undercover as recruits at the FBI training center to uncover potential traitors. So we get more training sequences. And we get another big terrorist attack a year later, this time with hostages, which cuts back and forth with the training scenes.

The only reason I’ve kept watching this long is Priyanka Chopra’s hair, the greatest natural wonder on television.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is dealing with the fall-out at the end of the first season from Rebecca admitting to Josh she came to West Covina just for him. In the first episode of the season, “Where is Josh’s Friend?” (written by Rachel Bloom & Aline Brosh McKenna and Marc Webb), they have given Rebecca a great song “Love Kernels,” with a video number involving variations on most surrealist films, as well as Rebecca dressed up like a cactus. What other show would do that?

Documentary Now!

Since I taught a course in the history of documentary film for nearly forty years at Los Angeles City College, you would think I would be the perfect audience for the satire Documentary Now!

I turned out not to be.

I watched one episode the first season, a mediocre parody of Grey Gardens (1975), in which the two leads, Fred Armison and especially Bill Hader just simply overacted as the Beales.

I gave it another shot this year with “The Bunker”, an equally mediocre parody of The War Room (1993). It was supposedly written by John Mulaney, but there is absolutely nothing witty or perceptive about the writing.

It plays like very bad improvisation at a summer camp for amateur comedians.

Jane the Virgin

Jane the Virgin is still a virgin. Yes, she got married, but her husband Michael was shot on their wedding night. The first episode of this season, “Chapter Forty-Five” (written by Jennie Snyder Urman), was not as well-balanced as this show usually is. It is more melodramatic than it needed to be, even if it is about the characters waiting to see if Michael will live. The next episode, “Chapter Forty-Six” (written by David S. Rosenthal & Paul Sciarrotta), was back in the groove.

Designated Survivor

Turning to the new shows, one of the best is Designated Survivor, which has a kick-ass premise. During the president’s State of the Union speech, the Capitol is bombed. The president, his Cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, and more nearly all of Congress are killed.

There is one Cabinet member who was appointed the designated survivor; that’s the Cabinet member who is assigned not to go to the State of the Union address just in case something like this happens. In this case it is the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Thomas Kirkman, whom the late president was in the process of moving out of the job. Well, Kirkman is played by Jack Bauer his ownself, Keifer Sutherland, so he is obviously going to take names and kick ass.

Except this is a very different role for Sutherland, and he is terrific as an everyday sort of guy forced into the highest office in the land. The writing is very sharp for all the characters, and there is a boatload of them, most of whom don’t think much of Kirkman.

There is also Kirkman’s wife, Alex, played beautifully by Natascha McElhone as sort of a white Michelle Obama. McElhone is usually cast primarily for her looks, but here the writers give her a lot to do. The plotting is very complicated, as it would be in that situation, and you have to run to keep up.

 

Lethal Weapon

Another good one is Lethal Weapon. Yes, it’s a TV version of the feature films, but it is a lot less silly than the films were. Yes, there are action scenes as Riggs and Murtaugh whip bad guys, but the show spends more time on character than the films ever did.

That’s a smart move, since Riggs is brilliantly played by Clayne Crawford. Crawford has been an actor in films and television for nearly twenty years. You and I have seen him in a lot of stuff, but he has not made any impact on me until this show. The writers have brilliantly shaped the character for his strengths: he is not as wildly crazy as Mel Gibson was in the films, and Crawford brings a lot more nuance than Gibson did.

We get a lot more detail about his wife who died and see the pain Riggs has in a way we did not with Gibson. I do not remember if the films had Riggs seeing a police department shrink, but they do here. I am not a fan of shrink scenes, but these have a little more tension than usual with those scenes. It’s helped that the shrink here is played by Jordana Brewster. Yes, Mia from the Fast and Furious movies. Like Natascha McElhone she’s usually cast for her looks, but here the writers give her some scenes that really show her acting chops.

Pitch

I like the idea of Pitch: the first woman to pitch in the major leagues is not only a woman, but a black woman, Ginny Baker. Mostly the writing is very smart. We get a lot of Ginny’s feelings about her situation.

Ginny gets blown out of her first game and when assigned to the All-Star completely gives up a home run to the first batter she faces, so it is not all triumph all the time. The show is also very good at how the public reacts to her, how the other ballplayers react to her, and how her merchandizing agent manipulates the business for Ginny.

The Good Place

The Good Place is a sitcom set in a new version of the afterlife. The nominal lead is Eleanor, who has ended up here even though she was not good in real life. She’s played by Kristin Bell, but she is wiped off the screen by Ted Danson playing Michael, the rather bumbling creator of The Good Place.

The writers have not given Bell that much to do, and they have given Danson more, so he becomes the one to watch, even though it’s supposedly her show.

Better Things

Better Things is one of those “realistic” comedies, i.e., not a lot of jokes or funny lines. We are supposedly going to like and be interested in the main character, Sam Fox, an actress of a certain age, dealing with the problems of being, well, an actress of a certain age in Hollywood. The character is based on the life of the show’s co-creator, Pamela Adlon, but Adlon seems to work a lot more than Sam does. You can see her IMDb page here.

Sam is not that interesting a character, and I had very little sympathy for her. I had even less for her obnoxious kids. Obnoxious kids seem to be in this season: the Kirkman children on Designated Survivor are brats as well. I kept waiting for Sam to slap hers upside the head.

Speechless

On Speechless it is the mother who is a real pain in the ass, more so in the first episode, less so in the following episodes. Minnie Driver plays Maya, the mother of three kids. One of them is JJ, who has cerebral palsy. He can’t walk and needs a wheelchair, and he can’t speak, but can “talk” through a keyboard. He is played by Micah Fowler, who actually has a less severe form of cerebral palsy.

Fowler is a charmer, with a sly grin.

Maya, unfortunately, is a holy terror of a mother who wants nothing but the best for her son. We can understand why she wants that, but the ways she goes about it are a complete turnoff.

Driver is certainly a fearless actress, and while you can admire that, the writer, at least in the pilot (Scott Silveri, the creator of the show) overloads the character.

Subsequent episodes have mellowed Maya a little bit, and Fowler’s charm carries the rest of it.

American Housewife

American Housewife is a more-or-less traditional sitcom. The hook of the show is that the wife Katie is bothered that all the women in her town are much skinnier than she is. She describes herself as becoming “The second fattest woman in Westport” when a large neighbor moves out.

In the pilot (written by its creator Sarah Dunn), there are a lot of fat jokes, more than the show needs. Katie is played by Kathy Mixon, who was second banana to Melissa McCarthy in Mike & Molly, so she’s used to fat jokes, but I think of her more as zaftig. She was marvelous as the flirtatious waitress in Hell or High Water, so she can do more than even zaftig jokes.

The next couple of episodes reduced the fat jokes, but replaced them with standard sitcom family jokes.

The show needs to find its voice. One potentially interesting element they can develop is the scenes with Katie and her two friends, one an Asian American woman and the other a black lesbian. So far those are the best scenes in the show.

Divorce

Divorce is another of those “It’s not television, it’s HBO” series. It’s supposed to be a comedy, but it is mostly depressing, as most divorces tend to be. You should go back and look at the 2011 film Crazy, Stupid, Love to see how to do it right. Or you could just read my review of it here.

Westworld

Westworld is yet another of those “It’s not television, it’s HBO” series. It takes the Michael Crichton novel of the same name and the 1973 film for which he wrote the screenplay and tries to turn what was basically a potboiler into something serious and unfortunately solemn, taking all the fun out of the original idea.

The plot is the same: At an amusement park designed to give the guests a taste of the Old West, the hosts (robots) begin to think for themselves, which causes havoc. (Hmm, things going wrong at an amusement park. Yes, this is the same Michael Crichton who wrote the novel Jurassic Park.)

Since this is a miniseries, it takes a long time for the managers of the park to know and accept the fact that the robots are turning into sentient beings. This gives Evan Rachel Wood an opportunity to give a really great performance as a host who is, bit by bit, realizing what she is.

On the other hand, the actions of the film get very, very repetitive as the hosts and guests go through similar storylines, sometimes with different outcomes. The problem is that in all the shootouts, of which there are many, there is really nothing at stake. That makes it difficult to get involved in the show.

One character in an early episode says that the guests come to Westworld for the “violence and sex.” That’s a real limitation in the conception of the series. Emily Nussbaum, in October 24^th issue of The New Yorker makes a similar point, that the series conceives the park from a very male perceptive. She then has some interesting ideas of what the show should be if there was more of a woman’s perspective. I think I’d like her version better, as long as they keep Evan Rachel Wood. After coming to our attention as a teenager in the early 2000s series Once and Again, she has developed into a terrific actress.

On the upside, a lot of it was filmed in the Canyonlands area of Utah, which is gorgeous and has been used in films for years. And most importantly, they have an old-fashioned train. No train wrecks yet, but a boy can hope.

Queen Sugar

Queen Sugar is a miniseries on Oprah Winfrey’s network OWN, and its credits say it was developed by Winfrey and director Ava DuVernay. Nowhere on screen or in the IMDb does it mention was it was inspired by the 2015 novel of the same name by Natalie Baszile. Well, when you are dealing with egos of the size of Winfrey’s and DuVernay’s, a mere writer’s gotta expect that.

Baszile’ novel deals with Charley, a black woman who moves back to the South to take over the running of the family sugar plantation after her father dies. In the adaptation two more sisters and a brother have been added to the mix, so there are a lot of storylines. The problem I have with it is that I just don’t find the characters that interesting. Or rather the most interesting is the father, who is played by the great actor Glynn Turman, but he is dead by the end of the first episode.

Bull & Notorious

Bull is the show CBS put Michael Wetherly in after his years on NCIS, and he certainly brings his charisma to it. The problem is that is based on the early life of Dr. Phil, when he worked as a jury consultant for lawyers. I have been on four juries and was an alternate on a fifth, and they are just not as easily led as this show makes them out to be. In the publicity for the show there is no mention of how many cases Dr. Phil “won.” I suspect his percentage of wins is rather small.

The case I was an alternate on was a high profile case in 1998, and the defense attorney was Mark Garagos. Because he won the case, he has since been able to become a “celebrity lawyer.” And lost more of his high profile cases than he won.

Notorious purports to be based on his work and his dealing with a television newswoman he trades tips with. They have cast the incredibly sexy Daniel Sunjata as the lawyer, which took me right out of the show. Garagos is many things but not charismatic or sexy.

The other problem I have with the show is that if he had been doing these information swaps, he would have been disbarred for ethical violations decades ago.

This is Us

In the Spring NBC ran a trailer for their new fall show This Is Us. Millions of viewers saw it and loved it. I only caught a glimpse of it, but there was enough of a hullabaloo that I gave the first two episodes a watch.

The “Pilot” was written by the show’s creator Dan Fogelman, who by the way wrote Crazy, Stupid, Love. It introduces us to three characters who are all celebrating their 36^th birthday. At the end of the episode, the big reveal is that the three kids from the same family, even though one of the men is black.

O.K., maybe, but the show sets us up to believe they are all living in different time periods.

But the second episode, also written by Fogelman, just continues as though that had not been revealed in the pilot. Then the episode comes back to it briefly at the end. Which means we are going to have to wait forever to get it all explained. I did not find the characters that interesting to want to hang around and wait for it.

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