This $#*! Ain’t So Hot

There are reasons why I don't like reviewing a new show based on the pilot, and this show is an example of why. If I had written about $#*! My Dad Says after the first episode of the show aired I would have panned it quite badly. And it would have deserved it too because that pilot episode was pretty dreadful. About the only sympathetic character in the whole episode was Tim, the "nice homosexual from the DMV," and his role was almost entirely as a deus ex machina, intended to make the Shatner's character stop being so damned obstinate about his relationship with his kids. If the show had continued in this vein it might have survived but wouldn't have been enjoyable to watch. Fortunately something changed, and while the show is never going to be an outstanding artistic success it also isn't going to die a quick death.

William Shatner plays Ed Goodson, a retired Navy Doctor in his mid 70s whose relationship with his two sons can best be described as strained. Ed is opinionated and is not shy about sharing his opinions with anyone who is nearby, whether they're interested in them or not. This may at least partly explain why Ed's two marriages broke up. Ed thinks he's perfectly happy living alone – he doesn't need anyone and he doesn't have much patience for anyone who isn't as self-sufficient as he is. That would include his younger son Henry (Jonathon Sadowski) who lost his job at a magazine as a result of the recession and needs a place to live. Ed was ready to give him the bum's rush until some he met Tim at the DMV and he came to realise that unless he at least tried to compromise with his sons he'd be all alone. As a result Ed finds himself living with Henry in a relationship that is not without its disagreements (massive understatement) – which of course is the root of the humour. Rounding out the cast are Will Sasso (MadTV and Less Than Perfect) and Nicole Sullivan (also from MadTV as well as King Of Queens) as Ed's other son Vince and Vince's assertive wife Bonnie.

Unusually, Thursday night's episode focuses on the relationship between Ed and Vince with Henry taking a back seat and the B Plot in the episode. Vince has always craved affection from his father, affection which – of course – he's never had. Every week Vince invites Ed over to their place, which as we discover is just a few blocks away from Ed's house, (and has a view of a place that has a view of the ocean), and every week Ed never shows up. One might expect that this would discourage Vince and he'd give up on his father showing up, and it might to an ordinary man. But Vince is no ordinary man. At least where his father is concerned he's an eternal optimist hoping that he'll get some sort of recognition from his dad. At work – they sell real estate – Vince and Bonnie arrange to have Henry take their bulldog Root Beer out for a walk. However, because Henry has an emergency meeting with an editor who wants to publish some of his freelance writing, Henry is forced to leave the dog with Ed. Naturally Ed is determined not to bond with the dog, and just as inevitably he ends up doing just that, to the point where he sings a lullaby to the dog ("Hush Little Baby") and seems depressed when Vince and Bonnie come to take the dog home. In fact he's so put out by the dog leaving that he actually goes to their condo "for dinner." Vince has set a place for his dad, like he does every week, while Bonnie is so sure that he won't show up that she makes a bet with him, like she does every week (apparently it involves sex). They're both surprised when Ed walks in the door, but it soon becomes apparent that Ed isn't interested in spending time with his son and daughter-in-law; all he wants to do is spend time with Root Beer. Ed claims that spending time with Root Beer has led him to a breakthrough, that there was a member of the family that he neglected and was never there for. This gets Vince's hopes up that his father is about to acknowledge that maybe he wasn't there for his eldest son and that he's sorry for all of that. But it doesn't work out like that. It turns out that the family member that Ed is sorry about neglecting is his former dog Schwarzkopf. Ed leaves as soon as he gets that off his chest. Vince is crestfallen but it is the effect on Bonnie that is really galvanizing. She goes all "mama grizzly" on Ed and tells him how much Vince looks forward to seeing his dad, and how Schwarzkopf wasn't the only one that Ed neglected and was never there for when he was working. When Ed tells her that Vince is fine, Bonnie makes it absolutely clear to him that Vince isn't fine, that he craves his father's attention and every time his father blows him off or ignores him it hurts and disappoints him and makes him feel inadequate. When Vince comes home from walking Root Beer, he finds his father there. He tells his son to come over to the couch where he's sitting and indicates that Vince should put his head on Ed's shoulder. Once he does he starts singing "Hush Little Baby" to Vince. When Bonny comes home she found Vince, asleep on his father's shoulder. Ed tells her to be quiet; that he'd just got him (Vince) down.

The B Plot in this episode was much weaker than the main plot. It featured Henry, who is supposed to be the second lead in this series, looking to "expand" his love life. This is after a date with a girl named Donna who is "safe" and in Henry's view boring. As we discover, her job is literally to watch paint dry. Henry is looking for someone who has a bit more of an edge. When he visits Vince and Bonnie's office he meets their boss, Katie. What he doesn't know about Katie is that she's manipulative and doesn't appear to have any boundaries. She had previously given Bonnie listing that would have represented half her total commission for the year, but suddenly took it back. Then Henry shows up at the office and suddenly Katie turns all sweet and charming as she flirts with Henry. Henry is clearly interested in Katie. When Henry leaves, Katie reverts to type and informs Vince and Bonnie that if they can deliver Henry to her for dinner she'll give them back the listing. She makes it clear to them that Henry will be dinner. When Henry arrives at the office, he's expecting a normal date starting off with dinner. Katie has something different in mind. She's wearing a trench coat which she strips off to reveal a lacy black bustier and stockings. She proceeds to ravage him. When Henry returns home his shirt is torn and he can barely walk, and he spit out at least one tooth. After giving Bonnie her listing, he informs his father and sister-in-law that while he was looking for someone crazy, he had in mind Playboy Mansion crazy, not Bates motel crazy. As henry described it, Katie did something that was "so profound and so disturbing to me that it would make German pornographers blush." Suddenly boring Donna doesn't look so bad to him.

There is nothing particularly innovative about $#*! My Dad Says. The basic premise is of a man who is forced by circumstances to move in with someone who is the polar opposite of himself. Think of The Odd Couple mixed with Two And A Half Men and you won't be far from the direction of this show. Into the mix you can add just about any show in which a parent is forced to deal with the mistakes he (or she) made in raising their adult kids. Or not as the case may be (Alan and Charlie's mother on Two And A Half Men refuses to face her failures in raising her sons; at least Ed is trying... a little). I think that this has a lot to do with the source material. As everyone knows, $#*! My Dad Says started out as the Twitter feed (and later book) Shit My Dad Says by Justin Halpern. Halpern's explanation on the Twitter feed is simple: "I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says." Which if fine for 140 characters at a time, or a collection of those 140 characters at a time. The problem comes in taking those pithy remarks and building a television series around them. While the writing, particularly for Shatner can be quite funny, the show as a whole comes across as feeling like a bit of a retread. Yes it's funny – much funnier than I found the pilot to have been – but the sense of "I've seen this before" is inescapable.

Which leads us to the cast. The supporting cast is something of a mixed bag. I love Nicole Sullivan in just about anything that she's done and while I'm less familiar with Will Sasso, I'm quickly becoming something of a fan. He's a strong actor in a supporting role and his face is capable of conveying his emotions in a way that we don't see with some other actors. It's a significant part of his acting arsenal, and it gives him a sympathetic air. As for Sullivan, Her character of Bonny is very much the dominant member of this pair, even though she can be kind of pathetic in her desire to please and to be upwardly mobile. In a previous episode she tried very hard to become friends with two married high end brokers, and it didn't matter that they may have run over a guy in Mexico and killed him (what broke up the "friendship" was that the wife was pro-Angelina Jolie while Bonnie was pro-Jennifer Anniston). Sasso and Sullivan work well together, having spent several years at MadTV during the same period, and I don't think it is that hard to see them as the leads in a fairly typical domestic comedy. For me, the weakest of the supporting actors on the series is Jonathon Sadowski. Much of Sadowski's role is spent reacting to Shatner of course, but there is something about Sadowski that is doesn't measure up to the other three actors in the show. Sadowski spends a lot of his time reacting to Shatner and generally being antagonistic to the character of Ed. Henry is the voice of "sanity" in this family, even more so than Bonny. I think part of the problem is the way that Henry is written. His major reaction to any opposition from Ed is to threaten to leave or to feel insulted, and for me that just doesn't work. Still part of the problem has to go to Sadowski because I just don't think that he has the comedy acting chops that the other actors in this series do.

Sadowski's biggest problem may be that he's the actor who spends the most time working with Shatner, and Shatner kind of overpowers him. Shatner isn't brilliant in this, at least not as brilliant as his list of Emmy wins for The Practice would indicate, but he delivers what he's asked to deliver here. They've given him the character of a crusty curmudgeon when, when you eventually get through the crust has a somewhat less crusty interior. Shatner is loud (few scenes with him are delivered below a low bellow) bombastic, and chews the scenery with the intensity of my dog when she gets a dog treat. In an earlier episode there was a scene where Ed has to sing karaoke. He did "I'm Too Sexy" in a fashion that wasn't quite as painful as Shatner's version of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was very much in the expected Shatner style. And this Shatner, who is very much a caricature, is probably exactly what the producers is looking for. I think that's true about just about any producer who hires Shatner these days. The effect can be quite funny, and it's part of what makes Shatner work as a comedic actor. Still it's got to be hard for someone like Sadowski to work against a presence like William Shatner.

To sum up my feelings about $#*! My Dad Says is kind of difficult. I think it is funny, but I'm well aware that there are people who found According To Jim to be funny (I just don't know anybody who'll admit it). Having said that it's funny I'm also wise enough about the show to know that it isn't innovative in the way that shows like 30 Rock, The Office, or Modern Family are innovative, and I don't find it hilarious the way that I find The Big Bang Theory which precedes it on Thursday nights to be. I mostly like the cast even though I think that Jonathan Sadowski is not the ideal person to play opposite Shatner in as key a role as Henry should be. I think that the writers were presented with a significant problem given the vague and limited nature of the original source material. There were directions that they could have taken that might have been more innovative but they didn't; they took the safe and well trodden path. And, as Robert Frost might said, that made all the difference, because $#*! My Dad Says could have been more than just a funny show, it could have been a very funny show that been another option for future writers. In twenty years people may feel nostalgic for the show, but nobody will be talking about the new ground that it broke. I think we may have been spoiled by the shows that have debuted in recent years.

Full episodes of $#*! My Dad Says can be found online at the show's CTV website for Canadians. Apparently it is not currently available online in the United States.

Hawaii Five-0.2

I don't think that anyone will ever accuse CBS of really pushing the envelope when it comes to most of their dramas. Or at least the shows that work. The network has been willing, on occasion to try a show like Viva Laughlin, and replaced the marginally successful Moonlight with the disastrous The Ex-List, but for the most part the network seems content to build on and spin-off or copy (with some changes) their own successes. You can see this in the 2010-11 season. The three new dramas on CBS are Blue Bloods, a cop show merged with a family drama, The Defenders, a dramedy built around a pair of
lawyers who are just a couple of steps above being ambulance chasers (and which just might be the most innovative of this year's CBS dramatic crop), and the subject of this review, Hawaii Five-0.

Hawaii Five-0 is of course a remake of the classic CBS series that debuted in 1968 and ran until 1980. The original, which starred Jack Lord, James MacArthur, Kam Fong and a host of others, is one of the most iconic television series ever. The theme is so well known that the first introductory notes, before the theme really gets going, are enough to identify the theme and bring back memories of the show's title sequence and thoughts of Hawaii. It's an almost Pavlovian reaction. In fact when the new version of the show was announced with an "updated," more "rock oriented" version of the theme, the villagers were out like a flash with their torches and pitchforks to destroy the "monster," which was successfully accomplished.

The big question is how do you handle this sort of iconic series when you want to do a new version? You could got the "Next Generation" route; have the new series be a continuation of the old series set a couple of decades later with new characters and references to the past. That was in fact done in an unbroadcast 1998 pilot featuring Gary Busey as the current head of Five-0. That pilot also featured a number of members of the original series cast (including Kam Fong playing his old role of Chin Ho Kelly despite the fact that the character had been killed during the series; no one connected with that revival remembered). The other way to go is to simply use the characters names and the basic concept of the show but to ignore everything that had occurred in the previous series. It worked very well when they remade Battlestar Galactica and much worse when they remade Bionic Woman. This is the approach that the producers of the new Hawaii Five-0 have taken.

The pilot episode of the current Hawaii Five-0 set up the whole premise of the series. Navy Seal Commander Steve McGarrett (Alex O'Laughlin) is part of a heavily armed escort detail transferring terrorist Anton Hesse to a different facility. However Hesse's brother Victor (James Marsters) took McGarrett's father, John, hostage and forced him to call his son. This allows Victor and his gang to locate the convoy that is transporting Anton and direct another group of terrorists to attack it. During the attack, Anton manages to escape and gets a gun. Steve is forced to shoot Anton and in retaliation Victor murders McGarrett's father. Returning to Hawaii for his father's funeral McGarrett is brought to meet Hawaiian Governor Pat Jameson (Jean Smart) at a public area of Pearl Harbor. She has a proposition for him; she will appoint him to head a special state task force to track down Hesse and other criminals like him. He will essentially have carte blanche to pick his own people and a promise of immunity for just about anything that they might have to do in order to get the job done. McGarrett turns her down. He's after Hesse himself. While at Pearl Harbor, McGarrett meets up with Chin Ho Kelly (Daniel Dae Kim) who had been John McGarett's protégé at the police department. Although Chin Ho is now working as a security guard in the public areas of Pearl Harbor, he gives Steve some information about the case and how seriously it's (not) being taken. The Police Department has picked a "haole" (a word in the Hawaiian language which is usually taken as meaning Caucasian, although in this context it seems to used as a term of contempt for someone who doesn't have roots in Hawaii). Returning to his family home, Steve finds and observes several clues that tell him about the number of people who were involved in the murder of his father. He is interrupted in his search by an armed man who just happens to be the haole detective that Chin Ho mentioned. Danny Williams (Scott Caan) is a divorced cop originally from New Jersey who came to Hawaii to stay close to his young daughter. He's not very happy with Steve McGarrett becoming involved in his case. This leads Steve to call the Governor and accept her offer, even being sworn in over the telephone. Suddenly Danny is Steve's subordinate, and not in a position to give any orders. Clues found at the house leads Steve and Danny to a suspected arms dealer who supplied Victor with some of his weapons. The man is not exactly happy about the police coming around and a running gun battle starts. It ends when the arms dealer threatens to shoot McGarrett and is shot by Danny. Steve isn't exactly pleased with having his one lead killed but the discovery of a Chinese girl, tied up in the arms dealer's house gives them a new direction to try. Steve reasons that Hesse might be using snakeheads, or people smugglers, to get him out of Hawaii.

In order to get a line on the snakehead responsible for bringing the girl they found at the arms dealer's house, McGarrett turns to Chin Ho. He's happy to provide some information but when Steve asks him to help on the case he refuses. He's been shuffled off to the side – given a rubber gun as he puts it – despite fifteen years on the force, because of allegations that he took bribes. Steve believes in him though because his father believed in Chin Ho. At a meeting with one of Chin Ho's confidential informants, a Hawaiian seller of shaved ices, Steve and Danny are excluded while the informant gives Chin Ho the name of the snakehead. They need to get the man to incriminate himself. The problem, as Chin points out, is that on an island the size of Oahu, all of the bad guys know all of the good guys. They need someone who isn't known, and Chin Ho has just the woman, his cousin Kona Kalakaua. They meet Kona (Grace Park) at the beach where she's surfing. A former professional surfer, she blew out her knee which led her to enter the police academy. She hasn't graduated yet, which makes her an ideal candidate to go undercover to get information to incriminate the snake head. She goes in as a Chinese immigrant who wants to get her family out of China. Outside the rest of the team is waiting in a semi-trailer equipped with some of the latest electronics, including a special laser microphone that will allow them to hear through walls. To prove that she's not a cop wearing a wire the snakehead forces her to strip down to her bra and panties, but because she has beach sand in her hair the snakehead is convinced that she's a cop. Just as things are about to go very bad for Kona the semi smashes through the wall of the old warehouse where the snakehead is based. After a gun battle, the snakehead is defiant. He claims that McGarrett and his team are guilty of entrapment and that he'll get off. After Danny discovers a group of people locked in an shipping container, Steve has some leverage on the man. The threat of prison isn't going to break the man so he threatens to have his wife and son sent back to Rwanda, where the boy is just about old enough to become a child soldier. He gives up Victor Hesse's location – a Chinese freighter that is ready to leave Hawaii soon. McGarrett contacts the Governor and insists that she stop the ship from sailing. She's worried about an international incident if American cops invade the freighter, but McGarrett not only reminds her of her promise of full immunity for his actions but claims that if it becomes public that a known terrorist was found aboard a Chinese freighter they won't press the matter of the ship being Chinese territory. McGarrett and his team drive their car up a ramp and ont the ship. In a gunfight they wound or kill most of Victor's men. In a confrontation on top of a shipping container Victor and McGarrett manage to disarm each other but recovering a gun Victor seems to get the upper hand before Steve manages to get his hand on a gun and shoot Victor. He falls off the top of the container into the ocean, but as the body doesn't come to the surface there's some question of whether or not Victor is dead. The episode concludes with Steve surveying the new headquarters of his task force in Honolulu's Iolani Palace. As the group enjoys a beer, Kona brings up the idea that they need a team name.

In 1998 Kam Fong, who played Chin Ho Kelly on the original version of the show once spoke about the possibilities of a remake: "When you have a show that runs successfully and you try to duplicate it, people who watched the earlier version can't help but associate the current cast with the former one. If they did Five-O again, everybody would compare Jack Lord with the new guy. It's never the same. The original is always better than the remake." While anyone who compares the two versions of Battlestar Galactica critically would be inclined to disagree with the assessment that "the original is always better than the remake," it is almost inevitable that one would compare the various actors to those who played the originals. This presents a problem because of the differences in acting styles over the years. I was generally pleased with Alex O'Laughlin's portrayal of Steve McGarrett; it was looser and more relatable than Jack Lord's performance. In Hawaii Five-O at least, Lord always seemed to run the emotional gamut from A to A-; for the life of me I can't ever recall his McGarrett smiling, let alone laughing. O'Laughlin's version of the character not only smiles and laughs but he comes across as a more human character. The approach with Scott Caan's version of Danny Williams is also very different from James MacArthur's. Caan's version seems to be a more mature adult than MacArthur's even though his life off the job is probably more messed up. Caan's version of Williams comes across as more of an equal to McGarrett rather than a protégé which is how MacArthur's version of the character always seemed. Making the initial relationship confrontational created more of a "buddy cop" vibe than was ever achieved in the original series. There is big difference between Kam Fong's portrayal of Chin Ho and Daniel Dae Kim's. As portrayed by Kam Fong, Chin Ho was a garrulous veteran cop (his first line in the pilot of the original series was something like "Have no fear, Chin Ho is here!") who was very well connected, often through family connections. He also represented something of an institutional memory – he had a lot of facts at his command. Daniel Dae Kim's Chin Ho has some of these qualities. He's a veteran cop and he has plenty of connections. The allegation that he's a corrupt cop who took bribes is something that would never have been used for the original character. His link to Steve McGarrett, and the reason why McGarrett is willing to bring him into his task force is that Chin Ho was his father's protégé. John McGarrett believe that Chin Ho wasn't guilty and because his father believed in and trusted Chin Ho he's willing to trust him as well. The biggest change is of course the character of Kono/Kona Kalakaua. Zulu who played Kono was a big Hawaiian guy who quite frankly had limited acting ability. The character was essentially the group's muscle, and generally had little to do in most episodes besides providing the muscle. Grace Park place Kona (that's the feminized version of the name Kono, although apparently the show will use the name Kono for the character interchangeably), and the character has been give a lot more to do than her previous male counterpart. They've made the character a tough, capable kick-ass woman with a lot of potential for storylines. Just as an example, making the character a new cop, fresh out of the academy, and therefore unknown to the bad guys means that she is likely to be the character most likely to go undercover in many episodes. I'm impressed with the direction that they're taking with the character, making her far more visible and important than Zulu's character ever was. Where I have a problem is that they have not only made the character an Asian woman with a Polynesian name, and presumably some Polynesian ancestry, but they've reinforced this by making her Chin Ho's cousin. But as you'll see this is a problem that I have with the show in general.

I generally liked the pilot, although there are a few things that I had problems with. The decision to start the series with a pilot that explained how the "Hawaii Five-0 unit" (as it is going to become known, though I don't think that the "naming session" at the end of the episode actually got around to mentioning that particular name) was created was probably a good one. It not only gives us background as to why this particular group of people came together but it also gives the characters a back story. In what will not be the last reference to the old series in this review, that is something that was painfully absent from the original Hawaii Five-O. In fact we probably knew more about the private lives of the characters on Law & Order, a modern series that was notorious for focusing only on the professional lives of its characters, than we ever knew about Jack Lord's version of McGarrett and we knew more about him than we ever knew about any of his team members. There were other nice touches, such as an explanation of why McGarrett calls Williams "Danno" (it's the name that Danny's daughter used when she had first tried to say his name). More to the point we saw the origins of the McGarrett and Williams relationship. In the original we never knew how Danno became McGarrett's protégé/second-in-command. In this we saw the relationship develop from open hostility to grudging respect.

Turning to things I didn't like, my biggest problem with the show as a whole is that there seems to have been no effort made to use local Hawaiian talent in the show, particularly Polynesian-Americans. Of the four main cast members, not one was born in Hawaii, and none is a Polynesian American. In the original series Kam Fong and Zulu (real name Gilbert Lani Kauhi) were both born in Hawaii (in fact Kam Fong was a sixteen year veteran of the Honolulu Police Department) as was later cast member Herman Weidemeyer. Another later cast member, Al Harrington, was of Samoan ancestry. A bigger problem for me – and this is something that might improve in later episode – is the sense of pace. The episode seemed to race to a conclusion in the "hour" (including commercials; more like 45 minutes without) apparently winding up the entire case a lot faster than any other show on TV. When you consider just how many of the scenes in the episode were action sequences you have to wonder how smart a terrorist Victor was to be caught the way he was. The pace of the whole thing was frenetic, and to my mind this pace left too much unexplained. This is a show that would have benefited from slowing the pace down by either running the pilot as a two hour movie – not something that's done much anymore – or splitting the pilot between two episodes. Hopefully in later episodes they'll even out the pacing.

I'm not going to say that this version of Hawaii Five-0 is better than Jack Lord's Hawaii Five-O (the replacement of the letter "O" with the number "0" is an official edict from the show's producers). The original series was very much a product of its time, and is constructed in the way that shows at the time were done, without necessarily delving deeply into the backstory of either the people or the organization that they were working for. The viewers are meant to accept what is presented to us without questioning their origins too much. Because of what we've generally become used to in shows, this lack of exposition can make the original show feel old-fashioned. Viewing a few old episodes in a recent marathon that Spike TV ran prior to the debut of the new series, I couldn't help but feel that at times the show just didn't hold together well. Based solely on the pilot the new Hawaii Five-0 has given us many of the qualities that the original series didn't explore because they didn't need to. Where I find fault with the new series (besides the lack of local actors in leading roles) is that based on the pilot the pacing isn't right. This is something that can be readily fixed so that we aren't inundated with action with bits of exposition in between to fill in the gaps. I think that the show needs to be a bit more believable as a procedural in order to live up to its namesake. While in my opinion the show has some room for improvement, Hawaii Five-0 is still a solid performer that people are going to watch, and I doubt that few of them are going to feel short changed when they watch it.

As far as the network is concerned, Hawaii Five-0 is a safe bet for CBS in this time slot. It follows the networks formula of generally playing it safe and not taking too many risks. It builds off an established name and concept and doesn't do much in the way of pushing the envelope. This may be something that the professional critics, and amateur reviewers like me may bemoan on occasion, but I think that we all have to admit that this is a formula that works. It's a formula that CBS is riding, cautiously, all the way to the bank.

CBS's 2010-11 Schedule

While CBS has probably the most stability in terms of new shows they also have what are probably the most changes of any of the networks.

Cancelled: Cold Case, Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs, Miami Medical, Accidentally On Purpose, New Adventures Of Old Christine.

Renewed: How I Met Your Mother, Rules Of Engagement, Two And A Half Men, NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles, The Good Wife, Criminal Minds, CSI, The Mentalist, Medium, The Amazing Race, Undercover Boss

Moved: Big Bang Theory, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, Survivor

New: Mike & Molly, Hawaii Five-O, The Defenders, $#*! My Dad Says, Blue Bloods

For the mid-season CBS has an as yet untitled spin-off from Criminal Minds.

Complete Schedule: (New shows in Capitals, except CSI, and NCIS)

Monday
8:00-8:30 p.m.: How I Met Your Mother
8:30-9:00 p.m.: Rules Of Engagement
9:00-9:30 p.m.: Two And A Half Men
9:30-10:00 p.m.: MIKE & MOLLY
10:00-11:00 p.m.: HAWAII FIVE-0

Tuesday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: NCIS
9:00-10:00 p.m.: NCIS: Los Angeles
10:00-11:00 p.m.: The Good Wife

Wednesday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: Survivor (new day and time)
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Criminal Minds
10:00-11:00 p.m.: THE DEFENDERS

Thursday
8:00-8:30 p.m.: Big Bang Theory (new day & time)
8:30-9:00 p.m.: $#!* MY DAD SAYS
9:00-10:00 p.m.: CSI
10:00-11:00 p.m.: The Mentalist

Friday
8:00-9:00 p.m.: Medium
9:00-10:00 p.m.: CSI: New York (new day & time)
10:00-11:00 p.m.: BLUE BLOODS

Saturday
8:00-10:00 p.m.: Crimetime Saturday (reruns)
10:00-11:00 p.m.: 48 Hours Mysteries

Sunday
7:00-8:00 p.m.: 60 Minutes
8:00--9:00 p.m.: The Amazing Race
9:00-10:00 p.m.: Undercover Boss
10:00-11:00 p.m.: CSI: Miami (new day & time)

Mike & Molly, the latest comedy from Chuck Lorre, is a love story about a couple of people who don't exactly fit into society's vision of attactive. Chicago cop Mike Biggs (Billy Gardell) and fourth grade teacher Molly Flynn (Melissa McCarthy) meet at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. While Mike and Molly want to lose weight they do face obstacles bigger than a mutual fondness for pie and a mutual desire to resist temptation. Reno Wilson co-stars as Mike's partner Carl, while Swoozie Kurtz plays Molly's mother Joyce and Katy Mixon plays Molly's sexy sister Victoria. Rounding out the cast is Nyambi Nyambi as Samuel, the waiter at the diner where Mike and Carl eat, who finds the concept of eating less entire incomprehensible.

Hawaii Five-0 is the revival of the classic series from the 1970s. Starring Alex O'Laughlin as Steve McGarrett, a cop and former naval officer who returned to Hawaii to track down his father's murderer. He decides to stay after the Governor (Jean Smart) asks him to head-up a new state police unit. Making up his team are Danny "Danno" Williams (Scott Caan), a former New Jersey cop who has relocated to Hawaii with his 8 year-old daughter, Chin Ho Kelly (Daniel Dae Kim) an ex-Honolulu detective wrongly accused of corruption who was also McGarrett's father's protégé, and Chin Ho's cousin Kono (Grace Park) who is fresh out of the police academy.

The Defenders is nothing like the classic 1960s series of the same name. This version is a comedy drama about a pair of hotshot Las Vegas attorneys who go all out to represent their clients. Pete Kascmarek (Jerry O'Connell) has a passion for the law as well as for expensive clothes, fast cars and beautiful women. His partner Nick Morelli (James Belushi) is a an earnest hard charging lawyer who is trying to his marriage to his estranged wife (Gillian Vigman) and remain a presence in his son's life. Their new associate Lisa Tyler (Jurnee Smollett) is enthusiastic and determined to put her past as an exotic dancer behind her. Tanya Fischer also appears as their eager to please assistant Sophie.

$#!* (pronounced "Bleep") My Dad Says is undoubtedly the first TV series based on a Twitter feed. The feed in this case is called Shit My Dad Says but we all know how that would fly as a title for a TV series. William Shatner (must resist the desire to pun on this) stars as Ed, the titular Dad. Ed is prone to rants on just about any subject he can think of and political correctness is the last thing on his mind. Ed has two sons, Vince (Will Sasso) the meek half of a husband and wife real estate team dominated by his wife Kathleen (Nicole Sullivan), and Henry, a struggling writer and unpaid blogger (a type I'm eminently familiar with). When Henry (currently uncast) is unable to pay his part of the rent to his roommate Sam (Stephanie Lemelin) Ed suggests that Henry move in with him. The pilot at least was directed by sitcom veteran James Burrows. Oh, and late breaking news (like this is a huge surprise; The Parents Television Council has denounced CBS for the show: "CBS intentionally chose to insert an expletive into the actual name of a show, and, despite its claim that the word will be bleeped, it is just CBS' latest demonstration of its contempt for families and the public. There are an infinite number of alternatives that CBS could have chosen but its desire to shock and offend is crystal clear in this decision." Whatever?!)

Blue Bloods is a police drama following three generations of the Reagan family. Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) is the family patriarch and New York's Chief of Police, just as his father Henry (Len Cariou) had been. Frank has three children; Danny (Donnie Wahlburg) a veteran detective, family man, and Iraq war veteran whose tactics on the job can be a bit dubious; daughter Erin (Bridget Moynahan), a New York ADA and a new single parent; and Jamie, a Harvard Law graduate who gives up a lucrative career as a lawyer to enter the "family business." After graduating from the Police Academy his life takes an unexpected turn when he's asked to become involved in an undercover investigation that even his father knows nothing about and which could have an impact on the family legacy.

The as yet unnamed Criminal Minds spinoff stars Oscar winner Forrest Whitaker as Sam Cooper, the head of an elite team from the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit. Sam's team is an unusual one, not drawn from the usual run of Quantico trained agents. They include Mick Rawson (Matt Ryan), a former member of Britain's Special Forces who is an ace marksman and "an undiluted eye for rooting out evil"; John "Prophet" Sims (Michael Kelly), an ex-con with a street smart edge and a zen-like calm; and Gina LaSalle (Beau Garrett), a tough and attractive agent with a cunning sense of perception.

Comments:

CBS network boss Les Moonves described this line-up as an example of "aggressive stability." It's an apt description. The moves that Moonves announced were aggressive, attacking moves but also moves that recognised that some CBS shows, while retaining value as properties aren't what they used to be. Moving the two CSI shows not only recognises that their audiences are slipping but also acknowledges that the network has some weak points where established shows can be effective. Over the past few years CBS has had problems with the second hour of Fridays and the third hour of Sundays. The latter time slot in particular has been a show killer for CBS, so moving what was once the most popular show in the world there has to be seen as an effort to take back the hour. As for moving The Big Bang Theory to lead for $#!* My Dad Says, I think this will be a real threat to the NBC sitcoms that it will be going up against. This is actually a comedy bloc that I'm looking forward to, which something I don't often say. As for the other comedy, I'm sure that Mike & Molly will do just fine in its Monday night slot but I confess it just doesn't fire me up.

Turning to the other new shows, the one that I feel least comfortable with is The Defenders. Quirky lawyers can work but given the two lead cast members it just seems like it will be more comedy than drama. Further, I guess I have a tendency to just dislike both O'Connell and Belushi. I have higher hopes for Hawaii Five-0. I think that it is both familiar enough for people to turn in and far enough in the past that people who aren't old farts like me won't be nit picking about it. A lot will depend on the producers, writers and directors on the project making us buy Alex O'Loughlin as Steve McGarrett. Jack Lord had a certain quality that O'Loughlin in his recent series has yet to show me. (And in the spirit of nit-pickery, I would like to mention that not only does the show not have any native Hawaiians/Polynesian actors, but not one of the principal cast members was born in Hawaii.) The CBS show that I think might have the most potential to hold me is Blue Bloods. I'm a fan of Tom Selleck of course, but have been a fan of Donnie Wahlburg's acting since seeing him in Boomtown. I think that the multi-generational and family aspects of this take it beyond the realm of the "ordinary" procedural and have the potential to make it into something special.

Later today, The CW.

The Poker Conundrum

So the other night I fired up the DVR to watch something other than the Olympics. Yes it's true. Olympics junkie though I may be, there are times when I just have to watch something other than the Olympics. It usually happens when the "Olympics Broadcasting Consortium" (meaning CTV and its cable networks TSN and TSN2 aswell as Rogers Sportsnet) are showing tape of events I've already seen – or some figure skating – but that's beside the point. On this particular night I decided to catch up on an episode of The Big Bang Theory whichis one of the few sitcoms that I can not only sit through but actually enjoy. I was rewarded with the episode in which Sheldon – the character who elevates the show to another level – encounters his mortal enemy Wil Wheaton.

The reason why Wil Wheaton is Sheldon's mortal enemy is complicated but when is anything with Sheldon not complicated. Essentially Sheldon's favourite character on Star Trek: The Next Generation was Wesley Crusher – well you knew there had to be one – and when the opportunity to see Wil Wheaton at a Star Trek convention and to have him autograph a collectible action figure came up, Sheldon travelled nine hours by bus (twice violating his personal rule going to the bathroom on a moving vehicle – I have the same rule for busses and so do most people who have travelled by bus; gross!) to attend a Star Trek Con in Jackson Mississippi only to discover that Wil Wheaton wasn't going to be there. Finally Sheldon's chance for vengeance comes when he discovers that Wil Wheaton will be competing in a collectible card game that sounds like Magic: the Gathering...but isn't for copyright reasons. It is also a tournament that Raj has been begging Sheldon to enter – Raj wants the money – but that Sheldon has been dismissive of...until he learns that Wil Wheaton is playing in it. Inevitably Sheldon and Raj triumph over all opponents on the back of Sheldon's eidetic memory which allows not only to remember what cards have already been played but to deduce with incredible clarity what cards each of his opponents has. It's something that, in his smugly arrogant manner, he delights in telling them. Eventually he comes face to face with Wil Wheaton. And it is Sheldon's delight in explaining things to his opponents that proves to be his eventual downfall. He explains to Wil Wheaton why he is so hostile, and Wheaton explains that he missed the con because his grandmother died. Suddenly Sheldon, who is devoted to his Meemaw, melts and much to Raj's consternation throws the match to Wil Wheaton, who after winning informs Sheldon that his Grandmother will probably be very pleased that he won the money in the tournament – she's still alive.

The episode contains some elements of truth. Wil Wheaton is well known as a gamer, particularly a Dungeons & Dragons player. What's also fairly well known is that Wheaton is a competitive Poker player. How good is he? Well I've outlasted him in a couple of tournaments but that occurred in large part because I never played a hand against him. He's a solid recreational player who would have cleaned out the game on the USS Enterprise (those of you who remember Star Trek: The Next Generation will recall that a number of episodes centered around a Poker game featuring Riker, Worf, Data, Geordi, Dr. Crusher, and Counsellor Troi; like all TV poker players they played Draw Poker, a version of the game that is largely extinct in the casinos). This connection got me to thinking about how Sheldon would do as a Poker player. It's not really idle speculation on my part, rather it stems from a couple of things that's I've observed about Poker and what non-Poker players think about the game. One is that the most successful Poker players tend to be highly intelligent. Several of the top players either have PhDs or (in the case of Annie Duke) were close to getting the post-graduate degrees. Several were involved in high tech companies. We are also confronted by people who insist that poker isn't a game of skill but rather all about the luck of the draw.

If you believe that Poker is about the luck of the draw, which a recent "gamble responsibly" ad around here stated (not even suggested) then Sheldon would be an excellent Poker player. He's capable of calculating odds almost instantaneously, and obviously he'd know the relative values of various hands. His Eidetic Memory would be a tremendous asset in any of the games based around Seven Card Stud because he'd remember every card that had been played including the ones that had gone into the muck and been able to tell what each of his opponents had. It would be like the scene in Rounders where Matt Damon's character tells each of the players in the "Judges Game" what they had. That of course is what the situation would be if poker were entirely about the "luck of the draw."

In fact Sheldon would be a lousy Poker player just as Wesley Crusher, admitted into his mother's game, would be a terrible poker player (but not as bad as Sheldon; in this Sheldon would be more like Data). Sheldon would be easy to bluff because he wouldn't understand why someone would lie in that sort of situation or would always expect an opponent to bluff once a bluff is exposed. He'd only play good to great hands rather than the marginal hands that turn into something. As a result, when he does collect pots they wouldn't be as big as they might be. Big pots are usually pulled in when a player has a hand that develops into something greater than the losers expect them to be. With Sheldon playing only strong hands opponents would know that when he bets he has a very strong hand. In being a winner in the luck of the draw he would lose in the game of taking ships from opponents. Sheldon would be a disaster playing a Seven Card Stud style game because of his tendency to gloat when he wins, or more accurately when he knows he's going to win and sets out to explain why his opponents will lose while the hand is playing out. This is a breach of poker etiquette which in tournament play would probably result in penalties from the organizers and in standard "ring" games would probably result in a player being thrown out of the card room.

Sheldon's greatest weakness as a poker player is that he doesn't relate to people. In Poker playing the person is often a bigger thing than playing the cards, which is why Poker is a game of skill. An experienced poker player will be able to read his opponents, even online, and know when one of those opponents has a good hand and when they don't. They know when to bluff with a weak – or at least a not very strong – hand and when to fold their cards and wait for a better hand. It's about knowing when the other player is bluffing and when that player really is strong. It's about knowing the right time to apply pressure. It's about adopting different personas and styles of play during a tournament based on the skills and actions of opponents. Poker is about being one person at one table and a different person at another. It's knowing the right time to be loose and aggressive and when to be tight and conservative. They say that great comedy is all about timing. So is great Poker playing..Great comedy is about understanding people, at least in so far as it involves knowing what they'll laugh at. The key to great Poker is also understanding people and how they think. Sheldon would never get any of that – you can see that from the way he interacts (if you can call it that) with other people not to mention what he allegedly describes as his sense of humour – and more to the point he would care that he didn't get it. Sheldon's Eidetic memory would make him a great Blackjack player (at least until the casinos banned him and put him in "The Black Book") and his skills as a physicist would turn him into a wonder at the Roulette table, calculating orbital mechanics in his head, but when it comes to Poker, he'd be a disaster.

Now his roommate Leonard might have potential....

Man Undercover

There's one word that sums up the new CBS series Undercover Boss – "Meh!" In fact to paraphrase Lucy Van Pelt of all the "Meh" shows out there, Undercover Boss may be the "Meh-iest." I'm not saying that it's a bad show, but it's not a good show. It is probably a better fit for Friday nights on most networks and for the summer on all networks.

Undercover Boss, based on a British series of the same name, debuted after Sunday night's Super Bowl game and as a result had good ratings. But the problem is that while the premise seems sound the execution left me with a ton of questions, and the whole thing seemed flat.

The first episode of Undercover Boss followed Lawrence O'Donnell III, President and COO of Waste Management, which is one of the two largest waste disposal companies in North America. And here is where the problems start for me. The introduction to the show – before we met O'Donnell – made a big thing about out of touch CEOs that didn't care about the little guy and how it hurt in this time of economic troubles. The problem is that Waste Management is generally describes as one of the best companies in terms of corporate ethics. In 2008 and 2009 the company was named by business magazine Ethisphere as one of the most ethical companies in the world. And for his part O'Donnell comes across as pretty level-headed and likable sort of guy. He has an attractive but age-appropriate wife, a son and a daughter. O'Donnell's daughter suffered a Brain Injury as a child as a result of a doctor who failed to follow proper procedures; as a result he is a stickler for doing things the proper way in his business. In terms of safety it is not a particularly bad attitude to take.

When O'Donnell first notified the members of his executive team that he was going undercover to work for the company at what amounted to entry level positions there was a certain amount of surprise not to mention an attitude that amounted to "Is he serious?" Indeed he was. Going undercover as "Randy Lawrence" an unemployed construction worker who is being followed by a documentary film crew as he starts a new career in the waste management industry, O'Donnell gets a first-hand look at what's going on at his company at various locations. His first working day is at a recycling plant in Syracuse, New York where he's put onto a line to separate cardboard and trash from paper on a conveyor belt. Almost immediately he has difficulties getting all of the unwanted material off of the belt which to him seems to be moving impossibly quickly. Sandy, the woman who is training him informs him that this is the slowest line in the plant. But the real revelation comes when a piece of cardboard that "Randy" apparently missed jams a machine and they are forced to take their half hour lunch break early. "Randy" is shocked when Sandy suddenly bolts for the door in the middle of a conversation. The machine breakdown is lasting longer than the 30 minutes of their break and she has to clock in so as not to clock in late. The local plant manager has instituted a policy that docks an employee two minutes pay for every minute they are late clocking in.

The next working Day, "Randy" is relocated to Pompano Beach Florida where he works picking up trash that's blowing around at a landfill. His boss there is Walter, a man has little patience for able bodied workers who can't measure up to his standards – in this case filling a bag with scrap paper every ten minutes. At lunch "Randy" learns that Walter is on dialysis but is still able to do his job. Randy hadn't been able to measure up before lunch and isn't able to after lunch. Walter Fires him, which according to O'Donnell is the first time anyone has ever fired him from a job.

And so it goes. One day "Randy" is in Rochester, New York meeting Jaclyn, a woman who has one official job and several other posts that she's unofficially filling and is still in danger of losing her house. The next day he's cleaning portable toilets at a fair in Houston (where Waste Management's corporate headquarters is located) with Fred, a man who is extremely cheerful in his work despite the nature of the job.

Maybe the most eye-opening event for "Randy" comes on the final day when he works on a garbage collection truck with Janice, again in Syracuse. She has a bit of a grudge with "corporate" because of productivity targets that O'Donnell himself had put in place. The implementation of these policies includes supervisors who check up on how fast the collection trucks accomplish the requirement of collecting from 300 homes per day. Feeling under pressure to complete the requirements which she feels doesn't take her gender into account she resorts to peeing in a tin can rather than taking normal restroom breaks. Still, she manages to develop relationships with various customers along the route. Most touching for O'Donnell is when he meets a mentally challenged woman who has written a poem for Janice.

At the end of the week, O'Donnell retires the "Randy Lawrence" identity and reveals himself to the people that he worked with, who have no idea why they have been brought to Houston. There are no really big changes that O'Donnell makes from his time in the field although the show tries to make it seem like there are. He personally takes the manager of the plant in Syracuse to task for the docking policy that had Sandy so worried, and he arranges for Walter to have extra time off so that he can work with other dialysis patients. Indeed it is later revealed that Walter has become a health mentor within the company. He compliments Fred on his attitude and arranges for him to address senior managers He makes Jacklyn a supervisor – her first task is to hire two people to fill the jobs that she previously held, and arranged for her to be given salary status and eligibility for bonuses. Finally he explains to Janice that he empathises with her concerns over the productivity quotas and promises to work with her to help improve conditions for female workers within the company. Most of this is still ongoing, although Fred has left Waste Management to work in a hospital.

I have a lot of problems with this show. For example I don't know why the various plants in different parts of the country were chosen for this show. Was it because the producers pre-screened the various facilities within the company – which is not only across the United States but is very important within Canada – for various conflicts, or did they follow the idea that you can find a story anywhere. What would have happened if everywhere that O'Donnell had gone was full of happy employees who loved their jobs just the way they were without any complaints at all? Obviously that wasn't going to happen simply because the concepts put forward by corporate headquarters are put into real terms by the local managers like the guy in Syracuse who decided that clocking in a minute late would mean being docked two minutes pay. (Indeed the Syracuse operation seems to have huge problems with management since that was the same operation where Janice was concerned about supervisors following her truck to make sure she accomplished the productivity goals.)

Setting aside that however are two concerns. First of all Lawrence O'Donnell seems like an essentially good guy who is concerned with his company and his employees. There are things that are wrong with the company but it's not so much that O'Donnell is deliberately creating a hostile work environment so much as the fact that the policies are sound ideas that are being applied locally in a way that isn't sensitive to either the employees or what corporate headquarters is trying to implement. O'Donnell isn't the sort of guy that the voice-over that introduces the show is talking about. It might be interested in seeing a boss who really isn't so concerned with what's going on down the line within his company seeing how their policies were affecting employees, but of course such a CEO would never appear on a show like this. The other major thing I was hoping to see was O'Donnell making sweeping changes within his company; that seeing up close the sort of things that were going on would lead to big changes within Waste Management's corporate culture. That didn't happen. With respect to the people who were "Randy's" bosses, the changes that O'Donnell implemented were to a large degree very personal to them. It was great that Jacklyn was put on salary and given a better position in Syracuse but it doesn't do a lot for some man or woman in a different plant who is filling a number of jobs "unofficially" and is only being paid for their "official" job. The only areas where there are opportunities for real change come in Sandy and Janice's stories, both of which seem to reflect some of the worst attributes of efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's time and motion studies. In the case of Sandy's story it is apparent that there is a need to clarify policy regarding docking pay for clocking in late since the one manager took it in a different direction than O'Donnell intended for them to go. In the case of Janice, her story is more far reaching if it does change the way that the productivity goals are implemented and perhaps makes things better for lower level female workers.

In the end Undercover Boss lacks many of the qualities that I would like to see in this sort of reality show. There is little in the way of conflict; far less than on shows like Supernanny, Wife Swap or even Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (okay, I only watch the last of these). At the same time, in O'Donnell at least you have a boss who wants to change what is wrong, but the changes that this experience allows him to make are at best minor and "local" rather than "global." For the most part change for specific individuals that he met while he was "Randy" rather changes to the way that the company works overall. Add onto that some questions about the way that locations and people that he would be working with were selected and the show becomes less than a success for me. It certainly didn't deserve the post-Super Bowl slot (I'd have put the first episode of the new season of The Amazing Race but by now you know that The Race is my favourite reality show and high on the list of my TV shows overall, so I'm a bit prejudiced). The show was competently done for what it was, but between the lack of real conflict and the absence of real, significant change this show really doesn't do it for me. Instead of running it on Sundays after The Amazing Race CBS should have saved it for the summer. It earns too much of a "Meh" from me to be on at such an important time on Sunday nights.

No Phones, No Lights, No Motorcars – At Home!

One of the worst things you can probably say about a TV series may be that it is derivative. Everyone wants their show to stand out as original, or if not original then as the best of the type. I think that's why CSI and The West Wing became such huge hits when they debuted. They were original; they weren't derivative (of course the fact that the shows treated their audiences like intelligent human beings not only didn't hurt but helped). And maybe that's why there are so few reality shows that really pop. Most of the reality shows out there, particularly the summer reality shows, are as derivative as hell. A few years ago there was a deluge of The Apprentice clones, and only one of them worked. That was Hell's Kitchen, and it works not because of what is similar to The Apprentice but because of what is different. Unlike Trump, and the hosts of virtually all of the clones, Gordon Ramsay has his eyes on the donkey's every working minute of the process. Ramsay is very much a part of the process, and his personality – or at least the part of his personality that comes out when dealing with a crew of what are essentially novices that he is trying to mould into a team – is an essential part of the show, even more than Trump's personality shows up in The Apprentice. (Anyone who has ever seen Ramsay's big British show, The F Word, will have seen a different aspect of his personality; of course that show would never sell on FOX.)

In the new CBS show There Goes The Neighborhood the show being cloned is Survivor, with some Big Brother thrown in for good measure. Call this Survivor: Family Edition if you want to and you wouldn't be far wrong. Of course you can't whisk kids – some as young as 6 years old – off to a tropical hellhole paradise, so the show instead tries to replicate the tropical hellhole paradise atmosphere in their own homes. This is accomplished by erecting a concrete wall around eight houses in an Atlanta neighbourhood (it looks like the Berlin Wall without homey touches like the guard towers), and then cutting the power to the neighbourhood. The loss of power not only means no TV, no video games, no chargers for cell phones but also no electric stoves, no refrigerators, no hot water and no air conditioning. And they're in Atlanta. That makes it the next best (?) thing to a tropical hellhole paradise but without the poisonous snakes and man-eating fish. Of course in Survivor (and Big Brother) the real threat isn't from those things but from the people that you're competing with and on this show that makes things more than a bit complicated.

Casting in a reality show is essential of course. That's complicated in this case because they're actually casting a neighbourhood with both pre-existing relationships and pre-existing groups. It's not like they can bring people in to fill some real or imagined quota system that requires a certain number of each group. That said, the producers managed to find a street to do this show on that is almost surprisingly diverse, both demographically and interms of human interest stories, which is another aspect of reality show casting. There's a mixed race family (the Upshaws), a mixed faith family (the Schindlers – the father is Jewish, the mother is Christian – they go to temple and celebrate Christian holidays), a same sex couple (listed as the Mullenix family), a single parent family (Laurie Southey and her daughter), a family consisting of three generations (the Bussieres), and another where the wife's niece is living with them while going to school (the Johnstons). The human interest stories are there as well. Clarissa "Chris" Mullenix has her own son from her previous marriage and adopted her two nephews after her brother and sister-in-law were killed in a freak accident (only one of the nephews is participating in the show). When Susan Bussiere suffered a stroke in 2008 her mother moved in to help the family out and has stayed. David Schindler is a workaholic whose kids often don't see him as much as they'd like, and when they do see him he usually has his phone glued to his ear. The participants on the show range from 5 to 74 (Jake Bussiere and his grandmother Marcia Flerra, with most of the "adults" being in their 40s.

As you might expect most of the first episode deals with the players getting used to their new situation and throwing in the various twists – like the power going out – before the game part of the game really gets going. Losing the power, is a big thing of course. The children and teenagers primarily think about playing their video games, using the computer to communicate with their friends and being able to charge their cell phones. For adults of course the worries are more basic questions of survival; storing food (think how much of it goes into the refrigerator), cooking it, staying cool (think of how dependent all of us are on air conditioning), and even being able to do things after dark. It is very much like being on the island in Survivor. And of course that's where competitions come into play.

The competition in the first episode required one player from each team to wear a T-shirt covered in mud and another player from the team to unravel a tangled fire hose and use it to wash the mud off the shirt, revealing three numbers printed on the shirt (water supplied by a fire engine on the other side of The Wall). Once the numbers were revealed the two team members had to run to a box locked with a combination lock – the three numbers on the T-shirt were the combination to the lock, but they had to be put into the correct order to open the lock. It was a close race, but in the end it was won by the Nelsons, the self-described "Southern Family." They became "Kings of the Neighbourhood, which carried both a Reward a Responsibility. The Reward in this case was a refrigerator full of food powered by generator, probably on "the outside." There's also a plentiful supply of food, and of course the Nelsons are expected to share with their neighbours. The Responsibility is to nominate two families one of which will be removed from the game. The Nelsons choose the DeGirolamo family (a competitive but overweight poker player) and the Mullenix Family. Chris Nelson (the father of the family) has some rather interesting logic in making his selections. He believes that the neighbours will see the Mullenixes as being weak competitively – he sees Chris Mullenix as being a bit of an emotional basket case – so that they will vote to keep them and eliminate the "strong" team," the DeGirolamos. After the nominations are made, the other families adjourn to their homes to talk about which of the families they wanted to keep. Voting was done by handing in photos of the family they wanted to keep. As Chris Nelson predicted all but one of the teams – probably the Southeys – elected to keep the Mullenixes.

I'm not entirely sure what to think about There Goes The Neighborhood. On the surface it seems like a rather ordinary reality-competition show, a reworking of an older, superior, format that manages to rise slightly above the level of most such reworkings of originals. It's not on the same level as Hell's Kitchen when it turned the format of The Apprentice on its ear, creating – in my opinion at least – a product that is in some ways superior to the original (or maybe I just like Gordon Ramsay's personality better than I like Donald Trump's – Ramsay would have appreciated Annie Duke over Joan Rivers in a second). On the other hand the show is much better than that ersatz version of The Amazing Race that NBC put on the air called The Great American Road Trip. Quite frankly, as viewers we basically know what to expect from There Goes The Neighborhood; there will be competition and interpersonal conflicts and from a purely detached point of view there's nothing really to object to. The show isn't cheaply done or badly thought out. It is, in its own way, as comfortable for the viewers as an old boot.

My problem with this show isn't with the show as television, it is with the concept itself. In most reality-competition shows the relationships are transitory. With relatively few exceptions the people who appear on these shows have no previous exposure to each other, no bonds to be tested, and after the event they will have as much or as little connection as they wish with each other. Famously, Rob & Amber got married after their time together on Survivor: All Stars (and in July of this year became parents of a daughter, Lucia Rose), but I have no idea of how close Amber is with her fellow Survivor: Australian Outback competitor Elisabeth Hasselbeck. These are, by their nature mostly transitory relationships so that the disagreements and battles and other relationship stressors cease to matter outside of the context of the game. A major exception is The Amazing Race in which team members have pre-existing relationships, but the teams are competing against people with they don't have a history. That's different in There Goes The Neighborhood. There are pre-existing relationships, friendships or at least acquaintances. Chris Nelson was able to make the strategic move that he did because he knew his neighbours, both the ones he nominated and those who would be doing the voting. That's where the show seems somehow unsavoury. There will come a time when, despite the fact that everyone knows that it's just a game and that what goes on in the game stays in the game, feelings are going to be hurt in a way that goes beyond the game, and that after the game things aren't going to be the same. I find it vaguely unsettling that the production company was willing to take that chance with people's lives. I find it even more unsettling that the producers were able to find eight families willing to risk their friendships.

As a detached TV viewer I find There Goes The Neighborhood to be an competently executed, if not particularly compelling, summer reality-competition; the sort of thing that will hold your interest for a while but which you won't particularly miss when it's gone or care about when it's not back next year. But part of me is disturbed by the voyeuristic aspects of this show. It's one thing to see people who don't know each other brought together in a highly stressful environment and watch how they interact because they know that once they're done with this show they don't necessarily have to see each other again. It's quite another thing to watch the possible disintegration of existing relationships. Somehow it makes me feel just a little unclean. But maybe that's just me.

40 Years Ago

It was forty years ago today that man landed and walked on the Moon. Everybody is going to be posting about this of course, particularly we old farts, who remembers seeing it when it happened. I think we want to share our memories.

I don't know that my memories are much different from most people. Back in those days Saskatoon was a one channel town. CFQC was a CBC affiliate – as was every station in a single station market. What CBC did was to take the CBS coverage pretty much in its entirety and intercut some of their own material into the coverage. Lloyd Roberston was the CBC news anchor, but the face of it that we all remember was Walter Cronkite working along with Wally Schirra. In fact I remember very little about the CBC's own coverage beyond a very strong memory of a sort of three sided interview involving writer Isaac Asimov and (I believe) Abbie Hoffman, and the only part of that I remember was Hoffman "explaining" to Asimov that "obviously" no one with a name like Asimov would ever walk on the Moon, because a name like that didn't fit the WASP white-bread vision of America that NASA was designed to promote. Which of course has turned out to be true but certainly not for the reasons that Hoffman imagined.

I watched the Moon landing with my grandfather, and I'm pretty sure that we saw it on a black & white TV (which I still have by the way). As you'll see from the clips it didn't make too much difference. While the show was in colour, the important bits – the events from the surface of the moon – were in pretty low definition black & white. Apollo 12 was the first Moon mission with a colour TV camera; not that it did them much good after Alan Bean accidentally pointed the camera at the Sun which burned it out. The parts that were in colour were the clearly labelled animations and simulations. Thus we saw Neil Armstrong step on the Moon live, but thanks to the positioning of the camera (which dropped out on a shelf on the side of the descent stage of the Lunar Module, deployed when Armstrong pulled a lanyard on the "porch" of the module) we could barely tell what we were seeing. It got better.

My grandmother wasn't watching. She hated the idea of men walking on the moon, as if the very fact of their presence changed it somehow. In fact, at the time I remember her saying, "It's not the same Moon." In a way I guess she may have been right. A bit of the mystery had been taken away. Later flights would take away more of the mystery, but they would add more as well. As it turns out, the Moon Rocks weren't just gifts to be handed out to foreign dignitaries, they reveal a considerable amount about the formation of the Earth and the Moon and have led to at least one new theory about how the Moon was created (the Giant Impact Hypothesis which is currently the leading theory on the formation of the Moon). Still, when I was watching the Moon Landing as a 12 year-old kid I wasn't worried about the Moon being somehow changed by the event, or even about the science of the thing. I was excited by the sheer joy of the exploration in the one place where it seemed there was still the chance to explore. We knew our world (or thought we did) now there was nowhere else to go but up and out of the cradle. Little did we know how brief the time out of the cradle would be.

Regardless, here are the key events of that marvellous (in the true sense of the term – full of marvels) day forty years ago, mostly as I saw it. There are eight 10-minute parts to this playlist.

CBS’s 2009 Upfronts

(I'm slowly getting through the upfront stuff, a lot slower than I had anticipated and normally do it, but the past few day's I've been dealing with a series of all-day nasty headaches. I'm not nice when I have this sort of headache – I usually .)just want to sleep.

Here's what CBS is planning for the coming season.

Cancelled: The Ex-List, Without a Trace, The Unit, Harper's Island, Eleventh Hour, Worst Week, Game Show In My Head.

Renewed: The Amazing Race, Survivor, Two and a Half Men, Ghost Whisperer, Criminal Minds, CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, NCIS, Numb3rs, Gary Unmarried, New Adventures of Old Christine.

Moved: The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, The Mentalist, Cold Case.

New Shows: Accidentally On Purpose, The Good Wife, NCIS: Los Angeles, Three Rivers, The Medium (picked up from NBC).

Not Yet Scheduled: Rules of Engagement, Flashpoint, Arranged Marriage, The Bridge, Miami Trauma, Undercover Boss.

Complete Schedule

Monday
8:00-8:30 p.m. How I Met Your Mother
8:30-9:00 p.m. ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE
9:00-9:30 p.m. Two and a Half Men
9:30-10:00 p.m. The Big Bang Theory
10:00-11:00 p.m. CSI: Miami

Tuesday
8:00-9:00 p.m. NCIS
9:00-10:00 p.m. NCIS: LOS ANGELES
10:00-11:00 p.m. THE GOOD WIFE

Wednesday
8:00-8:30 p.m. New Adventures of Old Christine
8:30-9:00 p.m. Gary Unmarried
9:00-10:00 p.m. Criminal Minds
10:00-11:00 p.m. CSI: NY

Thursday
8:00-9:00 p.m. Survivor
9:00-10:00 p.m. CSI
10:00-11:00 p.m. The Mentalist

Friday
8:00-9:00 p.m. Ghost Whisperer
9:00-10:00 p.m. MEDIUM
10:00-11:00 p.m. Numb3rs

Sunday
7:00-8:00 p.m. 60 Minutes
8:00-9:00 p.m. The Amazing Race
9:00-10:00 p.m. THREE RIVERS
10:00-11:00 p.m. Cold Case

Accidentally On Purpose is the story of Billie (Jenna Elrman), a newspaper film critic who finds herself pregnant after a one night stand. She decides to keep the baby and the "boy toy" who is the father (Jon Foster). They decide to live together platonically but Billie isn't sure whether she's got a boyfriend, a roommate or a second child to raise, particularly when his freeloading friends come around. Also stars David Show, Ashley Jensen, Lennon Parham and Nicolas Wright.

The Good Wife stars Julianna Margullies as a woman whose life collapses when her politician husband (Chris Noth) is jailed amidst stories of sexual improprieties and political corruption. She returns to her own career as a lawyer at a prestigious Chicago firm, but its been thirteen years since she's been in a courtroom. She finds herself in competition with people half her age for the one associate position with the firm. She does all of this to provide a stable home for her two teen age children. Also stars Christine Baranski, Josh Charles, Matt Czuchry, and Archie Panjabi. Producers are Tony and Ridley Scott.

NCIS: Los Angeles is a spin-off from the original NCIS focussing on NCIS's Office of Special Projects, a branch of NCIS that is involved in undercover surveillance. Stars Chris O'Donell, LL Cool J, and Louise Lombard.

Three Rivers looks at the organ donation process from the perspective of the three groups concerned – the families of the organ donors, the transplant doctors, and the transplant recipients. The only permanent cast members are of course the members of the transplant team at one of the most prestigious transplant hospitals in the country. Cast includes Alex O'Loughlin, Katherine Moennig, Daniel Henney, Julia Ormond, and Christopher J. Hanke.

Arranged Marriage is a reality show that looks at three adults who decide for a variety of reason to allow friends and family to arrange marriages for them. The show follows them from the first meeting with the partners who have been selected for them and through the marriage to the day to day problems of married life.

The Bridge is a Canadian made show from CTV, which also created Flashpoint. Aaron Douglas (from Battlestar Galactica) stars as Frank Leo, the new head of the police union. His work as a cop forces him to bridge the gap between rich and poor in the area they patrol, while his position as union head forces him to bridge the gap between the cops on the streets and the department brass, many of whom have their own political agendas. Also stars Paul Popowich, Frank Cassini, Michael Murphy and Ona Grauer.

Miami Trauma moves Jerry Bruckheimer away from the world of forensics and police procedurals. In Miami Trauma, Bruckheimer goes into the world of emergency medicine with a team of surgeons of varying degrees of experience and different personalities but who excel at the so-called "golden hour" when a trauma patient's life hangs in the balance. Stars Jeremy Northam, Lana Parrilla, Elisabeth Harnois and Omar Gooding.

Undercover Boss is another reality series, and like Shark Tank is
another series taken from a foreign original, this time British. In this series high level corporate executives take low level positions in their own companies to get a real sense of problems that their companies face and how their workers are actually being treated. There's no indication of how long the American executives will stay as low level employees; in the British version of the show they had to spend ten days in their temporary positions.

Comments:

CBS has made several interesting moves in their schedule that I'm not entirely sure of. Moving The Mentalist to Thursday night following CSI from Tuesday following NCIS is both a testament to the show's break-out performance in the past season and a bit of a puzzle in that they're putting a lot of eggs in one basket. My guess is that with Leno taking over the third hour for NBC, CBS is aiming for a show that can deliver a knockout punch against ABC's Private Practice. Bringing Medium over from NBC is another move that some are finding controversial. I've seen Medium described as dying show based on its NBC ratings, and when CBS described NBC's failure to pick up the show as "indefensible" because it had higher ratings than some NBC shows that were renewed (including Chuck which was – rightly – the subject to so much effort to get it brought back) NBC countered by saying that the series was lower rated than some of the shows that CBS cancelled. One of those shows was Eleventh Hour which was a show that I loved but one where the cancellation wasn't a surprise, just frustrating. I have a suspicion that when the ratings for the full year come out Eleventh Hour – which frequently finished 13^th in overall viewers – will probably be the highest rated show cancelled this season (yes, above Without A Trace). And yet anyone who reads Marc Berman's Programming Insider forums knows that the "numbers heads" (as I call them) there were demanding that the show be cancelled practically from the time it debuted because it didn't do well in the 18-49 demographic – though it was improving – and had poor retention out of CSI. I'll mourn Eleventh Hour but I do see the merits of putting Medium on the network and putting it on Friday night when the 18-49 demographic is arguably less important than it is on other nights.

Looking at the new shows I think there isn't much that really stand out. I'm not entirely sure that moving Big Bang Theory out of the first half hour of prime time and moving How I Met Your Mother will necessarily help Accidentally On Purpose. This show is going to rise and fall on how much people like and accept Jenna Elfman in this role, because the show doesn't seem overly original. The description of the show reminds me a lot of the Katherine Heigl-Seth Rogen movie Knocked Up and the clip that I've seen doesn't disabuse me of that notion.

Turning to the dramas, my one concern with NCIS: Los Angeles is that they've decided to use it to follow the original NCIS. The problem is of course that looking at the CBS schedule I can't think of anywhere else to put the show except maybe following The Amazing Race. Does it really fit to have a show that is going to deal with global terrorism follow a show that deals with global travel? Three Rivers, with its dramatic emphasis on saving lives probably works better. Finally there is The Good Wife. I'm pretty much convinced that if NBC had continued to program the third hour of prime time rather than turn it over to Jay Leno, CBS would have retained Without A Trace. As it stands the new Julianna Margulies series will be facing up against a relatively routine procedural (The Forgotten).

CBS looks set to be the dominant network – at least in terms of total audience numbers if not in the 18-49 demographic (let alone the 18-34 demographic which is becoming more important for some advertisers) – this year. The network has admirable "bench-strength" and could arguably have retained all of their 2008-09 line-up, replacing only The Ex-List and Worst Week. That said, there's nothing particularly bad about the new line-up either. The problem is that while there's nothing particularly bad about it I really can't say that there's anything particularly outstanding about it either. It's a nice safe, unchallenging line-up. It's going to work, and I'm betting that few of these shows are going to be cancelled before the end of the season. I just don't think that it's a line-up that will set the world on fire either.

New Harper’s Island Trailer

Normally I don't post trailers for new shows that are coming up in the next few days, but I'm making an exception for Harper's Island. There are a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that the show features one of my favourite character actors, Jim Beaver (Jim is a favourite of mine not only because he's a first rate actor but because he's an extremely knowledgeable guy who used to post a lot in newsgroups like rec.arts.movies.past-films; it doesn't hurt that he was Don Adams's son-in-law either). The show looks to be a great combination of gothic horror and mystery with a ton of atmosphere.

It's possible that the show could represent a fundamental change in the way that American network TV is done, if it's successful. It will tell a close-ended story in a thirteen week run which is similar to the way that British TV is done. It seems very close to the original concept of a mini-series. However, unlike a miniseries there is the possibility that the show could be renewed for another thirteen week run. If so, most if not all, of the cast would be replaced and the setting would be different. Even the name would change.

I have a couple of worries about Harper's Island. One is the way that the network has chosen to handle it. Starting the show in April and having the finale run on July 2 seems to me to be something of a vote of non-confidence in the series. If CBS felt sure about the show wouldn't they have started during the "February" sweeps (which happened in March this year) and ended it during May sweeps? Or were they worried, once they decided to put it in the prime Thursday night slot following CSI that the show would suffer against the final episodes of ER and wanted to put it against the (supposedly) weaker competition of NBC's new series Southland? My other worry about the show has to do with whether or not the serialized nature is going to have a negative effect on its performance. Will an audience that seems with only a few exceptions to be dialled in to procedurals (here defined as "a genre of programs in which a problem is introduced, investigated and solved all within the same episode") be willing to invest the time and thought needed for this type of drama which requires an extended attention span. A plus for the show in this area is that it will be running for thirteen weeks without a hiatus. Still, it does seem to be a risky move.

Anyway, here's the new Harper's Island trailer. (I hope to have the 1972-73 TV Guide Fall Preview material posted later this afternoon.)