Ranked, Week 2: All Scripted Shows I Watched Sept. 28-Oct. 4

I gave my thoughts on the new and returning shows of week 2 of the fall television season here, but here’s a straightforward ranking of all the scripted, non-variety (no Daily Show, Last Week Tonight, etc) shows I watched during the 2nd week of the fall television season. It’s based wholly on my enjoyment of them, so while there are some shows that may be better than others, if I didn’t like as much, it will be ranked lower. On to the rankings!

—————Good—————
1. The Good Wife (CBS) Following up a solid season premiere with a good episode
2. Masters of Sex (Showtime) season finale
3. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox) season premiere
4. The Knick (Cinemax)
5. Boardwalk Empire (HBO)
6. Modern Family (ABC)
6½. The Goldbergs (ABC) ‘and a half’ because, while it’s not quite equal to Modern Family, this episode was pretty damn close. The best parts of Modern Family (Luke Phil Haley and the ‘experiment’) shined brighter than the best parts of Goldbergs, but damn that Cam-Mitch storyline
8. The Awesomes (hulu) season finale
9. Downton Abbey (ITV)
10. Sons of Anarchy (FX)
11. South Park (Comedy Central)

—————SO-SO—————
11. Sleepy Hollow (Fox)
12. The Mindy Project (Fox)
12. Gracepoint (Fox)
14. Madame Secretary (CBS)

————–Worse than so-so, but not quite Bad—————
not even worth the effort to rank
-Scorpion (CBS)
-Black-ish (ABC)
-How to Get Away with Murder (ABC)
-Gotham (Fox)
-Bad Judge (NBC)
-Stalker (CBS)

—————Not Good—————
21. Red Band Society (Fox)

Downgraded to Background Noise in Future Viewings: Gotham, Bad Judge, Stalker, How to Get Away with Murder, Scorpion
Dumped: Red Band Society, Madame Secretary

Quick Thoughts on Episode 1 of CW’s ‘The Flash’

The pilot for CW’s fall superhero drama ‘The Flash’ was leaked this week, thankfully, so I can get this episode out of the way now instead of it being another show amongst the many, many shows I’ll sample come fall.

Quick thoughts:

-Casting nailed it for the lead, Grant Gustin makes The Flash/Barry Allen a fun, likeable, and appealing character for those less familiar with the comic book world. The tone of the show, and by extension, the lead, is worlds apart from the CW’s other DC comicbook show, Arrow, which took a “darker, grittier” feel, and undid that darker tone with the most hackneyed, idiotic inane, insipid dialogue this side of Transformers. I can’t say the dialogue is much better in The Flash (it is, but only marginally), which makes sense seeing as how the creator of this show is Greg Berlanti, also a writer/creator/producer/developer/craft services for Arrow as well as The Tomorrow People, the 2011 Green Lantern movie, the shit stain that was 1-season-blunder “No Ordinary Family,” and the utter bullocky cock fart “Political Animals.”
Still, The Flash has a lighter, more fun tone and they do succeed more often than not at making a more fun show.
There are no obvious stinkers amongst the cast, the chemistry between lead Gustin and friend/unrequited love interest Candice Patton as Iris West is good. It does indeed feel as if they’ve known each other for years and have developed a warm relationship over the years.

-The episode sometimes got a little too origin stories for me, I mean, it makes sense for the especially uninitiated, but, I don’t really care how he got his powers, just move on and do stuff

–[SPOILER SPOILER] I may have negative feelings towards Arrow, but I still got a bit giddy with the Green Arrow cameo [END SPOILER]

-“I don’t think the lightning struck you, I think the lightning CHOOSE you” groan

-The CGI effects for the tornado was pretty neat and worked well at not looking excessively CGI

-Okay so they flip the car over going at 50+ mph and Flash makes it out with little more than a cut above his eyebrow despite his NOT wearing a seatbelt?!?! Okay, I know he has fast healing, but even fucking Wolverine can’t heal that fast. Like, he’d be half-healed at most after that. No broken bones?! Like…he doesn’t even have a firm grasp on his powers yet. C’MON!

-Also, seeing as how his muscles regenerate so fast, I’d really like it if they had him eating a lot/often, his body would need a constant intake of nutrients to perform the bodily upkeep. Little details like that will really make it pop for me

-Conflicted feelings about the ending, I hate how it just HAS to tease something more, something that will just be horribly drawn out and just be a tease for the audience. Still, that they don’t seem to be setting up wheelchair guy to be an out and out villain is good at least.

-Who the fuck builds a particle accelerator in the middle of an urban area? First of all, that shit is LONG. Fermilab’s is 4 miles, the Large Hadron Collider’s circumference is 17 mile. It’s not some dinky shit in a building. Second, these are all built on farm land a) for safety b) because urban areas have lots of wires and subways and shit underground that would make building the accelerator impossible. DETAILS MOTHERFUCKERS, DO YOU SPEAK IT

-Why would you just stand there without your mask on after beating weather guy. Run motherfucker run.

-It had my attention for the first half of the episode but afterwards I just grew too damn bored with the show. I thought it was the end of the show about 3x during the course of the episode only to be sorely disappointed. I’ll watch another episode, I like it better than Arrow at the same point in its run (granted that may be because the hype for that show built it up too much). Fuck, this may very well end up being a ‘watch-half-the-season-but-should’ve-dumped-it-after-the-third-episode’ situation.

Overall, I enjoyed/tolerated/didn’t hate about 35% of the episode and was bored/annoyed/aggravated by 65% of it.

The Flash Pilot:

6.0-6.5/10 with particular regard towards lead Grant Gustin. I kind of hate the phrase but he does geek chique well, straddling the line between being semi/sorta-believably geeky/intelligent and but able to be affable when needed. The show semi-convincingly portrays him as an intelligent-ish character without falling into the pitfall of feeling the need to turn him into one of those Brilliant-with-Aspberger’s Sheldon Cooper-types. He’s likable, the cast isn’t bad, but I don’t know if a story-of-the-week show filled with questionable dialogue at best will cut it for me.

Quick Thoughts on 1st Episode of FX’s ‘Tyrant’

This was probably one of the cases where it was beneficial that I had avoided reviews/seeing the metascore for a show before watching it. If I had, I probably would’ve been tainted by its mediocre reviews and kept poking holes in the first episode and looking for reasons to not like it or justify its so-so reception.

Instead, I watched a solid first episode of a show that burnishes FX’s reputation, alongside Fargo, after the misfires of Chozen and The Bridge. At the end of it I was guesstimating that the show’s score on Metacritic would be in the mid-to-upper 70s to low 80s. I completely overshot it as it got a very mediocre score of 53. I don’t immediately know why critics scored it that low, but you know what, I don’t want to. Isn’t there a saying, to analyze something is to destroy it? (after a quick google, those exact words are not a saying, but I’ve heard something along those lines, maybe specifically for art?) I don’t want to understand the criticism, maybe in time I will also see what others find lacking in this show, but for now I will enjoy an interesting new piece of television that covers ground that has barely been touched by other American television shows. I enjoyed a first episode that ruminated and was quiet in all the right ways in all the right places while still having enough action and plotting to keep things interesting and revealed just enough of the characters to let use know enough to want to know more. Maybe it’s my penchant and natural interest in politics, foreign affairs, and the real-life happenings in countries such as Syria, Iran, Egypt and the like that gives this show a bit of a buffer for me these critics don’t have. Whatever the case, I liked what I saw and want to see more.

(One more thing: after reading The Hollywood Reporter’s cover story about the behind-the-scenes difficulties of getting the show started, including exiting directors and showrunners, I was apprehensive whether something created amidst such turmoil during a crucial developmental phase could succeed at being great. My apprehension was for naught.)

Quick thoughts:
-The lead is serviceable as the lead, he plays more of an introspective character so the quietness/stoicism is understandable. Still, the flashback shows that perhaps there is something darker, simmering underneath the surface of Barry that makes his quietness interesting and hinting at something more rather than a boring quietness

-The wife, while not given too much in the episode, does well as the loving wife and mother. I see some complaints of bad writing and making her very one-dimensional, relax. Something I don’t like is the episode-by-episode reviews and guillotine marches that if a show doesn’t deliver 100% in 45 minutes, it’s off with its head.
I see enough in this show that it is better to see one season as a complete work and each episode as individual cogs within the season. I will skip critiquing the trees to make a better assessment once I have a full(er) view of the forest. So the wife is no Carmela Soprano, so what. She’s not particularly bad either and who’s to say she won’t become Carmela, this is only episode 1.

-Teenage kids in a show are always a tricky thing to do, and they fail/infuriate viewers about 90+% of the time on dramas. Seeing how the showrunner for Tyrant also worked on Homeland, and that there is a female teenage daughter character here, fears of Dana Brody 2.0 were understandable. No Dana 2.0 here, from the little scenes she had, female teenage daughter seems to have her head on straight. If anything, the son seems like he is the more likely one to slip into the pout-master-supreme role of Dana 2.0. Also I imagine his homosexuality-in-an-Arab-Middle-Eastern-country will be used to blackmail him/his father at some point in time. See, this show is setting the foundation for the season.

-I’m wary of shows that run a full hour actually having enough material to be worthy of a 60-minute runtime, but this 55-minute episode did not feel that excessive of the normal 45-minute runtime for dramas.

-That shower scene. Almost went full Eastern Promises there.

-Gave us bits of lots of characters, from gay teenage son’s potential lover/security chief’s son to the U.S. ambassador being a bit too close with the Al-Fayeed family and a bit too comfortable with how they run things. Lots of interesting supporting characters to delve into.

-Yup, I hate the brother.

-The last flashback of the episode raises the question: Who becomes the Tyrant, the brother, with his built-in psychopathic tendencies, or our main character, Barry, who perhaps had not returned to his home country in 20 years, not because he was avoiding what was in the country, but because he was avoiding what was in him. Hmmmm…

6.9-7.9/10 Anticipating the next episode.

A Moody Christmas/The Moodys like an Aussie Arrested Development

I don’t really like making comparisons like I did in the title. It just sets you up for disappointment. And what makes Arrested Development so Arrested Development-y is its tone and comedic style.
And while A Moody Christmas/The Moodys don’t mimic AD’s style or tone (veering more into a dramedy territory at times), its story of a UK-based photographer who comes back once a year to his homeland of Australia to put up with his family’s shenanigans for Christmas reminds me of Arrested Development’s characters a bit.
There’s the man-child brother (a little Buster and a little Gob), the loopy uncle (Gob), the brother-in-law with a secret (Tobias), the straight-man lead character (Michael), the sister trying to get her life together (Lindsay-ish). None of them have a sure equivalent, save for lead guy Dan Moody, but there’s flecks of AD characters sprinkled throughout.

The conceit of the original series, “A Moody Christmas,” is that each of the six episodes takes place during Christmas, one year apart. Despite none of the characters looking at all like they’ve aged between the first and sixth episode, it’s certainly a fun style the show uses well. Each Christmas gatherings gives us a peak at how the characters’ various lives have progressed (or not) over the last year while still leaving us wanting to see more of what happened in the preceding 365 days. The humor is a little dry, a little silly, but fun.

Wisely, the show abandons the once-a-year Christmas idea with the series “The Moodys,” with pretty much all the characters returning. It’s still a fun show though the chemistry is a bit lacking between Dan and Cora. The will-they-won’t-they of Dan and Cora was strong throughout A Moody Christmas but less so during The Moodys.

However, one aspect of The Moodys that stays strong, if not even better, is ne’er-do-well, manchild brother Sean Moody, he’s a hoot and a half and in the hands of someone else, the character would be annoyingly one-note and over-the-top but he’s played with just the right amount of absurdity and semi-groundedness.

All 6 half-hour episodes of A Moody Christmas can be found on hulu with the 8 episodes of The Moodys to arrive at some point.

British Conspiracy Series “Utopia” Doesn’t Live up to its Name

Last year I stumbled upon two great UK series in the spring/early summer: the sublime, moody Broadchurch and wholly unique, deeply intriguing Black Mirror. I had read good things about Broadchurch and quickly tore through its episodes, catching up with it shortly before its finale. I had read a review about Black Mirror and decided to give it a shot on a whim, and what I tumbled upon was one of my great discoveries of last year. I had stumbled upon these shows almost out of nowhere, without the hype and heavy promotion that oftentimes accompanies American television series. And they were such wonderful discoveries.

So when I heard rumblings about a UK show called Utopia this spring, I gave it a try, hoping to discover another under-the-radar gem.
Utopia is stylish, yes. Utopia makes good use of colors, yes. Utopia is a well-shot show, yes. But Utopia is not Broadchurch. And Utopia is not Black Mirror. Broadchurch and Black Mirror are weighty and substantive shows, and placing Utopia next to the two shows makes it pale in comparison in terms of weight and substance.

That’s not to say it’s just puff, no. As a conspiracy thriller, it has some interesting spots. Jessica Hyde and RB (and the assassin with neat hair, a crisp suit, and nice shoes) make for good characters excellently acted. But as a show that runs 48-55+ minutes, it definitely feels like it’s running that long, sometimes longer. It simply doesn’t explore issues deeply enough, it doesn’t have a cast of characters interesting enough, it doesn’t have intrigue or action or plot twists interesting enough to sustain my interest and full attention for its 50+ minute runtime. Some/many will disagree, the comments I read for it simply raved about it. And I suppose I can see how this can tickle someone’s fancy. But as someone who’s watched plenty of spy shows and thrillers, I found the plotting and twists and turns superficial at best, I was never drawn into it, I was never gripped by it. Not in the way that Broadchurch had me wanting to know who the killer was, not the way Broadchurch could utterly distract me from the main plot by exploring the backstories of the various residents of Broadchurch, not in the way Black Mirror could set up a futuristic world that intrigued you and have a plot that kept you glued to the screen, or the way Black Mirror could hit you with an emotional wallop by a plot twist.

Comparing Utopia to two of the best British series of the past year is probably not entirely fair. Utopia is not a bad show. It’s decent, and its 61-minute long finale was probably the best of the bunch, managing to be the longest episode of the season without feeling as such; but the series as a whole did not pull me into it the way that properly good dramas should. Too often it gets lost going down its own conspiracy rabbit-hole, with double agents, betrayals, potential other ominous groups or shadowy conspiracies all getting mixed up into an amorphous mess.
Ultimately, Utopia felt like a show that’s on its 4th draft but really needed to get to a 7th draft. It needed a couple more writer’s meetings/rewrites to flesh out the story, tighten the script, and structure the storyline better. It’s been renewed for a 2nd season, and I might(/probably will) give that a go (especially upon hearing that Rose Leslie aka Game of Thrones Ygritte/Downton Abbey’s Gwen has been added to the cast).

Also HBO is working on an adaptation of it, which begs the question, can you make a great show from a mediocre one? Les Revenants did it with a movie. Still, the fact that David muthaeffin’ Fincher (Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Curious Case of Benjamin Button) is spearheading the adaptation along with author Gillian Flynn (of the acclaimed novel Gone Girl) gives me hope that he will be able to inject the needed pizzazz to elevate a show that’s simply serviceable in its current form. I’m also looking forward to how Fincher, known for his dark, moody, sullen cinematography, translates the brightly-colored aesthetics of Utopia. Also casting will really interest me, they have some juicy characters that, if matched with the right bubbling-under-the-radar, up-and-coming actors could create sparks. (Spoiler alert Spoiler alert Spoiler alert: I imagine they’ll keep the sharply-dressed assassin around a bit longer seeing as how he was so creepily good in the original but merely lasted 1 episode + a brief appearance, hell, I can totally see them just bringing the actor along for the ride in the US adaptation END SPOILER ALERT).

tl;dr Neither a Utopia nor a Dystopia, leans more towards the former but a bit too surface-level for my tastes, not enough intrigue to keep me from getting bored during its lengthy-ish run-times