Lifetime has a new show called “You”, and I wasn’t going to watch it or review it. I really wasn’t. It just sounds, well, icky. The premise is a bookstore manager who meets a nice girl, wonders if she might be the one, yada yada yada, he stalks and invades her life by stealth to figure out everything he can about her. Including faking his way by a gas company repairman so he can go through her apartment.
Yep, it’s a stalker show, from the perspective of the lovable bookworm.
The creepier part is that it is watchable. You can see what she sees, and how she might come to be interested. You can see upfront too that she just sparks all over the place, and is like catnip to the introverted bookstore manager. And if it was just a short romantic comedy, it would be, well, maybe not deep, but cute.
And I’m under no illusions that stalking is cute or harmless. But I want to see where it goes as his madness and obsession expands.
I’m not familiar with the male lead, Penn Badgley, as I wasn’t into Gossip Girl, and I haven’t seen Elizabeth Lail either as the female lead. But she has a bit of a Piper Perabo thing going on, which doesn’t suck, and Penn isn’t initially creepy to watch.
I’ll give it a go. But I don’t see how it could ever get to a second season, and I’m betting it will be cancelled anyway.
Everybody wants a hit drama. Most try to manufacture the drama each week with a murder or a legal case, or some other “profession / case that can drive the plot this week” device. Doctors or hospitals are always popular. Even pathologists. Occasionally they find magic with the teaching profession. And 44 minutes later, the plot is resolved for that week.
The current search is for the new “This Is Us”. A drama with flashbacks, no professional hook, just family relating. With the “family” being the plot device, no 22 minute-long joke reels in these ones though. I watched “This Is Us” for the premiere, and I liked it well enough, thought they did a good job, but it wasn’t a hook for me. And most of the attempts at non-procedural dramas die. The group who “flashed forward” and saw their future. The parents whose kids returned after death. The lottery winners and what happened to their lives after the big win. All popped up and got beat down in a ratings-based game of whack-a-mole.
So when I read about the new show, A Million Little Things, I thought, “hmmm…”. Okay, so it has a Big Chill feel to it. Although fans of the Big Chill who resonated at the time are WAY older now. Still has a death to pull people together and to “handle”. But it’s a suicide, which is a bit risky. My prediction based just on the description was “CANCELLED”, no renewal.
I have now watched the premiere and I flat out loved it.
The premise is four friends who met when when they got stuck in an elevator together as four random strangers ten years ago. Two and a half hours later, and they had bonded. Friend #1, John, is played by Ron Livingston, and I just loved him in Defying Gravity, even if he gets more props for Band of Brothers (and rightfully so). Back in the elevator, John was the perfect glue, the guy who thought everything happens for a reason but you have to fight hard to find that reason, and that friendship was made up of “a million little things”. John is a smooth-talking business type, and you see him on the phone at the start of the episode wheeling and dealing, the epitome of always be closing, without the smarm. Would he kill himself?
Friend number 2 is Eddie, played by David Giuntoli (ahh, I miss Grimm too). Eddie is no longer in love with his wife, and in fact has been planning to leave her for years (apparently). A recovering alcoholic, he is in the process of “packing to go” as the episode opens, he’s in love with someone else, and just as he is packing, he has a sudden realization — what will he tell his son? Really? Planning for years and this is the first time it occurs to him? Really? Okay, so that writing sucked, but David is pretty solid. And while later you see him deliver a kick-ass eulogy, at the start, he’s stressed, did he kill himself?
Friend number 3 is Gary, played by James Roday (yep, Shawn Spencer from Psych!). It’s a bit of an adjustment to see his delivery 100% serious all the time, but good. Gary is a bit of a hot mess, honestly, as the episode describes him. He has beaten breast cancer, but is tested every 3 months to be sure it isn’t back. He is working his way around the cancer support group as the only guy, and since he “gets” what they’re going through, he cleans up with the group like Casanova in a hospital gown. In the opener, he’s getting a cancer update diagnosis, and he’s a bit stressed, so maybe he killed himself.
And friend number 4 is Rome, played by Romany Malco. Rome is losing his sh** as the episode opens, and he has already drafted a suicide note. Okay, it’s him, pretty clear. He pours a bunch of pills on the counter and then stresses out when he spills too many. He goes to get water out of the fridge, and the Brita is empty. He starts to get water out of the tap, but there’s a story on the news about somewhere having poisoned tap water, and so he starts again with the Brita, so he can wash it down. As he is trying to cram the pills in his mouth, and then wash them down, his phone keeps ringing. It’s one of the other friends calling to tell him that John killed himself. Rome spits out the pills.
There is a bit of mystery going on though. His assistant, Ashley, has a small folder with Delilah’s name on it from him, and she hides it in a drawer rather than give it to her. Is it a suicide note? Was there something going on with her and him? Later, she hides even more stuff. Dun dun dun.
Meanwhile, the guys are not coping alone. David has a wife Katherine that he doesn’t love and she knows he wants to leave (Grace Park of Battlestar Galactica, Hawaii Five-O). John’s wife is strong and near picture perfect as the grieving widow, Delilah. Rome’s wife, Regina, is super strong, a chef who opened her own restaurant once when she was young and as inexperienced as her investor, but John got her out of it (someday she’d like to reopen one).
And new to the mix is a date from the cancer support group — Maggie. Clinical psychologist by training, she’s struggling with her cancer treatments and diagnosis. She latches on to Gary, and their first “date” is John’s funeral. I haven’t seen the actress, Allison Miller, before but she has some presence. I was worried she might be the “observer” plot tool for the show, but she has her own drama developing, and I think she’ll be with us for the duration.
The guys bond, the girls bond, they deal with the funeral and the immediate aftermath.
Speaking of duration, the whole point of watching the premiere was to predict if the show will be cancelled or renewed. While I guessed cancelled in the beginning, sight unseen, I’m on the fence now that I’ve seen the pilot. It’s good, but is it “renewal” good? I’m going to take a chance and say yes. Either way, I’m going to be watching.
I love dramas, I like crime shows, I like serialized story telling. What I don’t often like is any show that glorifies the life of crime or hides the reality of the impacts of the crime, whether it be drug-dealing or trafficking or general thuggery. I don’t need it whitewashed with a nice wrap up in 44 minutes of story-telling, but outside of The Sopranos, my taste for watching gangster shows is pretty limited.
So I never watched Sons of Anarchy, and I was fully expecting to watch the new spin-off Mayans M.C. and pass. Imagine my surprise when the show quickly veered into — spoiler alert — Wiseguy territory. Yeah, that’s right, the lead character is being extorted by the DEA into joining the Mayans Motorcycle Club and using his connections to root out one of the powerful drug cartels.
Part of the reason I might like it too is the main actor, J.D. Pardo. He played a young buck in Revolution, and I enjoyed most of his episodes, as well as his earlier role in the short-lived series Drive. His ex-gf is played by Sarah Bolger (Once Upon A Time and Into the Badlands), but we didn’t get to see much of her doing anything in Ep1 so hard to tell how she’ll be. Edward James Olmos plays his dad, and if they can stay away from “Sure enough” chants, I can probably live with his occasional over-acting. He’s pretty muted in Ep1.
My second surprise was seeing Danny Pino as the head of the cartel. When he was first on the screen, I couldn’t place him at all. It was his face that was throwing me, though — his voice was SO familiar. Later, you get a better look at him, and I was like…”Oh, him, wait what show was that?”. Oh right, sure, he was on L&O: SVU for a long time, but for me, he will always be Scotty Valens from Cold Case. I loved him on that show. Now he’s the bad guy, but I can live with that.
When I read the description originally, my thought was that as a sequel to a relatively successful show, it should have enough legs to get it to renewal. Having seen the premiere, I’m sticking to the RENEWAL theme and I’ll even be one of the ones watching.
I am not the demographic for the new show Rel. I’m not black, I’m not young, and I’m not looking for a stupid sitcom about nothing. The lead actor Lil Rel has a Seinfeld-ish plot going, with slightly off friends and family, him playing most of it straight, and repeated jokes milked through the episode. This one is about someone who wears loose-fitting boots aka loose boots, and about the 8th time it is used, it’s almost funny.
I didn’t like him talking to his phone as if he was talking to his kids, I didn’t like his female best friend, I didn’t like his little brother or the people they meet on a bus. The only bright spot in the whole episode was Sinbad playing his dad, a slightly crazy but self-aware father.
Oh, and the premise? His wife was cheating on him with his barber, and now they’re separated, with a potential fight looming for custody. Man, I’m sure all of that will be hilarious. Apparently, though, they’re not sure about the show as they didn’t bother casting either the ex-wife or the kids — they’re only talked about, you never meet them.
I didn’t laugh once through the whole show. I’m sticking to my original prediction of CANCELLED.
I’m not a fan of horror movies, so I haven’t watched any of the four movies on which the series is based. But, if you ignore the ridiculous political premise, the idea behind one night of the year where all crime is legal is interesting from a purely philosophy of law and order, role of the state, etc. kind of perspective. Intriguing even. Not enough to watch one of the movies, not my genre, but when they turn it into a movie and thus by extension have to turn down the gore factor and up the storyline, I am willing to watch an episode.
The characters seem to have a loose tie back to the movies, and the creator of the movies wrote the first episode of the new series. From watching the first episode, there are basically three main storylines:
Miguel is looking for his sister Penelope who was in a rehab program but checked herself out while he was off being a Marine. She’s found her way to a suicide cult who commits suicide-by-purge. The cult members basically “give” themselves to purgers to kill, thus freeing them from the world to embrace the invisible world of Heaven. So if Miguel doesn’t track her down in time, she’s going to die tonight. Willingly in order to reunite with their dead parents, who died during the fourth movie.
Jane is a business executive who has to work on Purge night on a secure floor of an office building along with a bunch of high-end young corporate types to put a deal together before the Japanese markets close in the morning. However, Jane is not as she seems, and she seems edgy all the way to the end of the episode when you find out she has another game going on, not just the business deal, and it is illegal (she can’t commit the first step until the Purge starts). Dun dun dun.
Finally, there is a couple, Jenna and Rick, who have accepted an invite on Purge Night to spend it at an one-percenter’s party in order to try to get investment capital to build housing for low-income families. They feel like they’re selling their souls to the people behind the Purge, and it’s all complicated by the fact that they have a past sexual relationship with the benefactors’ daughter, a relationship that did not end well.
Episode 1 takes place from 90 minutes before the Purge up to just after the start of the Purge, and I confess I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s on USA network, so it’s not like it is Netflix or HBO where the gore, violence or sex are going to be too explicit, but still, I’m not a horror fan, as I noted earlier.
Based on the initial description, I didn’t think it had enough oomph in the reboot world to make it through the season and get renewed. Having watched the first episode, I’m going to keep that prediction — CANCELLED — but I confess they’re making it a closer race. They almost made it interesting enough for me to watch. But honestly, I don’t care about Penelope or if Miguel saves her. I don’t care about Rick and Jenna, just hypocrites from the looks of it. I found the acting weak for Jane, but I would kind of like to know what happens with her storyline and what the big plot is that she’s part of for the night. But one out of three storylines is not enough for me to keep watching. I’m out.
