Tag Archives: fall

Series premiere: All Rise

The PolyBlog
September 27 2019

When I read about CBS’ new show, All Rise, about a new judge taking the bench, it sounded a bit like Judging Amy back in the day. Then I happened to catch a short trailer that showed her first day on the bench where she is walking to her chair and she face plants. So I was starting to wonder if it was more Night Court than a drama. Either way, I was predicting cancellation.

I’ve now watched the first episode, and I’m not sure about my prediction. Yes, it still has the basic drama premise — former prosecutor, now a judge, hoping and excited to make a difference finally in ways she couldn’t as a prosecutor. Partly as she is a black female and thus more representative of the types of people who will show up in her courtroom. But I wasn’t thrilled with the first extended scene. She accidentaly ends up going to the wrong courtroom while still a prosecutor, and while there, notices that a defendant is not wearing any pants. She was booked, arraigned, and is now in the courtroom, and nobody has given her any pants. So the judge-to-be rails at the institution that put her there, there’s a blow-up from the prisoner’s guard, someone is shot, and it’s fun in the OK corral. Two weeks later, all’s well and she’s starting work. First, the scene has nothing to do with the series, not really. Unless they plan to have gun violence regularly. Second, she is only in the scene by accident — wrong courtroom. It is completely contrived for a plot device for no real benefit. The young woman in the case ends up as the judge’s first case, separate charge.

But after that initial crapfest, the episode sings. She’s going to be an activist judge, and she doesn’t care if her legal assistant thinks she should just accept plea deals. The judge even goes against the LAPD and one of their finest detectives. In the end, the case moves along fine. But that isn’t the whole show, it’s not Law and Order: The Bench.

The judge is played by Simone Missick, and I did not recognize her from the Luke Cage / Iron Fist world as Misty Knight. But she is bright, shiny, and full of energy. And when she’s doing her inspirational speeches, she is a super nova. Great to watch. She even pulls off a change in gravitas going from prosecutor to judge in the episode. Nice.

Her friend, and still prosecutor, is played by Wilson Bethel and while he looked familiar, I don’t remember him from The Astronaut Wives’ Club (I think I saw an episode) or Hart of Dixie (maybe 2 episodes). He did well in the episode, but it isn’t really clear where the friendship is going since he’s a prosecutor and she’s a judge, and normally those two don’t mix.

Various other characters are running around, but hard to tell if they’ll be involved for the future: Marg Helgenberger (CSI) as a senior judge; Jessica Camacho (Flash, Sleepy Hollow) as a public defender; Ruthie Ann Miles as a legal assistant; Lindsay Mendez as a court reporter who flirts with the prosecutor, even if he doesn’t see it; and Erin Cummings as a hot-shot detective who cut corners on the Judge’s first case.

So almost an ensemble cast, even with the Judge as the lead. There were lots of scenes with the other characters on their own though.

Will it succeed? I’m going to give it a coin flip and change my vote to RENEWAL. If it doesn’t go saccharine sweet, it might have a chance.

Series premiere: Bob ♥ Abishola

The PolyBlog
September 26 2019

I am a harsh judge when it comes to sitcoms. Very few catch my interest enough to warrant watching. Sometimes I think it is too much simple serialized joke telling with no plot; other times it is just plainly not funny. But even with my harshness, the new show Bob ♥ Abishola (Bob Hearts Abishola) was better than I expected.

The basic premise is that Bob has a heart attack and winds up as a patient in Abishola’s ward. He is intrigued by her, likes her singing, and because she is nice to him, he wants to say thank you by giving her some of his business merchandise — compression socks. He does, and then he tries to get to know her. They are from two totally different worlds, but he’s trying to get her attention.

The problem for me, and it was present even in the trailers, is I can’t see what Bob sees in Abishola. If he woke up, found her beautiful, and wanted to keep seeing her, that would be one thing. If she did something extraordinary that sparked his interest, sure. If they had some common interest, maybe. But it’s a tough sell in this episode.

Sure, he says she looks like an angel when he first wakes up, but it is so brief, there’s no meat to the item. And then they move on to him needing to pee. She sings to him while he is in the bathroom to get him to be able to pee, and he likes her voice. But he’s not blown away by it. The sole scene that resonates is that he gets her to laugh, and for a moment, her face lights up, and he likes having accomplished his goal to amuse her. But is it enough? The next day, he’s at work with his family, they’re up in his face about something, and he zones out thinking about her singing. Is it enough to spark a romance?

There are a lot of other characters running around, and interactions with them produce the funniest lines in the episode. Amusing, not laugh out loud guffaws. But he gives her the socks he makes, everyone loves them including her, and when he brings some more around, she is willing to take them. And she knows he is interested…there is a good conversation between her and another friend about how picky she can be when she’s at her current age (according to her friend, even a white man should be considered).

He’s sweet, he’s interested, he’s a bit funny, and he’s somewhat successful in business. Plus she likes the socks. I get why she might respond enough to get to know him or at least not chase him away. But there is little to the first encounter to justify the interest from him in the first place. Even if they had shown that he was lonely, all he wants is a kind face sometime, is that too much to ask, and then BAM! show her helping him. Without SOMETHING of a catalyst, I just didn’t find his interest in someone so different to be credible.

I predicted cancellation initially, and now having seen an episode that was better than I expected, I’m still sticking with the same prediction. I just don’t think there’s enough there.

Series premiere: Northern Rescue

The PolyBlog
September 26 2019

I tripped over a “new” show called Northern Rescue on CBC, and I thought it was a new “Canadian” show, which more often than not translates as “crappy sub-par show” made on a shoestring budget but meeting Canadian-content rules. Okay, a slight exaggeration. But the number of Canadian shows that I like are few and far between. The ones that are somehow popular are the ones I usually think are embarrassingly bad. The basic premise is a Boston Search and Rescue specialist moves his three kids back to his small hometown to take a SAR job after his wife dies. The job offer is attractive, and his sister-in-law also lives there, so there will be family around. It’s not that unusual a premise, lots of shows have a “post-spouse-death” premise, and I wasn’t expecting much.

Except it isn’t the CBC show I thought it was, it’s actually a Netflix show. Ten episodes locked and loaded. I was fully expecting the show to basically open post-funeral or maybe mid-funeral. Instead, Michelle Nolden (Republic of Doyle) plays the wife who collapses while making dinner, a reaction to a flu bug. Nope, Stage 4 cancer, and death follows shortly thereafter. But the show takes almost 20 minutes to get to the post-funeral stage. Almost half the first episode is pre-death, and I was quite surprised. It’s handled mostly okay, although there is a scene between the mother and oldest daughter that is ridiculously bad. Strike One for me.

William Baldwin plays the father, and he’s fine. I don’t have high expectations for him, his range is limited, but it’s fine for what he needs to do. The three kids are another story.

The oldest daughter is a mess, acting rebellious, getting high, blah blah blah, and as she hints at herself, it started before Mom got sick. There’s a foreshadowing that she might be pregnant, but hard to tell. She basically says there is other stuff going on, but doesn’t elaborate, and the frequent scenes with her acting self-centred and rebellious are terrible. Some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen…wait, maybe it IS a CBC show. The middle child, a son, has almost no presence. There is ONE scene where he kisses a girl who has had a crush on him for years. And the youngest, a girl, who is an academic wunderkind, is now screwing up math tests. The other two kids aren’t bad, but the oldest is enough for it to be Strike Two for me.

John (the father) thinks moving to the small town might be the thing they need to start over and nothing is explored in the episode about the fact that it is actually the idea of the sister-in-law. Played by Kathleen Robertson, I had trouble picturing her. Even reading the CBC bio, I still wasn’t seeing where I knew her from…I knew some of the roles, but nothing was gelling. A trip over to IMDB popped out the truth — she was Clare on Beverly Hills, 90210 a long time ago. I didn’t watch it much, but I at least recognized her. She’s fine in the episode, not a lot for her character to do, but the promotional materials talk about how she wants a family of her own. Oh, crap. Does that mean there’s going to be weird stuff with her and the father? Her ex-brother-in-law? Ewwww.

Anyway, the job is open, he gets the offer, and he calls a family meeting to discuss it. And this is where Strike 3 comes in for me. We saw 16 minutes of Mom preparing for death. We saw another 10+ dealing with the aftermath, but fairly sparse treatment. And then, the discussion with the kids lasts about 2 minutes. That’s it, that’s all. No tearful goodbyes, no pangs of anxiety, nothing. The kids aren’t happy, but well, they’re going. Wait…what? How do we see everything else and NOTHING from any of them about losing their entire lives in the blink of an eye, six weeks after they lose their Mom. WTF? Definitely Strike Three. If that had been the first 3 minutes, sure, why not. But thrown in the middle of a long episode that dwells on everything else? Nope, I’m out.

I have no idea what balance they were going for, but whatever it was, they missed. I still have to predict cancellation, my original prediction.

Series premiere: Unbelievable

The PolyBlog
September 26 2019

I have to confess a bias going into watching this mini-series. First, I’m male. That one’s a bit obvious. Second, I’m jaded about rape stories that tell the same tale over and over again without any real nuancing or adding anything new to the narrative. An insight we haven’t seen before, perhaps. Without it, it seems exploitative and derivative to me. More “ripped from the headlines” tabloidism than a real attempt at worthwhile television.

The quick opening for the mini-series Unbelievable establishes the basis for the eight-episode arc of a 16-year-old woman living at an apartment complex for at-risk youth who wakes up one night to find a man in a ski mask with a knife in her room. She’s raped, and afterwards, calls a strong ex-foster mom to come help her; several contacts later, and the police are called. The first police officer on the scene interviews her to get all the details and she’s remote, detached as she recites the details, slowly and without any volunteering of info. Her foster mom is present. Two detectives show up, interview her again, and again, she is remote and detached through the recitation. They do a rape kit at the hospital, she tells some friends and family, and a group therapy session, and then calls another ex-foster mom who comforts her with warm emotion and support. Meanwhile, the police find almost no physical evidence.

Without being too cold and clinical, there is nothing in the story up to this point that is new or different. It is, for wont of a better term, retreading almost every episode of L&O: SVU and has been seen in news stories or cop shows dozens of times. And it was my main worry with the show…the story is tragic, it’s far too common, and given the state of the justice system for dealing with sexual assaults, the rest of the tale could be rather linear. While the show is a mini-series, not a series, and thus not an option for “renewal”, there was also nothing up to this point that would make it compelling television.

For the remaining part of the episode, there are four elements that affect watchability of the series. First, in favour, there is an extended scene at the hospital as she goes through the examination. Most shows skip over this pretty fast, no lingering, and it is often shown more in “hinting” than in exposition. Not this show. They show the explanations from the nurse, the requirement to repeat everything, and then some of the medical stuff. Dye on her genitals looking for damaged tissue. Antibiotics in case of STDs. A morning after pill in case of pregnancy. The nurses are portrayed a bit smug and insensitive, but the overall hospital visit is a strong addition.

Second, while most stories assume it is the insensitive man who dismisses the victim’s story, they went in a different direction here, with the detectives starting to question the veracity of her story mainly because the ex-foster mother suggests the victim isn’t acting the way the mother thinks she should — and suggests maybe she made it up for attention. This starts a snowball for an almost self-fulfilling prophecy where absence of evidence leads them to conclude evidence of absence. So she gives up, recants to avoid painfully retelling the story again and again. She doesn’t want to but she can’t take it anymore.

Both are relatively strong elements that argue in favour of watching the show. But two elements go the opposite way. As mentioned above, the victim plays the role very detached and remote. This isn’t accidental, it is to show the arc, but it makes it harder to connect with her character. However, a bigger problem is that the smug and insensitive nurse portrayal is nothing compared to the ham-fisted way in which the detectives switch to neanderthal status, her friends all turn against her, and one of her close friends is hurt because she made up part of the story with him (embellishing it a bit for attention). While anyone watching it can easily see that she’s coping through deflection and denial, nobody else can — including the health system professionals involved. Really? A bit amateurish and lacking in nuance.

While my initial worries that there would be nothing new in the story were unfounded, the amateurish acting and character development for the secondary and tertiary characters make it almost unwatchable. The big change for the rest of the mini-series is the addition of two female detectives to investigate the case, and hopefully they will be fully realized characters rather than caricatures.

But I confess I won’t know. I’m out. Not enough “new” to keep watching.

Series premiere: The I-Land

The PolyBlog
September 25 2019

Everytime a new show comes out where something “weird” happens at the beginning with no explanation, everyone tries to compare the show to Lost. Personally, I don’t care if it is better or worse, similar or different, whatever. I just care if the show works. The I-Land premiered this month on NetFlix and was immediately declared a Lost wannabe. Which would be hard to discount in most cases — a bunch of individuals stranded on an island? Heck, even the show itself jokes about the comparisons by suggesting maybe they survived a plane crash.

But for me, the real question is if the show works. The premise is ten people waking up on an island with amnesia — they have no memory of who they are or where they came from, or how they got to the island. The show focuses initially on the one woman waking up with her hand on a conch shell. Which she immediately uses to blow as a horn to attract attention. And that was strike one for me. She has NO idea who she is, where she is, but blowing a conch shell is the first thing she does? Really?

As the show progresses, you see that she’s not alone. Another woman comes from down the island and she too woke up with something nearby — a knife. A third person, a man, comes running down the beach. Now, just to be clear, both of these people were NOT within her line of sight down the beach when she started blowing the conch shell, she couldn’t see anyone. The camera pans and you find others down the beach slowly waking up, but you see that they all seem relatively evenly spaced and that they are all wearing relatively the same clothes. Dun dun dun.

Presumably they have all watched Survivor or even Lost maybe (!), but they start organizing themselves to make a plea for help in the sand, move some logs so they have somewhere to sit, etc. And the first woman extrapolates that if she woke up with a shell, and the other woman woke up with a knife, what did others have? They find all sorts of things — one at each site, including a first aid kit, etc. One woman finds a book called The Mysterious Island, and she basically throws it away. That was strike two for me.

As the episode moves on, there’s drama and conflict, fighting and assaults, a man gets attacked by a shark, blah blah blah. They find him on the beach the next morning, still alive but wounded, work to save him. Meanwhile, the two geekiest of the group have been huddling and doing math stuff. They measure how far apart all the bodies were and come to the conclusion they were all 39 steps apart. Dun dun dun. Furthermore, one of the geeks multiplies 39 by the number of people and then walks that distance to the end of the beach where they find a sign that says FIND YOUR WAY BACK. Mind blown, right?

No, not really. More like strike three for me. First, there’s no reason to do that math at all. Maybe doing a larger search grid around each of the ten sites or something, but multiplying them together to see where it all leads at the end? Hardly. If they had said they wanted to see if there was anything at increments of 39 AND they found something, I would have said “sure, why not”. But not a decision to specifically try the factor of the two. Second, however, much more important to me is that it was inconsistent with the opening. The people WEREN’T all 39 steps apart. Remember when she woke up? She couldn’t see ANYONE. And the two she did meet came running or walking from farther away — far enough she had to WAVE to them. Plus, a bunch of them were clustered together, no more than about 20 feet apart from each other. Certainly not 39 steps. While they at least acknowledge that there is a movie by that name, and then tell you that it isn’t related, they never explain that not everyone WAS that far away.

So let me get this straight. They want us to tune in to figure out the mystery and they can’t even get the basic logic right themselves? No reason to blow the conch shell, but she does; one of them finds a book called the Mysterious Island and she’s ON A MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, and she throws it away without looking at it or flagging for someone else; and they can’t even get the first clue’s explanation right. It was like the people who filmed the opening didn’t know where the script was going and thus didn’t set it up properly.

Sorry, but I’m out. And I’m sticking with my initial prediction of cancellation. I’m not even going to bother asking how nobody noticed they’re all relatively physically fit (no fatties among them), why there are two psychos in the group, or failing to wonder if one of them really still has their memory and is a plant of some sort. Nor am I even going to bother reviewing the basic acting talents on display.