First Cancellation–Wicked City

ABC has announced that they will be pulling their new series Wicked City after three episodes. For now it will be replaced by reruns of reality series Shark Tank which had held down the time slot while the network waited for the show to debut. Yawn

This makes the series, about a kinky serial killer and his lover set in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the first new series of the 2015-16 to actually be cancelled. The cancellation date of November 13 is the latest date for a cancellation in recent years.

But is it really?

There’s no argument that Wicked City is the first series to leave the air this season and the show that has left the air quickest so far this year (3 episodes), but a number of series have had their series orders reduced. These include FOX’s Minority Report, ABC’s Blood & Oil, and NBC’s The Player and Truth Be Told. With the exception of The Player these shows have had their orders reduced from 13 to 10 episodes (The Player’s order was cut to 9 episodes). Aren’t these effectively cancellations, which would mean that these shows were cancelled before Wicked City?

Well I think that maybe an argument could be made along those lines. I suspect that the networks have definite reasons for reducing orders and letting the shows run out their abbreviated orders rather than being pulled outright in the way that Wicked City was.

TV.Com did an article called 6 Reasons Why Networks Are Trimming Orders Instead of Canceling Shows. The writer lists reasons why he thinks that the networks have opted to trim orders. I think that some (but not all) of what he says has some validity. The six reasons, with on interpretation of what I believe he’s saying are:

1. Face Saving for Networks: Image is everything for the networks and “trimming the order” for a show “sounds” better than saying outright that the show is cancelled.
2. Shows Finish On Their Own Terms: Trimming the order gives the creative team the ability to craft a series finale rather than having the show just end, or worse end with a cliff-hanger.
3. The Bridges Remain Unburned: According to the writer, there’s a power shift going on between networks and creators so that “playing nice” – which presumably means not cancelling a show outright – makes more sense for the networks because “you never know who’s going to be worthy of a second chance.
4. Life (and Money) After Death in Streaming: Basically the idea that even a failed show like Minority Report can have life after leaving the broadcast network – and can generate revenue for the network – on a streaming service like Netflix or Crackle, or some other site that “come up with funny names and pay exorbitant amounts of money for streaming rights to shows.” But they won’t do that if the show only had a couple of episodes before being canned.
5. The Bench is Shallow: There aren’t the reserves of new shows that can be brought in to fill in the blank spot where a cancelled show used to be – which presumably is why Wicked City is being replaced by reruns of Shark Tank instead of episodes of something new – because those shows are earmarked for hiatus periods of running shows, or to replace short-run shows.The irony is that Wicked City was meant to be a mid-season show, which may indicate that the bench is not only shallow but weak.
6. Networks Have Accepted the Grim Realities of Their Futures: For this I’m going to have to run nearly his entire reasoning, so please excuse the profanities – they’re his not mine, although my opinion of the logic in this one can be described with a word he uses in this explanation (you can guess which one): Like a single man approaching his 40s and eating Hot Pockets for dinner for the third night in a row, sometimes it's easier for networks to accept that things are just how they are and it's pointless to try harder. This is the new paradigm, and networks understand they're dinosaurs and the chances of getting a huge hit that can float a network are slimmer and slimmer with each day that passes. Yeah, this is a pessimistic view of things, but it's also the truth. You can only throw so much shit at a wall to see if it sticks before you run out of shit and your arm gets tired. More important for networks right now is to try to devise alternate ways of competing with the expanding TV market rather than spending all the money it takes to find the next Empire. 

So I think he may have some valid points with some of his reasons, specifically (and in order) numbers 5, 2, 3, and 4. The big reason is that “the bench is shallow” but more importantly is that it is rare for a new replacement series to earn ratings that are better than the ratings that the show it is replacing earned. As it is, shows starting in January or later often face an uphill struggle to gain acceptance. Empire, which debuted in January 2015, is a rare exception.

I’d like to offer a couple of options of my own that may have some validity.

1. Trimming the Order is a Flexible Response: Put simply, trimming the order for a show allows the network to reverse or at least modify their decision as to the fate of a show. If, for example, the people who watched Thursday Night Football decided that they’d rather watch The Player on NBC than CBS’s Elementary (or ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder) once football left CBS, a trimmed order would allow the network to react to the sudden upswing in viewers. Not that a sudden increase in audience numbers is a likely outcome. In fact it is increasingly rare in the current TV landscape.
2. Using What You Paid For: As I understand it – and I readily admit that my understanding of the workings of this part of the TV industry is weak – the networks contract for a certain number of episodes. Those episodes are in various stages of the production process, from completed scripts to post production. The networks has paid, or made partial payment, for those episodes. Trimming the order would stop work on new scripts but would allow the completed scripts (that the network has paid for) to go through the production process.

Of course all of this begs the ultimate question: why was Wicked City cancelled when Minority Report, The Player, Blood & Oil, and Truth Be Told had their orders cut? It seems to be a pretty simple answer really. The viewership for the shows that had their orders reduced were bad, no doubt about that, but the viewership for Wicked City was abysmal This chart shows the combined “live” and same day viewership 18-49 demographic ratings and share of Wicked City and the shows shows that had their orders cut. (There’s same day +7 data also available for some shows but not for Wicked City so I won’t include that). All information taken from Wikipedia which in turn uses data from TV By The Numbers. I will give information for the pilot and the most recent show to air, and for comparison sake I’ll include the information for NBC’s Blindspot, which appears to be the most successful of the new series (except Supergirl, for which I don’t have enough data).

		Viewers (Same Day +1)	18-49 Rating/Share
Wicked City	Pilot	3,280,000	0.9/3
	November 10	1,690,000	0.4/1
The Player	Pilot	4,680,000	1.2/4
	November 19	3,410000	0.8/3
Blood & Oil	Pilot	6,360,000	1.4/4
	November 8	3,400,000	0.8/2
Minority Report	Pilot	3,100,000	1.1/3
	November 23	1,520,000	0.5/2
Truth Be Told	Pilot	2,580,000	0.7/3
	November 20	2,110,000	0.6/2
Blindspot	Pilot	10,610,000	3.1/10
	November 23	7,030,000	1.9/6

Compared to the four shows that had their orders cut, viewership for the pilot of Wicked City was worse than Minority Report (which probably should have been cancelled but it ran on FOX) and Truth Be Told (which aired on Friday night, where viewership is lower than the rest of the week). Wicked City’s pilot actually had a lower viewership than the most final episode of The Player.  Maybe the worst part of all for ABC was the 18-49 demographic numbers given that at the network’s upfronts in May “ABC president Paul Lee stated that the show was their highest testing pilot of 2015 among millennials.” This group would represent the 18-35 year-old portion of the demographic, and yet the 18-49 rating and share for Wicked City was worse than that of any of the new shows except the Friday series Truth Be Told. This is the big reason why Wicked City got cancelled instead of having its order cut.

Prelude to Upfronts: Cancellations and Pick-ups

Before I started this blog, the whole business of “Network Upfronts” was as foreign as the Greek language to me. All I knew is that sometime in May the US networks would announce their new shows and cancel the unsuccessful ones from the previous year, and then the Canadian networks would pick them over to find the “best of the lot” for us, and conveniently forget that half of the shows that they considered the “best of the lot” were either cancelled by the end of the season.

Upfronts used to be the day when a Network President and his (and they were all men for a long time) would stand in front of the assembled masses of advertisers and the ink-stained wretches from the entertainment media and announce which shows have been cancelled and which have been picked up, and what next season’s TV schedule would look like. The advertisers would then – over the next few weeks – decide what shows they’d make their media buys on, and how much they’d be willing to pay. Meanwhile the entertainment media would, wittingly or not, promote the new shows with information even thought they’d basically only seen the few clips provided by the network at the Upfronts. The key point was that the networks announced all of their changes at their Upfront day.

In recent years things have changed. Networks announce their renewals and their cancellations before the Upfronts – days and sometimes even weeks before – and they’ve taken to announcing shows they’ve picked up in advance as well. In the past I’ve held off from reporting or commenting on these announcements, preferring to wait until a network’s upfront day. I’m not sure that that approach is practical anymore. So what I’ve decided to do is to list the cancellations and the pickups before the upfronts, and comment on the percentage of available time that the proposed new shows will be taking up on each network.

ABC
Cancellations: The Assets, Back In The Game, Killer Women, Lucky 7, Mind Games, Once Upon A Time In Wonderland, Mixology, Trophy Wife, Betrayal, The Neighbors, Super Fun Night, Suburgatory,
Status Unknown: The Taste, Black Box
Picked Up: Dramas – American Crime, The Astronauts Wives Club,The Club, Forever, How To Get Away With Murder, Marvel’s Agent Carter, Secrets & Lies, The Whispers
Comedies – Black-ish, Galavant, Manhattan Love Story, Selfie
Update: Two comedies that I missed: Cristela and Fresh Off The Boat  which were announced at the same time as the renewal of Last Man Standing.

Comments: Eight hours of Dramas, four half-hours of Comedies. I was saddened but not surprised by the cancellation of Trophy Wife. The kids, and in particular Burt, were great and it was fun to see Bradley Whitford playing straight man both to the kids and the women in his life. If this show had a better time slot – like between The Middle and Modern Family instead of after another newcomer, The Goldbergs – I think it could have worked.

CBS

Cancellations: How I Met Your Mother, We Are Men, Bad Teacher, The Crazy Ones, Friends With Better Lives, Hostages, Intelligence
Picked Up: Dramas – Battle Creek, CSI: Cyber, Madam Secretary, NCIS: New Orleans, Scorpion, Stalker
Comedies – The McCarthys, The Odd Couple

Comments: Six hours of Dramas, two half-hours of Comedies. Only two survivors of the new shows, Mom and The Millers. I think that the limited series nature of Hostages was a bad choice to go against Castle, and Intelligence was just pretty bad. Disappointed that the cut The Crazy Ones, a series with a stand-out cast that I really enjoyed. Unfortunately stand-out cast equals expensive cast, which was probably as much a cause of the show’s demise as the ratings.

FOX

Cancellations: American Dad (moving to TBS), The Cleveland Show, Raising Hope, The X-Factor, Almost Human, Dads, Enlisted, Surviving Jack, Rake
Picked Up: Dramas – Backstrom, Empire, Gotham, Hieroglyph, Red Band Society
Comedies – Last Man On Earth, Mulaney, Weird Loners

Comments: Five hours of Dramas, three half-hours of Comedies. All of the professional TV critics are mourning the loss of Enlisted but I never saw the show (because the premise sounded dumb to me) so I can’t comment. I really liked Almost Human, the “cop and robot” buddy show set in a not totally dystopian future. It wasn’t great but I liked it better than THe Following. So sue me.

NBC

Cancellations: Ironside, Sean Saves The World, Welcome To The Family, The Michael J. Fox Show, Believe, Community, Crisis, Dracula, Revolution, Growing Up Fisher
Status Unknown: Parenthood
Picked Up: Dramas – Allegiance, Constantine, Emerald City, The Mysteries of Laura, Odyssey, Shades Of Blue, State of Affairs
Comedies – A to Z, Bad Judge, Marry Me, Mission Control, Mr. Robinson, One Big Happy, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Comments: Seven hours of Dramas, seven half-hours of Comedy. It is a mark of how far NBC has fallen that I can’t think of one show that they cancelled that I am really going to miss. I know the professional critics and a devoted fan base loved Community with a love that burned like the Sun, but I never watched it, being totally turned off by the presence of Chevy Chase. BTW, there apparently hasn't been a decision on Parenthood because of negotiations over the number of episodes stars of the show will appear in. The network weasels want the leads to do nine episodes of the total of thirteen planned, and they're balking at that idea
Update: While the renewal of Parenthood has not been announced officially, the cast have apparently agreed to a deal which would see them each participate in a reduced number of episodes within a 13 episode season, thus allowing the series to have a resolution.

The CW
Cancellations: Nikita, The Carrie Diaries, The Tomorrow People, Star Crossed
Picked Up: The Flash, iZombie, Jane The Virgin, The Messengers

Comments: Four hours of new series, all Dramas. Yawn. The only show I watch on The CW is Arrow. I suppose I’m sort of surprised that a show about 16th century royalty and religious wars (Reign) got renewed, and I suppose that The 100 is the sort of show I generally like but really, I’ve got nothing.

The First Series Cancelled Is…

The ironically named Lucky 7 after two episodes. The second episode of the ABC Tuesday night drama had a 0.7 rating in the 18-49 demographic (which we know are the only people whose buying habits count).

The show had ton of problems. It was part of an all-new Tuesday line-up and aired an hour after the heavily touted blockbuster Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The lead-in for Lucky 7 was the new comedy Trophy Wife. Neither Trophy Wife nor Lucky 7 were given a heavy promotional push by the network before the start of the season. It had a cast of unknows.

There’s one other thing, and I’m not sure it’s accurate but I think it leads into something that is accurate. More than one writer has claimed that people don’t like shows about lottery winners. Of course it’s not exactly easy to find shows in the past about lottery winners, but let’s let that slide.A bigger problem for the show as far as I can see is that it’s an ensemble drama where we have very little investment in what the characters are doing. There is a very long history of shows with that sort of premise dying quickly on the vine. Successful ensemble dramas – shows like Lost or The West Wing grab you with dramatic stories and make you want to be involved with the characters. It isn’t easy to do; for all the Losts and West Wings there are shows like Reunion, Six Degrees Of Separation, and The Nine that are dismal failures. An ensemble drama can work if it delivers a cohesive group dynamic with people we like and can identify with quickly, and dramatic situations that people can relate to. Lucky 7 clearly didn’t do this.

ABC’s immediate plan for the time slot is to have reruns of their hit Thursday night series Scandal fill the slot, opposite new episodes of Person of Interest on CBS and Chicago Fire on NBC.

Imitation Cheese

There are some shows where you can just picture the “elevator pitch” made to the network. Take the new ABC reality competition series The Taste for example. I imagine the elevator pitch went something like this:

Producer type: I’ve got a great idea for a new reality-competition series.
Programming Executive type: Give me the elevator pitch and remember my office is on the third floor.
Producer type: It’s exactly like The Voice except – and this is going to blow you away – instead of singers judging and mentoring singers we get chefs to judge and mentor cooks.
Programming Executive type: My God that is BRILLIANT!!!! Come to my office immediately and I will throw huge amounts of money at you to make it and then we’ll work out the details.

I’m pretty sure it went like that because The Taste is exactly that, a blatant rip-off of The Voice where four professionals in the food industry – Chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain, Chef Ludo Lefebvre, TV food goddess Nigella Lawson, and Chef and restaurateur Brian Malarkey – do blind tastings of a spoon-sized portion of a cook’s food.

The premiere of the show, which aired Tuesday January 22nd, was one of two audition shows that are being done for the series, but the principle behind it becomes very clear very fast. Each of the four judges will pick four of the cooks who auditioned for the show (and presumably made it past some sort of screening process). They will then mentor and advise their team of four in how to prepare food, probably involving a different ingredient or style each week. Then, after the training sessions the contestants will cook their food which will be presented to the judge/mentors in random order. They’ll then decide which one or ones they like the least and eliminate them. They make a big point of the notion that because this is a blind tasting it is possible that they could vote to eliminate one of their own team members.

So far I’ve only seen the first, two hour, audition episode of this show. It gave us the usual assortment of characters; arrogant professionals, people looking to step up their reputations to a higher level by appearing on TV, home cooks with varying levels of skills, the plucky underdog who cooks like a dream, and of course the idiots who inform us that, “I quit my job to do this…” which in most cases on this show and just about every other show of this type is a kiss of death because you ain’t going to go any further than the audition. Everyone has a story, like the guy who works in a sewage treatment plant (he didn’t get on the show), the self-described tattooed Asian lesbian who is the personal chef to Charlie Sheen and who actually said when she was picked to be one of the final 16, “Winning!” Two of my favourites – for entirely different reasons (and in the case of this show, favourite is a relative term for reasons that will become obvious if they haven’t already) – who went through to the mentoring period are an arrogant and prickly older woman who took offense to one of the other contestants asking her a question about what she was doing (she was picked by Bourdain), and a young home cook from Mississippi who is the very definition of “plucky underdog. She lives in a mobile home with a stove that consistently sets off the smoke detector but somehow managed to produce a flourless chocolate cake and a pistachio brittle that blew all four judges away although only Nigella decided to pick her for her team. I can already picture both of them in the final episode.

The Taste isn’t good TV. It’s a lazy concept model based on the popularity of TV cooking competitions on channels like The Food Network or like Hell’s Kitchen and Masterchef, and of course the blind judging element of The Voice. They seem to be missing the point however. The shows on The Food Network are on a specialty network and the competitions have their own dynamic suited to the channel. Hell’s Kitchen survives not because of the cooking but because of the combative nature of the show’s contestants as well as it’s charismatic host and judge, Gordon Ramsay. Masterchef has some of those qualities – in smaller doses – but also has the personalities of the contestants. So far at least The Taste has none of the qualities that elevates those other shows. Even the raves and the snarky remarks by the judges fail to give this show a zip or a personality.

From my perspective The Taste is both a pale imitation of a fairly original concept and more than a bit cheesy in it’s execution. And I might have described it as the worst reality show to debut in the second half of the 2012-13 TV season except for one thing: the series that will follow The Taste is Celebrity Diving. Shoot me now!

Two For One

Two for one is an offer you usually can’t pass up in a store, but when it comes to TV reviews – at least from me – it signifies that all or part of the deal is something you can pass up. You can tell because I’m not spending a lot of time on either show. On Monday night FOX and NVC debuted two summer shows. One is “original” and controversial, and one basically recycles another show that is already on the same network in a different setting. I really didn’t like one but could just about tolerate the other. Neither one is a bad as The Glass House, but that’s not saying a whole hell of a lot.

Let’s start with FOX, and it’s new show Hotel Hell. It’s the recycled one. It takes everything about Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares – including Gordon Ramsay – and moves it to hotels with problems. While for most people this may have been the summer of the London Olympics, or the summer of the great heat wave, or the summer of the drought, for FOX this has been the Summer of Ramsay, since this is third Gordon Ramsay series of the summer, joining Hell’s Kitchen and Master Chef. Shows from Ramsay’s production company, One Potato Two Potato, occupy almost a third of FOX’s primetime line-up this summer.

How much of a copy of Kitchen Nightmares is Hotel Hell? Probably as close as if Xerox had done it. Honestly, I think that there are more differences between X-Factor and American Idol than there are between these two shows. In Kitchen Nightmares Ramsay goes to a restaurant, samples the substandard product, yells and swears at the usually delusional owner and frequently at the staff, and over the course of a week (condensed into an hour on TV) sets the place to rights and walks away feeling it’s a job well done. The fact that a fairly large number of the restaurants that Ramsay has worked with go broke generally isn’t mentioned unless they’ve gone out of business because they reverted to their old habits and ignored all the improvements that Gordon put in place.

Hotel Hell is pretty much the same thing except maybe spread over two hours instead of one. In the debut episode, Gordon checks into the Juniper Hill Inn in Vermont. Which isn’t actually easy because the obvious front entrance is blocked off – something to do with snow load according to the owner. When Ramsay finally does get in he finds a place stuffed with antiques and art work. He’s taken to a beautiful room…that stinks of backed up sewage, and the owner seems surprised when he asks for a different room. Ramsay then goes down for lunch, only to discover that the chef doesn’t serve lunch. But Gordon prevails and gets a lunch from the dinner menu including a macadamia encrusted rack of lamb that’s virtually raw. In fact the desert is the only thing that’s good, and that’s provided by one of the hotel’s suppliers. There are no prices on the menu except for a note that there is a $15 extra charge for the lamb. Ramsay’s total bill would come to $74 for the meal.

During the course of lunch Ramsay discovers that his server, a 70 year-old woman with a crush on Gordon, he discovers that she has had to argue with the owner to get paid regularly. A survey of most of the staff, including the chef, indicates that none of them have been paid regularly and that where wages are edging close to slave wages; the chef’s salary amounts to about $21,000 a year, and the server seems to paid around $7,000 a year, and their pays is usually days and sometimes weeks late. Where I live would be grounds for a complaint to the Labour Relations Board, but this is Vermont not Saskatchewan. The previous chef, who Ramsay interviews but absolutely refuses to set foot in the Inn even after Ramsay gets finished with it, used to buy produce using her own credit cards and then have to fight the owner to get payment. The owner and his partner (Business and Life) don’t live in the hotel but in a motor home – sorry a motor coach (the owner actually corrects Ramsay on that) – parked next to the hotel, and as a result are virtually unreachable either by staff or by customers. When the owner and his partner are reachable they come across as elitist snobs who regard their staff as beneath them.

But perhaps the biggest surprise comes from the Inn’s estate manager who take Ramsay on a tour of the places the owner probably didn’t want Ramsay to see. There’s the now unused office which looks like a tornado of trash had hit it. There’s the basement which is filled with unused chairs. And there are four storage containers stuffed with antiques and furnishings. While the Inn is being run off of the partner’s salary and savings (and now the partner has lost his job) the owner has tied his savings up in “art”; the stuff in the basement and storage containers which the estate manager estimates is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The episode ends after a disastrous dinner service in the restaurant where the owner and his partner insist on serving all of the guests at once thereby swamping the kitchen and drinks orders don’t get written down so the guests don’t all pay. It’s a disaster and Ramsay tells the owners so in his usual manner.

NBC had the controversial new reality-competition series Stars Earn Stripes, and for once a reality show featuring a member of the Palin clan (in this case Sarah’s husband Todd Palin billed here as “four time Iron Dog winner” – the Iron Dog is a 1,000 mile snowmobile race) is not controversial because a member of the Palin clan is in it. No, in this case the controversy started when Sharon Osborne announced that she was quitting as a judge on America’s Got Talent because, she claimed, NBC discriminated against her son Jack because of his recent diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. Jack Osborne was on the shortlist of people who could be on the show but was rejected after his diagnosis, supposedly because of a medical exam for the show. NBC has denied discrimination. The more major controversy took the form of an open letter from nine Nobel Peace Prize recipients including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jodi Williams (the only American of the nine) which demanded that NBC not air the show because, “It is our belief that this program pays homage to no one anywhere and continues and expands on an inglorious tradition of glorifying war and armed violence. Real war is down in the dirt deadly. People — military and civilians — die in ways that are anything but entertaining.” Mind you, this was while none of them had even seen an episode of the show.

The show is the product of a collaboration between Dick Wolf (the Law & Order franchise and this fall’s Chicago Fire) and Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor and The Apprentice (and a number of less successful reality-competition series). The show is hosted by former Dancing With The Stars host Samantha Harris, and former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark. In introducing the show Clark states, “I'm doing this series for one reason to introduce you, the American people, to the individuals that sacrifice so much for all of us.” You will excuse me for being cynical but the fact is that there are far better ways of doing that.

The show features eight celebrities (five men and three women) who are participating for a military or police related charity. They are paired up with eight special forces or law enforcement professionals, known on the show as “operatives.” The teams are:

• Actor Dean Cain with Navy Seal sniper Chris Kyle
• Skier Picabo Street with Navy Seal Brent Gleason
• “Outdoorsman” Todd Palin with former Marine and current New York MTA police officer J.W. Cortes
• Singer/ Actor Nick Lachey with SWAT Commander Tom Stroup
• Former WWE ”Diva” Eve Torres with Green Beret Grady Powell
• Biggest Loser trainer Dolvett Quince with Marine Andrew McLaren
• Former Boxer Laila Ali with Navy Corpsman Talon Smith
• Action star Terry Crews with Delta Force soldier Dale Comstock

The celebrities meet up with their operatives at a training camp where they will learn about the equipment they’ll be using in a specific “mission” and learn a few techniques, like how to crawl under barbed wire or how to breach a door using a sledge hammer. Then they meet with General Clark in the “command center” to get their mission. In the first mission is called “Amphibious Landing.” The celebrities and their operatives are split into four teams of four for this mission. They have to drop from a helicopter into a lake then swim to a Zodiac inflatable boat. Once aboard the boat they are landed on the beach where they have to avoid a “minefield” and make it to some oil drums. At the oil drums the celebrities first have to use a grenade launcher to destroy a guard tower, and then use their light machine gun and rifle to hit six targets, some man shaped and others circle targets. Once those targets are hit the “operatives each have to hit three “transmitters” each (red light bulbs on top of two electrical cabinets. Once that’s done the teams have to crawl under a barbed wire entanglement and recover a box marked “Ammo” from along the beach. The box must be carried to a shed where the team have to breach the door and put the box inside along with a charge of C4 explosives. Then they are extracted by helicopter, blowing the C4 remotely once they are clear. The two celebrities on the lowest scoring team (aka the slowest team in this case) face off on a “shoot-off” with the slowest person there going home, while the remainder earn a “stripe” and money for their charity.

Or at least that was how it was supposed to go. I won’t go into detail about the competition except to mention that two of the celebrities – Dolvett Quince (teamed with Todd Palin for this mission) and Terry Crews (teamed with Picabo Street) were unable to make it to the Zodiac and had to be rescued with a jet ski. Even though their team mates were able to complete the mission (and I have to say that Todd Palin was sort of impressive carrying the “Ammo” crate along the beach, which was really a mud flat) General Clark decided that  it was only fair that Quince and Crews face each other in the elimination round.

The Elimination was a race between the two men. They first had to breach a door and shoot out six targets, some of which were moving. Quince was slightly ahead after this part of the course. They then moved on to a firing range with targets at various ranges including a large moving target at the far end of the range that blew up when hit properly. Quince finished this part of the race quickly and built up a lead while Crews seemed to be hitting the big target but nothing was happening It took him a long time to realise than instead of firing at the centre mass of the target (as police officers and soldiers are generally taught to do) he needed to go for a head shot for the target to explode. Once he figured this out he moved on to the final part of the race, a sniper test. This was the only part of the course that the “operatives” were able to help their celebrities on, serving as spotters as they shot. The target was a plastic strip which joined two pieces of cable together. At the bottom of the cable was a box that would blow up when it hit the ground. Although Quince had a big lead when he moved to the sniper test he simply could not zero in on the plastic strip. Crews settled in and (apparently) hit his strip with a single shot.Crews won his stripe while Quince was eliminated with some money for his charity, Got Your 6 an entertainment industry campaign that “will help create a new conversation in America, one where veterans and military families are perceived as both leaders and civic assets.”

The celebrities participating in Stars Earn Stripes spend a lot of the show talking about how tough the show is physically (undoubtedly) and how it gives them a idea of what the real life fighting men go through (hardly). In response to the letter from the Nobel Laureates Dean Cain has said, “This whole show is a love song to our men and women in uniform ... We're not trying to glorify war, we're glorifying service.” And while Cain may think it is true, it’s a hard idea to swallow. What the show is depicting isn’t the experience of the average soldier serving in Kandahar  Province. The celebrities aren’t undergoing the experience of an attack by a suicide bomber or an IED exploding as they are driving along a seemingly peaceful road. They don’t find themselves suddenly under attack with little warning or having to take a fortified farmhouse that may or may not be booby trapped. The show is putting the celebrities through a variety of probably simplified versions of special forces training exercises. The celebrities do find themselves under fire and are using real bullets, but whoever is shooting those bullets and setting off those explosions is making a very conscious effort to not hit anything or anyone. Not like the real lives of American servicemen in combat at all.

So there we have it; two new reality shows, one of them a competition (the form I prefer) and the one I like better….is Hotel Hell. Yes, the show is a retread of another – better – show and yes the concept doesn’t tread far from the format of the original, but there is something very reassuring about listening to Gordon Ramsay yelling at people, particularly people who absolutely deserve to be yelled at (like the owner and his partner at the Juniper Hill Inn). One could almost call it satisfying. And that one quality alone, that it satisfies a certain desire to see people who provide bad service yelled at by a person like Ramsay who makes an art-form puts Hotel Hell miles ahead of Stars Earn Stripes.

When it comes down to it, after all of the self justifying statements by the participants, including Wesley Clark’s statement at the beginning, this show isn’t about introducing “you, the American people, to the individuals that sacrifice so much for all of us.” The whole show has the quality of a video game like Call Of Duty, rather than the real life of most of the people in anybody’s military, be it American, Canadian, or British. The “missions” may be adapted from real training missions for special forces, but the way they are presented makes them feel just as real as a mission in a video game, which is to say not real at all. With all due respect to Desmond Tutu and the other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates who signed the open letter to NBC, this show doesn’t glorify war by making it a game. Nor is it a “love song” or a love letter to the men and women in uniform. It is a blatant effort to shoot off guns and blow things up for the entertainment of the viewers because of course TV viewers love to see things blow up. I’m most disappointed not with the celebrities who participated in the show or with NBC for airing it or even with Mark Burnett for producing it (although come on Mark, you could have worked harder to get another season of Expedition Impossible on the air; that was a show that I liked). No, I am most disappointed with General Clark for participating in this mess and for trying to justify it. It is beneath what I expect of him, and I can only hope that the paycheque that he got for doing the show was worth the shot to his reputation. This show stinks and my advise to you next week is to watch the combination of Hell’s Kitchen and Hotel Hell instead. Or read a book.

People Who Live In A Glass House... Shouldn’t

Imitation is the sincerest form of Television. – Fred Allen

CBS went to court to try to prevent ABC from airing their new series The Glass House. They claimed that the show was a blatant copy of their network’s summer series Big Brother to the point where it constituted copyright infringement and “misappropriation of trade secrets.” I can’t speak to the question of “misappropriation of trade secrets,” but base on what I saw on Monday night I would suggest that it comes awfully close to copyright infringement if it doesn’t cross the line.

The Glass House features fourteen players of various ages, occupations, sexual orientations and attitudes towards the game and how it should be played. On one hand there’s Apollo, a poet, who proposes to make no alliances but rather to decide who he’s going to vote for based on having people pick cards. On the opposite side is the exceptionally obnoxious Alex – or as he calls himself at least twice in the first episode “primetime 99 Alex Stein” – who asks America if he should become “the most epic villain in the history of reality TV” but who seems to be getting a good start on that project even before America tells him “Yes!”

Audience participation is a big part of this show, far bigger than on most seasons of the American version of Big Brother after the first season. The home audience votes or has input on virtually every aspect of the game. In the first episode the audience (entirely made up of people who watched the show’s live feeds online since the episode was recorded) voted on which “guests” would occupy some of the rooms for the week – they put the oldest and youngest women in the “Enemies” room. The viewers decided on what sort of party the “guests” would have (Pool Party beat Pajama Party), the kind of drinks they’d have, and the party favours they’d receive (feather boas and Mardi Gras beads). The home audience even decided on the party game the people inside would play.

The audience also decided how the players would be split into teams for the competition which was the main feature of the week. Given a choice between “Men vs. Women,” “Older vs. Younger,” and “East vs. West,” the viewers chose “East vs. West.” One of the players, Jacob who lives in Oregon, didn’t know whether he lived in the East or the West. The only choices left to the players was who would be their team captains for the competition. Being a team captain puts the person selected (or volunteering) in considerable danger. Two members of the losing team are placed in “Limbo” – sequestered from the other players in the game but not out of the game. One of the players sent to limbo will be the losing team captain, while the other will be a member of the losing team voted for by all of the players, both from the winning and the losing team. Jacob, the guy from Oregon who doesn’t know that he’s from the West volunteers to lead the Western team, while the Eastern team is led by Jeffrey, a self-proclaimed fat Gay guy working as a receptionist in Brooklyn, who also volunteered to be team captain.

The first competition is a relatively simple puzzle. Names of members of the opposing team were on the left side of a board, and some attribute or activity that they participate in was on the right side. Separating the two sides was a four-by-four grid of squares. The squares were in fact the faces of a three sided object (there couldn’t be more than three sides or they wouldn’t have turned properly in the space allotted to them. Four team members were placed on lifts controlled from a panel behind them. Two of the remaining players operated the lifts following the instructions of the team captain. Once the competition started the players would flip the squares revealing coloured lines. The lines connected the names to the attributes. The clock would stop when when the correct people were connected by a coloured line to the correct attribute.

As I’ve said this is a relatively simple puzzle if you ignore the attributes and concentrate on getting the lines within the grid of squares to connect to each other. The West team were the first to tackle the puzzle and did exactly what they shouldn’t have done. They tried to guess which person had which attribute and tried to find lines which connect the person to the attribute that they expected them to have. It took them over seven and a half minutes to complete the puzzle correctly. The East team took the correct approach, turning the outer sets of squares – the ones by the names and the attributes – and then finding the correct paths in the middle group of squares. It took them just over three and a half minutes. The West team lost and Jacob was automatically placed in Limbo.

What remained was for the players to select the other player to go into Limbo. Throughout the time that they had been in the Glass House, Alex had been making himself the most hated person in the house. He strutted around the house in his underwear, pretending to hump Andrea, a married Mormon woman with three kids, denigrated Joy – a nurse who has also appeared in Playboy several times – as a stripper and sex worker whose opinion doesn’t matter because of that, and attacked cocktail waitress Erica for being fat. It was all part of his effort to be “the most epic villain in the history of reality TV,” but the other great reality TV villains such as Dr. Will and Evel Dick on Big Brother and Russel Hantz on Survivor had a greater plan behind their “villainy” (and in the cases of Will and Dick, it was a successful plan in that they won their seasons of Big Brother). Alex’s “plan” was to be “evil” (or rather hateful and obnoxious) for no other reason than to be evil and obnoxious. It certainly won him few friends and allies in the house. While Apollo stuck with his “plan” to vote for the person who picked a specific card, and another vote went a different way, pretty much everyone voted to send Alex to Limbo. And while Jacob quit the show shortly after he went into Limbo that doesn’t mean that Alex is safe; it is left up to the viewers to decide if Alex will be going back into the Glass House.

So is The Glasshouse guilty of copyright infringement and “misappropriation of trade secrets?” Well I can’t speak to the latter – reportedly the “misappropriation of trade secrets” included someone from ABC “acquiring” the CBS policy handbook for the show – but speaking as someone who isn’t a lawyer (and doesn’t play one on TV) and who isn’t certain as to what constitutes copyright infringement legally, I have to say that it certainly feels close enough to what Big Brother is like – and of almost equal importance what the international versions of Big Brother produced by Endemol are like – for it to be almost the same show. The basis of both shows is a “houseful of people living their lives under a ‘microscope’ with no privacy”, constantly under video and audio observation (and they know it). There are differences from the American version of Big Brother: there is no “Head Of Household” and the nomination ceremony is significantly different from the current American version of the show – they use a video screen and what appears to be a variation on the XBox 360’s Kinect movement system  for selection of one of the people to go into Limbo – and of course the evicted “guests” are decided by the votes of the audience rather than the fellow competitors. Then there’s the idea that the actions of the players are controlled by the audience. The problem for me is that virtually everything that sets the show apart from Big Brother is stuff that the American version of the show has done in the past, mostly in a limited manner, and/or is stuff that is commonly done in the international versions of Big Brother. The CBS show has had contestants “remotely controlled” by the audience in that past; in one case they had an “America’s Player” was controlled by the audience right up until the moment he was evicted. Big Brother routinely has audience votes on punishment foods and a variety of other conditions within the house. And while they no longer do it, in the first season of Big Brother the houseguests nominated people for eviction but it was the audience that decided by their votes who would be evicted. It didn’t work in the first American season which is why the format of the show was changed to make the evictions more Survivor-like. It is however very similar to the way that every other entry in the international Big Brother franchise operates. On the face of it I’d say that CBS has a strong case that the similarities between The Glasshouse and Big Brother are close enough to constitute copyright infringement.

For me the big question is whether The Glasshouse is good TV and as far as I’m concerned the answer is that it is pretty awful TV. The show comes across as almost an afterthought; while most shows, including Big Brother, have online components as an adjunct, The Glasshouse feels as though the TV show is less important than the online component. The show’s live feeds from within the house are the primary content while the TV show is merely a summary of what people saw there over the week. The one thing that ABC didn’t steal from Big Brother was multiple episodes each week (three episodes in most weeks for Big Brother including one live episode). For a show like this multiple episodes are necessary for those of us who don’t watch the live feeds obsessively (in other words those of us who have lives) multiple episodes in a week help viewers to develop a connection or empathy – or hatred – for the people on the show. It also helps to enhance the flow of the show allowing storylines to be picked out an developed. After one episode of The Glasshouse I really don’t feel any connection to people on the show. My “hatred” for Alex is based entirely on his over-the-top “villainous” behaviour (or if you prefer his general “douchebaggery”), not because I’ve seen his behaviour develop over any period of time. ABC seems to care less about their TV audience than their online audience (one sign: the contestant bios list how many Facebook Friends each player has). If you watch the show’s online components on a regular basis maybe you develop this sort of flow but from a TV point of view it that contributes nothing. The sense of dramatic flow that even shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race are able to develop in an episode was totally missing from the first episode of The Glasshouse. The web content isn’t being seen by most of the people who are the potential audience for the TV show. And since I happen to be writing about the TV show (and okay I admit it, because I had such a hard time trying to use the online content – maybe because I’m Canadian) my assessment is that The Glasshouse is pretty abominable TV.

ABC’s 2012-13 Season

ABC announced their new line-up for the 2012-13 season on Tuesday morning. The network made a limited number of cancellations – though it’s worth noting that four of them came from two timeslots (Sunday’s third hour and Thursday’s first hour) – and a small number of new shows. In fact the network has as many new shows waiting for mid-season as they do for the start of the year (five each – three dramas and two comedies). The network is taking a couple of risks – which is admirable – but whether that risk-taking will pay off is the big question.

Cancelled: Charlie’s Angels, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, GCB, Man Up, Missing, Pan Am, The River, Work It, Cougar Town (moving to TBS)

Moved: Revenge, Last Man Standing, Happy Endings, Dancing With The Stars Results

Renewed: Dancing With The Stars, Castle, Happy Endings, Don’t Trust The B---- In Apartment 23, Private Practice, Suburgatory, Modern Family, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Shark Tank, Primetime: What Would You Do?, 20/20, America’s Funniest Videos, Once Upon A Time

New: The Neighbors, Nashville, Last Resort, Malibu Country, 666 Park Avenue

Held Until Mid Season: Body Of Proof, Wife Swap, Mistresses, Red Widow, Zero Hour, How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life), The Family Tools

Complete Schedule (All times are Eastern; New shows in capitals)

Monday
8:00-10:00 p.m.: Dancing With The Stars
10:00-11:00 p.m.: Castle

Tuesday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: Dancing With The Stars Results (New Time)
9:00-9:30 p.m.: Happy Endings (New Day)
9:30-10:00 p.m.: Don’t Trust The B---- in Apartment 23 (New Day)
10:00-11:00 p.m.: Private Practice

Wednesday
8:00-8:30 p.m.: The Middle
8:30-9:00 p.m.: Suburgatory
9:00-9:30: Modern Family
9:30-10:00 p.m.: THE NEIGHBORS
10:00-11:00 p.m.: NASHVILLE

Thursday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: LAST RESORT
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Grey’s Anatomy
10:00-11:00 p.m.: Scandal

Friday (until November)
8:00-9:00 p.m.: Shark Tank
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Primetime: What Would You Do?
10:00-11:00 p.m.: 20/20

Friday (starting in November)
8:00-8:30 p.m.: Last Man Standing (New Day)
8:30-9:00 p.m.: MALIBU COUNTRY
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Shark Tank
10:00-11:00 p.m.: Primetime: What Would You Do?

Sunday
7:00-8:00 p.m.: America’s Funniest Videos
8:00-9:00 p.m.: Once Upon A Time
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Revenge (New Day)
10:00-11:00 p.m.: 666 PARK AVENUE

The Neighbors is set in the gated community of Hidden Hills, New Jersey. Townhouses in the exclusive development with its own golf course haven`t come on the market for ten years. When an opportunity to buy in the community comes up, the Weavers – Marty (Lenny Venito), Debbie (Jami Gertz) and their three kids – buy in. Things seem a bit odd at first. For one thing all of the other people in the neighbourhood have the same names as famous athletes, like Reggie Jackson (Tim Jo), Jackie Joiner-Kersee (Toks Olagundoye), Dick Butkis (Ian Patrick), and Larry Bird (Simon Templeman). At their first dinner with the neighbours, Marty and Debbie discover that all of their neighbours are actually aliens from the planet Zabvron, where people gain nourishment through their eyes by reading books, cry green goo from their ears, and where men have the babies. The Zabvronians have been on Earth for ten years waiting for instructions from their home world, but Marty and Debbie are the only actual humans that they’ve ever met.

Nashville stars Connie Britton as Rayna James, a country music legend whose career is starting to slip. Her record label thinks that a tour as an opening act for up and coming star Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettierre) will help boost her career. The problem is that Juliette can’t wait to grab the spotlight from Rayna. Juliette is a disrespectful, untalented vixen and Rayna soon finds herself in a power struggle with the younger woman. Maybe the undiscovered talent of songwriter Scarlett O’Connor (Clare Bowen) will help Rayna resurrect her career. Adding to the tension is Rayna’s wealthy and powerful father Lamar Hampton (Powers Booth) who, although he is estranged from Rayna is still a powerful figure in her life, particularly when he schemes to get Rayna’s husband Teddy (Eric Close) to run for Mayor of Nashville.

The Last Resort starts as a taut military thriller. 500 feet under the surface of the ocean the ballistic missile submarine USS Colorado is operating properly when a message comes to them on a radio channel designed to be used only if the United States has been destroyed in a nuclear war. Their orders are to launch the sub’s missiles against Pakistan. When the Colorado’s commander, Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher) seeks confirmation of the order from the White House he is removed from command. When his executive officer, Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman) also seeks confirmation the submarine is attacked. Damaged and declared rogue by their own country Chaplin, Kendal and the men and women of USS Colorado seek refuge on an exotic island where they will find romance and the chance for a new life even as they seek to clear their names and return home. Also stars Daisy Betts, Dichen Lachman, Daniel Lissing, Sahr Ngaujah, Camille de Pasis, Autumn Reeser, and Jessy Schram. Robert Patrick also appears in a recurring guest star role.

Malibu Country marks the return of Reba McIntyre to weekly television playing Reba Gallagher. When Reba discovers that here country singer husband Bobby (Jeffrey Nordling) has been messing around on her, she gets a divorce and movers her two children and her sharp-tongued mother Lillie May (Lilly Tomlin) to a home in Malibu – just about the only asset they have left. Despite gaining a new friend named Kim (Sara Rue) and her son Sage, Reba feels out of place in Southern California. Nevertheless she sets out to revive the musical career she gave up when she married Bobby, with the help of her new manager Geoffrey (Jai Rodriguez).

666 Park Avenue is a new drama with supernatural overtones. For residents at “The Drake,” all of their ambitions and desires will be fulfilled, courtesy of the building’s mysterious owner Gavin Doran (Terry O’Quinn). Everything has a price of course, and the people living at the ominous address of 666 Park Avenue are involved in a Faustian contract. This includes the young midwestern couple, Jane Van Veen (Rachel Taylor) and Henry Martin (Dave Annable) who are hired to manage the historic building. They not only fall under the machinations of Gavin and his mysterious wife Olivia (Vanessa Williams) but begin to discover the shadowy supernatural forces within the building that imprison and endanger the lives of the residents of The Drake.

Mistresses, based on the British series of the same name, is the story of four sexy and sassy girlfriends who are on their own path to self-discovery. Alyssa Milano plays Savi, a successful career woman who is looking forward to make partner at her law firm, and to starting a family with her husband Harry (Brett Tucker). Her younger sister Josselyn (Jes Macallan) is totally different; a single woman partying, serial dating and leaning on her big sister for support. Their common friend April (Rochelle Yates) is a recent widow with two children trying to move forward and rebuild her life. Finally there’s Karen (Yunjin Kim) a successful therapist who reconnects with her three old friends after a complicated relationship with a patient goes too deep.

The brutal murder of Marta Walraven’s (Radha Mitchell) husband is the starting point for new drama Red Widow. Stay at home mom Marta’s first instinct is to protect her three young children but for Marta this has a different meaning from what it might have for others. Her husband’s business partners – Marta’s scheming and untrustworthy brother Irwin Petrova (Wil Traval) and Mike Tomlin (Lee Tergesen) – were involved in a drug deal with other mobsters and Marta’s husband paid the ultimate price. The world of mobsters is hardly new terrain for Marta. Her father Andrei Petrova (Rade Sherbedzija) and his loyal bodyguard Luther (Luke Goss) are gangsters too. Marta and her sister Kat (Jamie Ray Newman) always wanted a life without the danger and fear, and it was something that Marta thought she had before her husband died. Now she’s determined to take on both the Mob and the FBI to dig her way out of the underworld,

In Zero Hour Anthony Edwards plays Hank Galliston, the publisher of “The Modern Skeptic”. Hank has spent his career debunking myths and solving conspiracies. His motto has always been “logic is the compass,” but when his beautiful wife Laila (Jacinda Barrett) is abducted from her antique clock shop, Hank is embroiled in a mystery that spans around the world and through the centuries. Aided by two young associates – Rachel (Addison Timlin) and Arron (Scott Michael Foster) – and sexy FBI agent Becca Riley (Carmen Ejogo) Hank not only has to unravel the clues but also to keep the answers from falling into the hands of the man they call “White Vincent” (Michael Nyqvist) in order to find his wife and save humanity.

How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life) is a new comedy starring Sarah Chalke. Polly (Chalke) is a single mom whose been divorced for a year. The change in her circumstances, combined with the current economy forces her to take her daughter Natalie (Rachel Eggleston) and move back in with her eccentric parents Elaine (Elizabeth Perkins) and Max (Brad Garrett). Polly and her parents are totally different in surprising ways. Polly is too uptight; her parents are too laid back. Polly is ultra-conservative when it comes to sex; her parents are still sexually adventurous. But with some help from her friends, including her best friend Gregg (Orlando Jones), her ex-husband Julian (Jon Dore) and her assistant Jenn (Rebecca Delgado Smith) Polly sets out to get a life, starting with a social life.

When Tony Shea (J.K. Simmons) has a heart attack he’s forced to turn over the keys to he beloved handyman business to his son Jack (Kyle Bornheimer). That’s the starting point for The Family Tools. The problem (of course) is that while Jack is enthusiastic and determined to make his father proud, his past career efforts have been less than successful. Needless to say, everyone expects him to fail, including his father’s rebellious troublemaking assistant Darren (Edi Gathegi) and Darren’s flirtatious sister Liz (Danielle Nicollet) who works at the local hardware store. In Jack’s corner are his Aunt Terry (Leah Remini) and his oddball cousin Mason (Johnny Pemberton).

Comments
ABC has some problems which they need to address. Some of them are fairly obvious. Their hold on the third hour of Sunday night has been tenuous since they folded Brothers And Sisters, with Pan Am, GCB both dying in the time slot. The first hour of Thursday night has been a problem even longer; the last time they had a show last even a full season in the timeslot was…well actually I’m not sure when they had a show run more than a season in that timeslot. In the past three years the time was held by Flash Forward, The Deep End, My Generation, Charlie’s Angels, and Missing. This past cycle of Dancing With The Stars has seen some erosion in the ratings thanks to going up against The Voice. Then too, some of their existing shows are aging, so while things are not as dire for ABC as they are for NBC, I think they do have concerns.

Looking at the new shows that ABC is bringing out, I’m not sure that they’ve really got a handle on their problems. Last Resort looks like it has a lot of action – at least in what I suspect will be the pilot – but while the pilot is vaguely reminiscent of the theatrical thriller Crimson Tide (with Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington) the description of what comes after feels like a mix of Jericho and Lost. I’m not sure what the audience wants in the Thursday timeslot but I don’t think it’s this. And sad to say I think  As to Sunday night, I like the idea of moving Revenge to the old Desperate Housewives timeslot although I might have put it in the third hour instead. The problem for me is 666 Park Avenue. It appears to have a good cast but we’ve seen shows with this sort of supernatural aspect come and go quite rapidly in the past. It’s a risk and I’m not sure it’s one that will pay off for the network. Moving Revenge to Sunday night opens up the third hour of Wednesday night, and I think that the female oriented Nashville is going to do fine there.

I’ve got a mixed opinion on ABC’s comedies. I like the idea that they’re going to program scripted shows on Friday, vaguely reminiscent of the old TGIF shows although aimed at an older audience. I was a big fan of Reba McIntyre’s WB series – the lady has a talent for comedy – and Malibu Country sounds good to me. The Tuesday comedy Neighbors on the other hand seems just plain dumb, and reminiscent of that other great comedy success (sarcasm most assuredly on) Cavemen. People with a modicum of taste should sink this one. The Family Tools is another show which seems weak to me. I don’t thinks it will be as bad as Neighbors has the potential to be and it’s certainly not as offensive as Work It was but the description is hardly attractive. On the other hand How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life) does sound like a show with potential even if the “conservative daughter-liberal parents” thing is a bit old hat.

Finally, looking at the mid-season dramas I expect the Anthony Edwards series Zero Hour will replace Last Resort when that show falls and – despite the obvious rip-off of The DaVinci Code – I don’t think either Last Resort or Zero Hour will be renewed this time next year. Finally there’s Red Widow. I’m not really sure where this one is going to fit for the network. Is it Revenge set amongst Russian mobsters instead of rich people in the Hamptons, or are they trying to make the sort of hard hitting violent show that other networks are pushing? Whatever the case I’m not seeing it work on a network that tends toward the “light and airy.”

I applaud the efforts that ABC is making to shore up their line-up before things get significantly worse. If NBC back in the day had taken that attitude a few years ago we might not be seeing the collapse of that network and their seeming inability to get any traction when it comes to rebuilding. I’m just not certain that all of the moves that ABC is making are going to be successful. On the other hand enough of them are going to work that it won’t be a disaster.

We Don’t Deserve This

Over the years we all seen our fair share of game shows. There are the classics, like Jeopardy and Wheel Of Forturne, flashes in the pan like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, The Weakest Link, and Deal Or No Deal, and show that were – in one way or another – duds. Million Dollar Money Drop, Show Me The Money (starring William Shatner), and of course Downfall (the one where if you don’t answer the questions in time your prizes – and in some circumstances your friend, and you – get dropped off a ten story building). In my opinion the new ABC series, You Deserve It, which debuted on Monday following a one hour episode of Dancing With The Stars, falls into the dud category.

The hook for You Deserve It (because every good game show needs a hook whether it’s answering in the form of a question or dropping the prizes off the side of a building) is that the players aren’t actually playing for themselves but for some person – or I suppose some organization though that isn’t clear – that the player thinks “deserves” the money. In the series premiere the woman who was playing the game was playing to benefit her best friend since college, a widowed mother of two young children whose husband drowned while diving. The woman was faced with bills that needed to be paid particularly health insurance (I’d like to point out that if she were Canadian she wouldn’t have to worry about that). The beneficiary of the game – who doesn’t know that she’s the beneficiary – is sequestered (in this case she and her kids went, or were taken, to a movie).

The show opens with host Chris Harrison (better known as the host of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette) introducing the player of the game and showing a tear-jerking piece about what makes the beneficiary deserving. Then the player, who is accompanied by some of the people who appeared in the introductory piece starts to play the game. I should mention here that the people who are with the player play absolutely no part in the actual play of the game. They’re entirely there for moral support.

The gameplay itself is pretty basic. The game has five rounds of increasing value: $10,000, $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 and $250,000. There are three types of questions: Who, What, and Where. In each round the player has to identify the person, place or thing to win money. If they give the wrong answer they don’t get money for that round but do carry on to the next round. The player is given one “Free” clue. There are nine other clues available but each clue has a price. There are nine prices for clues, which are randomly assigned to numbers from 1 to 9. Each time a player decides to buy a clue after the “Free Clue” (which is so general as to be virtually useless; in one case the Free Clue was “White Collar” from which the player was supposed to deduce “Santa Claus”) they give a number. The value that has been assigned to that number is then deducted from the prize that the player is able to win. So, for example in the $250,000 round, if the player picks “8” first and “8” has a dollar value of $75,000, the maximum the Player can win is $175,000. So while theoretically the player can win $435,000 for the person they’re trying to help the reality is that they will win significantly less. The total of the nine levels is the same amount as that round’s value so if someone uses all nine clues in a round they’d get nothing. Needless to say the best policy is for the player to have an answer by the eighth clue.

Meanwhile the show’s other host, Brooke Burns (who I at least remember fondly from when she hosted Dog Eat Dog on NBC a few years back) hangs around the place where the beneficiary is being sequestered with more friends who are rooting for the player. That’s all she does for the first 50 or so minutes of the show (including commercials. In this particular episode she stands in the lobby of the theater with the beneficiary’s friends and introduces shots of the woman in the movie theater watching the movie with her kids and eating popcorn. At one point she “sneaks” up into the projection booth to do one of these intros, leading one to ask “Why?” But surely you say she comes into her own when the game ends right? Well not quite. Once the final round of the game is over and the audience knows how much has been won for the beneficiary, Burns leads the group of friends in the lobby into the theater, where the film is stopped and she reveals that they’re with You Deserve It and that there’s a special message for her from… Chris Harrison and the player projected onto the movie screen. That’s pretty much all that Brooke Burns has to do on the show.

I really don’t like the mechanics of this show. The random nature of how much is taken from the pot for each round is straight out of Deal Or No Deal but in this situation it really doesn’t feel “right” somehow. There is no linkage between the amount lost in each round and the quality of the clue that is given. Which is a problem when the first three clues are just about as useless as the "”Free Clue.” Still I guess I could forgive this in the name of randomness if it weren’t for the fact that I believe that for the most part players are going to be more cautious in taking a guess when they’re playing to win money for someone that that they have an emotional connection to than they might if they were playing to win money for themselves. The woman who played the game in the first episode averaged about six clues before she ventured an answer even though in a couple of cases she had the answer (or maybe should have had the answer) earlier. Then there were the friends who were with the player. They needed more of a role in this game than simply cheering the player on. For one thing they really didn’t get much chance to even fulfill that role. For another thing, these people could be a valuable resource for the player. There was at least one question where I could see one of the people (the beneficiary’s father-in-law) knew the answer a couple of clues before the player knew the answer. Even interviewing the friends about the beneficiary between rounds would have been better – particularly if that cut down on the segments of Brooke Burns doing nothing.

But my real problem with the show is tied to the very nature of the show. It is maudlin, mawkish and self congratulatory. It embodies all of those things that I came to dislike and then hate about ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Yes, I know that the people who participate on this show on behalf of their friends are sincere in their desire to help their friends. I just don’t like the way that this show goes about it. Chris Harrison comes across as particularly unctuous in this, and I can form no opinion of Brooke Burns because quite frankly I can’t see what she contributed to this show. I can’t even say that ABC has even a portion of its heart in the right place because this show has enough of being a cynical ratings grab that I find it off-putting. And based on the ratings, which lost a large percentage of the Dancing With The Stars finale lead-in and which were lower than the rating for the show that followed it (Castle), it would seem that the viewing public didn’t care much for the show either. With Dancing With The Stars off the air until March and “encore programming” (repeats) leading into it until it ends its run, expect the ratings for this mess to sink even lower. It is likely that You Deserve It will complete it’s intended six-week lifespan no matter how low the ratings go, if only because ABC doesn’t have anything that they can replace it with. If we’re all very lucky we won’t be seeing it again.

Tim Allen Retread, And Why I Don’t Like It

What do you get when you take comedian Tim Allen, add a “manly” work environment with a work place friendship with a guy with facial hair, three kids (including one who makes with the wise cracks), and a real actress to play his wife? That’s right, you get Home Improvement, Allen’s 1991-99 series with Richard Karn, Zachary Ty Bryant, Jonathon Taylor Thomas, Taran Noah Smith, and Patricia Richardson.

Now take that show and turn the three boys into three girls, make the work place friend with facial hair into his boss (and friend) with facial hair, and replace Patricia Richardson with Nancy Travis, and what do you get? Tim Allen’s new show Last Man Standing.

In Last Man Standing, Allen plays Mike Baxter, the Marketing Director of a chain of sporting goods stores owned by Ed Alzate (Hector Elizondo), who also happens to be one of his best friends. In the past this has meant travelling to various places around the globe to shoot ads for their catalogues. However the catalogue is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the Internet Age, and Ed needs Mike to focus more on the website. The website includes videos for demonstrations of the merchandise, but Mike turns these into personal rants with only passing reference to the merchandise, but that doesn’t matter since his rants generate hits for the website, and as one of his younger employees tells Ed, “Hits are good.”. Though Ed is willing to let Mike go back on the road for the catalogue, he decides that maybe he should spend more time with his wife and daughters.

At home, Mike has to deal with his wife Vanessa (Nancy Travis) a normally level-headed woman who sometimes goes a bit overboard, and his three daughters. Kristin (Alexandra Krosney) is his oldest, a 20 year-old single mom (she has a life-long memory of her prom in the form of her two year-old son Boyd) who works as a waitress and is trying to go back to college. Middle daughter is Mandy (Molly Ephraim), a self-centered 17 year-old “girly girl” who loves to shop (as long as she’s spending her parents’ money), hang out with her boyfriend Travis and update her website, Mandyland. Finally there’s Eve (Kaitlyn Dever). She’s her father’s favourite largely because she a tomboy interested in all of the things he’s interested in, including sports and guns.

The most recent episode of Last Man Standing is a fairly typical one. There are two plotlines, a “Home” plotline and a “Work” plotline with the “Home” plotline being the dominant one of the two. This time around the story focuses on Mike always being the “good cop” of the parents in their relationship with their daughters – the one who says “yes” to whatever they want – while Vanessa feels that she’s forced onto the role of the “bad cop” – the one who always has to say “no”. This might have been fine when Mike was on the road so much but now that he’s back home it’s causing problems. One of the problems is that Mandy wants to enter the Denver audition for a reality show, America’s Next Hot Teen Model. There’s probably only going to be 10,000 girls there so she figures she’s got a pretty good shot. Her mom forbids it but Mike figures why not, since she’s too short anyways. Eventually Vanessa browbeats him into saying no as well. But that’s not enough to stop Mandy from doing what she wants to do. She enlists Kristin and Eve into helping her shoot some photos for a portfolio, but her full blown diva attitude alienates them and they walk out, without a photo being taken. Even that doesn’t stop Mandy. She can take her own photos with a remote control, and proceeds to do some shots that she thinks will work. Then she decides to do something a bit more provocative, and takes off her top. Of course it’s fine (as far as she’s concerned) because she’s got here hands over her breasts and you can’t see anything except the bottom of them sometimes.


Of course her  parents find out – Kristin finds the pictures on the camera – and they both go ballistic. Pictures like these will get out and they have the potential to harm her future prospects if an employer or someone else finds them. They take the SD Card from the camera, but Mandy is one step ahead of them; she’s emailed the photos to her boyfriend Travis’s phone! So Mike has to go to Travis’s house. He’s practicing his trombone so his mother answers the door. When Mike mentions that the photos involve Mandy not wearing her top – even though nothing was showing – Travis’s mother calls the photos pornography, and says she should have known better than to allow Mandy in her house because she comes from such an “immoral” family. Proof of their immorality is that Kristin had a baby out of wedlock. Mike gets very angry at her over that, and rather than simply taking the pictures off the camera before Travis had the chance to see them, he drops the phone into a vase full of water. Which, as we find out, is not nearly as extreme as what Vanessa would have done if the woman had called Krisitin and Mandy immoral to her face; Vanessa says she would have “cut her.”

The Workplace plot of the show always takes second place to the Home storyline. In this episode, Ed is feeling left out because Mike is making marketing decisions (he is the marketing director) like moving the parkas out front in the stores and moving the fishing vests back – well it is nearly winter and fishing season is over. He feels like he’s losing some control of his business so he decides to do some marketing of his own. To promote the store’s selection of snowmobiles, he hires some local models – his “snowmo-bunnies” – to dress in fur bikinis and talk to customers. Initially Mike is fine with this – at least he is when he sees the sales figures that the models are ringing up – but he eventually ends the promotion before Ed wants it to end (when all of the snowmobiles are sold). It seems that in his argument with Mandy over her entering the America’s Next Hot Teen Model auditions she brought up the calendars featuring scantily clad models that he can’t get enough of. He said that “They aren’t my daughter,” to which she responded, “They’re somebody’s daughters.” It doesn’t hit home until he discovers that one of Ed’s “snowmo-bunnies” is a girl who went to school with Kristin. Needless to say, Ed isn’t happy about yet another decision being taken away from him, and all of his feelings come out. He’s afraid that Mike is trying to force him out of his own company, and that he’s at the age his father was when he retired. Retirement killed Ed’s father. Actually it was the husband of the woman that Ed’s father was having an affair with who killed him, but he wouldn’t have had time for that if he hadn’t retired. Mike reassures Ed that he’s not trying to force him out of the company and the whole crew at the store has a birthday party for him. That restores Ed to his normal, cranky, self as he complains about breaking the “no birthday party rule”, then about the cake and about their present (they had his chair reupholstered).

Last Man Standing is a pretty bad show that is getting pretty good ratings and a full season order because Tim Allen is in it. The three daughters are a pretty standard set of TV tropes; the smart tomboyish one, the self-centered shopping obsessed one, and the one trying to get her life on track. They’re a cookie cutter assortment of problems that could be fitted into just about any family sitcom. They really don’t have any discernable character traits beyond those that define the stereotype. Nancy Travis is fine as Mike’s wife Vanessa, but Vanessa is no Jill Taylor because Travis isn’t given the same sort of material that Patricia Heaton was given to work with, even at the start. As for Hector Elizondo, well casting him in this role seems like such a waste of a first rate character actor in a role that could be played by just about anyone.

The writing of this series shows little in the way of originality. It wouldn’t have been hard to take these characters and this concept and give it a real twist that would the people more “real” with more than one dimension. They have had solid situations to deal with – a teen taking inappropriate pictures of herself; “too sexy” Halloween costumes; a tomboy who wants to get a particular boy to “notice” her – but their approach to these situations has scarcely pushed the envelope in either developing their characters in these situations or taking a different direction. They seem most interested in going for the cheap and easy laugh. My big concern is how many of these decisions are flowing from series star Tim Allen through the Writers’ Room and onto the screen. Sure, I know that this show and this character fits into ABC’s current efforts to show the problems that face affluent married employed white men in modern society as comedy. And yes, I do get that part of the way to do that is to recycle a well remembered character (someone who is a lot like Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor) that fits right into that mould. But I think it does a disservice to the audience, because the show isn’t funny, and it does a disservice to its star.

You see, my big problem with Last Man Standing is that it’s not a property that is going to stretch Tim Allen’s acting ability. See here’s the shocking thing; I happen to think that Tim Allen has some acting ability. Oh he’s no Kelsey Grammer, let alone a Tom Hanks, but he is personable and shows more range as an actor than Roseanne Barr ever did (there’s a reason why Roseanne’s filmography is a tiny as it is – she’s a lousy actress). Maybe he couldn’t replace Steve Carell on The Office (but that might have been something to see if just for one episode) but he could have given us something new that represents the next step in his development as an actor. Instead, Allen is in a property that is a bad retread of what he did before on Home Improvement. And a car guy like Tim Allen should know that a retread rarely performs as well as a new tire. I’m sure that barring a catastrophic drop in ratings this show is going to be back next season. I just don’t think it should be. I just wish that Tim Allen would have waited for something better to come along. He deserves it, and we, as an audience, deserve it as well.

Put “Man Up” Down

(Author’s Note: I started writing this review of Man Up a week ago when the show debuted. However there were some things from the pilot that I was unable to remember. And believe me when I say that this in itself is an indictment of the show since I normally remember just about all the details from a TV show that I watch. As I’ve said, I didn’t remember details of the episode and so was forced to try to locate and watch the show online. I eventually found it on the CTV Two section of the CTV website. However I kept finding reasons not to watch it and relive the agony I felt when watching the show the first time. I eventually watched it and that is what I am reviewing. I am not going to willingly watch this show again.)

I have, for the most part, attempted to avoid reviewing the pilot episodes of series this year. I am breaking this self-imposed restriction in order to review Man Up, the new ABC Tuesday night comedy, and I am doing this for one reason: I would do anything short of ripping my own testicles off with my bare hands in order not to have to watch a second episode of this abomination. And under the right – err, wrong – circumstances I’d think about the testicle thing.

Man Up is a comedy (allegedly) that centers around three friends, Will Keen (Mather Zickel), Kenny Hayden (Dan Fogler) and Craig Griffith (Christopher Moynihan). Will is married to Kenny’s sister Theresa (Terri Polo) while Kenny was married to Theresa’s friend Brenda (Amanda Detmer). Rounding out the adult cast is Bridgette’s new boyfriend Grant (Henry Simmons).

The pilot opens with Will, Kenny and Craig playing Call Of Duty online together while talking in their headsets (sorry I don’t own a game console so I have know idea of the exact terminology). Will was able to get permission to play by suggesting to Theresa that they have sex while she was folding laundry, a suggestion that provoked an eye roll from Theresa. The game chat isn’t entirely game related. Will’s son Nathan’s thirteenth birthday is later that week and Will doesn’t know what to get his son that says “I’m a man.” Craig (who has never been married) is obsesses with  Lisa, a former girlfriend who he had lunch with earlier in the day. She’s getting married on the same day as Nathan’s birthday party but from their conversation and she talked about a song he used to play for her on his guitar. This he took as “a cry for help.” Kenny says that this woman is crazy and he should know because he used to be married to a crazy woman. Will then has to tell Kenny that Brenda will be at the party. Kenny calls Theresa on her cell phone to tell her to uninvite Brenda, while Craig calls Lisa, which breaks up the game because the only one playing is Will.

The next day Will and Theresa are in their kitchen. Theresa gets a package which she has Will open. He uses his pocket knife. It turns out to be a video game which Will initially thinks is for him because it is violent and scary and rated for 17 year-old and older. In fact it’s her gift for Nathan. He himself is searching for the right gift for his son to usher him into manhood and he thinks that this would have been a perfect gift to usher him into manhood. His point is undercut somewhat by his use of Hazelnut coffee creamer. Theresa further undercuts him by telling him that his grandfather fought in World War II and his father fought in Vietnam but he plays video games and uses pomegranate body wash. He’s “man…ish.” Just then Kenny arrives to tell his sister that Brenda has to be uninvited, that she can’t come to the “fluffin’” party (the kids are present and he has to use a substitute word). Just then Brenda arrives with some party hats and tells Kenny that there is no way that she isn’t going to be at the party They argue about her coming to the party. Eventually Will pulls Kenny out of the argument and tells Kenny that he has to deal with it and he should try to act like the “coolest guy he can think of .” For Kenny that’s Toby McGuire (?!). Kenny tries to act cool like Toby McGuire but then Brenda informs him that she’s bringing a date to the party, and Kenny loses it.

Will’s at work but still looking for a “manly” gift for Nathan’s birthday.when Kenny comes in. He’s a pharmaceutical salesman with a product that has side effects worse than what it treats. Will lists some of the options that Will has found for Nathan’s gift when Craig, who works at the same insurance company, comes in to tell him that not only aren’t they paying a particular claim but that not claims would be paid that day; it’s in a memo. Kenny notices that Craig is growing a beard to which Kenny objects, because a beard is “my thing.” Will remembers that Lisa liked him with a beard and this is how it’s revealed that Craig called Lisa six times the previous night. Kenny and Craig still want to go out for lunch in spite of the fact that it’s only 10:15 but Will does go out because all the talk of beards gives him a great idea for a gift for Nathan.

At the party, Craig is telling Brenda and Theresa about Lisa, and while everybody is telling Craig that Lisa is just feeling a bit nostalgic for what they had, Brenda totally agrees with him that it is a call for help and that he needs to make some sort of a gesture, that when you realise that someone is your soul mate it is forever. Kenny says that Brenda used to say that he was her soul mate she tells him that her soul mate is coming soon and he is bringing lemon bars. There’s a first meeting between Kenny and Grant that really shows a certain amount of perfect pomposity on Grants part, and which is hard to explain in words. Later, when Grant is shooting hoops with some of the kids, Kenny decides to challenge him to a game of one on one. It does not go well for Kenny. every time he tries to make a shot Grant blocks him (not surprisingly since Grant is tall and perfectly muscled, while Kenny is short and not muscled at all.

The crisis suddenly erupts when Nathan unwraps Grant’s gift. It’s a shaving kit. Will’s gift for his son, something that only a father would get his son (he thought) was a shaving kit. So he has to make a mad dash to the mall to get a replacement gift, and he takes Craig and Kenny with him, with Craig driving. Suddenly Craig announces that he needs closure with Lisa. Coincidentally (not really) they’re right in front of the church where Lisa is getting married. Will needs to be back for the cutting of the cake so he gives in and let’s Craig go in the church. Lisa is in the middle of her vows when Craig bursts in singing “Brown Eyed Girl”. Soon after he, Will and Kenny are rushing for the car, with an angry mob of groomsmen following them, yelling “You’re dead.”

Back at the house Will gets everybody in the house just as the angry wedding party shows up and demolishes his mail box. They want “the brown-eyed girl,” meaning Craig. Kenny wants him to give himself up while Craig is about to call the police. Then Nathan says “Dad” and Will decides that the three of them will go out to confront them, because that’s what their fathers would have done, because “they were real men, not the over evolved generation of pantywaists we’ve become.” Craig will stay on the porch while Kenny will go through the garage and get Nathan’s hockey stick to cover Will’s flank. Then Grant wants a job. Kenny doesn’t want him involved but Will tells him to stay on the porch with Craig. Grant says he’ll do something cool. Kenny can’t find the hockey stick; the best he can come up with is a pink pogo stick. The two groups stare each other down when suddenly Grant charges off the porch and tackles the groom and two of the other men. Later as Craig, Kenny and Will are congratulating themselves, we find out that he’s the only one who actually got into a fight, which was why he was the only one actually arrested. Brenda then tells Kenny that they are leaving; they have to go bail out Grant…and Kenny had better have his ATM card because they’re going to need bail money. Finally, after everyone leaves, Will has some time with Nathan. Turns out that between the party and the fight (and kissing a girl named Samantha in the “bounce house”) it has been the best day of his life. Will is about to apologise for not getting Nathan a gift when the boy reveals that Theresa said that the game was from Will. He can’t get it unwrapped so Will takes out his pocket knife and suddenly he realises what the perfect gift would be. He passes down “the old Mohaska” to his son just as his father passed it down to him.

I can’t fault the cast of Man Up. This is a Grade A cast in a Grade F series. Dan Fogler is a Tony Award winning Broadway actor, while both Mather Zickel and Christopher Moynihan have extensive experience both in series and in film roles, as has Amanda Detmer. And I’ve always been impressed by Terri Polo in just about anything that she’s done, either comedies like Sports Night and dramas, including the last season and a half of of The West Wing where she played Helen Santos. She has a nearly chameleon-like quality that allows her believably take on a variety of roles an not only be believable in them but to sometimes make me fail to recognise her in a role until I look at the credits. And while Henry Simmons will always be Detective Baldwin Jones (from NYPD Blue) to me he was almost ideally suited to play the all too perfect (if not necessarily too bright) Grant. Part of the problem is that he has to play that role, just as all of the other actors have to play their characters they way they do.

A big problem that the pilot had was that it was simply not funny. In fact there were places where it was catastrophically unfunny. The scene where Craig went into the church was cringe worthy, as was the scene where Grant charges into the weeding party. The scene where Kenny “played” basketball with Grant didn’t make me feel any sympathy for Kenny at the same time that it didn’t make me feel anything at all about Grant. I don’t really know how to feel about that scene. It’s sort of like watching someone goading a peaceful animal into charging and then feeling ill-served that it attacked. And yet, in watching that scene play out the way that it did, I don’t feel any sympathy for Grant because of the way that he was introduced.

But the biggest problem in the writing is with the characters. I don’t feel any emotional attachment to any of them. There's nothing about any of them that I fell that I can relate to, and they are too self-centered and self-aware. In their own ways, Will, Kenny and Craig are all doofuses. No sane man would take a lunch with a former girlfriend who is about to get married as a “cry for help” or an effort to rekindle an old relationship the way that Craig does. And Kenny, who plays the angry divorced guy, is still so “whipped” by his ex-wife that despite seemingly trying to “lay down the law” he ends up paying the bail for her new boyfriend. Grant is basically “The Old Spice Guy” brought into the everyday world, and even then it is a caricature rather than a character with any real dimension. And while Henry Simmons has the ideal look to portray him, and he did a good job with it, it’s not exactly a character that you can deal with in large doses.

And the two female characters don’t come off very well either. Brenda is a bitch, and not in the pro-feminist badge of pride sense that the word can have if said in the right way. She delights in treating Kenny like dirt and humiliating him at every opportunity. In fact that’s the reason – maybe the only reason – why she’s dating Grant. She treats Craig just as badly by encouraging his delusion that Lisa wants to reconcile with him. The only reason I can see for her taking that action is to see the “fun” when Craig takes the advice of the only person who agreed with him. And Theresa is only slightly better. Her best friend is Brenda, someone who takes pleasure in messing with Theresa’s brother. She’s the one who undercuts Will when she says that his grandfather fought in World War II and his father fought in Vietnam but he just plays video games on a console and uses pomegranate body wash. Theresa calls Will and his friends “man…ish” And the thing is that the qualities that she presumably finds unmanly are undoubtedly the qualities that she found attractive in the first place.

It is the concept that is probably the worst part of Man Up. The basic notion, that modern man are “an over-evolved generation of pantywaists,” is a running theme through a number of series. It was the basis of the late and unlamented How To Be A Gentleman, and of the ABC series which precedes Man Up, Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing. I think that the idea that men in general are becoming less masculine, or “man…ish” as Theresa puts it, is a fallacy. Maybe it’s a by-product of the feminist movement and the or maybe it’s just a result of a misguided view of what being a man entails. When Will tells his friends that their Vietnam War vintage fathers (and presumably their grandfathers, the World War II fighters) wouldn’t have called the police when there was a mob of angry groomsmen on their lawn threatening to beat Craig to a pulp, he was wrong. They would absolutely call the police. (Of course if they had met Craig, they might well have thrown him out to the mob, but that’s a different story.)

Man Up fails in some of the most important ways. The characters are poorly drawn and in several cases are unlikable. At best they are only mildly engaging, and the leading male characters were people that you didn’t really want to know (and hope that other people don’t thing you’re like). The humour was at best weak and at worst depressingly unfunny, and median edged closer to the latter than to the former. In a year which has produced a number of good comedies (several of which have featured strong female characters) this is particularly bad show. If you’ve watched the first episode – or worse the first two episodes – do yourself a favour and don’t watch any more. If enough people do that maybe this abomination will go away.