Tag Archives: premiere

Series premiere: Into the Dark

The PolyBlog
October 17 2018

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.

Series premiere: I Feel Bad

The PolyBlog
October 16 2018

I feel bad that I don’t like NBC’s new show, I Feel Bad. So here’s the premise — mom of three kids who works in a video game company running project teams has Mom guilt about lots of things. Each episode therefore will be her starting off “I feel bad about…” something as she goes through the day.

The show stars Sarayu Blue as Emet, the daughter of a stereotypical Indian family — the mother is overbearing, the father is mentally absent, but they’re available for childcare, so they’re relatively close. Her husband is aware enough to spot a question as a trap but not aware enough to be really part of what’s going on in the pilot. She has four male coworkers at the office and one good female friend, and she consults them all about her problems of the day. Which likely is going to continue to revolve around her kids. In the opening, it is about her daughter being quite young but wanting to be on a highly sexualized dance team. Emet is afraid she’s turning into her mother, so she wants to be the cool hip supportive mom even though she hates the dance style.

So why do I feel bad? Emet’s mom is so bad as to border on farcical, almost Corner Gas style and I hate Corner Gas. She’s so passive aggressive it feels like they’re parodying mother-in-laws when in fact she’s the mother/grandmother. I don’t know her previous work, but her husband Brian George is a perennial Indian character actor, often in comedies, and most recognizable lately as Raj’s gynecologist dad on The Big Bang Theory (hard to believe he’s only been in 15 episodes in the last 11 years, he seems more regular than that) although older fans will recognize him as Babu from Seinfeld. Not for nothing, the guy has 283 credits since 1976. He keeps busy. But he has never been more than a bit player to me and he has almost no role in the first episode.

Husband David is played by Paul Adelstein, who has been in multiple shows in recent years, but nothing I saw him in, and as I said, he’s not very well-developed in Episode 1. Throw in the four coworkers, kids, and the female best friend, and you don’t get much of an impression (although the coworkers do cover a bit of ground — almost like if you put them all together, you would have a functional person to talk to at work).

Which therefore leaves the show, as always, squarely on the main character’s head, and the reason I feel bad is I just don’t care what happens to her. I didn’t like her when she was Lalita Gupta, Raj’s would be girlfriend on The Big Bang Theory, but that’s probably not relevant at this point. You see her right from the start in the middle of chaos, so there’s no time to bond with her, she’s just in it. She narrates the episode, which is another problem we’ll come to in a second, so you think it would feel almost intimate. You know her, you’re in her head, instant bond. Not so much. The narration might be the problem…rather than showing us her reactions to various things, the episode just tells us what she’s thinking. And while it is slightly deep, her actual behaviour with coworkers is ludicrously shallow and naive. I have no reason to root for her in any of this, nor care to watch her.

Which brings me to the plot device of the narration. There is no real plot to the episode, and instead it is her saying “here’s something” and then “here’s something else”. More like a disjointed set of skits rather than an actual script joined together in any way other than sequence of scenes. Add to it that her solution to her problem is to be a horrible, manipulative person to fake her daughter out, and I REALLY don’t care about the show with no structure or likable characters.

I read a review by someone who said they’re Indian and could totally relate to the mother and the main character. Good news, as a friend likes to say, there are over a billion Indian people and someone is related to all of them, so maybe the show will find a home. Not with me, cuz I’m out. I didn’t laugh once in the entire episode.

When I did my initial prediction sight unseen, I said, “Oh, look a story about a mom with lame plot ideas each week = CANCELLED”. I didn’t re-read that before I watched the episode, trying to keep it unbiased as I start, but I would stick with the same review afterwards, as well as the prediction. CANCELLED.

Series premiere: The Good Cop

The PolyBlog
October 15 2018

Netflix has a new show called The Good Cop starring Tony Danza and Josh Groban. Danza is hit or miss, but Groban has a following for his singing and, well, being himself, even if he doesn’t have huge acting chops in his background. Plus it’s Netflix, not a broadcast show, and the economics are completely different. So I predicted RENEWAL, sight unseen.

Now that I’ve seen the first episode, I’m retracting that prediction. The show’s premise is that Danza plays the dad who went to jail for 7 years for being a corrupt cop. Which he was. Unapologetic about it too. His son, Groban, went the other way — the Boy Scout who never breaks a rule, never takes a gift, won’t use a sugar packet from a restaurant, won’t go through a broken red light and instead prefers to “give it a minute”. In other words, “The Good Cop”.

So here’s where it gets weird. The son is a detective, and it will be the “case of the week” for plots, no problem there. Apparently back in the day, his father was a pretty ace detective himself, so the son will consult Dad on the approach to the cases. Which is easy because they’re living together. Fine, no real problem yet.

In the first episode, spoiler alert, an asshat cop gets whacked, and Dad is the obvious suspect. Until ballistics come back and they show that the bullets were fired from the son’s gun, which never leaves his person, even in the shower (it’s on the sink). So here are the two apparent options…either Dad, who hated the cop, borrowed the son’s gun and whacked the guy in the stupidest way possible (since the bullets are tagged), or the son, on behalf of Dad perhaps, killed the cop. Okay, now we have a problem.

But the real problem is that the detective is such a boy scout that it’s like watching paint dry. The show has comic elements, but it is more PG-related Murdoch Mysteries-lite / Scoopy Doo-esque. Heck, my 9 year old son could have watched it and been equally bored. The comedy was bland, the romance with a parole officer was bland, even the rough and tumble Dad was bland. I kept asking myself, “Is THIS really a Netflix show?”. It could air after school based on what I saw.

And while the comic elements are a bit amusing, it is not funny enough to register as a comedy. Plus, one more nitpicky thing. The opening credits/theme is that of a series of newspaper headlines to tell you what the episode is about, and give a bit of back-story. So you see the headline for Dad cracking a big case, Dad getting busted, etc. and then, a snippet to ask, “Who framed the good cop?”. It’s actually the title of the episode, but I didn’t think much about it as the show opened, no biggie, just credits, until about 15 minutes into the episode, when you realize that it was accurate — the show is about who framed him. Which makes me wonder if every week will have the basic plot outlined for you in a headline. I was watching it cold, so what should have been a big surprise was instead just a confirmation of something I already knew. I took a quick peek at the other 10 episode titles and they are pretty descriptive.

Danza was fine but mostly because he was fairly muted. Groban was fine too, but no real spark of, well, anything. I didn’t care what he was doing, there was no spark with the parole officer, and I didn’t really care how the case would resolve itself. In the end, it was a bit amusing, and in fact was the maximum of light fare. Just not worth watching in my view. I’ll change to CANCELLED, even though it is on Netflix with a better than average chance of renewal.

Shame. Danza does better than I expected, Groban is watchable if only he had something resembling emotion, Monica Barbaro is cute for the sidekick, Isiah Whitlock is funny as Groban’s partner, and Molly Price as Groban’s boss does a near-cameo job, at least in the pilot. All of them deserve an upgrade. Just not here.

Series premiere: Manifest

The PolyBlog
October 14 2018

NBC has a new show called Manifest i.e., a small play on words for both a passenger manifest on a plane and a supernatural phenomenon manifesting itself in the real world. In the opening episode, you have a plane from Montego Bay to JFK that takes off normally, hits some pretty rough turbulence in the air, recovers, and tries to land at JFK. But the air traffic controllers re-route it to a small airport outside the city instead. Why? Because the plane has been missing for over five years, with everyone assumed to be missing and presumed dead.

It is a pretty great premise, not the least of which is that unlike Lost being out in the deserted wilderness, everyone is back to their regular lives in NYC. Except their old lives don’t exist anymore for some. For others, it’ll be a bit, well, different.

I also love the main character. A police officer dealing with guilt from the death of someone in a car crash (she was driving, the other person died), had a boyfriend / near fiancé when she left for the trip, and five years later, he’s married to her old best friend. Melissa Roxburgh plays Michaela, and I have seen Roxburgh over the years in a few guest star roles (Arrow, The Tomorrow People, DC Legends of Tomorrow, Travelers) and last year’s Valor. I knew she looked familiar, but had trouble placing her. But what I love about her character i.e., police officer, is that the writers have a natural hook for her to investigate, well, things. And while a lot of shows struggle in pilots for actors to find their character, she inhabits the role perfectly.

Equally, her brother, Ben, is played by Josh Dallas just coming off of 7 years as Prince Charming on Once Upon A Time. He can rock the odd side of scripts and just go with it, and he seems to have no trouble adjusting to his new character. Not even when Michaela and him start hearing their own voice in their head telling them to go to a specific building in NYC and “set them free”. They think the voice means the dogs guarding the building site; spoiler alert, it means set two little girls free who were abducted and are being kept in the building. Michaela frees them, they realize these voices are not simple hallucinations, and this sh** is starting to get real.

There are other stories going on too, mostly to do with Ben and Michaela’s extended family. Ben’s son has leukemia, and was given just six months to live before the flight. Now, there’s a new protocol available to treat it that looks pretty promising, and it is based on research from a doctor that was on the flight too. Ben’s daughter is now five years older, Ben’s wife has some sort of secret person texting her (I’m betting it’s a woman lover, not a man), and the son is connected to all of it.

And then at the end of the episode, they realize they’re not the only two people on the plane who were affected.

When I read the description, I thought it sounded too much like Lost, not to mention too many links to shows like The Returned. Lost went long, others usually don’t. It is so hard to get enough weird to hook people and keep them coming back but not so much weird that they can’t suspend their disbelief or they give up completely. So I predicted CANCELLED, sight unseen.

Now that I have watched the pilot, I’m going to upgrade it to RENEWED, primarily based on Michaela and Ben’s characters. It’s a nice hook. I’m not entirely convinced it will catch fire, but I’m watching whether it does or not.

Series premiere: God Friended Me

The PolyBlog
October 12 2018

CBS has their new show called God Friended Me, and if you think it is like Facebook giving you past memories in your feed, you might not be that far off. Joan of Arcadia tried it with Amber Tamblyn back in 2003 and she kicked ass for a whopping two seasons. And then got cancelled.

Last year, they tried to up the comedy with Jason Ritter (yep, John Ritter’s son and oddly enough, also an alumni of Joan of Arcadia where he played the brother) in Kevin (Probably) Saves the World. It was a bit more Touched By An Angel than the hinted worlds of Arcadia, but it wasn’t enough to find an audience.

So CBS is trying with God Friended Me, where a podcaster who talks about science and that God doesn’t exist, gets a friend request on FB from, you guessed it, an account named God. He ignores it, of course. No need to be punked. Then it shows up again. And again. And then he sees a burning bush. And he ignores it again. Then finally he says Confirm just to see what’s going on and God immediately sends him a friend suggestion. Of a guy who he literally bumps into 3 seconds later who is having a bad day, and podcaster boy ends up *spoiler alert* saving the guy’s life from jumping in front of a subway. Wow, mind blown, right?

Nope, he thinks he’s being punked. Next name suggested is a woman named Cara Bloom, he tracks her down, finds out she’s a reporter for an online magazine, and finally confronts her to see what the deal is with the fake account. Except she knows nothing about his deal, nor does she want to…he’s acting a bit crazy.

Eventually, they get interacting, work together, find out there’s some weird family connection from 15 years before (his mom had her mom as a nurse) and bob’s your uncle, they work together to help her meet her long-absent mother. When it doesn’t go well, Cara runs away, gets hit by a car, and mind blown, she’s saved by the guy that the podcaster saved from the subway. Say what?

Yep, it sounds like a really weird loop. And yet, somehow, some way, it works. I fully predicted CANCELLATION, and I’m going to go with that anyway. I just don’t know if there’s a market for the show’s premise. Which is a shame. Because whether it was “fate” in Early Edition, or Seven Days using time travel to fix things, or God handing out tips in Arcadia or to Kevin, it creates a nice “help someone each week” storyline. A bit lighter than most things out there, and that’s not a bad thing for a change of pace.

So I’m going to watch. Whether it lasts or not, and I suspect it won’t. But in the meantime, I’ll enjoy the cast. Brandon Michael Hall who was terrible in last year’s really terrible The Mayor as the podcaster…Violett Beane as the reporter, looking even better than she did as Jesse Quick on Flash and much more meat for her to work with…and Joe Morton as the Reverend who is the podcaster’s father (ironic, right?). I liked Morton on Eureka, way back on Smallville, and dozens of weekly roles on other shows over the years. He’s awesome as the dad, partly because he has instant presence when you see him.

I’ll be watching. I just won’t be too surprised when it’s cancelled.