Ghosted is a pseudo comedy from Fox that is basically Men in Black, without the straight man. My prediction, sight unseen, was:
FOX: Ghosted – Men in Black, weekly? With extra comedy? Yeah, that’s going to need a lot of work to keep it fresh – CANCELLED;
The basic premise is that there is an organization called The Bureau Underground who does the X-files / MIB thing. One of their agents has gone missing, and his last transmission was to find two guys — one is an disgraced astrophysicist working in a bookstore and the other is a disgraced LAPD missing persons detective working as a mall cop. TBU needs them to help locate the missing agent, and in return, they’ll try and help them get their jobs back. Deal.
Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation) plays the nerdy believer; Craig Robinson (The Office) plays the cop. Who doesn’t want to be partners or involved initially. They are okay together, not too over the top, and their partnership isn’t completely unbelievable. Way more understated then K though.
Ally Walker (Profiler) is familiar to me, but more for Taxi Brooklyn oddly enough. I like her, but have no idea what she’s going for in this portrayal — serious, comic, surprised, skeptical, vacuous? Adeel Akhtar looks to be comic relief in the office (ooh, forensics are weird and funny) and Amber Stevens West will be their weapons designer.
The pilot is full-on MIB, with aliens with no heads, space ships, and multiverses in the first episode. Nerds should love it but not sure it was funny enough for mainstream audiences. I liked it, didn’t love it, but it was cute. I’ll try a few more episodes but I think it will either need to up the humour or find ways to stay fresh.
When I was looking at the upcoming TV series, my prediction for The Gifted was:
FOX: The Gifted – Fox wants to expand into the superhero world too, after their relative success with Gotham, RENEWED;
For me, it was practically a given that if it was XMen, it would make it to Season 2. What I missed in the short announcements was that it is set in the XMen universe, the government doesn’t like XMen, and two parents discover their children have powers so they go on the run to hide. It isn’t XMen, it is the Xmen-ish underground.
Or, for those keeping score at home, The Tomorrow People with different characters and actors. You know, the show that lasted a single season.
In this incarnation, two teens exhibit mutant abilities when they try to protect themselves during a bullying incident at school. Percy Hynes White plays Andy, with the ability to move heavy objects — like buildings, atoms, etc. — and shake them. Or fling people. It’s not a very well developed ability yet, more generic. His sister apparently has had abilities for three years and hidden them. Natalie Alyn Lind plays the sister, and I didn’t recognize her from her turn as Silver on Gotham. Much softer look to her character here, and it works. Somebody has looked at the Heroes original, and made her look a lot like Hayden Panettierre (Save the Cheerleader, Save the World, remember?). They’re okay, not awesome.
For the Tomorrow People, err, the mutant underground, we have Emma Dumont (Aquarius), who for a moment looked like Rachel Nichols (Continuum) to me and I was all excited. She has presence, but not a lot of airtime in the episode. Jeff Daniel Phillips, Hayley Lovitt, Jermaine Rivers rounds out some of the other cast.
Is it great? Not really. And if they were trying to be different from a show that got cancelled, they probably shouldn’t use almost the identical set for the underground headquarters. I’m not even sure it isn’t the EXACT set.
I’ll stick by my original prediction, as I think Fox really wants into the superhero world. And I liked the Tomorrow People, even if the ratings didn’t, so I’ll be watching. At least for this season, which is now a toss-up in my view.
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;
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;
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.
