True Recall Or Total Lies

(This review was delayed by that pesky Canadian election, which managed to irritate the crap out of me because of the way the candidate I supported lost. Someday maybe I'll tell you about it.)

When I first heard of the concept for My Own Worst Enemy my immediate thought was that it sounded like the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie True Lies. In that movie Arnold plays a married computer consultant with a wife and kid and a best friend (played by Tom Arnold) who in reality is a super-spy who goes around romancing Tia Carrere. As publicity for the show increased and we found out more about the premise we learned that the lead character had two very distinct personalities that didn't know about each other. The concept at least started to seem more innovative. Having seen the first episode I am led to a slightly (but only slightly) less interesting conclusion, namely that My Own Worst Enemy is like a mash-up of True Lies with another Schwarzenegger movie, Total Recall, in which he plays a man who believes himself to be one thing only to discover that who he thought he was has been artificially imposed over his real personality (of course that could also be untrue and his adventures are part of a futuristic computer vacation program).

The first time we encounter Edward Albright is on a video recording in which he warns someone to call his wife and tell her that he can't make the kids' soccer game. It's the one way he can save his own life. Immediately we are taken forty-eight hours into the past. The location is Paris and Edward is talking to someone we can't see before he meets with a young woman. He very quickly seduces her and after they have sex the talk turns to someone named Uzi Kafelnikov who, as Edward puts it, has taken something that doesn't belong to him. As the woman goes to the bathroom, we see her loading a silenced pistol. As she goes into the bedroom she fires into a man shaped bump on the bed. She thinks it's Edward but that's the last thought she has as Edward puts a bullet through her brain. Back in Los Angeles Edward meets with a woman named Mavis. Mavis is Edward's boss and she's not happy that he killed the woman in Paris – he was supposed to interrogate her and get information about Uzi. As he leaves Edward comments on the nice suit that he's wearing and mentions that "he buys off the rack," speaking in the third person. After his meeting with Mavis Edward goes to meet with a "tech geek" who gives him detailed memories about a business trip to Akron and puts Edward "to sleep."

The next thing we see is Edward getting out of an elevator. He looks subtly different and answers to the name of Henry Spivey. Henry is a senior consultant for a company called A.J. Sun which consults in the financial and investment areas. Henry is happily married, has two kids, a dog and a minivan. He is also dreading a meeting with the company psychiatrist, something that he talks about with his friend Tom. Henry has had a strange dream, which in itself is unusual because Henry doesn't dream. In his dream he was in a hotel in Paris with a woman who called him Edward. Most puzzling of all is that he has a matchbook from the hotel that he was at in his dream, the Hotel Lyonnais in Paris...and Henry's never been to Paris.

After that things start coming apart. As Henry is reading a book, Edward suddenly emerges. Worse, Henry emerges as Edward is on a mission in Russia to do surveillance on, and possibly assassinate Uzi. Henry fires the sniper rifle that Edward is equipped with, giving away his position. Uzi's men shoot Henry, although fortunately Edward was wearing a bullet-proof vest, and Uzi proceeds to torture Henry to get information (though of course he thinks he's torturing Edward – to say this gets confusing is an understatement). Suddenly a rescue is staged by an agent in a mask who gets Henry out of the building and also manages to grab the briefcase that Uzi had taken. Safely away from Uzi and his men the hooded agent reveals himself to be Henry's friend from A.J. Sun, Tom. Except Tom insists that his name is Raymond!

Needless to say Henry is confused (more so than we are but then we're seeing a lot more than he is). Raymond takes Henry to meet with Mavis who explains things in great detail to him. Henry has only existed for 19 years while Edward is the real personality, someone who submitted to the technique to create an alternate personality of his own free will. The problem is that something is breaking down the barriers. Taking Henry to Edward's living quarters, Mavis tells him they'll get to the bottom of things. Exploring, Henry discovers not only Edward's large supply of champagne (a bottle of which he proceeds to drink) but also a hidden room containing Edward's personal effects including press clippings from when he was a high school football star, his parent's obituary, and his Medal of Honor. He also finds Edward's car keys and taking Edward's Camaro drives home, only to have Edward take over part way through the trip. Mavis contacts Edward and tells him that Henry is going to be "erased." Edward decides to take the opportunity to find out what Henry's life is like and arriving at home makes very passionate love to Henry's wife. During the night Henry takes over and finds a message written on his hand telling him not to drive Edward's car again. He also has a very appreciative wife. When Henry rides up to the office in the elevator he asks Tom some questions about tom's personal life and in return Tom asks about his life. Henry mentions that his parents died in a fire, but it was Edward's parents who died in the fire not Henry's, and it wasn't Tom in elevator, it was Raymond. Raymond, Mavis and the computer geek take Henry into a white room where, we're led to believe that either Henry's or Edward's memories were destroyed.

Apparently it was Edward who was erased because we see Henry arriving at home and checking his mail. His wife called to remind him about the soccer game but suddenly he's attacked by Uzi and one of his goons Henry is taped up with duct tape and tortured by Uzi's goon. Henry manages to persuade Uzi that he has a split personality but that he knows how to get where Edward hid the case with the items that Uzi had stolen thanks to a GPS that Edward left in Henry's car. This took them out into the desert. Henry digs a big hole – nearly grave sized in fact – and at the bottom finds a crate with a brief case in it. It's pretty clear that the hole would be Henry's grave but when Uzi makes it clear that his wife and children will also be killed, Henry activates something on the GPS and ducks into the whole. The case explodes killing Uzi and his henchman but leaving Henry alive. The DVD from Edward explained that he had hidden a fake case in the desert and that the GPS has "an interesting" feature. The last scene features Edward, waiting for a meeting with Mavis watching a DVD made by Henry.

In spite of the fact that My Own Worst Enemy boasts a strong cast that includes Alfre Woodard as Mavis, Mike O'Malley as Tom/Raymond, and Madchen Amick as Henry's sexy wife Angie, the truth is that the series rises or falls on Christian Slater's ability to play Henry and Edward. It is crucial for us as an audience to get the sense that while the man is the same there is a distinct difference in the two personalities. Henry and Edward are not multiple personalities in the true sense of the word. Rather they are closer to two sides of the same person both allowed to have equal control. Henry is responsible, monogamous, peaceful and in the end not adventurous. Edward is a rule breaker, promiscuous, violent, and a thoroughgoing risk taker. Most people have both aspects within them but with one or the other having control, usually the responsible one, although those other aspects come out on occasion. Henry and Edward are split artificially, the perfect cover for a spy and assassin but also the perfect way to have the violent rule breaker under control and only available as needed. In a way Edward is a prisoner to be let out only when needed, with Henry as his prison. It's apparently not an accident that Slater's two characters are named Henry and Edward, the same names as Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde. What I think is interesting is that it is the "Hyde" side of Henry and Edward that is the original man – the athlete, linguist, and war hero as well as the violent risk taker and rule breaker – while it is the "Jekyll" side – the responsible family man – who is the construct.

There were some nits to pick with the writing of the first episode mostly related to the timeline that has been imposed on Edward and Henry. We're told at the start of the episode that forty-eight hours have past between the events in Paris and Henry watching Edward's DVD. And yet we're also supposed to believe that in those two days Edward/Henry flew from Paris to Los Angeles spent one night at home (as Henry), flew (as Edward) from Los Angeles to Moscow, set up a position where he could observe and possibly assassinate Uzi, been captured (as Henry) and tortured, then rescued by Raymond, flew from Moscow back to Los Angeles, met with Mavis, had sex with Angie (as Edward pretending to be Henry) then (as Henry) been caught by Raymond and Mavis and apparently treated. Oh yes, and set up the equipment to save Henry from Uzi and made the DVD. That time scale is rather difficult to accept as you can imagine. Indeed the whole premise, if looked at from a point of view that demands realism in TV shows is rather difficult to accept. However there is such a thing as willing suspension of disbelief. In this case, while the physics of Edward/Henry's transportation situation (as described) are at Santa Claus or Superman levels – and Edward wears neither a red suit nor a red cape – the idea that a shadowy portion of the intelligence "alphabet soup" might concoct a plan where they deliberately split personalities and store dangerous agents inside ordinary people is a believable enough premise to serve as a jumping off point for a series. If nothing else it feeds into our present fear, distrust, and dislike of intelligence agencies.

Reaction to My Own Worst Enemy has been mixed. Some people have been drawn into it and others have at the very least been disappointed by the show. I fall into the former group. Even though, as the title of this post suggests, I remain unconvinced about the originality of the concept I have to say that I found the execution of the concept to be intriguing enough to get me back on a regular basis for as long as the show hangs around. One thing I will say, as usual, is that the true measure of the show won't be found in the first episode – where the concept is set up – but in how well the writers make use of the dual nature of Edward and Henry in future episodes. You have to hope that every episode doesn't involve Henry popping up to screw up one of Edward's missions, or Edward pulling off some superspy trick to save Henry's life and protect his family from a bad guy who has discovered their secret. If they can avoid that, if they can keep the ideas relatively fresh and relatively innovative this could be an interesting show to follow. One thing's for sure, of the three new series released by NBC so far this fall, it's the best of the lot ... not that that's saying much.

We Aren’t In Kansas Anymore

Every so often you get surprised by a show. Usually it's a bad surprise. Maybe it's a show that you expected (hoped) would be great turned out to be a steaming pile of poo. Sometime a creator whose previous work you loved and respected disappoints you. Yeah I'm talking about you Aaron Sorkin – I like Studio 60 more and more the more I see of the shows that have come after it on NBC but it was no West Wing...or Sports Night...or The American President...or A Few Good Men. Occasionally though you get a show that you don't really expect much from and it hits a home run with you. That's how I feel about the new ABC version of Life On Mars.

There were a lot of indicators that Life On Mars was going to be a ticking time bomb. It was an adaptation of a British series, and how many of those make the transition well. For every The Office there's a couple of Couplings hiding in the weeds. The British series was definitely a quirky one that had a cult following in North America. Does Blackpool which became Viva Las Vegas ring some bells with you fine people? The Internet buzz on the show wasn't great. A lot of people posting in response to the original YouTube clips that ABC released were screaming at how awful the American version was when compared with the British series, and some of the professional critics that I respect had low feelings about the new series. Worst of all, the show went through a thorough recasting, with only the original lead actor being retained from the original pilot of the show – the one that the clips came from. Even the city changed, with production and location moving from Los Angeles to New York, "to allow producers to take advantage of recently enacted local and state tax credits for shows filmed in that state." Under most circumstances these factors would spell DOA even while the blood was still pumping through the victim.

You know what though? I think it works. Maybe it's because I've never seen the BBC version – it was on BBC Canada but I never managed to be free while it was on – but there was a moment when the show hooked me and I was drawn in. I'm pretty much convinced though that a big part of what makes it work for me is the recasting and moving the show from Los Angeles to New York. For once I think that a network decision actually did what these decisions are meant to do – make the show better. Of course I've only seen the pilot episode. Subsequent episodes might totally destroy the feeling that I have for the show, but after this episode they've got me.

We're first introduced to detective Sam Tyler and his partner Maya Daniels as they are racing to the home of a suspected serial killer. We quickly learn that Sam and Maya are involved with each other against departmental regulations, and that Sam is afraid of people finding out that they're together. They managed to capture the killer, Collin Raimes, who has been holding his victims for 30 hours before killing them. However, although they have considerable evidence against him, including a diary, the Raimes's lawyer is able to supply a security camera DVD from a casino in Atlantic City that seems to prove that the man was there shooting craps all night at the time the latest victim was taken. Maya continued to track Raimes on her own (against orders) after his release, until she disappears. All they find is a blood stained sweater she was wearing. It is only then that the detectives discover that Raimes had an identical twin brother and that he was the one that the security cameras recorded. It's as he is frantically trying to get to Raimes's apartment that Sam is hit by a speeding car, seemingly coming out of nowhere as David Bowie's song "Life on Mars" plays on his iPod.

It's at that point that the real story begins. Sam comes to, apparently to the sound of "Life on Mars" but we know before he does that something is radically different. Sam is now wearing a leather jacket and a different shirt and pair of pants than he was before. He very quickly is made aware of his surroundings by a beat cop who tells him that he can't park here. What's he's parked is an orange muscle car (to my untutored eyes a Plymouth Roadrunner). "Life on Mars" is playing off an eight track tape. The apartment building where the suspect lived hasn't been built yet. But most of all, standing tall proud and seemingly indestructible are the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Not knowing what else to do, Sam makes his way to the precinct where he worked in 2008. The outside's the same, but the inside confuses Sam a lot. Still the people there seem to be expecting Sam, their new transfer. Still things are very disorienting for Sam, particularly the lack of a desk and computer for him (the other cops get a great kick out of him expecting a computer – like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey?) but his actions rouse the precinct's Lieutenant, Gene Hunt. Hunt is not happy at being roused out of his sleep by the new guy and proceeds to give him a bit of a beating before turning him over to the lone woman in the squad, Policewoman Annie Norris, known as "No Nuts" to the men in the squad. Annie listens to his story about being from 2008 with more than a little incredulity, although without the ridicule that the others heap on him. There isn't much time for Sam to settle in. He's almost immediately thrust into a murder case that has similarities to the case he was working on in 2008. Still the slowness of the 1973 system works against him. Fingerprints take two weeks to process, and the cops in the precinct think that it's amazing what they can do these days. When Sam tries to get Annie to help in psychologically profiling the killer – she has a degree in psychology – the other cops regard it as gobbled-gook while Annie is mad at him for drawing attention to her because it subjects her to ridicule. When Sam hears The Who's "Baba O'Riley" from a record store (he gets to explain to Annie about CDs and MP3 players and how the sound is ... not as good as this, this being vinyl) he finds a key piece of evidence, artificial fibre used as sound-proofing for a listening booth in the record store. Another bit of evidence comes into focus when an investigation that Sam instigated when he mentions Collin Raimes's name leads to a complaint filed by a woman named Raimes against one of her neighbours. They bring the woman into the precinct but initially she seems more interested in the coffee and cookies than in helping the cops. Finally Gene persuades her to help by bringing in some pricey Italian pastries. It seems that Mrs. Raimes – who has twin grandsons – has a neighbour who played his stereo too loud. The cops hadn't done much about the complaint but what they had done seems to have helped because she doesn't hear his music anymore. With that bit of information Sam and Gene head for the apartment building. Gene kicks the door open – without a warrant, another change from 2008 – and they find the soundproof room where the man, Willie Kramer, is holding his most recent victim still alive. Chasing Willie to a cluttered storeroom Sam is ambushed by him and loses his gun. Willie holds the gun on Sam and says something about it being the "only way to get back." Sam is certain that Willie means that the only way for Sam to get out of whatever state he's in and back to his 21^st century life (and Maya) is for Willie to shoot him. Sam comes closer and closer to Willie until the muzzle of the gun is firmly in his chest, but Willie doesn't pull the trigger. Just then Gene and Ray Carling break into the store room and arrest Willie – and then after the cuffs are on him punch him at least once. They don't need to, they just want to.

Sam does not adjust well to his new world. At one point he says he wants to "follow the Yellow Brick Road" until it ends; to just keep going until the point where his mind can no longer produce the "reality" of the 1970s, which he believes might be a way for him to return to his real life. At various points during the episode Sam seems to be in contact with that real life. In the police squad room he hears the sounds of paramedics trying to revive him. In the apartment has been rented for him, and where "his" stuff has been unpacked by Annie, as he sits watching a late night science show, the professor on the TV suddenly stops talking about the sides of a triangle and starts talking about the status of the patient's mind, including how his mind may in fact be in some sort of alternate reality. Finally, as he is talking to the child version of Colin Raimes – a boy who idolized Willie Kramer because Willie wasn't afraid of anything – Sam hears the voice of Maya over the car radio, reassuring him that she is safe and asking him to come back to her. Sam had considered turning the gun on himself as his way to get back to Maya, but in talking to Colin about Willie and how fear is something that should be embraced because it protects us and keeps us alive he seems to decide that maybe he should stay in 1973 for a while. Perhaps it is knowing that Maya is safe presumably removes some of the urgency, particularly since he can't be entirely sure that his interpretation of what Willie said is correct. In this at least his own fear – fear that dying in this reality might just mean that he dies in his "real" reality – keeps him from trying to find out once his greater fear, that not taking the chance will mean that Maya is going to die, is removed from the equation.

The casting for this series seems absolutely spot on, with one or two possible exceptions. Even though some people have said that Harvey Keitel is too old to play Gene Hunt – presumably based on the age of the actor who played the character in the original British series – he's a perfect fit for the role of the boss who is both brutish and doesn't give a rat's ass for the rules. And yet he has moments where he's almost charming. He knows how to handle innocent people as seen by the way he treats Mrs. Raimes. We don't see too much of the other two main detectives in this episode – clean-cut and somewhat green Chris Skelton (Jonathon Murphy), and shaggy and dishevelled Ray Carling (Michael Imerioli) – except as they ridicule the ideas of their somewhat strange new squad member. The major female role of Annie "No Nuts" Norris is played by Gretchen Mol who manages to catch the look of an early 1970s conformist quite well. While Annie's clearly unwilling to accept what Sam is telling her about the future she at least seems more sympathetic to him than the men in the squad. Moreover Annie is trying very hard to make Sam accept that he is where he is and the reality of it. Annie is the portrait of the early 1970s woman; not an equal with men in her job but still accomplished and ready to be taken into that world, even if she isn't totally accepted by it. I have some worries about Jason O'Mara as Sam Tyler if only because so much of the structure of the show rests on him playing a man struggling to cope with a situation not of his own creation.

For me the big thing though was the setting. The moment that I mentioned that hooked me on this series was the scene where Sam looks up and sees the World Trade Center intact. It was the perfect way to not only set us in the time frame of the show but also to make Sam realise the absolute foreignness of his experience. I don't think it's something you could do with another location. What place in Los Angeles could serve as that sort of reference point for the character and for the viewer? I can't think of one. And it seems to me that New York in the early 1970s is the perfect place for this. The city was both cosmopolitan and somewhat faded in its glories. It was just a few years after the Stonewall Riots and faced ongoing racial tensions. It would only be a few years later that the headline in the New York Daily News would say "Ford to City: Drop Dead." Most of all the New York Police in this period were notorious for their methods, and were recovering from the after-effects of the Knapp Commission, which had not fully weeded out the department's bad apples. While the British version of Life On Mars used Manchester – Britain's third largest city – as its setting rather than London, it is difficult to imagine any other city where this series being set and certainly not Los Angeles.

My feelings about Life On Mars are somewhat conditional. As I've mentioned on more than one occasion, I'm not always happy reviewing a series based on the pilot episode if only because the pilot is frequently a standout episode that doesn't show you what the series will really be like. Character development and really solid writing are going to be key to the show's ongoing success. This is true of all TV shows of course but in this one it is particularly important. The series got off to a sound start but among the concerns has to be how long this concept can be sustained. The original British series only ran for 16 episodes after all, just slightly less than a basic order for most American dramas that don't get a "back nine." That's how far the British though the concept could be stretched. The worst thing that could happen to this show is for it to degenerate into a bog standard police procedural where the "gimmick" is that the show is set in 1973 rather than 2008. I think that's a real fear as the show goes on. At the same time it can't constantly emphasis Sam as a fish out of water. For me the essential aspect of this show is Sam's journey as he integrates himself into his "new world," probably to a point where he's unsure about going back to his reality when the opportunity presents itself. Still if the writers, producers and actors can maintain the standards of the pilot episode I think they've got something truly intriguing with this series. A strong, if somewhat provisional, recommendation from me.

Knight Rider – Disorganized Thoughts

This is not a review of the not-really-new NBC series Knight Rider. I don't know when – if ever – I will get around to writing a real review of this show but this isn't it. What it is, really, is a bunch of disorganized thoughts about a show that I missed the start of and really only half watched when I did turn it on. I believe I dozed off either before the show started or after it ended and trust me, I enjoyed the nap more than I did what I saw of the show. But hopefully this helps to explain why my thoughts on this matter are disorganized than they would be if I had been attentive and taking notes.

I did a full review of the made for TV movie revival of Knight Rider
back when it came out last February. Back then I heaped a ton of scorn on the show for basically being a dopey revival of a dopey show with a ton and a half of dopey plot holes and some characters intended to make it seem modern and well, hip. As I think you can tell I didn't like it, regarding it as a failed attempt to do a "next generation" remake of a well beloved but not particularly good show from the 1980s. The movie was intended to serve as a backdoor pilot for a revival of the show, and despite being pretty bad (as far as I was concerned) it was picked up by NBC's new president of entertainment Ben Silverman. Given some of the revelations about Silverman that are currently making the rounds, one wonders what he was using when he approved this. Say what you want about Kevin Reilly, he gave us Life, Friday Night Lights, and Studio 60, and not crap like this. Anyone who saw that movie knew it was bad no matter what the ratings said. But, as the saying goes, the worst was yet to come.

The original Knight Rider series was once described by its creator Glenn Larson as "The Lone Ranger with a car. Kind of a sci-fi thing, with the soul of a western." And at its very heart it was as much that as it was Brandon Tartikoff's joking idea "The Man With Six Words." Although Michael Knight operated within a cloak of authority in the form of the Foundation for Law And Government (FLAG – a very powerful acronym in Reagan's America) he was essentially a lone vigilante operating with the equivalent his transportation (Silver) and partner (Tonto) rolled into one in the form of the original KITT. To be sure there were supporting characters in the form of Devon and Bonnie, but in a very real sense he was alone. The same was largely true in the TV movie. It was Mike Traceur in place of his father (Michael Knight), Charles Graiman as his version of Devin, Charles's daughter Sarah as the analog of Bonnie, with the addition of an FBI agent named Carrie Revai and Michael's friend and mechanic Dylan Fass. Even though the movies team was larger than the team in the original series it was still a compact and secret operation with Michael usually been sent off on his own to right whatever wrong the revived FLAG had chosen for him.

In the series that has all changed. Now Michael has a support system that seems to rival Mission Control in Houston in terms of personnel and infrastructure. In fact there's even a secret base of operations, cleverly hidden beneath an aircraft hanger that reminds me of the old airship hangar at Moffat Field in San Francisco. The whole thing has been dubbed "the KITTcave" by producers. Also included in the "KITTcave" is what appears to be some sort of government oversight in the form of a bureaucrat who seems to be ordering everyone around – including Charles Graiman who "reactivated" the Foundation and was therefore presumably the boss of things. He's the typical "get it done and get it done now," "failure is not an option," I want to know everything even though wanting it makes me look like a total ass" stereotype of a government type. Obviously he's disliked by most of the group and treated with resigned disdain by Charles.

Ah, but there are more changes. Mike has been given a "secret past". It's so secret in fact that even he doesn't know what it is. He has no memory of a chunk of his life during which he was apparently romancing some woman in Lebanon even as he had proposed marriage to Sarah. What's more his records are so restricted that even KITT can't get to them. Whatever Mike was doing it made him a lot of enemies. In the mission that started the episode the bad guys are targeting Mike as much if not more than they're targeting the thing that Mike and Sarah are trying to recover. In fact they even have a missile that seems capable of tracking Mike himself. That missile is also capable of setting KITT on fire for an extended period of time. This allows for an extended period of seeing Deanna Russo (who plays Sarah) in her underwear (for the guys...and some women) and Jason Bruening with his shirt off (for the ladies...and some men). It's also so big that at the end of the episode Carrie Revai "kills" Mike in order to protect the project – Mike Traceur has become a liability and so is required to become the "new" Michael Knight.

Of course the car plays a big role in this series, as a source of product placement revenue if nothing else. The producers spare no effort to remind us that this is a Ford Shelby GT500KR Mustang, by making sure that we see the Cobra logo as often as possible. In fact when KITT goes from street mode to "attack mode" (sprouting a couple of spoilers and a heavy duty air intake gadget, or maybe it's a hood mounted missile launcher) the Cobra logo becomes bigger and shinier. And when the car flies (yes, the car now has the ability to leave the ground under its own power) there's even a Cobra logo on the underbody of the car! However we don't see all that much of the car in actual action. Both of the extensive car chase sequences in the first episode feature a lot of projection shots from inside the car, and only limited scenes of the Cobra, or the Ford F-150 truck it transforms into (yes, it transforms, with moving panels and everything – Transformers was a success after all) driving on the roads. It may be my hazy memory but I think we saw a lot more of the old KITT from the original series from the outside.

As I have said, this is not intended as a review of the revived Knight Rider, but the result of the retooling of the original concept and even the TV movie is a mess. The show is pathetically weak on characterization of any sort let alone realistic characters. It's mainly about car chases and attractive people and why an actor of the quality of Bruce Davidson is mixed up with it is beyond me. But the roots of the problem go even deeper than the writing and the characterization to the mangling of core concept of the original series. Far from holding to Larson's original concept of "the Lone Ranger with a car" this version is closer to The Bionic Woman with a car. Michael and KITT are no longer free agents or part of a compact organization helping ordinary people, they are an extension of some government agency carrying out espionage missions and dealing with higher ups who demand results. They've gone away from the original soul of the show. I suppose that what they're trying to do is create something "relevant" to today's world but I think that if that's the intention they're taking the wrong approach even though I'm not sure there is a right approach. NBC-Universal seems to be engaged in an effort to replicate the success that they had with the revival of Battlestar Galactica by remaking or updating old shows which, not surprisingly, they have an interest. They failed – deservedly – last season with Bionic Woman, and if the made for TV movie and this first episode of Knight Rider are any indication they're going to fail – deservedly – with this. The root of this is a failure to understand why the revival of Battlestar Galactica works. It works because David Eick and Ronald Moore took the elements from the original 1978 and threw most of them out leaving just the bare bones on to which they grafted their vision. The original Battlestar Galactica never had the sense of fear and desperation that current series has. In the old series everyone seemed comfortable, and the enemy repeatedly proved easy to beat. Within the context of the science fiction setting, the revived Galactica has an almost realistic feel to it in the post 9-11 world. The problem is perhaps that Battlestar Galactica was a unique opportunity, as show with a great basic concept that never truly reached its full potential I suppose because Glenn Larson posited a utopian rather than a dystopian society to arise the destruction of humanity. Larson's humans were on the whole perfect rather than flawed creations. I'm not sure that you could make the same sort of magic happen with a show like Knight Rider. Perhaps an approach where Mike Traceur really was "the Lone Ranger with a car" could work; Mike and KITT alone, devoid of all outside aid except for access to Michael Knight's fortune to pay for gas and repairs (well after all, the Lone Ranger had his silver mine) working to live up to his father's and the now long gone FLAG organization's ideals by trying to help people in trouble. Would it work? Who knows? What I do know is that the current version of the series works even less well than the TV movie and that didn't work at all for me. Then again, I liked Studio 60.

No Medium Here

CBS has this knack. They put on these shows that are unlike series that the other networks would put on. They're shows that feature detective who have a quirky manner in solving crimes either because of who they are or how they go about solving crimes. And yet these people are not so quirky that their quirks become the story. In short they're not producing shows like Monk or Psych. But think of it; they took a show about Navy lawyers who solve crimes that was cast off after one season by NBC and made it such a success that it ran for a total of ten years. That was JAG. Then they put together a show about Navy investigators originally called Navy NCIS (which was of course redundant since the "N" in NCIS stands for "Naval"). Then there was that show about a math professor who solves crime for his FBI agent brother – Numb3rs. Arguably you can add the CSI franchise shows to this list. What do these shows have in common? Charming characters, well defined relationships, and solid but not spectacular writing. These shows are never going to win an Emmy and they're never going to get a lot of love – or indeed hate – from the critics. In fact I've seen people who do criticism online say that they don't know anyone who watches NCIS. And yet NCIS is in the top 20 in ratings, the CSI franchise are among the best rated shows on TV, and Numb3rs is absolutely solid on Friday nights. So obviously CBS is on to something. CBS's latest addition to this sort of show is The Mentalist starring Simon Baker. It's not genius, but all things considered it's pretty solid TV.

The lead character in The Mentalist is Patrick Jane. For years he pretended to be a psychic, able to use his supposed abilities to contact the dead and to work with the police. He was very successful at this, being a favourite on the TV talk show circuit. That was five years ago though, and things have changed for Patrick – a lot. What exactly that was is a major plot point that I want to reveal at the appropriate point, and indeed it might not be the full story. Jane is now working with the California Bureau of Investigations (which I was surprised to learn is a real organization). We first meet Patrick and the team that he works with as they arrive at a mansion. Posters showing a teenage girl are being pulled down and a teenage boy is being taken away in handcuffs. It's obvious that the girl was missing and her dead body has been found. The local police don't think that the CBI team needed to come out for this one. While the girl's parents – her father really – are giving a press conference thanking the police, Patrick goes into the kitchen of the house, making a sandwich for himself and making tea. The girl's mother comes in and Patrick sympathises with her, telling her that he knows what she's feeling. She says he can't possibly know but he rapidly gains her confidence by telling her things about herself that supposedly no one could possibly know. In fact it's all a matter of observing things in the kitchen. He also figures out that she has doubts about the arrest of the neighbour's kid for the murder. When the husband comes in Patrick accuses him of killing his daughter. He observed a strip of pictures in the kitchen of the father and the daughter that indicated to him that the father had been altogether too close – in a sexual way – to his daughter. The wife leaves the room and comes back with a gun and shoots her husband.

This is all in the first ten minutes or so, and I want to say something about this sequence. I found it interesting that clips from this sequence were used extensively in the advertising for the series, all of which might suggest that the story of this couple was the major storyline for the episode. This is a feeling that is intensified by the actors chosen for the roles of the husband and wife – Stephen Culp and Gail O'Grady. You wouldn't hire actors of this calibre for a brief role after all. Well remember what Hitchcock did with Janet Leigh in Psycho? Hire a big name actress and then kill her character early in the movie to set up the rest of the thing? That's exactly what the producers did with Culp and O'Grady. They set up the rest of the episode with the events that culminated with the mother killing the father. And in this case they gave us some insight about Patrick Jane including a hint about his experience that we're meant to dismiss until information about his past is revealed. It's a neat trick.

The actual case begins a few weeks later. In Palm Springs a professional golfer and his brother arrive home to find the bodies of a man, bludgeoned to death with a golf club and the golfer's wife killed in their bed. On the wall of the room is a smiley face drawn in blood. The team, minus Patrick but with a new young female member are called in. They're met at the crime scene by Patrick. He's had himself reinstated. In the house a local CBI agent explains how this killing is the work of a notorious serial killer named Red John. The young agent is positively gleeful about the prospect of seeing the work of Red John. Patrick immediately explains that this isn't the real work of Red John but of a copycat who doesn't know all the details that the police know. He's been working on the Red John case for five years, since before he revealed that he was not a psychic. The immediate thought is that the wife is having an affair with the man (a Doctor) who was killed but after a quick examination of the corpse Patrick declares that the man was Gay (the man's toe nails had been done with a clear lacquer). Sure enough the man's medical partner, Doctor Wagner, confirms that he was Gay. While the other investigators look at the golfer and his brother, Patrick and his boss visit the Wagner, who's a psychiatrist. The office is full of African art – the partners in the practice run a charity helping African kids. During this interview the Doctor reveals that his partner had given the woman a year's supply of birth control pills without prescription – her husband had a vasectomy – indicating that she was having an affair. There's some physical evidence found at the scene that points to the brother as the killer. He admits only to having an affair with his sister-in-law. The assumption is that the wife was the killer's primary target and the doctor was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

That night, after the team has had dinner, a letter is slipped under Patrick's door. It's allegedly from Red John, but Patrick knows this is not the killer's style. Patrick arranges to meet Wagner at his office supposedly to get a supply of sleeping pills. Patrick claims he doesn't sleep well. When asked by about the roots of his insomnia, we again flashback five years to an appearance that Patrick had made on a talk show. During that show he made a comment about Red John. When he returned to his expensive, lavishly decorated home where he lives with his wife and daughter he enters his bed room and sees... a smiley face drawn in blood. Of course Patrick doesn't tell the psychiatrist the truth about his family being killed by Red John. Instead he makes up a story about a brother who was killed in an accident as a child doing Patrick's chores. During this visit, Patrick plants the seed of an idea in the psychiatrist's mind, that his partner kept a diary and that it was hidden in the office. Once Patrick has gone the psychiatrist searches the office for the diary and finds nothing. However Patrick comes back to get his cell phone – he claims the door was unlocked but in fact he picked the Doctor's pocket to get his key card – and "finds" the partner's diary. To get it the Doctor pulls a gun. He killed his partner and the golfer's wife because his partner had found out that Wagner was embezzling money from their charity. His partner was the primary target while the golfer's wife was to distract attention. After bluffing Wagner into believing that he had taken the bullets from the gun, Patrick manages to get away and runs into one of the other CBI investigators as he is arriving at the office, who arrests Wagner. At the end of the episode, after Jane and the rest of the team wrap up their activities in Palm Springs, we see Patrick returning to the same home where he lived before. The building is now empty except for a mattress lying on the floor of one bedroom...under the smiley face drawn in blood.

The writing on this show is solid if not spectacular. The preliminary story (with Culp and O'Grady) is nicely set up to tell us what we need to know about Patrick Jane – he's observant and intelligent but at the same time has a charming arrogance about him. He can be compassionate to those who are deserving of compassion but can also be brusque to those who aren't deserving of it. His scene with the wife, in which he understands what she is going through becomes even more important when we learn about the tragedy in his own life; he really does understand what she is going through. In his scene with Culp's character, who I think he initially suspected when he saw the body language of the husband and wife at the press conference and which was confirmed in his mind by the photos in the kitchen, he comes right out and asks if he killed his daughter and then badgers right back when the man gets mad that very idea that's being suggested. The main story suffers a bit from doing stuff that most of us have seen before. Anyone who has watched enough TV mysteries would have been able to tell you that when two people are murdered in a way where one looks like the main target and the other seems like someone at the wrong place at the wrong time, you should always look to the enemies of the innocent bystander. And of course when the first suspect is arrested, he's never guilty. But of course this needs to happen at least in this episode because it is far less about the actual mystery than it is about establishing the character and at least part of the story of Patrick Jane.

A bigger problem than what I suppose you'd describe as the triteness of the initial mystery is the development of the other characters in the episode. With one exception we don't even know their names – at least not unless we don't check the show's IMDB page. No, instead you've got the female boss who is tough on Patrick but knows enough to give him his head, played by Robin Tunney (character name: Teresa Lisbon), the smart but unimpressed Asian guy played by Tim Yang (character: Kimball Cho), and the big, solid though sometimes easily befuddled white guy played by Owain Yeoman (character: Wayne Grigsby). He's the one who comes to Patrick's aid at the medical office. The one supporting character who isn't a cipher is the new young agent Grace Van Pelt. That's the character's name; she's played by Amanda Righetti. Grace is a "true believer" who at one point asks Patrick what the reaction of real psychics was to him before he came out as a fraud. He tells her that there are no real psychics, there is no afterlife just the here and now. She disagrees – she firmly believes that her sister is at least a little psychic, and more importantly she is a firm believer in "the Kingdom of God." This is of course an effort to flesh out our understanding of Patrick – that he's an atheist, probably as a result of his time pretending to be a psychic – but it is useful in giving us someone who is both more of an idealist and who holds an alternate, religious view, from Patrick's. Patrick Jane is much more of a profiler, in the style of the characters on Criminal Minds than he is Allison Dubois (from Medium), but then he quite clearly not claiming any mystical powers like Dubois does; quite the opposite in fact. This is very much Simon Baker's show. The man is eminently likable – almost charismatic – and is capable of holding our attention without the histrionic sort of performances that an actor like James Woods from last season's Shark has to resort to. He's very much the focus here, although for this series to work up to its potential I am convinced that they are going to have to build up the characterization of the supporting cast. They're never going to be the focus of the show but we need a stronger sense of who they are.

When this series was initially announced my first impression – and the first impression of a lot of people – was that this some sort of serious version of the USA network show Psych. It's not of course and not just because Patrick Jane isn't using powers of observation to pretend to be a psychic. He's "out" and I wouldn't be surprised if, in his off hours, he doesn't take on the sort of role that James Randi has adopted in exposing claims of psychic powers. I tend to see this show as sort of the "anti" Medium. I find Patrick Jane far more believable than either the real or the TV version of Allison Dubois. Jane rejects the notion of psychic abilities, ascribing what others saw as his "powers" to his abilities as an observer. This far more rationalistic approach more appealing, at least it is for me. As a character, Patrick Jane has a considerable amount of charm and charisma, a quality which is common in the lead characters of shows like JAG, NCIS and Numb3rs. And of course those shows took a while for the supporting characters to come into their own. As it stands the show depends on the charm of its leading character and the actor who plays him for much of its attraction to an audience. I think they need to beef up the mysteries a bit more and (as I keep on harping about) make the supporting characters stand out as something more than just foils for Simon Baker. If they can do that, give us better than ordinary stories and develop more the team while at the same time this is a show that should go on for a long time and be a strong component in a CBS Tuesday night that is suddenly looking quite strong. A nice quiet performer with – as other critics have said – considerable charm.

The Science Of The Impossible – Fringe

There are times when I think that it is easiest to write about things that you really, really like or really, really hate. It is only mediocrity that is difficult to quantify. Which may explain why I still haven't come up with a review of 90210 while dashing off a review of Hole In The Wall the night it aired. I am going to do it again for Fringe but this time it's because I really, really, really like it. To be sure there are flaws in logic and execution but despite flaws in some of the parts the thing holds together quite well. For me the proof is that despite the 95 minute running time – with limited commercial interruptions no less – the episode felt quickly paced and not like something that was padded with excess material. Indeed one of the faults was that, at times, it felt like it was rushed; as if they could have used a bit more time to develop an idea. That's unusual in most pilots that are longer than an hour and feel like they were stuffed with fluff to make them fit the time slot.

We get a pretty quick impression of what we're dealing with in the first scene aboard a German airliner flying to Boston. Encountering extreme turbulence the passengers fasten their seat belts. One of the passengers is feeling unwell. He uses an auto-injector which we later discover is supposed to contain Insulin (the device looks like an EpiPen, so my first reaction was that he was using Epinephrine for an allergic reaction). Almost immediately he gets up and runs for the front of the plane, a flight attendant running after her. When she finally catches up with him and sees his face she recoils in horror. His face is melting. We see the other people on the plane; their faces are melting. When the plane's co-pilot opens the cabin door to see what the panic is about he quickly closes it. The last image we have from the inside of the plane before it lands is of the co-pilot's face melting away, allowing his jaw bone to drop off.

FBI agents Olivia Dunham and John Scott are called to the airport to participate in the investigation. They're called separately but they're in bed together, conducting a secret love affair in a cheap motel. The FBI isn't in control of the operation though. That job goes to curt and abrasive Homeland Security agent Philip Broyles. Broyles takes charge of things in the sort of pre-emptive manner that most local law enforcement agencies on TV accuse the FBI of adopting, and when Dunham protests using her position as "interagency liaison officer" she not only earns a new nickname, "Liaison" but also a position as one of the people going on board the plane. The plane is absolute carnage; bones, clothes, blood and sticky slime. We learn (after one of the episode's commercials) that the plane has been ordered burned by the Centers for Disease Control, a cover story of course. Acting on an anonymous tip John and Olivia go to a storage facility. There they share "a moment" where they talk about the fact that John said that he loved Olivia for the first time at the motel. Naturally this means that something very bad is going to happen to John. Sure enough, after what must have been hours spent looking in storage lockers – since it has gone from daylight to night (all the better to see the explosions of course) John opens a locker filled with experimental animals and chemicals. He has also flushed his quarry, the man running the experiments. The guy runs, with John in pursuit, then, using his cell phone triggers a booby trap. The subsequent explosion not only badly injures John but also catches Olivia. Then as they say, things get weird.

When Olivia regains consciousness we learn that John isn't dead ... yet. His skin has basically turned transparent to the point where we can see through his skin to his muscle structure. The doctors have managed to slow the process of degradation but not totally arrest it. Investigating the circumstances of the deaths on the plane, Olivia finds a link to an incident at Harvard many years before. This leads her to Dr. Walter Bishop. The only problem is that Bishop is a patient at a mental hospital, and the only way to get to his is with the permission of his sole surviving relative – his estranged son, Peter. Peter Bishop is a high school dropout who is on the run from a gambling debt. He's currently in Iraq trying to make money by conning some Iraqi oil men with a plan to build a pipeline. Olivia travels to Iraq and bluffs Peter into coming back to the States with her. She uses him to gain access to Walter. It's apparent that Walter is both brilliant and totally detached from reality – as if his mind is travelling on two tracks at the same time. Seventeen years in an asylum that is little better than a snake pit will do that to you. Bishop lets Olivia know that the only other person has any idea about the compound that caused the deaths on the plane and John's condition is his old lab assistant "Belly" – Dr. Bell. Bell is the founder of Maximum Dynamic, a company that states that what they make is everything. Olivia wants to talk to Bell, but without any proof of his connection to the deaths on the plane it isn't even something to be considered. The only person who can provide the information that can cure John is the man who caused the explosion and the only person who saw him is John.

Walter suggests a method to allow Olivia to find out what John knows. It's called coordinated dreaming and required Olivia to enter a sensory deprivation tank, take LSD and have her brain connected to John's with electrodes. Peter is appalled by the idea, but Walter claims that he has used it in the past to interrogate a dead man. The technique works in allowing Olivia's mind to contact John's and she persuades him to remember the events leading to the explosion. She sees the man and is able to create a computerized drawing of him, which in turn allows him to be identified. The picture matches one of the passengers on the German airplane. They also discover that the man has a twin brother, and the twin brother works for Maximum Dynamic. It's enough to all them to try to contact Bell. However Bell is out of the country, and Olivia and her FBI partner Charlie Francis to one of Bell's leading executives, Nina Sharp. Sharp is all charm and cooperation, giving them information on the man they're looking for, Richard Steig. Nina also lets slip the information that the event they're investigating is part of a pattern. It's a pattern that Olivia and Charlie have no knowledge – according to Nina, their security clearance isn't as high as her company's. Once they have the information from Maximum Dynamic, Olivia and the FBI, with Walter and Peter in tow track him down to his home. Peter sees Steig escaping from house and lets Olivia and the FBI know the direction he's taken off in and give chase. They eventually catch him and get the information they need to cure John with, after Peter threatens him.

Steig has one other piece of information to make a deal with. The events on the airliner were in the way of a demonstration. However Steig had already set up a deal with someone else. When the plane landed Steig had received a call from one of their representatives, an FBI agent. Steig recorded the call and was willing to release the tape to Olivia in return for a plea deal. The voice on the tape was John's. Hurrying back to the hospital where John is recuperating and where Steig is recovering from Peter's interrogation techniques, Olivia finds Steig smothered with a pillow and John missing. Olivia chases him but his car crashes. He dies as Olivia tries to get the name of who John is working for. Broyles has explained the pattern of mysterious events to Olivia by now and offers her a job working with him on trying to discover the cause of the events. She is reluctant to take on the job but the events with John have forced her to change her mind. She wants to enlist Peter and Walter Bishop into her team. Peter is reluctant but eventually they agree to work with her.

The acting, at least from the people who have an opportunity to say more than a handful of lines, is first rate. Australian actress Anna Torv, who plays Olivia has a vaguely exotic quality that is difficult to describe, however she delivers a strong performance playing a woman who is determined to do anything necessary to save the man that she loves. She expresses her pain when she realizes that John was involved with Steig as much with her expression as with anything that she says. Joshua Jackson as Peter Bishop progresses from a sort of outraged disbelief that anyone could take his father's rantings and pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo seriously (as far as Peter's concerned his old man could rot away in that asylum forever and it wouldn't bother him one little bit) to someone who, if he still doesn't believe everything that he's seen, is at least committed to helping Olivia. The implication is not so much that he has romantic feelings for her but rather is impressed with her determination to save John if only as a way to escape from this scary world. Even as he seems to reconnect with his father he rejects his father's work. Blair Brown is perfect in the small role (in the pilot at least) of Nina Sharp. From the moment we see her – even before she actually says a word, just based on the way she carries herself – we sense that there is something sinister about this woman. And when she does speak, even though she says nothing that seems particularly threatening, our suspicions are aroused even further. She is too calm, too smooth, too prepared, as if she already knows what is going to happen and how she is going to react to every question posed to her in her interview with the FBI (because of course that's exactly how she treats it, as if she is being interviewed by a reporter who feels well briefed but actually has far less information than Nina does). And as we find out in the last scene, where Nina talks to an orderly about John's corpse, we are exactly right about her.

Still there are two really standout performances. The first comes from Lance Reddick as Philip Broyles. Reddick imbues Broyles with a sense of arrogance. This seems particularly directed at Olivia that turns to something like bemused tolerance as she goes off on what probably seems like a foolish tangent, to something that's not quite respect but may be acceptance. All the while, even as he reveals some of the details of "The Pattern" to Olivia, you get the sense that he's holding stuff back. It's not malevolent (although it could be) simply that there are things that she doesn't need to know and won't find out about them until she does. And it's all done with a calm even serene demeanour. The other bravura acting performance comes from Australian actor John Noble as Walter Bishop. They say that playing someone who is insane can be amongst the hardest challenges for an actor. Noble, who is probably best known in North America for playing Denethor in Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King does what seems to my untutored eye to take a magnificent stab at it. By turns his Walter Bishop is all business and childlike. At one point he takes a skin sample from John's arm while asking for some ginger ale because it's been so long since he's had any. At another point, while waiting for some result from Olivia's attempts to contact John in the dreaming state, we see Walter watching Spongebob Squarepants, with a joy and amazement that surpasses anything that you'd see from a child. It's ana amazing performance.

The writing may, in some respects be a weak point for the show. I don't mean the actual dialogue, which conveys the emotion of Olivia's desperation to save John quite well. Rather I guess it's a vague sense of being rushed. There's no real sense of the passage of time unless the characters specifically comment on it. We move from Olivia telling Broyles about needing to get to Peter Bishop to Olivia in Baghdad confronting him. To be sure there's an indication that we're in Baghdad (one of the "cute" visual tricks of the episode which I'll mention in the next paragraph) but there's no sense of how long it took her to get there. For all we know (and in this series it's just possible) that she was teleported where she needed to go. Everything about the pacing of the episode seemed to have been rushed. In a show like Mad Men or Battlestar Galactica (two dramas that never fails to impress me with their quality) one is never without a sense of the passage of time, even though it's normally not overtly stated. I suppose that that contributed to the sense that the pacing of the episode seem fast – as if they were trying to fit everything into the 95 minute running time – and why it sometimes didn't seem like the episode took as long as it did.

I wanted to mention a couple of the visual effects. The setting for John and Olivia's shared dream was suitably other worldly. It probably should have provided us with a clue as to the turmoil within John that the place where she met him was not a "happy place" but at the time I supposed we were meant to see it as an effect of his injuries. The other effect, which I like though others seemed to have been annoyed by, was the use of captions to indicate location. Other shows use these but none do it with the "flair" (or perhaps "chutzpah" is the better term) that J.J. Abrams displays here. The captions are big and done in a three-dimensional type face. Moreover at times they seem to exist in the physical universe. In the establishing shot at the FBI office in Boston, the camera pulls through one of the "Os" in Boston to get into the office. But perhaps one of the most brazen/brilliant uses of the effect comes soon after when Olivia travels to Baghdad. We start with an establishing aerial shot of the city with the words "Baghdad Iraq" superimposed over the city. We then switch to a ground level establishing shot looking up towards helicopters flying over the city...and the "B" from Baghdad. Like I said, "flair" (or perhaps "chutzpah").

Already opinion of this series seems to be all over the place. People either love it (like me) or they loathe it. Many people comment on the similarity between this series and The X-Files and usually find it lacking. I do acknowledge a similarity to The X-Files but I also see similarities to a show from a couple of seasons back called Threshold, starring Carla Gugino, that I actually think is closer to this series than The X-Files is. I liked that show a lot – felt in fact that it was the best of the three "alien invasion series" from that season (the others were Invasion and Surface). Despite a handful of things about Fringe that I found annoying – the pacing problem that I mentioned being the biggest, and that may be have a lot to do with getting the show up and running – I really like this show as well. What I'm really interested in is how they'll follow up on this. After all, as is often the case the pilot is not reflective of the show that we'll see in subsequent weeks. In the pilot for Fringe the focus was on Olivia's relationship with John, her desperate attempts to save him, and her sense of betrayal when she finds out that he had been dealing with Steig. All of this is what draws her into the area of fringe science and introduces her to Broyles and to the Bishops. What the rest of the series has to do is to hold on to us as she and her team investigate the various threats that they'll be investigating. That could be a difficult thing to pull off. Threshold wasn't able to – it was one of the first shows cancelled that season. FOX, which is notorious for cancelling series quickly needs to take its time with this one, but given that it comes from producer J.J. Abrams, that seems likely to happen, even if the ratings for the pilot may not have been stellar (it finished second to America's Got Talent, though to be fair it held its audience solidly in each half hour). This could still turn out like Threshold, but I'm hoping that things go more like The X-Files, which started slowly and built an audience. I think this show is intriguing enough for that to happen.

Retro-Larson

There was a period in the late 1970s and the 1980s when you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing a Glen Larson Production. The list of shows that he created or was executive producer of is like a hall of fame of the sort of TV that the '70s were, well infamous for (the sort of shows though that the Parents Television Council pines for if their most recent TV Trends is to be believed). They were escapist fantasies with various gimmicks and if they "borrowed" from some hot trend, well so much the better. Larson's shows included Alias Smith and Jones (borrowed from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), Sword of Justice, B.J. and the Bear, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century, The Fall Guy, and Battlestar Galactica. Larson would do everything for these shows: he produced them, directed them, wrote them and even composed the themes (he actually started as a musician, a member of the group "The Four Preps").

Perhaps the most memorable of Larson's creations is Knight Rider, the story of a man and his talking car (the car of course was smarter than the man most of the time). Supposedly the concept for the original version of Knight Rider came from Brandon Tartikoff, who were discussing the problem of handsome leading men who couldn't act with an assistant. Tartikoff jokingly came up with an idea he called "The Man of Six Words." According to the Knight Rider entry in The Complete Directory of Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, the man would wake up in a woman's bed and say "Thank you," would chase down the bad guys and say "Freeze," and after the almost victims thanked him would say "You're welcome." In between the car would do all the talking, presumably voiced by a better, if less photogenic, actor. Larson apparently took this basic concept and refined it to become the original Knight Rider. The handsome leading man, in this case David Hasselhoff, had more than six words of course (although there are some who think that keeping him to six words would have been just fine) but the car – the Knight Industries Two Thousand a.k.a. KITT – was still voiced by the better actor in William Daniels. The series ran for four seasons, and spawned a couple of made for TV movies as well as the series Team Knight Rider.

Of late NBC seems to have started on a retro programming kick for both itself and at least one of its cable networks. It began with a revised version of Glen Larson's Battlestar Galactica. This version of the series which had originally run for a single season in 1978-79 took the original concept of a refugee fleet running from an alien menace and not only updated it but took a far more serious tack with the show. The Sci-Fi Channel version emphasised the sense that things were not normal within the fleet, that these people were fleeing from a genocide, something one never really had a sense of in the original version. The success of Battlestar Galactica led to NBC trying Bionic Woman, a remake of the Lindsay Wagner series of the mid-1970s. This series was unsuccessful in part I suspect because while the original was hardly great drama, unlike Galactica there were relatively few ways in which it could be improved. The net result was that there were some surface changes – Jamie Summers wasn't a tennis player turned teacher, she was a bartender – but most of the plots centered on the character as a novice secret agent and that ground had already been covered better by the original. Still, while preparations were going ahead for Bionic Woman NBC announced that they would be reviving yet another series from the old Universal library (since NBC and Universal are now part of the same company), Glen Larson's Knight Rider.

The new version of Knight Rider – which I'm sure NBC-Universal hopes will become a series – is amazingly uncomplicated by any efforts to modernize it or make it "more relevant" or realistic. And when you think about it, that's probably a good thing. I mean we are talking about a talking car here. Also wisely, they have decided not to ignore what had gone before. There's a brief guest appearance by David Haselhoff at the end of the TV movie, and in the early scenes we see disassembled parts from the original KITT, so there's a tip of the hat to the past, but the producers don't dwell in it. They also don't dwell too much in such irrelevancies as plot. The producers basically spent two hours creating a chase picture with the secondary purpose of introducing characters for a relaunch of the Knight Rider franchise.

The story – such as it is – focuses on a group of mercenaries working for a shadowy Black Water style group that is trying to capture Charles Graiman (Bruce Davidson – slumming) because he holds the key to something called "Prometheus." As nearly as I can tell "Prometheus" is some sort of device that can take over control of computers the world over or something equally nasty. In the "wrong hands" – that is to say the hands of anyone except the United States of America – this has a potential to start wars and other bad stuff. All of which leads one to ask why in the hell anyone would build the damned thing in the first place. But let's face it "Prometheus" is just a MacGuffin; something to motivate the characters but with no other real purpose, as Hitchcock described it. To get the data on Prometheus the mercenaries burst into Graiman's home and threaten his life and that of his daughter, who is at Stanford. Unfortunately for them, Graiman drops dead of an apparent heart attack. Equally unfortunately for them, Graiman has completed work on the new KITT, the Knight Industries Three Thousand (Val Kilmer – career in the toilet). The new KITT has been pre-programmed to do three things. First it has to pick up Graiman`s daughter Sarah (Deanna Russo) at Stanford and protect her from the four mercenaries. Naturally, despite the fact that KITT is the fasted thing on the roads and can turn on a dime and give you nine cents change and the bad guys are driving a van, they still get there ahead of the car which means that the car gets to pull off a daring rescue and the chase is on. KITT decides to lose the mercenaries – who by the way are types that used to be described as "straight out of Central Casting"; a nerdy white guy (you can tell he's a nerd because he says the word "algorithms"; Kevin Christie), a beefy Black guy who is the muscle of the group and doesn't talk much (Kevin Dunigan), a young Asian guy with long hair and a definite fondness for guns (but in this one he exhibits no ability for the martial arts; Jack Yang), and the older white guy who is the brains of the operation and the only reason why these guys have any hope for success (Greg Ellis – this role is a big step down from playing Amador in the third season of 24). Naturally enough KITT evades them.

KITT's next task is to find Mike Traceur (Justin Bruening from All My Children). Mike is an ex-Army Ranger, who is also a failed race car driver. Currently Mike is living in Las Vegas with his mechanic and best buddy Dylan. The first time we see Mike he's in bed with a beautiful woman... and joined by a second beautiful woman. Obviously he'll have to be the man with eight words ("thank you" being said twice). Mike has a big problem – he owe $90,000 to some guys whose idea of debt collection consists of taking the debtor's best friend out into the Nevada desert and leaving him there, presumably not in a condition to make it back to the highway. Then twenty-four hours later they'll do the same thing to the debtor. Naturally Mike's solution to paying off his debt is to take every last dime he can raise and go play poker against a guy who looks a lot like Phil "The Unabomber" Laak. It is at the casino – the Montecito of course (note to Toby, this puts Knight Rider in the same universe as Crossing Jordan as well as Las Vegas). It is at the Montecito that Sarah catches up with Mike. The two of them grew up together and had a relationship in the past but for reasons we'll eventually discover he left her (the idiot). Naturally enough the bad guys catch up with Sarah at the casino, and naturally enough the combination of KITT and Mike are sufficient to stop them. But mostly it's KITT who does it; he sets off the fire alarms, opens locked security doors and so on – Mike just fights older mercenary guy and finds that his Army Ranger skills are meagre compared to the bad guy, who fortunately for Mike doesn't wear a cup thereby making him vulnerable to a knee to the family jewels.

KITT's final instruction is to turn himself over to the FBI represented by brilliant loner agent Carrie Revai. We know that she's a loner because she's partnered with the most ineffective FBI agent ever, who she soon ditches. Carrie has headed up to Graiman's isolated compound to identify the body (because remember they can't get in touch with Sarah) and besides she suspects murder. At the compound she meets up with the local sherrif. She quickly identifies the body as not being that of Charles Graiman but a body double. Charles, we discover has taken off through the woods to an even more isolated house, which happens to belong to an old friend named Jennifer, who just happens to be Mike's estranged mother. Now here I was half expecting it to be revealed that the reason that Mike had dumped Sarah was because he had learned that Jennifer and Charles had been involved and that Mike and Sarah were half-siblings. But no, we discover that the reason that Charles sent KITT to Las Vegas pick up Mike before going back to San Francisco to turn himself (yeah, I'm thinking of the car as a him, get over it) in was because Mike is actually the son of Michael Knight (I feel like there should be a trumpet call or something at this revelation).

Charles and Jennifer have to flee from her cozy cabin of course because she's totally off the grid – no phone, no computer (how can she live like that!!!!!). They eventually go to a motel where they call KITT to come pick them up. They also call the agent Revai which is a bad move because the local sheriff is in league with the bad guys. So naturally everyone ends up at the motel, where Jennifer nearly shoots Mike and the whole lot of them get captured by the bad guys. But are our heroes stopped. Of course not there's still one more chase left. Jennifer foolishly tries to come out shooting and ends up shot but before she dies, she manages to pass some sort of weapon over to her son. Then, after three of the mercenaries (and the sheriff) leave with Charles, and the one who remains prepares to execute Carrie and Mike they overpower him with whatever it was that Jennifer passed to Mike. KITT, Mike and Sarah take off after the mercenaries and Charles. Now this would normally be a mismatch but somehow nerdy mercenary has managed to hack into KITT's computer systems (because he's had all of ten minutes to do it in and no help from Charles, and really no reason to do it because he believes that the mercenary left behind will be bringing KITT and Sarah – but not Carrie and Mike – to meet them). He intends to take control of KITT so Mike is forced to turn the car's systems off which eliminates all the superpowers the car has, like auto-repair. KITT gets shot up and bashed up pretty good before mike finally figures out that if they can get ahead of the van and block the road and then turn KITT's systems back on the van will crash into the car and, in total violation of the laws of motion and a few other laws of Newtonian Physics, will stop the van without so much as pushing the car that it hits a millimetre down the highway. The end... well except for a coda at Jennifer's funeral where Mike meets Michael and talks him into "making a difference" by taking up the responsibility of driving KITT. If I were Mike what I'd want to know is why the old man deserted the mother and child before the kid was five, but hey, that's just me.

What to say about this? The acting was adequate although I had the definite feeling that there were people in this that were doing it for the money. I mean let's face it if you're Val Kilmer (who was brought into the project when Will Arnett pulled out because he did voice ads for General Motors and the new KITT is a Ford Mustang) this has to be a pretty nice payday for very little real work. As the voice of KITT, Kilmer is a worthy successor to William Daniels (and if you've heard the 80 year-old Daniels's voice of late you will understand at least in part why the change was made). No one else really stood out. It's only fitting because the real star of the show was the car. This time it's a 2008 Ford Mustang GT500KR. For the purposes of the show (only!) the car has self regeneration and damage repair, is solar powered (though it does need gas, primarily when driving at night – well duh) with gas mileage of 167 miles per gallon, has artificial intelligence, GPS and military satellite access and guidance, has a top cruising speed of 191 miles per hour, and can disguise itself as any other car... as long as that car is a Ford Mustang.

The writing can best be described as workmanlike for what it was. It certainly wasn't cutting edge, and I'd go so far as to say that it old fashioned. There were a couple of nice nostalgic touches, such as when Jennifer asks Charles if the new KITT is another Trans Am, or when the smart older mercenary mentions "an urban legend" about a car and driver that fought crime. Still, despite touches like having Mike in bed with two women when we first meet him, or having FBI agent Revai being a lesbian (she comes home after a bit of early morning surfing to a naked woman who she has obviously picked up the night before), the writing comes across as old fashioned. I think that may be the biggest problem with this revival, it's old fashioned and there's no real need for it. Like it or not (and the PTC most assuredly does not like it) TV has progressed beyond talking cars. Battlestar Galactica is successful for the simple reason that it took only the most basic premise of the original series and made it darker and more realistic. I'm not sure there's a way to make Knight Rider darker and more realistic nor do I think there's a real need to. If the powers that be at NBC are smart (I know, oxymoron) they won't turn this new Knight Rider into a series regardless of the ratings for this TV movie. While I think the ratings for this will be good I can't see the public watching an ongoing revival for more than a few episodes out of a sense of nostalgia. Leave us with our memories of the original series instead and renew Friday Night Lights, or even Las Vegas instead.

The Things I Do For You

Like on Thursday night. I subjected myself to a tape of the second episode of Cashmere Mafia.

Now it is absolutely clear that I am the wrong audience for this show. For one thing I pee standing up and for another my taste in porn features breasts rather than abs. In other words, I am a straight guy. There are certain shows that I find more enjoyable than others. I have never watched October Road or What about Brian? I will admit to watching Sex And The City which may sound like it goes against my stated tastes but I watched primarily in hopes that Cynthia Nixon would show off her goodies, something that happened far too infrequently to be really tolerable. I had to settle for Kim Catrall getting her clothes off in just about every episode. Does it hurt my "man-cred" to say that after a while (a very long while) seeing Kim's boobs and ass and whatever else HBO let her expose got sort of boring? One thing is for sure, I never ever watched for Sarah Jessica Parker. Frankly I could care less about Carrie Bradshaw and Big; for me Chris Noth will always be Detective Mike Logan not the guy who was the obsession of a chain smoking writer. And I don't even really like Law & Order (however I am a fan of Law & Order: Criminal Intent). Now I know that whole thing sounds sexist and shallow and what have you, but I'm willing to bet that if you asked most straight guys who watched Sex And The City they'd give you similar reasons for watching.

I'm getting off track here. I'm supposed to be telling you what I thought about Cashmere Mafia. The thing is that the two shows share a lot in common. Sex And The City was about four best friends who were in influential positions in New York City. It was about their lives and loves and about the fact that when you're a woman and have a best friend she's there to hold your hair when you throw up, and presumably that that's more than you can say for any man except the right one. Cashmere Mafia is about four best friends who are in influential positions in New York City. It's about their lives and their loves and the bond that they share that is bigger than anything that they could share with a man except maybe the right man and even then probably not. I think you're beginning to see a pattern here. Now Cashmere Mafia doesn't have the nudity and frequently dropped "F-bombs" that Sex And The City did but after all this is broadcast television. No vomiting and hair holding yet either, but it is only the second episode.

So who are these women and (almost as important) who do they match up with in Sex And The City. First up there's Mia Mason (Lucy Liu), who probably matches up with Carrie. She's just become the big boss at a major publishing company. All it has cost her was her relationship with her boyfriend in the first episode. He proposed to her at the start of that episode, was pitted against her in a competition to get the big job (and lost), and at the end of the episode decided that she wanted a more traditional wife. I'm just guessing but he probably wouldn't have been as quick to dump her if he had the corner office and she was his underling. Then there's Caitlin Dowd (Bonnie Sommerville). I'd say that Caitlin is this show's answer to Miranda. Like Miranda she's absolutely focused in her work life – she's in advertising while Miranda was a lawyer – but she's confused and almost neurotic in her personal life. Of course Caitlin's confusion is a bit deeper than Miranda's – she finds herself attracted to another woman for the first time ever (Alicia, played by Lourdes Benedicto) which naturally enough comes as a surprise after thirty some years. Zoe Burden (Frances O'Connor) is this show's answer to Charlotte. She's a working mother of two kids who are in a tony private elementary school, totally devoted to them and her stay at home architect husband Eric (Julian Ovenden) and is trying to balance work and home, with less than perfect results. In other words she's trying to have it all. Finally we have Juliet Draper (Miranda Otto). She had it all – or thought she did. Then she found out that her husband Davis (Peter Hermann) is not just having an affair (he'd had them before but kept them tastefully out of town) but was having an affair with someone they both knew. At a black tie event she told him that her revenge would be to have an affair of her own with one of the men in that room.

So there you have the set up. The second episode, which is in most shows is probably closer to what the series as a whole is going to be like, went something like this. As in the first episode there were four story lines that came together because of the relationship between the women. I just wish that most of the individual stories weren't absolutely trite. Take Mia's for example. Having won the big job with the corner office at the expense of her personal life, the big boss tells here she has to find new creative director, which means firing the existing creative director who just happens to be the guy who'd first hired her for the company. Naturally she puts it off and puts it off and then manages to fire him in the most public and embarrassing (to her) manner possible. It sounds familiar because it is – I had seen exactly the same storyline in an episode of How I Met Your Mother a couple of weeks ago, and it was old and trite then (but funnier than when Lucy Liu did it). Caitlin's story was almost as bad. The core of it was that she decided to explore her feelings for Alicia by going out on a date with her only to be accosted by a former (male) lover just when they were sharing a hot kiss. Caitlin's embarrassment at the situation and not immediately blowing the guy off somehow drove Alicia off. This in turn led to a reconciliation in which Caitlin admitted that she sucked at relationships but was ready to try with Alicia. About the only thing new about this story line was that Alicia turned around and told Caitlin that they weren't at the "R-word" stage yet, they hadn't even had a complete first date. And I'm not altogether sure that Sex And The City didn't try that during Samantha's involvement with a lesbian (played by Sonia Braga). Juliet's storyline was slightly more original, but only because of her circumstances. Juliet is frightened about getting a date after so long "off the market" so her friends help her out. That's standard sitcom fare and about the only thing that makes it even a little more original is that Juliet isn't divorced or widowed, she's still married to her husband – but it's the same thing because he's a cheating rat-bastard. Juliet's friends help her by picking out the man she should have her affair with (an old friend of the groups from business school and who Juliet had been attracted to back then). Caitlin gives her an extra push by livening up her look courtesy of the hair and makeup crew on an advertising shoot that Caitlin's working on. The transformation is, quite frankly, spectacular and manages to perk up her husband's interest. But Juliet seems determined on getting her "revenge" and goes to meet the man. Naturally it turns out that all those years ago he was attracted to her as she had been to him and the only thing standing in their way back then was her then boyfriend, now cheating rat-bastard husband.

About the only storyline that really showed any originality was Zoe's. She confronts the "stay at home mom from hell" who has become close with stay at home dad Eric. She seems relentless in needling Zoe about her lifestyle choice, pointing out that only three parents can go on a planned field trip with the class, implying of course that Zoe is so busy with her career that she didn't know enough to sign up weeks in advance. Even worse was when she bought Zoe a "working mom teddy bear" – complete with a Bluetooth headset – that said "not now, I'm on a conference call." It rattles Zoe, and when the woman suggests that she and her husband get together with Zoe and Eric for dinner in a few days, Zoe feels pressured to agree. It turns out to be a ruse – the woman's husband is away on business and just Zoe is arriving – late – the seemingly staid stay at home mom propositions Eric. Once Zoe sits down the woman tells Eric that she wants her him to design a new kitchen for her (and the suggestion of coverage in Architectural Digest as a sweetener to get Eric to accept), as cover. Once they get home, Eric makes it clear to Zoe that he knew exactly what was going on and that unlike Juliet's husband Davis, he wasn't interested in fooling around with another woman. The next day before the field trip Zoe makes her victory complete (her triumph included the other excluded parents and a Grey Lines double decker touring bus and the words "not now, I'm on a conference call."). The storyline isn't that original really, the harried working woman faced with a threat to her marriage from someone who doesn't spend all of their time working, that is seemingly in her imagination but which turns out to be all too real, but there is something about the way that the character triumphs that somehow brings something new to the table.

As you can tell, I was less than impressed with this whole thing. It isn't the acting; for the most part it seems quite good based on what they're given to work with. Lucy Liu has more than a little comedic ability of course, and I was quite taken with Frances O'Connor. Miranda Otto was of particular note when she was transformed from the "ice queen" who was trying marriage counselling with her husband Davis, to the newly revealed "hot babe" ready for vengeance sex and capable of attracting not only a prospective lover but also the wandering eye of her husband. The only one I really felt ambivalent about was Bonnie Sommerville. I just don't feel anything special about her.

No, the discontent I'm feeling is that this whole show just feels like a retread of other things. Darren Starr seems to be quite blatant in trying to create a broadcast-friendly version of Sex And The City, right down to giving the women a regular hangout table in a bar. (That location, one of the few time all four were physically together in the episode, had a couple of cute moments; when the three were trying to pick out a lover for Juliet, and Caitlin revealing her possible change in orientation which led to Mia and Zoe revealing their own experimentation with same sex sex.) I could probably accept that, but what I have too much difficulty in accepting is the way in which the storylines seemed recycled. There seemed to be little or no attempt, depending on the storyline, to turn those elements into something with even the vaguest hint of originality. In truth I expected something better from Darren Starr. From now on I think I'll stick to CSI: New York. But then I may be missing something – after all I'm someone who pees standing up, whose preference in porn features breasts not abs.

The Mysterious Mr. Webb

I'm going to steal a march on my buddy Toby, since he obviously missed this one in his fine blog Inner Toob.

Tuesday night's episode of NCIS – the title was Chimera – was the 100^th episode of the show. Now as we all know Donald P. Bellisario spun NCIS off from the immensely popular JAG. One of the most "beloved" characters on JAG was CIA Agent Clayton Webb (played by Steven Culp). He was there from the beginning, well at least the beginning of the show's run on CBS – he first turned up in the episode We The People which also introduced Harmon Rabb's long time partner and eventual fiancé Sarah Mackenzie. Webb was a suitably shadowy figure though he appeared in a lot of episodes. For a time he was even Mac's bed buddy (she did have a number of them). He'd turn up, sometimes as an adversary for Harm and Mac, sometimes as an ally. On the whole he tended to be a very frustrating person for our friendly naval lawyers. Eventually Webb died but like a good spook it didn't take. It was enough to end his relationship with Mac though, leaving the field open for Harm.

In Chimera, NCIS Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs and his team – Agent Anthony DiNozzo, Agent Tim McGee, Mossad Officer Ziva David, and Medical Examiner Donald "Ducky" Mallard – were sent to investigate a mysterious death aboard a naval auxiliary vessel, the USNS Chimera, only to find the ship entirely deserted (well almost). Left back at headquarters were forensic scientist Abby Sciutto and NCIS Director Jenny Sheppard. Gibbs and his team need to know what the Chimera's mission was but that's classified above their level, so it's left to director Sheppard to try to find out. She has to try to get the information from the mission's (apparently) over officious CO, Commander William Skinner. He's full of reasons why he won't tell The Director what's on the ship: the mission is "need to know" and you don't need to know; the mission is classified higher than her clearance level (which is Top Secret); and so on. But of course our Jenny is not one to let little things like that get in her way – she is after all someone who calls the Secretary of State "Condi," and she's only occasionally intimidated by Gibbs. So Skinner comes to NCIS with a file that supposedly explained the mission as "biological warfare research." That's bad enough, but as we later discover, it wasn't the "real" mission.

Now here's the thing: Commander William Skinner bears a stunningly suspicious resemblance to Clayton Webb. He also bears a stunning resemblance to Rex van de Kamp (Desperate Housewives), Speaker Jeff Haffley (The West Wing), Special Agent in Charge Fred Chambers (Traveler) and MACO Major Hayes (Star Trek: Enterprise) but unlike Toby I don't try to fit all TV into a single universe. The works of Donald P. Bellisario on the other hand are a different story. Particularly JAG and NCIS since the latter used the former for its backdoor pilot and Lieutenant Commander Bud Roberts (Patrick Labyorteaux) appeared in the show's second episode. The two shows are patently tied together despite what TV.com says ("Steven Culp had previously appeared on many episodes of "JAG" as CIA agent Clayton Webb. "NCIS" was a spin-off from "JAG," also created by Donald Bellisario. Several other actors have crossed over the 2 series, but in different roles. It would appear that despite starting in the same universe the 2 shows have gone their separate ways.") All of which has allowed me to come up with the "real" story.

Following Clayton Webb's "death" – which only a handful of people including his former fiancé and her new husband know was faked – Clayton Webb was able to return to covert operations. One of these operations involved the use of naval assets – the USNS Chimera – to recover a compact Russian nuclear device that had gone down with one of their submarines during the Cold War. Webb was inserted into the Navy with the identity of Commander William Skinner. His association with naval personnel, primarily with the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps, gave him a sufficient air of authenticity to allow him to fit in. However, complications arose in the operation with the death of one of the crew members (possibly another CIA officer), Lieutenant Commander Satoshi Takada. Notification of this death leads to an immediate NCIS investigation. Now "Skinner" is in a bit of a panic. He knows it's likely that he'll have to go to NCIS headquarters, and he also knows that Ziva David is serving at NCIS. This is a problem because not only is Ziva a Mossad officer, she is also the daughter of the Deputy Director of the Mossad. While Ziva might have met Webb at least once, it's more likely that she has been briefed about Webb and would recognise him, so either he arranged for Gibbs and his team to be sent to ship or counted himself lucky that they were – most likely the former. With Ziva out of the way "Skinner" can now safely go to NCIS and give Director Sheppard the cover story, although he makes sure that he has to drag it out of him. Of course there are complications – the arrival of some state sponsored Russian pirates aboard the Chimera, but they are dealt with in a way that Gibbs suspected was also supposed to deal with his team, including Ziva David.