Tag Archives: 2017-18

Series premiere: 9JKL

The PolyBlog
October 4 2017

I am brutal on sitcoms, very few in my mind are worth watching. And is there anything attractive about 9JKL?

Let’s see…parents live in 9J. Newly divorced actor son is “temporarily” living in 9K. And a married surgeon son with Asian pediatrician wife and new baby are living in 9L while a duplex is being renovated. All of which you learn in the first 3 minutes of the show’s exposition dump. You meet THE ENTIRE MAIN CAST in his one bedroom apartment while he is still in bed.

Actor Josh is played by actor Mark Feuerstein, aka show creator, and he is apparently drawing from his own life experience. I loved Mark back in 2002-2004 in a show called Good Morning Miami about a guy who becomes producer for a show called GMM. Lovable, boy next door, very clean cut, the show had little to offer but I still hung around for 40 episodes before it was cancelled. He then moved on to – dun dun dun – Royal Pains playing another relatively clean cut doctor living in Miami Beach (I think), and treating wealthy elite tourists in the area. You know as soon as you see him, there’s going to be sunshine in the episode. And he’s okay here.

Linda Lavin plays his mom, and like most sitcom parents, the character is one-dimensional and over the top needy. She has comic pedigree, but I haven’t seen in her almost anything I liked except the original Alice (1976-85), but at least she has some really good lines in this one. Throw in Elliott Gould as his dad. Gould was fine in Friends, Ocean’s Thirteen, Eleven, etc, but not a draw for me.

For supporting cast, there’s Matt Murray (Rookie Blue) as a doorman, not bad. The sister is played by Liza Lapira (NCIS, Dollhouse), but seems way too stereotyped here to tell if she has anything to offer. David Walton (New Girl) plays the brother and is beyond annoying. Sally Pressman (Army Wives) plays a potential love interest, but hard to tell if she’ll show up again. At least she has presence.

Which leaves only one other character. Albert Tsai (Dr. Ken, Fresh off the Boat) plays a wise-cracking pre-teen, and he has some GREAT lines. Unfortunately, they are poorly delivered, and off-key. It’s like they only had time for a single take. Hard to believe they didn’t recast him or reshoot the scenes. He even stumbles over one of his lines. But he has pedigree, so he will likely find his footing, but likely to be limited to single line exchanges and zingers.

I gave it a shot, but I’m sticking with my original prediction:

CBS: 9JKL – I love the main star, and everyone wants their family sitcom to work, but not this one about moving to New York and living between parents and siblings – CANCELLED;

Series premiere: Ten Days in the Valley

The PolyBlog
October 4 2017

I have almost no idea what this show is about. I mean, I watched it, I understood the scenes, but I have no idea who half the people are, what their motivation is, or more importantly, why I would care about any of them.

Kyra Sedgewick is the main character…a mother in the middle of a divorce, with a young daughter. She has constant flashbacks to herself as a kid? or herself as a young out of control mom? It’s not even clear which it is, but since she only has one kid and there are two in the flashbacks, let’s assume it was a crappy childhood surrounded by pills, booze and sex amongst adults, along with all the dysfunction that often goes with it. She’s a TV producer who is overworked and frazzled, with a history of documentary success but is supposedly in the fiction business. I don’t really understand the show she’s working on and how much if it is fiction and how much is from sources. Or the role of her writers room.

Anyway, all of that is irrelevant. The only thing you need to know is she is a mother, apparently. Her young daughter goes missing while Mom is working in a studio in her backyard. Mom thinks Dad took her; seems at first like he didn’t. But the cops eventually widen to think maybe she did something to her daughter, or something happened and she isn’t saying. She said she was in the shed for a short time, but it was closer to six hours. Either way, the cute snuggly daughter has been kidnapped by someone.

I don’t want to be a SPOIL sport, but if the show doesn’t turn on her assistant producer being involved, I’ll eat my shorts. He is the one who made her work at the last minute, setting up the opening for the daughter to be kidnapped. Unless someone tricked him, he is the only one who could guarantee the abduction window. And there’s no way it was simply a crime of opportunity, it would just be stupid. But the only way the plan works is if Mom is working, drugged, stoned, high, and doesn’t notice her daughter is missing until four in the morning.

A duplicitous assistant. A lying ex-husband. A suspicious cop. Weird co-workers. Drug dealers. And an aunt who doesn’t like Mom very much. Are any of them compelling? Not really.

And I didn’t see much of the daughter before she was gone.

Which leaves me only caring about poor broken Mom. Who is a zombie for almost the whole episode. I know, it’s Kyra’s schtick. She’s done it before in other shows, didn’t care then, don’t care now.

And colour me not surprised it has had the lowest ratings of any show debuting yet this year. Lots of pundits calling for cancellation, but there is a small component in there that some networks want to work with Kyra, and her shows do often have slow starts. But in the end, I’m sticking by my original prediction:

ABC: Ten Days in the Valley – Oooh, a missing child with a mystery. How many movie cliches can you pack into a new show that isn’t owned by ABC? Bye bye, don’t let the ratings guillotine hit you on the way down – CANCELLED;

Series premiere: Wisdom of the Crowd

The PolyBlog
October 2 2017

The premise for WotC is harnessing social media, crowdsourcing the internet, etc. into a tool to solve crime. Unlike “Person of Interest” using an AI for predictive analytics, WotC is basically just a platform app to help people share their views about a crime, the evidence, etc. Launched by a CEO of a big company, the platform is named Sophie. His daughter Mia was murdered a year ago. The first case to solve? Mia’s murder.

Which is a bit of a monkey wrench for a system that already has someone in jail for her murder. Which is part of the problem with the show. Are there many murder cases where the person didn’t plead guilty going through the justice system and leading to full incarceration within a year? No, there isn’t. Like zero. Yet only a year after her death, he’s launching the app. Not a big deal, but okay.

The detective on the original case got thrown off the case because he too believed the wrong person was being charged and convicted. So who better to liaise with this rich father than him? Well, just about anybody, really, but let’s not quibble. Add in an ex-wife and mother of the dead daughter and that HE DOESN’T TELL HER WHAT HE’S DOING, but hey, no biggie.

Eat all that up in the first 10 minutes, and then just go with it.

The first thing they get on the site is a video of the night of the murder, a AirBNBer who videoed the building from across the road and who is sharing the video. Giving them a new suspect. Now, this is where the 1 year timeline came in. Would she still have had the video if it was 4 or 5 years later? Would she think to check her videos? Probably not. But when it’s big, and splashy for news (think Steve Jobs launching a $100M reward for a conviction), and sure, lots of people started chiming in.

The premise is that while 90% of what people might say is crap, the other 10% might be useful; if the “app” can sift through to find the 10%, and amalgamate it, they might find new leads. One of which would be the girl’s BFF, except they never talk to her in the episode. WTF?

Anyway, enter another clue. Except for another case — a guy in the video gets identified, a Uber-like driver who had a call but it was cancelled, so he happened to be in the area. Which triggers a question mark for the detective. Because he had another case where the same thing happened. Except that woman ended up dead. Not related to Mia’s murder, but links to another case.

So, since the show is about solving Mia’s case, and if they solve it in episode 1, there is no series, they need another plot for the episode. They crowd-source, find a skanky bartender who has been spiking drinks and then handing off the drunk chicks to this other skanky dude, arrest him, all good. The system works. It’s like they solve a Law and Order: SVU case, in about 10 minutes of airtime.

The father behind the app is played by Jeremy Piven. Most people likely know him from Entourage, I remember him from Cupid and Ellen (the sitcom, not the talk show). He’s often been lightly comic, and it is interesting to seem him just playing dramatic here. I didn’t hate him. Not a lot of gravitas, but not bad.

Richard T. Jones plays the detective, Cavanaugh, and he has played a cop in a LOT of shows. Good gravitas, nice presence, good choice, highly watchable. I wasn’t a big fan of Judging Amy, but he was noticeable there; I loved him on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. And I like watching him here.

There are a LOT of other characters running around – the ex-wife, the cop who put the wrong guy in jail, a weird lawyer dude working for the techie, and a bunch of techie people who run the platform and help them solve crime.

I don’t know if the next few episodes have more in the tank than this episode, because when I saw the initial premise, I said, “CBS: Wisdom of the Crowd – Tech approaches to crime fighting, similar to a dozen other shows that have tried and failed to merge the two in the last five or six years – CANCELLED” and I still think that.

The only difference? I’ll probably stick around a couple of episodes to give it a try.

Series premiere: Star Trek: Discovery

The PolyBlog
October 1 2017

The original series. The animated series no one is sure is part of the canon. The movies. The relaunch of a new series, for the next generation. A static space station. Lost in the gamma quadrant. An origin story. More movies, with multiple generations. And a complete reboot with an alternate timeline. The Star Trek universe does not lack for stories.

And while a lot of people would love to see the story of the Enterprise C up to its destruction at the hands of the Romulons, the new show jumps forward from Enterprise’s origin story and prior to the NCC-1701 Enterprise of the original series and movies.

It has been a 100 years since anyone has seen the Klingons, and now they’re back. Why they look like the Xindi reptilian species, I have no idea, but they are back. And someone wants to light a torch, a beacon that will unite the 24 Klingon families into a single army to fight the Federation. They even have a new weapon — a huge ship with a kick-butt cloaking device.

Enter the Federation to see what’s going on when one of their outposts is attacked. They meet the Klingons, they try to negotiate, and a half-Vulcan half-human half-sister of Spock’s (no, you didn’t miss her previously, she’s newly revealed) tries to take the same approach the Vulcans took previously. When they first met the Klingons, they tried to talk, and the Klingons destroyed them. They eventually decided that whenever they met a Klingon ship, they would fire first. Until the Klingons learned it was too costly to not talk to them. So, Michael Burnham (don’t ask, that’s her name), decides that the best approach is to attack the Klingons as fast as they can. One nerve pinch and one attempted mutiny later, and her Captain ends up stopping her from firing.

Eventually, all hell breaks loose, multiple ships are destroyed, war is begun, and the only interesting character on the ship — the Captain, played by Michelle Yeoh — is eventually killed. Michael Burnham is court-martialed, convicted, stripped of rank, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

And basically so ends the two-part pilot.

Except those two hours were basically back story. Context. Episode 3 is the REAL first episode, with Michael transferred from a prison shuttle to the USS Discovery under the command of Captain Gabriel Lorca. He wants Michael to help him, supposedly, with a new propulsion system that would allow them to travel almost instantaneously anywhere in the galaxy. Think slipstream from Andromeda, or a host of other metaphors from other shows. And everyone important has black Starfleet pins, not the standard silver ones.

For those in the canon, it feels like they are working for Section 31, the ultra-secret group known for bending Starfleet rules when the need arises. But Captain Lorca isn’t sharing everything, at least not yet. And they have already had a catastrophic loss of another ship doing similar experiments.

Captain Lorca is played by Jason Isaacs. I loved him back in 2012 in the series Awake where he was living in two realities at the same time. I thought he was okay as the bad guy in The OA last year. But as the Captain? In a Star Trek role? Captains usually need way more gravitas than I think he is capable of showing. Michelle Yeoh was awesome, but she’s dead. There are a bunch of actors playing various other crewmen, but it’s hard to know how significant they will be yet.

Which leaves the bulk of the show, not surprisingly, resting on Michael, played by Sonequa Martin-Green. She was big on The Walking Dead, but I didn’t watch. She was on Once Upon A Time, but I don’t remember her. The rest of her casting credits are similar — nothing that I saw her in.

Now that’s not a problem, except for a good portion of Ep 1 or 2, she’s trying to over-emote to show the struggle of wanting to attack the Klingons first, to show there’s a struggle going on inside her. At the start of Ep 3, that struggle is long-gone, she’s basically doing a Vulcan emotion purge or something. But where Jolene Blalock did an awesome job as T’Pol on Star Trek: Enterprise, Martin-Green just looks limp and lifeless. Empty. And not in a good way. It makes little sense.

So there was this small problem of the war starting. Some time to transport people around the universe. A court-martial. Sentencing. Some time in a prison facility. A shuttle trip. It’s not like the events that traumatized her are ancient history, but they’re not yesterday either. Yet she is still walking around like it was recent. She’s retreating into herself, but can’t stop asking questions, making conversation eventually, etc. Anti-vulcan (note she’s actually human), anti-timeframe, anti-character development.

Will I watch? Of course, it’s Star Trek. Doesn’t mean they’re doing a good job of it so far.

Series premiere: The Good Doctor

The PolyBlog
October 1 2017

It’s hard to know how to describe The Good Doctor from just one episode. The basic premise is a high-functioning autistic boy becoming a surgical resident. In the opener, while the Hospital board debates whether to hire the autistic resident, the kid saves the life of a boy injured at the airport. He sees problems with the boy’s response, diagnoses unusual symptoms, and comes up with unique solutions of almost impossible to detect glitches in the boy’s condition, thus saving him.

It’s almost like a combination of House and Sherlock Holmes, farther back on the autism spectrum.

Unfortunately, the autistic character isn’t particularly compelling. There’s really only one or two scenes where he connects with anyone, and without connections, he can’t connect with the audience either. The whole backstory for him is told in flashback and it is almost clinical detachment for the viewer too.

Add in hospital politics between people we don’t know, multiple doctors romancing others, a whole host of other relationships running around that look like a soap opera, and the show is a mess. The only bright spot? Richard Schiff (Toby from West Wing) is the doctor who wants to hire him. He has lots of gravitas, but the show doesn’t.

When I did my preview, I thought it would make it to renewal, partly as it is an in-house production. Now that I’ve seen Ep 1? Not sure the House audience will find it in time.