I am not sure what I was expecting with Single Parents, a new ABC comedy about training a single dad, but it sure wasn’t what I got. I guess I was expecting a mild comedy, maybe someone like Paul Reiser or Tim Allen, with the comedy going either way. It is more like a cross between Office and Meet the Fockers, with a parenting vibe.
The initial premise is that four single parents of first graders go to the school on the first day to find a horror story as the “class parent” who wants them all to sign up for various committees, etc. They let him know pretty quick that they can’t do any of that, and really, their intent is just to survive the day most of the time. But he too is a single parent and they realize that if they let him continue to embrace his inner geek parent, and never do any adult things, they’ll never have any peace and quiet from him badgering them to do stuff. So they set him up on Tinder and get him a date. But then, because they’re invested in the outcome, they help him prepare for the date. And when it goes south, they show up to help him out with the cops (don’t ask).
I didn’t recognize the lead actor, Taran Killam as single Dad, Wil, but it’s interesting that I felt he was almost doing a SNL skit, and it turns out he was on SNL for six years. Just that kind of over-acting skit vibe. He’s okay, a little too Will Ferrell for my taste, but he’s okay. Leighton Meester plays the alpha single mom, Angie, out to ensure that Wil doesn’t badger them too much and she is quirky and cute enough that I have to assume the long-term plan is some sort of flirty romance between Wil and Angie. The other three parents are a bit quirkier … Jake Choi plays a 20-year-old Dad, Kimrie Lewis is mom to a dance and fashion diva son, and Brad Garrett (Everyone Loves Raymond) is the rich, emotionally-closed businessman dad to two daughters.
As I said, I wasn’t expecting Meet the Fockers as the brand of humour, and I didn’t laugh once in the whole episode. I smiled a couple of times, but that was it. And when I did, it was almost entirely at the adult lines coming out of the kids, all of them written as wise old souls. I wish the show had the same wise old soul, or that they had taken a more serious tone, as Leighton Meester could be quite good in a better “teacher mom” role. Maybe a little too saccharine sweet as written, but could have been fun.
Instead, I’m over-riding my sight unseen prediction of RENEWAL and going to predict CANCELLED.
Each year when I do my initial predictions, I try to do them as “sight unseen”. I look at the description, the so-called log line, and decide, “If I was an executive, would I have greenlit this premise?”. But it is hard to stay completely in the dark about all the shows. Some are talked about on radio, where one DJ will ask another, “Did you see blah blah blah last night? It was awesome!” or a friend wanting to talk to me about shows because they know I’m big on TV and serialized storytelling.
And then there are the ads. I can’t avoid all of them, and the one that has been the bane of my existence this year has been for New Amsterdam. Over and over and over, I have heard the same tired dialogue…”I want to get rid of the waiting room. Done”; “Let’s be doctors again.”; “You know they’re not going to just let you help people? Well, let’s see how many we can help before they figure out what we’re doing.”. Sanctimonious claptrap, big medicine is all bad, but the “human” will set them back to their true roots. Melodramatic, over the top, blather. And so, while I try to keep an open mind, I was fully prepared to hate this show.
Now, I had two strikes against me going in. First, while I am not attracted to Grey’s Anatomy, House, Scrubs, ER, etc., I did watch St. Elsewhere back in the day. So if they stay out of the sheets and don’t give me a nutbar as the lead character, it might work. Second, the lead actor is Ryan Eggold as Dr. Max, the new Medical Director for New Amsterdam who is willing to make lots of changes (including firing the entire heart surgery team the first day).
Eggold was Tom, Elizabeth Keen’s husband, on The Blacklist and even starred in The Blacklist: Redemption. I thought the spinoff was an ill-conceived ripoff of a bunch of shows, including Mission: Impossible and Covert Affairs, but I like watching Eggold do his thing on-screen whether he is bashful Tom or cold, calculating Tom. Here he is closer to nice, bashful Tom, and he is fun to watch.
His full ongoing supporting cast is hard to tell from just the pilot, but some faces popped out. Janet Montgomery was good back when she was on Human Target, and a strong interesting force in the hospital as Dr. Lauren, willing to take chances; Jocko Sims as Dr. Floyd, a heart surgeon who is fired and unfired on the first day because he was part of a group but not like the group that was fired; Anupam Kher as Dr. Vijay, the old but wise doctor; Freema Agyeman as Dr. Helen, a rockstar for the media circuit, willing to return to actual medicine to be a doctor again, and she looks very different from her Torchwood / Martha Jones days; Tyler Labine as psychologist Dr. Iggy, and I confess I had no idea where I recognized him from, and would NEVER have come up with Reaper / Sock from 11 years ago; and Lisa O’Hare as Max’s pregnant but estranged wife, Georgia.
Sure, it’s an ensemble cast, but I was surprised that they all got some decent airtime in the opening episode. Dr. Floyd and Dr. Lauren are sort of an item but he’s not sure he wants to date her anymore because, while fun, she’s not black and he wants a black partner for life; Dr. Vijay seems old and slow but he goes slow with a patient and finds out what is really wrong with her, not making a snap diagnosis; Dr. Helen is spending all of her time running around doing media stuff because she was becoming immune to patients; and Dr. Iggy is trying to help a psych patient who keeps coming back, and he doesn’t know how to help her with her life outside of the hospital.
In short, there’s a lot going on, and while it is the first episode so they spent a lot of extra time getting it right, it was indeed right. It rang all the right bells, it hit all the right notes, and I fully enjoyed 90% of the show. There are two parts I didn’t enjoy, and I’ll give you a spoiler alert right now for the next two paragraphs.
The first element is that Max’s wife is pregnant and they’re estranged because of his work, etc. He’s promising to be different, to be more present, to help more, etc. And then she calls because she’s bleeding out of the uterus, and she thinks something is wrong with the baby. Fast forward to the scene in the hospital where they’re examining, trying to assess what is happening, Mom and Dad to be are losing their shit slowly, and then the writers ramp it up. The nurse can’t find the heartbeat of the baby and the tension goes to 11. I couldn’t watch. Not because it wasn’t good, but because my wife and I experienced EXACTLY that scene. My wife’s water broke at 26 weeks, a partial premature rupture of the membrane (PPROM), and we were in the hospital room while they searched for a very elusive heartbeat. I had to skip ahead, I couldn’t watch the scene, way too intense for me. Flashback city, and it is NOT a good memory, even if my son is now a healthy 9 year old.
The second element is that Dr. Max has a bit of a secret. He’s sick. Something is happening, not sure what. At the end of the episode, the big secret is revealed, he has cancer. So it explains why he’s different, why he’s so driven, why he’s willing to take risks, why he is focusing on “what matters”. Except he’s only had suspicions, and symptoms, for 6 weeks. And it is such a cliché that if I was scoring, I’d be deducting marks.
Neither are enough to stop me from watching though. When I did my original prediction, sight unseen but perhaps slightly biased by the ads, I said “Hospital story about idealism = CANCELLED”. Afterwards, I have to say that while they did an awesome job, I don’t think it will be enough to grab an audience and get renewed, not enough grit. I’m disappointingly sticking with my CANCELLED prediction, but I’ll watch it to the bitter end.
Mr. In-between is a rare half-hour drama, given that most dramas are hour-long episodes with the 30-minute notch normally reserved for animated or comedies. It’s an FX show, billed as a drama involving criminal elements, and it doesn’t take much to see that the main character is a mid-level street thug acting as enforcer and collections for a bookie. It has a strong Sopranos taste to it in the sense of a dissatisfied crook, and he is at least good at his job.
He is appropriately menacing as he wanders around collecting owed monies, and acting as a bouncer at a strip club. But you also get to see him with his daughter and father, and another scene where he meets a girl with a dog in the park. But he fails to do anything about the girl, despite his obvious attraction to her and her interest in him. Later, he’s back at his simple apartment, playing video games by himself and lamenting the fact he didn’t do anything.
Scott Ryan is the writer-producer for the show, and also plays the main character, Ray. And he has some potential for the future, as trailers show him in a group therapy session for something talking about his work and what he does. But despite some interesting elements for the first episode, it’s missing anything resembling a plot.
I saw him meet some people, do a bit of collections, flirt with a girl, hang out with his daughter, and do a weird favour for a friend. I couldn’t actually care any less about him than I do now. There’s no REASON to care what happens to him.
I was leery of the 30 minute format, and I went with CANCELLED, sight unseen. Now that I have seen it, I want my 30 minutes back. Still predicting CANCELLED.
CBS has rebooted Murphy Brown with the old cast coming back — Candice Bergen as Murphy, Faith Ford as Corky, Joe Regalbuto as Frank, Grant Shaud as Miles, and just for fun, Jake McDorman as son Avery. Phil is gone, Eldon is gone, sure, but the rest are there.
What isn’t there is any feeling of edgy chemistry. Back in the day, there was a sense that the team of Murphy/Frank/Corky/Miles were doing something resembling news, the fourth estate that was holding politicians accountable. It had some edgy bits, and while I wasn’t a regular watcher, I did watch occasionally and I liked it. There were always some good one liners too.
The 2018 version has almost none of that.
Murphy wants to get back in the game, mostly to provide a factual counter-balance to Trump’s fake news claims. She brings Frank and Corky along too, and both are one-dimensional caricatures, as they often were. But whereas it seemed funny when they were young and spry, it seems cliché and tired now they are, well, old and tired. Similarly for Miles, he was always just a little stress ball, but now he’s mocking his own insecurities and a nervous breakdown. I don’t know if his weak mental health was somehow supposed to be funny, but it went nowhere.
Sure, she’s back. Sure, she’s interviewing Hillary Clinton to be her secretary with lots of little “in” jokes about managing emails. She’s having a tweet war with the President. There’s no sense of real honour, she just seems like a mean old woman who wants to brag about the good old days and how now that she’s back, there will be “real news” again based on truth and facts.
There is one small bright spot in the show, and that’s her son, Avery. Played, as I said, by Jake McDorman, I absolutely loved him in Limitless a few years ago. He really grew on me in the show, and seeing him here was very welcome. And I like his character. He’s going head-to-head with his Mom for ratings, although his news show is talking to real Americans, and *spoiler alert*, both him and his mom are surprised when his real journalism showloses to her glib show in the ratings war. There’s lots of real gold to mine in their relationship, as long as the writers don’t insist upon giving her the last word of wisdom. It just falls flat.
When I did my predictions, sight unseen, I thought it would get RENEWAL. I don’t think it actually deserves RENEWAL, but I’ll keep the pick there. Hopefully they find their ground, but I won’t be watching. I’m signing off after just one episode.
Into the Dark is a new anthology series from Hulu billed as a horror series, and I confess, there aren’t many words in there that attract me. Anthology series are rarely of interest to me over an actual serialized story; it’s tied to holiday themes like Hallowe’en, Christmas, etc., which isn’t encouraging; and it’s a horror show. 99 times out of a 100, I would pass. But it’s a new season, and I wanted to see what a anthology horror series looked like.
In a word, awesome.
The first episode, called The Body, is themed around Hallowe’en. A hitman has killed someone and his employer would like him to deliver the body to a specific site in four hours. The hitman is good to go, sets his watch for 4 hours and counting, and then his night starts to go off the rails. While transporting the body is fun because people think it’s an awesome costume, he gets outside to find his car has all the tires flattened by hooligans, along with being TPed, etc. It’s Hallowe’en, he parked on the street, what was he expecting?
A trust fund baby comes along, thinks the guy’s costume is awesome, and convinces him to come to a party with them, have one drink, and then he’ll drive the guy wherever he wants to go. Instead, they end up in a panic room set up as an escape room, the hitman gets tired of screwing around, the supposed dead guy doesn’t seem quite dead (he moves and moans), and they’re on to him. So the hitman kills one of them, leading to a wonderful soliloquy about the nature of existence and the primal nature of killing. It has a very strong Tarantino feel to it all. The hitman is distracted, three of them escape with the body, he’s left with a woman who is turned on by the predator in him, and the chase is on — her for him, him for the three people with the body. The hitman implicates them in the murder so they can’t simply turn the body over, and the first hour is basically about them playing a bit of cat and mouse to figure out what to do.
And if the show ended around the hour mark, it would have Emmy written all over it. It is spectacular to that point. The last 30 minutes are pretty cliché, with an ending landing smack dab on obvious. But that first 60 minutes? Television gold, baby.
The hitman, Wilkes, is played expertly by Tom Bateman. He is a bit quiet, reserved, except for the random soliloquy about the nature of life, but he combines a sense of the Terminator with the mannerisms of either Clive Owen from Croupier or David Boreanaz from his dark Angel days. Bateman has lots of mini-series and other shows to his credit, but I’ve never seen most of them. Great performance, and it is matched by Rebecca Rittenhouse. With blonde hair, there were a number of scenes where I kept wondering if it was Amanda Schull I was seeing or just a faint resemblance. Like Bateman, Rittenhouse hasn’t been in much that I’ve seen, but she was dead awesome for the first 60 minutes. There’s a scene where she’s talking to herself in the bathroom, trying to figure out what she’s doing trying to date the hitman, and again, absolute gold delivery.
Surprisingly, the supporting case of four do a great job. Ray Santiago, known for Ash vs. Evil Dead, plays a rich host of the party and general sleazeball trying to figure out how to deal with something that he can’t throw money at and fix. David Hull plays the trust fund baby, Alan, and through the whole episode I kept thinking I knew him from another show. He has one of those faces. Young frat boy type. But no, I haven’t seen hardly anything he’s been in. Harvey Guillen is the second body to drop, so not in the show for long, but he’s okay when he is. Aurora Perrineau, however, does a great job as the female tag-along / sidekick looking for something to happen. Dorothy-don’t-call-me-Dot is fun to watch, and has a strong Rent vibe to her.
In short, I loved it. Ending was mediocre, but the setup was fantastic.
When I rated it, sight unseen, I predicted RENEWAL. And I’m definitely going to stand by that prediction now that I have seen it. If Hulu can keep the same quality, particularly given they aren’t using huge stars, they have a certified winner.
