FOX’s 2011-12 Schedule

The FOX network unveiled its 2011-12 schedules – since FOX likes to reveal both the Fall and mid-Season line-ups at the same time – this afternoon. While the network made considerable changes the actual list of cancellations was rather modest. Five new series will debut in the Fall and three more will show up at mid-season.

Cancelled: Lone Star, Running Wilde, The Good Guys, Lie To Me, Human Target, The Chicago Code, Traffic Light, Breaking In, America’s Most Wanted.

Moved: House (at least for half a season).

Retained: American Dad, The Cleveland Show, Family Guy, The Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers, Glee, Fringe, Raising Hope, Bones, American Idol, Kitchen Nightmares, House, Cops, So You Think You Can Dance.

New Series: Dramas – Terra Nova, Alcatraz, The Finder
Comedies – New Girl, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, Allen Gregory, Napoleon Dynamite.
Reality: The X-Factor.

Complete Schedule (New Shows in capitals; All times are Eastern; Shows scheduled to debut at mid-season are named after the / )

Monday
8:00-9:00 p.m.  TERRA NOVA/ House
9:00-10:00 p.m.  House (New Time)/ALCATRAZ

Tuesday
8:00-9:00 p.m.  Glee
9:00-9:30 p.m.  NEW GIRL
9:30-10:00 p.m.  Raising Hope

Wednesday
8:00-9:30 p.m.  X-FACTOR PERFORMANCE/American Idol Performance
9:30-10:00 p.m.  I HATE MY TEENAGE DAUGHTER

Thursday
8:00-9:00 p.m.  X-FACTOR RESULTS/American Idol Results
9:00-10:00 p.m.  Bones/THE FINDER/Bones

Friday
8:00-9:00 p.m.  Kitchen Nightmares
9:00-10:00  Fringe

Saturday
8:00-9:00 p.m.  Cops
9:00-10:00 p.m.  Encores or America’s Most Wanted (Specials)

Sunday
7:00-7:30 p.m.  The O/T / Animation Domination Encores
7:30-8:00 p.m.  The Cleveland Show
8:00-8:30 p.m.  The Simpsons
8:30-9:00 p.m.  ALLEN GREGORY/NAPOLEON DYNAMITE
9:00-9:30 p.m.  Family Guy
9:30-10:00 p.m.  American Dad/Bob’s Burgers

Terra Nova, created by Steven Spielberg, was announced at last year’s upfronts but production difficulties meant that it wasn’t available for the 2010-11 season. This family adventure is set in 2149. Earth is dying of overcrowding and overdevelopment. The only hope for mankind’s salvation is the discovery of a fracture in time that will allow humanity to be resettled in Earth’s primeval past. The Shannon family are part of the Tenth Pilgramage to the first colony: Terra Nova. They are Jim (Jason O’Mara) a devoted father with a checkered past, his wife Elizabeth (Shelley Conn) a trauma surgeon, his 17 year-old son Josh (Landon Liboiron) who resents leaving the world he knew behind him, 15 year-old Maddy (Naomi Scott) an awkward teen who hopes that she can reinvent herself in her new home, and 5 year-old Zoe (Alana Mansour) who is the subject of a secret that could jeopardize the family’s place in this new world. Stephen Lange plays Commander Nathaniel Taylor, the leader of the new settlement who warns the new arrivals of the dangers they face…and not just from the local dinosaurs. There are threats outside of the colony, and inside as well. Also stars Allison Miller and Christine Adams.

Alcatraz is the new series from J.J. Abrams. While investigating a grisly murder San Francisco Police detective Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) makes a shocking discovery. A fingerprint found at the scene belongs to Jack Sylvane (Jeffrey Pierce), a man who died decades ago… in the Federal Prison at Alcatraz. Both Rebecca’s links to the prison run deep – her grandfather and her surrogate uncle were both guards there – and when Federal Agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill) tries to impede her investigation she becomes even more determined, particularly when she discovers that not only is Sylvane alive and leaving a trail of bodies throughout the city, but he hasn’t aged a day since he was in Alcatraz. Teaming with Alcatraz expert and comic book geek Dr. Diego Soto (Jorge Garcia) Madsen is eventually forced to team up with Hauser and his technician Lucy Banerjee (Parminder Nagra). Together they discover that Sylvane may be the first prisoner from Alcatraz to appear, but he won’t be the last… and it appears that Hauser is expecting it. Also stars Santiago Cabrera, Jonny Coyne, and Jason Butler Harner.

New Girl stars Zoe Deschanel plays Jess Day, a young woman who moves into an apartment with three guys after suffering a bad breakup. Jess is off-beat and adorable, described as goofy, positive vulnerable and honest to a fault. She’s more confident in dealing with women than she is with men, particularly at home. Of her three roommates, Nick is the most grounded. Although he once had big plans for his life he eventually stopped caring and became a bartender. Schmidt (Max Greenfield) is a an hustling young professional who is both socially ambitious and considers himself a modern Casanova. He regards Jess as a gateway in to the female mind. The third roommate Coach (Daman Wayans Jr.) is a former high school athlete who now works as a personal trainer. He maintains a macho exterior but it covers his shyness with women. Rounding out the cast is Cece (Hannah Simone), Jess’s life long friend. A deadpan somewhat cynical professional model she has the street smarts that Jess lacks. Their qualities balance each other and they accept each other despite their faults.

X-Factor is a new musical competition show created by Simon Cowell. The show’s judges – Cowell, Antonio “L.A.” Reid, Cheryl Cole, and Paula Abdul – travel the country seeking singing acts over the age of 12, whether individuals or groups. The audition process will occur before audiences of thousands in a number of cities. Those acts that survive the auditions graduate to a “boot camp” where they’ll be split into four groups, each of which will be mentored by one of the judges. Not only will the show be a competition between the acts but between the judges as they see whose acts will dominate the competition. Nicole Scherzinger and Steve Jones host the show.

What happens when you give your kids all of the things that you were denied as a child? I Hate My Teenage Daughter gives one answer. Annie (Jaime Pressly) and Nikki (Katie Fineran) were high school outcasts whose grew up and had daughters. Their parenting strategies were informed by the way they were brought up. Annie was raised in a strict religious household and had virtually no freedoms. As a result she allows her own daughter Sophie to do just about anything she wants. Nikki, who had been an overweight social pariah, has reinvented herself as a Southern Belle whose main goal in life is to give her daughter everything she never had. The intent was good but the result is anything but as their daughter have become the sort of girls who had once made Annie and Nikki’s life a hell. Annie’s daughter Sophie (Kristi Lauren) is embarrassed by her mother and takes every opportunity to ridicule her, even though she secretly knows that she need her mom. Nikki’s daughter Mackenzie works her mother’s insecurity to her own advantage. And the men in their lives aren’t much help. When their daughter’s mean-girl antics go too far Annie and Nikki realize that they need to take action and dole out some real punishments, and that maybe together they’ll be stronger in doing this than they are by themselves. Rounding out the cast are  Eric Sheffer Stevens as Annie’s ex-husband Matt, Kevin Rahm as his brother Jack who Annie has a secret crush on, and Chad Coleman plays Nikki’s ex Gary.

The Finder which used an episode of Bones for a backdoor pilot is about Walter Sherman (Geoff Stults) a former military policeman who had knack for finding insurgents, deserters and IEDs. After being caught in an IED explosion and being in a coma for two months, Walter discovers that he now has the ability to find anything that has been lost. Operating out of a Key West bar Walter is helped by bartender Ike Latulippe (Saffron Burrows), a woman with many hidden skills who is grateful to Walter for helping her to escape from “a dangerous life.” Leo Knox (Michael Clarke Duncan), a lawyer who has reinvented himself after the death of his wife and children, serves as Walter’s legal advisor and tempers some of Walter’s paranoia.

Allen Gregory is an animated comedy about “one of the most pretentious seven year-olds of all time.” Allen Gregory de Longpre (Jonah Hill) doesn’t see a child when he looks in the mirror, he sees a talented sophisticated worldly young man. He has a strong bond with his father Richard (French Stewart) and virtually no respect for his father’s life partner Jeremy (Nat Faxon). Also part of the family is his adopted Cambodian sister Julie (Joy Osmanski) who Allen wishes would run away and never be found. Now, Allen faces the greatest challenge of his life: attending elementary school. Despite having allegedly composed operas, written novels and dated Chloe Sevigny he is out of his element and desperately wants to fit in. Other voices include Leslie Mann, Renee Taylor, Jake Johnson, Cristina Pucelli and Will Forte.

Napoleon Dynamite is an animated sequel to the hit movie of the same name featuring the voices of the moivie’s original cast including Jon Heder as Napoleon, Aaron Ruell as his brother Kip, Sandy Martin as Grandma, Efren Ramirez as Napoleon’s friend Pedro, Tina Marjorino as Deb, Jon Gries as Uncle Rico, and Diedrich Bader as Rex Kwon Do.

Comments
Going into the upfronts the biggest news out of FOX might have been the cancellation of America’s Most Wanted. The show is almost as old as the FOX network itself, appearing in the network’s second season. According to network entertainment president Kevin Reilly, the show hasn’t actually been profitable for a number of years and the network needs an outlet for “encore” shows. The series will return to its traditional timeslot for quarterly specials, and series creator John Walsh is reportedly shopping it around to various Newscorp owned networks.

Turning to the actual schedule, I hate to say it but there is little here that excites me. The big ticket item in this season is X-Factor, which the network has been pushing practically since the beginning of the 2010-11 season. The show is a remake of Simon Cowell’s British success of the same name. It should probably be mentioned that the British original was created by Cowell to replace Pop Idol (which was the genesis for American Idol) because Cowell didn’t own all of Pop Idol and wanted a series that he would get all the profit from. X-Factor may have some differences from American Idol but it really doesn’t seem that different to me. In a very real sense it is almost as though Fox is looking for a way to have American Idol for a full season and that in turn makes it seem like a cynical effort on the part of Fox. The sad thing is that I’m sure it’s going to work too and hurt some shows that I like.

None of the three dramatic series – Finder, Alcatraz, and Terra Nova – really does it for me. Finder is quite clearly the show that will work the best, simply because it is the show that is most like something that is already on. People like something that’s familiar.  While I think that the concept of Alcatraz is the most intriguing one and one that I’m likely to watch, I don’t think that it’s an idea that the network will find easy to sell to the public. In some ways it “feels”a lot like Fringe, and while Fringe has a loyal – one could easily say a “rabid” following (which includes me) – it isn’t a large following, which ha sled to the show facing cancellation on an annual basis. In a similar vein, I think that Terra Nova will gain a strong sampling when it debuts but I’m not sure how many will stick with it. Me? Well I’m part of the “nitpickers” club, which is going to be talking about how the show sets up a temporal paradox in sending people back in time to potentially become their own ancestors; and besides, wouldn’t bringing the entire population of a dying Earth into the past lead to them making exactly the same mistakes that brought them to this situation, just a couple of million years early?

The two non-animated comedies are both female oriented. While I really like Zoe Deschanel, the concept behind New Girl feels a great deal like The Big Bang Theory without the geniuses and from a female perspective. I think I’d need to see at least one episode before I drew a conclusion on it, but right now I think it has a strike against it for being imitative  without truly understanding why the original works. I Hate My Teenage Daughter is a lot less imitative – which is to say that I can’t think of a show that it’s like that’s on the air right now. Whether that’s enough for it to gain an audience is a big question. The only actress in this that I’m familiar with is Jaime Pressly which isn’t by itself a bad thing. I think the female perspective and the new take on a family comedy is intriguing, and the placement after X-Factor/American Idol gives it a huge potential audience. whether the show will ratain that audience is what we’re going to have to see.

I’ve never really gotten into the network’s animation fixation so I have virtually no interest in either Allen Gregory or Napoleon Dynamite.


Take as a whole this is a very lackluster effort from FOX. Even though I wasn’t particularly excited by the network’s 2010-11 season there was at least a show that I thought had a certain amount of quality to it. That show was The Chicago Code and I’m really disappointed that the network cancelled it. This time around there’s nothing of that sort of quality. I think there are a couple of shows that might work, but the one show that really does anything for me – Alcatraz – is one that I don’t think there’s an audience for.

NBC’s 2011-12 Schedule

Although NBC’s official announcement of new shows won’t be official unveiled until Monday morning, the network made an announcement of their new schedule to the press on Sunday, and thanks to the network’s “new media strategies team” this blog was included in this.

The network announced a dozen new series, although not all of these will debut in the Fall season. In addition, several series have been moved, and there are some returning shows that as yet have not had an official release date.

Cancelled: Law & Order: LA, Outsourced, Outlaw, Friday Night Lights, The Event, Friends With Benefits, Love Bites, Perfect Couples, America’s Next Great Restaurant, The Paul Reiser Show, School Pride, The Cape, Chase.

Moved: Chuck, The Sing-Off, Parks & Recreation, Celebrity Apprentice, Harry’s Law.

Retained: Biggest Loser, Community, The Office, Parenthood, Dateline NBC.

New Series: Dramas – The Playboy Club, Prime Suspect, Grimm
Comedies – Up All Night, Free Agents, Whitney

Coming at Mid-Season or Not yet scheduled: Smash (Mondays after the Football Season replacing The Playboy Club), The Firm (Sunday night after the Football season, following Celebrity Apprentice), Awake, Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, Best Friends Forever, Bent. As well, returning series 30 Rock (on hiatus due to Tina Fey’s pregnancy), and Who Do You Think You Are? have been renewed but are not currently on the schedule. As well I have no official information on game show Minute To Win It. Or at least I’ve never seen anything official.

Complete Schedule: (New Shows in CAPITALS; All times are Eastern)

Monday
8:00-10:00 p.m.  The Sing-Off
10:00-11:00 p.m.  THE PLAYBOY CLUB/SMASH

Tuesday
8:00-10:00 p.m.  The Biggest Loser
10:00-11:00 p.m.  Parenthood

Wednesday
8:00-8:30 p.m.  UP ALL NIGHT
8:30-9:00 p.m.  FREE AGENTS
9:00-10:00 p.m.  Harry’s Law (New Day and Time)
10:00-11:00 p.m. Law & Order: SVU 

Thursday
8:00-8:30 p.m.  Community
8:30-9:00 p.m.  Parks & Recreation (New Time)
9:00-9:30 p.m.  The Office
9:30-10:00 p.m.  WHITNEY
10:00-11:00 p.m.  PRIME SUSPECT

Friday
8:00-9:00 p.m.  Chuck (New Day and Time)
9:00-10:00 p.m.  GRIMM
10:00-11:00 p.m. Dateline NBC

Sunday (after the NFL season)
7:00-8:00 p.m.  Dateline NBC
8:00-10:00 p.m.  Celebrity Apprentice
10:00-11:00 p.m.  THE FIRM

The Playboy Club, from Oscar winning Executive Producer Brian Grazer and Image Entertainment, is a period piece in the style of Mad Men. The period is the early 1960s, and the place is the legendary Chicago Playboy Club where Chicago’s top movers and shakers – on both sides of the law – mingle for a good time. Eddie Cibrian plays Nick Dalton, one of the city’s top lawyers who has mysterious ties with The Mob. Nick comes to the aid of Maureen (Amber Heard), a stunning, if naive, new Bunny who accidentally kills the head of the Berlanti crime family. Nick is dating Carol-Lynne, “the first Bunny” who realizes that her time at the club is drawing to an end. She is in conflict with club manager Billy (David Krumholtz). Also in the cast are Wes Ramsay, Jenna Dewan Tatum, Naturi Naughton, and Leah Renee.

Up All Night is a new comedy created by Emily Spivey who also serves as Executive Producer along with Lorne Michaels from Saturday Night Live and Jon Pollack. The show stars Christina Applegate and Will Arnett as new parents Reagan and Chris. Chris is a stay at home father while Reagan is a successful PR Executive. The arrival of their baby has set them on a new path towards being responsible adults, although balancing work, marriage and parenthood is not without its share of pressures. Maya Rudolph co-stars as Reagan’s boss whose whirlwind social life is a reminder of how things were for Reagan before the baby. James Pumphrey plays Reagan’s “socially awkward hipster assistant.”

Free Agents is based on a British series of the same name. Hank Azaria plays Alex, a newly divorced advertising executive who can barely keep himself together, while Helen (Katherine Hahn) is his co-worker, a woman who thinks is obsessed with her dead fiancee. She may think that she has it all together but in fact she’s on the edge of falling apart. When, after a drunken night of partying, Alex and Helen wake up in bed together, they decide to reamins “just friends.” However when Alex’s friends (Mo Mandel, Al Madrigal, and Anthony Stewart Head) are able to persuade Alex to re-enter the dating scene, Helen becomes jealous. And when he ultimately gets cold feet about going out on a date, the two end up back where they were – in  a “casual intimate and beautifully awkward relationship.”

Whitney is a new multi-camera comedy starring Whitney Cummins as a woman who is in a happily unmarried relationship with her boyfriend Alex (Chris D’Elia). After attending yet another wedding of their friends Whitney starts to feel that their relationship is on the verge of becoming boring. After a few attempts to spice things up on the advice of a couple of her opinionated friends (Zoe Lister-Jones and Rhea Seehorne) that end up with her and Alex in hospital ER, Whitney realizes that their relationship might not be perfect but it works for them. Also features Maulik Pancholy and Dan O’Brien.

Prime Suspect is a remake of the classic British series of the same name. Maria Bello plays Jane Timoney (the role played by Helen Mirren in the British series with a differnt name) a tough as nails woman detective with her own vices and a questionable past, who has to buck “boy’s club” atmosphere of her new precinct. She’s forceful, rude and reckless but she’s also a brilliant detective. Also stars Aidan Quinn, Brian O’Byrne, Tim Griffin, Kirk Acevedo, Joe Nieves, Damon Gupton, and Peter Gerety.

Grimm is a detective series with a difference. David Guintoli plays Nick Burkhardt, a homicide detective who finds himself seeing things he can’t explain. When his ailing Aunt Marie arrives for a visit she reveals to him that they are descended from a legendary group of hunters known as “Grimms” whose mission is to keep humanity safe from the supernatural creatures of the world. As Nick digs deeper into his heritage he discovers that the mythology of the Brothers Grimm is all too real. Also stars Russell Hornsby, Bitsie Tulloch, Silas Weir Mitchell, Reggie Lee, and Sasha Roiz. Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt are the creators.

Smash is a musical drama centered on the schemers and dreamers who populate the world of the Broadway musical. Tom and Julia (Tony award nominee Christian Borle and Emmy winner Debra Messing) are a successful songwriting team who are given the opportunity to write another hit, based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Vying for the lead role are an inexperienced Midwesterner played by Katherine McPhee trying to find fame against all odds, and a stage veteran determined to leave the chorus line played by Megan Hilty. Anjelica Huston plays Eileen, a determined producer who jumps all over the Marilyn Monroe project and brings along a brilliant but cunning and amoral director played by Jack Dvenport. The series is based on an idea by Steven Spielberg and features songs by Grammy and Tony award winners Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.

The Firm is based on John Grisham’s novel and the movie of the same name. Young lawyer Mitchell McDeere brought down the Memphis law firm of Bendini, Lambert & Locke which had operated as a front for the Chicago Mob. Now, after ten years in Witness Protection Mitchell and his family have emerged to reclaim their lives. They soon come to realize that past dangers and new threats are lurking. No casting has been announced.

Awake stars Jason Isaac as a detective living a bizarre double life. After a car accident Michael Britten regains consciousness to discover that his wife has died but his son Rex (Dylan Minnette) has survived. Trying to put his life back together Michael awakes to find himself in an alternate reality in which his son died but his wife Hannah (Laura Allen) survived. To keep both of his loved ones in his life he tries to live in both realities, which to say the least is confusing. To try to regain a certain amount of “normalcy” he goes back to work as a detective in both realities… with two different partners played by Steve Harris and Wilmer Valderrama. He also has therapists in both realities, played by Cherry Jones and B.D. Wong.

Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea is a comedy based on Chelsea Handler’s book of the same name. Laura Prepon plays Chelsea, a twenty-something bartender who is a force of nature determined to live life to the fullest. Co-starring are Jo Koy as Mark, a charming bartender whose wit makes him a perfect foil for Chelsea; Angel Laketa Moore as Shoniqua, a smart and sassy waitress who looks out for Chelsea’s best interests; Mark Povinelli as fellow bartender Todd whose wry sense of humour keeps Chelsea in check; Natalie Morales as Ivory, Chelsea’s best friend; Lauren Lapkus as Dee Dee, Chelsea’s shy and sheltered roommate; Lenny Clarke as Chelsea’s father and Melvin Handler as Chelsea’s sister Sloan.

Best Friends Forever is a single camera  comedy starring Jessica St. Clair plays Jessica, a woman who decides to move back with her best friend Lennon (Lennon Parham) after her husband divorces her. Unfortunately Lennon’s boyfriend Joe (Adam Pally) has just moved into the apartment and turned Jessica’s old room into a perfect home office. The two women soon fall back into their old patterns of life, leaving Joe feeling like the odd man out. While Lennon tries to find a balance between her boyfriend and her best friend, Jessica has to deal with the unresolved feelings that her old friend Rav (Stephen Schneider) has for her. St. Clair and Parham are Executive Producers along with Scot Armstrong and Ravi Nandan.

Bent is a romantic comedy about two people who are suddenly attracted by qualities that usually repel them. Amanda Peet plays Alex, a tough and resilient lawyer who is now a single mother of an eight year old daughter (Charlie, played by Zoe King). Deciding to downsize she moves into a smaller house and hires Pete (David Walton) to redo her kitchen. David is a recovering gambling addict and an unapologetic womanizer for whom the remodelling job is one last chance to prove that he isn`t a screw-up. Pete doesn`t know what`s about to hit him when he encounters Alex, while for her part Alex isn`t ready for someon who isn`t afraid to call her out for her flaws. Jeffrey Tambor plays Pete`s father Walt, an out of work actor while Margo Harshman plays Alex`s wild younger sister Screwsie.

Comments:
As usual, I am giving an instant uniformed analysis based on the synopses given by the network in their press release. I`ve watched a couple of of the clips that NBC provided with their press release but I haven`t looked at them all yet, and while the NBC clips are available to me, clips from the other networks may not be.

First up, some thoughts on time slots. NBC will be running reality shows in the 8-10 p.m. time slot two nights in a row – Monday and Tuesday – for the first half of the year, and three nights in a row once Celebrity Apprentice returns (with or without Donald Trump, depending on whether or not he decides to run for the Republican nomination for the Presidency). In my opinion this is altogether too much. Worse, their reality competitions on Monday night will be running up against the established time slot domination of ABC`s Dancing With The Stars. I don`t think that bodes well for Sing-Off or The Voice. I’m also dubious as to whether Playboy Club will be able to carve out an audience up against the established competition of Castle. Even the highly touted Hawaii Five-0 had difficulty in the time slot this past season. One thing’s for sure; the Parent’s Television Council, which has a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything or anyone even tangentially related to Playboy, will be watching this show like a hawk to find something to protest (in fact they already are protesting a supposed nudity clause in the actors’ contracts) – which in an odd way will probably make long-time anti-censorship advocate Hugh Hefner rather pleased. No matter, I don’t hold out too much hope for this show.

Sadly, another show that I don’t hold out much hope for is the one that will replace Playboy Club on Monday nights at midseason, Smash. If Studio 60, a series about the television industry, was considered to be too much “inside baseball” by viewers, how are they expected to react to a show about the inner workings of Broadway musicals. I realize that NBC is trying to tap into the audience that has made FOX’s Glee a big success, but I just don’t see this show catching on, particularly against the established competition.

Of the remaining NBC dramas debuting at the beginning of the season, the one with the greatest chance of success is obviously Prime Suspect. The network has finally decided to stop fooling around with a full night of comedies, and is making a serious push for viewers in the 10-11 p.m. slot on Thursdays. I have a couple of reservations about the show however. They are again trying to establish a beachhead in a time slot with established competition, and while Private Practice might be ready to be pushed out, I think the best that NBC can hope for is a second place finish. I have to wonder if the show will deal with criminal cases in a multi-episode manner, in the way that the British original did, or whether it will be just another “one and done” procedural like most of the shows on TV. Finally, with all due respect to Maria Bello as an actress, she has some mighty big shoes to fill taking on a role originally played by Dame Helen Mirren, and even if Bello is brilliant in the part she will inevitably be compared – negatively – to Mirren’s performance in the part.

Grimm is probably doomed by the time slot alone. Conventional wisdom does suggest after all that Fridays are a dead night for TV viewership. There is at least one point in its favour, and that is that it is paired with an established series in Chuck. The problem is that while Chuck has an ardent following, it is a small ardent following, and by the description Grimm comes across as odder than the show that will lead into it. The same can probably be said for Awake, except of course that we don’t know the time slot that they show will occupy. In fact, if NBC holds to their stated intention of ending Chuck after thirteen episodes Awake might lead into Grimm which in my opinion would be a disaster.

Turning to the comedies, I will remind you that I am not a very good audience for comedies, so my opinions on those series is probably not worth much. The one that stands out for me is probably Free Agents. It is probably the comedy that I would have put into NBC’s Thursday night line-up instead of Whitney. To me – and to others – Whitney doesn’t seem like a good fit on the night. As to the rest of the comedies – and this is just a gross generalization – there is nothing that really gabs me as being original or ground-breaking. There seems to be a lot of romantic comedies and attempts to duplicate the success of Friends. Judged purely on the descriptions and with no reference to the star power attached to the projects, I’d have to say that there’s nothing in this list that reaches out and grabs me the way that I would need to be grabbed if I were going to watch a comedy.

On the  whole I think that NBC has some ambitious show ideas, but I’m doubtful as to how successful these ideas will be when placed before the public. NBC is trying stuff which is good, but I'm don’t think people will be watching in the numbers that the network is hoping to attract.

(Editted to complete the list of cancelled shows.)

An Apology

This is for those of you who have bookmarked this site or who have it on your blogrolls and the like. I haven’t been writing a lot over the past few months. I can’t say it’s been ripping me apart but it has been very frustrating for me not to post when I have something to say.

What’s behind this? Well there are several things. I have been quite busy in my non-blogging life, and it usually comes at the same time when I do some of my writing; in the afternoons. Other things happen at night when I also write a lot.

But of course, If being busy was the only problem it wouldn’t be too bad. I could make the time to do the writing. A bigger problem is that I seem to be undergoing some sort of massive writers block which I really haven’t been able to get around. I start writing something and start to get a good flow and then after a while I’ll read what I’ve written and quite literally get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. What I’ve written feels like utter crap, and I give up on it. This happened earlier this week. I was writing a piece about why Smallville “worked” and became the longest lasting science fiction style show on TV (I attribute a lot of its success to it being about Superman and that it was on the right network, which is to say not one of the “Big Four”). The problem was that as I got deeper and deeper into it, the less happy I was with it, and as the time to run it became less and less my displeasure with it became greater and greater.

Finally I feel a rising sense of frustration with what effect I can have writing about TV. I love TV and I love writing about the medium. I don't recap shows because the medium seems to me to be a rich smorgasbord and there’s so much to try. The problem is that as I don’t get any of the preview materials that professional critics do – particularly screeners of network shows – I have to write my reaction after I see the show as an ordinary viewer. And really that’s too late, particularly if I don’t get my review written overnight. Even if the review of a new show is finished by the next afternoon – and remember I am sometimes busy or otherwise distracted in the afternoons – any ability I or anyone in my situation has to influence anyone who is reading this is gone. Television is a slave to the ratings numbers and those come out in the morning. Someone like Marc Berman of AdWeek – for whom I have a certain amount of respect even though his is a purely scientific measure of determining whether a show deserves to survive or not – is able to tell me that that show that I liked last night is doomed to die in a little while because the ratings say no one is watching it. It makes it all feel frustrating and pointless. Why bother analysing the dramatic qualities of a show; just print the numbers and declare that “this is a bad show.”

I can’t do anything about the whole ratings frustration. TV isn’t about art; it is about getting people in position to watch commercials, and the only way you can define if a show does that job is with ratings. And maybe that’s at least partly the source of the writers’ block – I don’t write because of the apparent futility of writing. Still, I can at least try to beat the writer’s block in the only way I know how: by forcing myself to write through it. To that end I intend to do a recap of episodes of a single season show from a few years back that intrigued me to the point where I want to share my views about it. Let’s see if I can power through my problem. In the meantime I’ve got another article that I could be writing, and upfronts are next week, so I’m going to have to write about those – if I can find the time.

Down A Man–Charlie Sheen Fired From Two And A Half Men

So CBS and Warner Brothers have fired Charlie Sheen from Two And A Half Men. HOORAY!!!

Now what?

Look, I’m as happy as anyone that Sheen and his absurd activities will be disappearing from the medium in short order. And I certainly get why the show’s creator Chuck Lorre, Warner Brothers and CBS are fed up with him. But it seems to me that this firing leaves the network, the production company and the show with a large, Charlie-sized hole. A hole in the network’s line-up or a hole in the show depending on what the network decides to do. None of the options that the network has before them is particularly palatable.

What are the options?

1. End the show

Maybe the best or at least the easiest solution, but this is a potential earthquake across the CBS line-up. One problem here is that Jon Cryer, Angus Jones and the rest of the cast are signed for another season, but for the most part this could be dealt with. The network has a bigger problem though. Two And A Half Men is one of their biggest shows, the anchor of their Monday line-up. If you drop the show you need something to replace it that has the same sort of drawing power for their Monday line-up. The obvious answer would be to bring The Big Bang Theory back to Monday nights from its current time slot on Thursday, but then what do you do on Thursdays? Do you keep comedies in the first hour and if so what anchors the night? How I Met Your Mother? Mike and Molly? Rules of Engagement or $#*! My Dad Says (the two shows that have held down the second half hour on Thursday following The Big Bang Theory)? Probably not that last option since neither of those series has shown any particular strength on the night.

Or do you decide that the whole experiment was a bad idea and move Survivor back to Thursday night? Or do you keep Survivor on Wednesday night and replace the comedies with a drama? If you do go with a drama is it a new show that you might have put elsewhere or do you move an established show to the time slot?

2. Kill off the Charlie character – or otherwise take him off the show – and just not replace him

This is really a non-starter. Oh sure, NBC initially did that with Valerie Harper’s character on Valerie when NBC and Paramount fired here from that series (for reasons that were far far less disruptive than what we’ve seen from Sheen). The problem is that this totally violates the premise of the show. At its heart Two And A Half Men is The Odd Couple with Jake as the equivalent of Murray the Cop, or something like that. Take away Charlie without some sort of replacement and what you get is One And A Half Men, and the show becomes a father dealing with a teenaged son. That’s a quick death for this show.

 

Still I like the idea of killing Charlie off…preferably in a messy and totally absurd way, like having a boulder drop on him. A piano would be good too.

3. Kill Off Charlie – or otherwise dispose of him – and replace him

This is probably what they’re going to do if they continue on with the show. It’s what they eventually did with Valerie Harper, and what happened when John Ritter died in real life. There are a couple of options they could use in this situation.

 

a) Bring in an older relative

They did this when John Ritter died. James Garner became the adult male lead on Eight Simple Rules, along with David Spade. Maybe Charlie and Alan’s father didn’t die of food poisoning but rather escaped from Evelyn. Maybe some other older male relative shows up after Charlie gets turned into a bloody splat in the road. The point is that whoever this relative is he has to be as thoroughly debauched as Charlie was, and just as good looking in spite of it. Too bad they killed off Robert Wagner’s character a few years ago.

b) Alan and Charlie’s long-lost and never before mentioned half brother of roughly the same age as Charlie

This was after all the way that they finally replaced Valerie Harper on what became Valerie’s Family (and later The Hogan Family) – Valerie’s sister-in-law, played by Sandy Duncan – came to live with the family after her death. And with Evelyn’s history why wouldn’t there be a forgotten brother or half-brother or “something” vaguely unsavoury, running around. You could even bring on Charlie’s previously unsuspected bastard son – and let’s face it, there’s plenty of potential for many such unsuspected mistakes to show up and take up residence.

4. Replace Sheen, keep Harper

This is the classic soap opera solution to this sort of situation, and what they did when Dick Sargent replaced Dick York. If you need an explanation (as often as not soap operas didn’t offer an explanation; they’d just say that the role of so-and-so is no being played by a different actor; Bewitched didn’t even do that) say that after a fire – probably related to his drinking – Charlie had to go through reconstructive surgery and now looks like John Stamos instead of Charlie Sheen. Sure, it’s a hokey solution but there are some reasons why it can work. Not only does this provide a smooth transition, it lets the writers just keep writing the same character as they have been from the beginning. The face changes but the attitude and the character traits remain the same. The question is whether the public would accept that Charlie Harper as played by John Stamos? Or should they just cast Ted “Show Killer” McGinley in the part and admit defeat.

Personally I think that CBS should bite the bullet and end the show. Maybe they can get Chuck Lorre to come up with something new. After all he seems to be the current CBS “King of Comedy.” Do I think that they’ll pull the trigger though? Probably not. I think that the network will go with the “non-nuclear option” and keep the show on the air for all or part of another season to clear the actor’s contracts and give Lorre or someone else time to create something outstanding to replace it. No matter what the network decides to do, I would be very much surprised to see Two And A Half Men on the 2012-13 line-up, which is not something I would have been sure of before this whole mess with Sheen blew up.

I would be even more surprised to see Sheen acting in just about anything in the next few years. I think his recent behaviour has made him box office and TV screen poison, and if it is possible for him to recover his reputation it will take a long stretch of good behaviour to manage it. I wish him the best in all of the recovery that he needs to do, but I think I’ss stick with the smart money when it comes to his future employment prospects.

Weekend Videos–Nicholas Courtney and Doctor Who

Nicholas Courtney passed away on February 22at the age of 81, following a long illness, reported by his former Doctor Who cast mate Tom Baker to have been cancer. Courtney was a well-regarded character actor who worked extensively in the theatre and on television. He was a regular on the comedy French Fields and appeared opposite Frankie Howerd on Then Churchill Said To Me, a series that was made in 1982 but was shelved because of the Falklands War. However it is for Doctor Who, and in particular the character of The Brigadier – Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart – that he is best known. Courtney appeared with every actor to play The Doctor in the first incarnation of the show except one – Colin Baker – and that includes Richard Hurndall who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors. In addition he appeared in Doctor Who audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions with Colin Baker, and Paul McGann playing their respective versions of The Doctor, and with David Tennant, who played a character named Colonel Ross Brimmicombe-Wood.

Courtney’s first appearance on Doctor Who was not as the iconic character of Lethbridge-Stewart but rather as Space Security Agent Brett Vyon in the third season serial The Dalek Masterplan. Among other people to appear in this series was Jean Marsh, who had previously appeared in the The Crusades arc of Doctor Who (she kills Vyon who, as it turns out, was her brother). Most of The Dalek Master Plan is lost. However among the episodes to survive is the one in which Nicholas Courtney first appears.

Courtney’s next appearance in the series was as Lethbridge-Stewart, but not quite the Lethbridge-Stewart we know. In Web of Fear Lethbridge-Stewart was a Colonel, and UNIT had yet to be formed. Based on his hat he was in a Scottish regiment, which fits with what we later discover about Lethbridge-Stewart. He appears opposite Patrick Toughton as The Doctor, Fraiser Hines as Jamie and Deborah Watling as Victoria. Courtney was originally cast as Captain Knight while David Langton (who later played Richard Bellamy on Upstair Downstairs) was to play Lethbridge-Stewart. Fortunately – given what happens to Knight – Langton was took another job and Courtney was recast as Lethbridge-Stewart. Unfortunately most of Web Of Fear after the first episode is lost and we have to depend on is fan recreations using photos taken while the show was being made, and Courtney doesn’t make his first appearance until the second or third episode. What I have is the last part of the last episode of one of these recreations.

Significantly more exists of Lethbridge-Stewart’s next appearance (although not enough to air as a “complete” episode) and in it the major aspects of his participation in Doctor Who were set. In Invasion we learn that four years have passed since the Yeti incident (for everyone except the occupants of the TARDIS) and Lethbridge-Stewart has been promoted to the rank of Brigadier. He now commanding an element of a new United Nations organization known as UNIT. Also introduced is the ever faithful Benton (John Levene) who at this point was still a corporal. This particular pair of clips are a bit of a mixed bag. It begins with an animated recreation of the end of the missing first episode and at about the 3:50 mark transitions into the complete second episode, which features Benton and two other soldier in mufti grabbing the Doctor and Jamie and taking them to their leader whose headquarters are aboard an RAF Hercules transport. The leader is of course Lethbridge-Stewart.

It is the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, that Lethbridge-Stewart is most closely associated with. In this clip, the Brigadier and UNIT’s new Science Advisor, Liz Shaw, encounter a problem that people who met previous versions of The Doctor should comment on more regularly, namely that he doesn’t look the same as he did when he knew them. In this case the change from Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee is just a little more than the Brigadier can absorb at the moment, though the man who (to Lethbridge-Stewart’s mind at least) is pretending to be The Doctor does seem well informed.

Perhaps the Brigadier’s most famous line in the series was from the last episode of The Daemons. “Chap with the wings. Five rounds rapid.” In fact Courtney used the line as the title for his 1999 autobiography Five Rounds Rapid (he wrote a second autobiography in 2005 called Still Getting Away With It)

The Brigadier and UNIT were pretty much fixtures of Doctor Who for the first two seasons of Pertwee’s run on the series. They became less so during the last two seasons, after The Doctor was freed from his exile on Earth by the Time Lords. About half of the serials after that featured UNIT. The final Pertwee episode had a relatively minor involvement of UNIT, with The Doctor returning to UNIT to regenerate. In this set of clips the Brigadier,and Sarah Jane witness the Doctor regenerating. This time around The Brigadier takes the whole thing entirely in stride, mentioning the first time that it happened. Of course Tom Baker’s Doctor could be a bit eccentric at the best of times, but newly regenerated he was more than a handful (as you might be able to tell I preferred Pertwee’s Doctor).

Robot, the first Tom Baker episode was the penultimate appearance of Nicholas Courtney in the Tom Baker series of Doctor Who. He’d appear one more time in Terror of the Zygons in the show’s thirteenth season, while UNIT itself would disappear a couple of serials later in the serial The Android Invasion. In that episode The Doctor goes to an office with Lethbridge-Stewart’s name on it but he’s absent. Still, you can’t keep a good character down and the Brigadier kept popping up from time to time. In Mawdryn Undead we get two versions of the Brigadier – now retired and working as a maths teacher in a British Public (which means Private) school – separated in time. One has a definite memory problem. Unfortunately, while this serial very much exists, the BBC seems to have cracked down on people posting full episodes. What we have in this clip is Peter Davison’s Doctor reviving the memory of the older, moustache-less, version of the Brigadier in a sequence which includes brief excerpts from various episodes in which the Brigadier featured. Interestingly the episode wasn’t meant to feature The Brigadier at all. It was written for William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the very first Doctor Who episodes. However, the actor (whose real name is Russell William Enoch) was unavailable to appear on the show and after some consideration was given to using Ian Marter and his character Harry Sullivan, Courtney was picked for the role.

Later the same year, Lethbridge-Stewart appeared in The Five Doctors special, commemorating the series’ twentieth anniversary. In this clip the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) drops in on The Brigadier at a UNIT reunion where he meets Colonel Crichton, Lethbridge-Stewart’s replacement, who doesn’t really impress the Doctor. Continuity obsessed fans were able to determine that this episode took place after Mawdryn Undead because The Brigadier recognises Tegan and the Fifth Doctor.

The Brigadier’s final appearance in Doctor Who proper was in the twenty-sixth and final season of the show’s original run. The episode was very much an old home week for Courtney as it featured Jean March as Morgaine. Marsh had appeared in the very Doctor Who story that Courtney did, The Dalek Master Plan. In that episode Marsh’s character, Sara Kingdom, kills Courtney’s Brett Vyon. In Battlefield she tries to kill him, but fortunately doesn’t succeed. In these two sequences we find The Brigadier, recalled to duty with the return of The Doctor, encountering Morgaine, and then in the second clip reuniting with The Doctor – who else could it be indeed.

Nicholas Courtney’s final appearance in the Doctor Who universe was in the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Enemy Of The Bane from the sho’s second season. The episode aired almost exactly twenty-five years after the last time Elizabeth Sladen and Nicholas Courtney had appeared together, in The Five Doctors. In the episode Sarah Jane needs access to some material that only Sir Alistair, now a special envoy for UNIT, is able to provide her with. Amazingly the entire episode has been posted on YouTube (though for how long I don’t know).

That was Nicholas Courtney’s last episode as Lethbridge-Stewart. Reportedly Courtney was supposed to appear again in The Sarah Jane Adventures episode The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith but had suffered a stroke and was unable to appear. It is also said that Courtney wanted to make one final appearance on Doctor Who in an episode that would kill the character off. Unfortunately this wasn’t to be.

Nicholas Courtney was an integral part of the original Doctor Who series, a first rate actor who took what could have been a throwaway role and became an iconic figure to the point where the word Brigadier has become a “TV Trope” (a convention or device found within creative works) for “any senior military person in a sci-fi drama who is a good guy.” And it seems to me that both Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Nicholas Courtney were pretty good guys. 

Poll Result–Everybody Loves Boston Rob

For those of you who forgot I ran a poll a while ago about who would last longer on the current series of Survivor, Boston Rob Mariano or Russell Hantz. And while calling the result a landslide would be disrespectful …….. to landslides, the result of the poll was unanimous. The person that four of you wanted to last longer on Survivor: Redemption Island is….

Boston Rob!!!!

Yes, I know that there were five votes cast for Boston Rob. I voted for him too.

 

Weekend Videos – Top Rated Series 1970-1974

It’s been a while since I’ve done a video posting, so I thought I’d do another one featuring top-rated series. This time around we enter one of the great transitional periods of American TV, the 1970-1974 period.

To remind you again about the “rules” of this project, as imposed by me on myself., I will list the top three shows for each season along with the percentage of the nation's televisions that were tuned to that show during the season. These figures are drawn from the Complete Directory To Prime Time Network And Cable TV Shows 1946-Present. If the season's top rated show has already been featured either in this post or in the previous post in this series I'll find a clip from the second highest rated show, provided that it also hasn't been featured before, or the third highest rated show if the first and second place shows have been featured, and so on. The same procedure holds true if there are no clips of the show available online. I will be including the overall rating for the show. Previously I've expressed these in percentages however in 1960 the way that A.C. Nielsen calculated ratings changed and I'm not sure that percentages is a precisely accurate manner in which to describe these numbers. Finally I will be including my own comments about the shows.

1970-71

1. Marcus Welby M.D. 29.6, 2. The Flip Wilson Show 27.9, 3. Here’s Lucy 26.1

Marcus Welby M.D. was a big shift from the way that medical shows had been done up to this point in time, and indeed from the way that such shows are done today. Virtually all medical shows up to that time and since have focused on big city hospitals and cutting edge medical solutions. Contemporary with Marcus Welby M.D. were shows like The Bold Ones: The New Doctors which debuted the season before Welby and Medical Center which debuted in the same season. The medical episodes of The Bold Ones focused on cutting edge medical science, or what was cutting edge at the time, while Medical Center dealt with a large university hospital. Marcus Welby M.D. was about a pair of general practitioners working out of what looked like a private home in a California suburb. What Marcus Welby M.D. had in common with Medical Center was that you had an older doctor working alongside a younger hipper doctor. In Welby you had the eponymous doctor played by Robert Young while his partner Dr. Steven Kiley was played by a young James Brolin (before he became Mr. Barbra Streisand). You could tell that Welby was the older supposedly conservative doctor even in the title sequence because he drove a big pile of Detroit Iron, while the hip Kiley got around on a Japanese motorcycle. The pilot episode of the series made the two men uneasy allies – Kiley was “discontented” with the idea of working as a General Practitioner; he was going to be a neurologist and made it clear that as soon as he could, he’d be gone. However as the series developed, the relationship between Welby and Kiley became a strong mentoring partnership. Welby tended to be the more unorthodox doctor, treating the whole patient and being concerned not only with their ailment but also their temperament, fears and family environment. Kiley tended to take a more textbook oriented approach to medicine. The only other character to be on the show for its entire seven year run (up to that time the longest run for a medical drama) was Welby’s dedicated nurse, Consuelo Lopez, played by Elena Verdugo. This 1974 episode guest stars Lois Nettleton, and Sharon Gless is also in the episode in a recurring role, but isn’t seen in this clip.
 

1971-72

1. All In The Family 34.0, 2. The Flip Wilson Show 28.2, 3. Marcus Welby M.D. 27.8

They say that William S. Paley hated All In The Family…right up to the time when he saw the show’s ratings. It’s probably true. Paley has a reputation as an ace programmer who had a “nose” for what the public wanted but All In The Family, based on the British series ‘Til Death Do Us Part can’t have been easy for any programmer to see the appeal of. The concept for the show had been at ABC since 1968 without being picked up because of the controversial nature of the material. Mickey Rooney was considered for the role of Archie Bunker but reportedly rejected the role when he read the script. It is a fact that Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton were in all three of the pilots developed for the show while the actors playing the younger characters changed. Eventually Producer Norman Lear settled on Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers to play the younger generation of the family. O’Connor’s Archie Bunker was a loud, opinionated, bigoted conservative working stiff who loved his country and didn’t like what was happening to it. This made him the perfect target for his brand new son-in-law Michael Stivic who was equally loud and opinionated but on the other side who didn’t like the way his country was behaving. Caught in the middle were Archie’s wife Edith and their daughter Gloria, who was married to Mike. While it was expected that the audience would usually be supportive of Michael over Archie, what happened was that Archie became the breakout character of the show. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, there really were a lot of Americans who, if they weren’t as bigoted as Archie was, still had a lot of the same beliefs that he carried with him, including a strong patriotism and a concern with the direction that the country was going in in terms of riots, and “youth rebellion.” At the same time Mike could come across as obnoxious, and he had his own preconceived notions which were in their own way as wrong-headed and prejudiced as Archie’s own. The show debuted in January of 1970 and became a national sensation by its first full season, even being discussed by Nixon on the Watergate tapes (Nixon didn’t exactly understand it, and the nature of the show had to be explained to him). This episode from Season One doesn’t introduce Lionel Jefferson, but it does bring the Jefferson family into the neighbourhood and into conflict with Archie.

1972-73

1. All In The Family 33.3, 2. Sanford And Son 27.6, 3 Hawaii Five-0 25.2

A year after All In the Family debuted on CBS, Norman Lear brought another British property to the American market. The British series Steptoe And Son was transformed into Sanford And Son in the United States. The story, about a widowed inner city junk man and his son who yearns for something better. What made the American version of the series was the casting of comedian Redd Foxx as junk man Fred Sanford. Foxx, at the time known mainly for his nightclub act and the comedy records that he did of his act (mostly not suitable for radio). Foxx played Sanford as being greedy and lazy, definitely the boss of the business that he co-owned with his son who he frequently fought with and manipulated. Fred’s son Lamont was played by Demond Wilson, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who was a comparative novice at acting (his first TV role was in Lear’s All In The Family). The dynamic between Fred and his son was more complicated than the Archie and Mike relationship in All In The Family; Fred frequently called Lamont “Big Dummy” while Lamont sometimes called Fred “Old Fool”, but the two legitimately loved each other despite their conflict (unlike the British series Wilson and Foxx were close off the set). The show had a large supporting cast, some of whom friends of Foxx’s from his night club work. One of these was LaWanda Page who played Fred’s sister-in-law and biggest nemesis Aunt Esther (Page had worked with Foxx’s wife at the time). The other major supporting character was Grady Wilson, played Whitman Mayo. When Foxx left the show for a season in a contract dispute Mayo, who was probably the most experienced actor in the cast, took over the position of the older lead. The show ran from January 1972 to 1977, and was only out of the top ten in its last season. The show ended primarily because Foxx left the show, this time for keeps. This clip is from late in the show’s run and includes a scene with the great Frank Nelson: “Yeeessss?”

1973-74

1. All In The Family 31.2, 2. The Waltons 28.1, 3. Sanford and Son 27.5

Just two years after CBS cancelled “everything with a tree in it” (to use Pat Butram’s famous reaction to the network’s “rural purge”) a rural show came back to the network with a vengeance. The Waltons was a show that seemed unlikely to be popular: it was based in the country rather than the city; the focus was on a family rather than the TV triumvirate – doctors, lawyers, and cops – and the family weren’t dysfunctional and funny; and it was a period piece set in the 1930s. A show like that wouldn’t even get to the pilot stage these days, and when the show debuted in 1973 it was generally expected that it would be blasted off the air in short order by the popular Flip Wilson Show. Instead The Waltons basically killed off Wilson’s variety series. The Waltons was introduces with a highly successful holiday movie called The Homecoming: A Christmas Story. Written by Earl Hamner Jr. The Waltons is a semi-autobiographical series based on Hamner’s life in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia in the 1930s (Hamner had previously fictionalized his family life in the book and 1963 theatrical movie Spencer’s Mountain). While most of the actors from The Homecoming were kept for the series, there were three important changes: Ralph Waite replaced Andrew Duggan as John Walton Sr., Michael Learned took over the role of Olivia from Patricia Neal (Hamner and the producers were concerned about Neal’s health), and Edgar Bergen gave up the role of Gandpa Zeb Walton to Will Geer. The only adult character not to be recast was Grandma Esther Walton, played by Ellen Corby. The focus of the show was on the oldest Walton son, John Jr. but universally known as John-Boy played by Richard Thomas. An adult John-Boy (voiced by Hamner) was the narrator of the show, and most episodes center around his life and ambition to become a writer. When Richard Thomas left the show – he was said to have gone to New York to become a professional writer – the focus moved to the other members of the family, brothers Jason, Ben, and Jim-Bob and sisters Mary-Ellen, Erin and Elizabeth. One of the show’s most memorable episodes concerned the return of Grandma to the Mountain – Ellen Corby had suffered a stroke and was written out of the series but her health recovered enough to be able to return to the series. Will Geer died in the hiatus between the sixth and seventh season and the character was stated as having suffered a heart attack at the beginning of the seventh season. The clip that follows is from the show’s first season (identifiable because the title sequence is filmed rather than using sepia toned photos).

1974-75

1. All In The Family 30.2, 2. Sanford And Son 29.6, 3. Chico And The Man 28.5

Chico And The Man, created by James Komack, was an instant sensation when it debuted in 1974. Oscar winner Jack Albertson took a back seat to stand-up comedian and novice actor Freddie Prinze. Albertson played Ed, the owner of a broken down garage in an ethnically diverse neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Ed, refused to acknowledge the changes in the neighbourhood and had few friends left. When a young Hispanic man named Chico Rodriguez comes looking for a job, Ed throws him out. Chico does come back to clean up the garage and eventually moves into an old van that Ed keeps in the garage. The relationship between Ed and Chico grows increasingly close. While Ed can still be acerbic towards Chico the bond between the becomes almost like father and son. The show had a good supporting cast, most notably Scatman Crothers as one of Ed’s few friends, Louie the Garbage Man (“Bring out your can’s because here comes the garbage man.”) The show also had a number of high profile guest stars. In fact I had hoped to be able to find the third season episode “Old is Gold” for a reason that my friend Ivan G. Shreve would readily understand; it was the last on-screen appearance of Jim Jordan, Fibber McGee from the radio series Fibber McGee and Molly. Unfortunately Chico And The Man is one of those series where no episodes have been posted onto YouTube. Like Sanford And Son, Chico And The Man was based on the relationship between the two leads; because of that the show was unable to survive Freddie Prinze’s suicide at age 22. The producers did try to keep the series going, replacing Prinze’s character with a 12 year-old Mexican orphan name Raul, adding Raull’s aunt (played by Charo) and finally added Julie Hill as Ed’s 18 year-old niece who moved into Chico’s old van. None of it worked and the series was cancelled after its fourth, Chico-less, episode. As no episodes have been posted on YouTube, what I’ve got for this show is the title sequence for the show featuring Jose Feliciano’s great theme song, and as a special bonus, clips from Feliciano’s appearance on the show where he sings “Light My Fire,” and the series theme.

Grey’s Grey’s, Grey’s Of The Jungle

I have been anticipating the debut of Shonda Rhimes’s new ABC series Off The Map. Anticipating it like a trip to the dentist. Where I know that there will be drills involved. And Novocaine.

From that I’m sure you can guess that my anticipation was mostly negative. Don’t get me wrong, It’s not that I don’t think that Shonda can’t carry three series. I’m not sure that she can, largely because I’m not sure that anyone who doesn’t have a factory behind him (or her) like Jerry Bruckheimer can pull off three series at a time. However I’m willing to give her the opportunity to try. No, my problem is that when I first heard the concept I thought that it was something that was a bit distasteful for some reason. The more trailers for this series that I saw the more convinced I was that I wasn’t going to like this. Maybe it was the scene with the one of the two female doctors claiming that they  “objectifying one of the greatest humanitarians of our time.” Somehow it just didn’t feel “right” somehow. Maybe it just came across as a trifle self-important? Or maybe just silly? Whatever it was, I came into this show predisposed to dislike it. What I wasn’t expecting to find something that felt, to me at least, more than a little familiar. Yeah, as I say in the title, this feels more than a little like Grey’s of the jungle.

The premiere episode opens with the three senior staff at a clinic “somewhere in South America” (but actually Hawaii for reasons I’ll get into later) watching local life guards struggling to rescue a swimmer and talking about a group of new doctors who will be arriving soon. They are Ben Keaton (Martin Henderson), Otis Cole (Jason Winston George), and Zitajalehrena – call her “Zee” – Alvarez (Valerie Cruz). Zee seems pissed about having another bunch of gringo doctors coming in to pad their résumés, but Ben and Otis seem more interested in the rescue, as if waiting for an excuse to dive off the cliff and lend a hand. And sure enough it happens. First Ben dives in then, after giving Zee his stethoscope so does Otis. And that ends the teaser scene, which I only really mention because it introduces us to the senior staff and because it is mirrored – minus the rescue – by a scene at the end of the episode with the three younger doctors.

The episode really begins with the arrival of an aged wreck of a car, conveniently labelled “jungle taxi” carrying Dr. Lily Brenner (Montreal based actress Carolyn Dhavernas), one of what Otis and Ben refer to as “the new shipment.” The driver’s reaction when he finds out that she’s going to be working at the clinic is to hand her his card and tell her that when she’s ready to go back to call him. She insists that she’s here to stay but as if on cue another young woman comes running out of the clinic building in a fury and demands that the driver take her to the airport. Inside Lily meets the rest of the “new shipment.” They give each other their names and their specialties. Besides Lily (Trauma) they are Mina Minard (Infectious Diseases) played by Mamie Gummer who is Meryl Streep’s daughter), and Tommy Fuller (Plastic Surgery) played by Zach Gifford, who most of us know as Matt Saracen from the TV version of Friday Night Lights. The three are quickly put to work by Ben and Otis. Because Otis heard Tommy say something that he didn’t like, he is given a house call, which Otis means as a punishment but which Tommy thinks is some sort of honour. Because Lily has brought her own portable trauma kit to the clinic she goes with Ben on an emergency call. This leaves Mina at the clinic with Otis and Zee to deal with patients at the clinic.

Lily’s emergency is Ed, an older man (played by Michael McKean) who slammed into some trees while riding a zip line over the jungle. The immediate problem is that he’s dangling in the middle of the zip line run since part of his arm has become stuck in the braking mechanism of the line. And because the zip line can “probably” hold the weight of two people at most, Lily has to go out on Ed’s line to attend to him – because she’s lighter than Ben – while Ben supervises her on the other zip line. Although the braking mechanism on Lily’s zip line malfunctions and doesn’t slow her down so that she crashes into Ed, she manages to calm down his panic and carefully cuts away the part of his arm that is jamming his braking mechanism. After they get him back on solid ground they take him back to the clinic. They determine that he has internal bleeding and probably a ruptured spleen. While waiting for Ed to stabilize Lily develops a bond with him, particularly after hearing the story of why he was in South America. Ed and his wife had come down to the region on their honeymoon many years ago and promised to come back. The everyday stresses of living prevented that, and then Ed’s wife died of just before they were to come down again. He’s there not just for his own memories but to scatter his wife’s ashes in Lago de Luz, a lake where bio-luminescent algae light up the lake when they’re disturbed. Lily it seems had lost someone too, her fiancé, which led her to quitting her residency program. Lily is there when they perform Ed’s surgery. A crisis arises when they discover that he is bleeding out and losing more blood than expected. They don’t have enough of his blood type or of Type O blood. Ben dashes out of the clinic taking Lily with him. He’s looking for green coconuts. According to Ben, green coconut milk has the same electrolyte balance as blood and was used as a blood replacement during World War II. Ben states that he has the most experience with coconut transfusions, which sound great to Lily…until she finds out that that means he’s done it once. The surgery is successful but when they prepare to evacuate Ed to the city, Lily begs and demands that they take Ed to Lago de Luz so that he can scatter his wife’s ashes in the water.

Tommy’s house call involves a long trek through the jungle led by thirteen year-old Charlie, who is also to serve as a translator for Tommy. Tommy is following up on a woman who Otis was treating for Tuberculosis. He had given her medication but after Otis left her husband decided that the drugs were making her sicker and stopped giving them to her. Tommy discovers that she has died. He wants to treat the man’s children, one of whom is coughing up blood, but the man refuses to allow it. Instead Tommy writes up a note that says that the man is refusing treatment AMA – Against Medical Advice – and goes back to the clinic. Otis explodes over this and reveals that he, Ben and Zee know all about Tommy and the others. In Tommy’s case this means that they know that while he is smart enough he’s always just slid by and devoted most of his time to drinking and strippers. Otis orders him to go back and “be a doctor,” or don’t come back. Fired as much by a desire to prove Otis wrong as anything else, Tommy and Charlie trek back to the husband’s shack and makes an impassioned plea to the husband – entirely in English (and without Charlie seeming to translate) in which he explains that his expulsion from the residency program he was in (as a result of the drinking and strippers) so disappointed his family that they tried to intervene. When they did he told them to get out of his life, and they did and now he’s lost his family. Tommy insists that if he treat the children the man will lose his family as well. The man lets Tommy treat the kids.
Mina’s story is the simplest. Her first clinic case is a man who is suffering from joint pain. She immediately thinks that it’s haemorrhagic fever because they are in one of the hot spots for infectious diseases. Otis tells her to treat it with an analgesic. She insists it could be an infectious disease but he response that it could be tennis elbow. When she asks how her patient could get tennis elbow, Otis responds “from playing tennis.” She backs down and treats the patient as Otis directs. Her next patient is an old woman who has trouble breathing. Mina immediately diagnoses her illness as a cold and tries to make it clear that there is nothing that a doctor can do for a cold. The woman keeps hanging around the clinic while Mina tries to get her to go home. Finally the woman collapses to the ground. Immediately Mina calls for epinephrine, and after this revives the old woman, Mina goes off to try, unsuccessfully, to find an corticosteroid to treat the woman’s asthma. In the dispensary she meets Lily who commiserates with her about the initial missed diagnosis, saying that “when you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras.” Mina then explains that she was bounced from her residency program when she started working “at County Emergency” in addition to her regular shifts at her own hospital. While working at County for her third straight day without sleep she treated a boy for flu without tests because there were about twenty cases of flu coming through the ER every day. The boy died of bacterial meningitis and the death could have been prevented if she’d run a simple lumbar puncture. Because she was unable to find any steroids in the dispensary Mina, who is asthmatic, gave one of her inhalers to the old woman. A day later the old woman returns with her daughter (who speaks English) who explains that for the first time every her mother has been able to take a deep breath. The old woman gives Mina a chicken in return.

The episode ends with mysterious figure approaching Ben’s office. It’s Dr. Ryan Clark, the young doctor who took Lily’s cab from the clinic. Ben was expecting her back and asked how far she got this time. She made it all the way to the airport. It’s revealed that Ryan is sleeping with Ben, sometimes, but there is – or was – someone in his life before Ryan. Ryan reminds Ben that she isn’t coming back. The final scene is of the young doctors at the same cliff that the older doctors had been standing on at the beginning of the episode. One by one each of them leaps into the sea.

After watching this show, and thinking about it as I have been writing this, my overwhelming feeling is one of disappointment. This show could have been more than it was. The acting talent is there, particularly in the actors playing the young doctors, while some of the “older” actors (who really aren’t that much older than the “kids”: the oldest of the three, Jason George, is six years older than Caroline Dhavernas and nine years older than Gummer) have solid filmographies.

No, I think the problem lies with the concept. For most of the pilot episode at least I was thinking of just how much the characters on this show reminded me of some of the characters on Grey’s Anatomy. Ben is pretty much Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd, while Otis reminds me a lot of Dr. Webber (The Chief), which kind of leaves Zita as Bailey. The similarity is also there with the young doctors: Lily is definitely Meredith, while Tommy is Karev and Mina is…well Mina has a lot of Christina in her and maybe a bit of Izzy. I mean these comparisons aren’t exact, and future episodes may erase the comparisons and make the characters stand on their own, but as it stands the similarities in everything but setting seem rather obvious.

There are aspects of this show that strain credibility to the breaking point as far as I’m concerned. And I’m not talking about the whole “green coconut milk is as good as a blood transfusion” thing (though that is in the mix). The biggest problem for me is that none of the “new shipment” appear to be able to speak Spanish! Ben and Otis are hiring doctors to work in a clinic in Latin America who are treating people who often speak only Spanish, and yet Spanish doesn’t seem to be deemed an asset by them in hiring staff. We saw the problems that Mina had in communicating with the old woman; had she been able to ask the right questions and get an explanation from the woman it would have been easier for her to make proper diagnosis. Similarly Tommy had difficulty explaining to the husband who took his wife off of the medication that Otis had prescribed that the medicine was need for his children, even with Charlie available as a translator. And yet when he returned to the man’s hut the second time he had no trouble getting his point across – in English without Charlie translating – so effectively that the man eventually gave him permission to treat his children.

And speaking of Tommy’s case I had a lot of problems with Otis’s reaction when Tommy returns to the clinic the first time. He seems to blame Tommy for not forcing the man to let him treat the children, but Otis wasn’t able to get the man to keep up the treatment of the wife that he himself prescribed. In North America this sort of case would have at least had follow-up care from a nurse to make sure that the treatment regimen was being followed. Here follow-up consisted of sending a young doctor newly arrived at the clinic with no prior knowledge of the case out to check up on things a week or two after the initial visit and treatment. And then blaming the young doctor for not being able to get the patient’s husband to allow his children the treatment that the husband withheld from his wife.

And I guess all of this brings me to the part of this show that loses me. I know that for Tommy, Mina, and Lily – and probably Ben, and maybe even Otis – working at the clinic represents a second chance (and probably redemption, though we don’t really know enough about Lily’s story to know if she has anything to seek redemption for) in an exotic location. A lot of good fiction has been written about people seeking a second chance and redemption in an exotic location. It’s not uncommon in real life either. Robert Louis Stevenson sought a second chance in an exotic location, as did Gaughan. Where this idea falls apart for me is that I don’t really believe in these characters. If Ben is supposed to be “one of the greatest humanitarians of our time,” why are these doctors the “best” candidates to work in this clinic. In other words, why are they getting the chance to have this particular second chance? Surely there would be applications from people who haven’t quit their residency program or have been forced out because they were slackers or because of overworking themselves or missing diagnosis. Surely there would have been applications from people who speak at least enough words of Spanish to get information from their patients. Indeed you would think that more than one of the doctors working at this clinic would be from this South American country that bears a striking resemblance to Hawaii. And yet the clinic is largely run by Americans (Ben and Otis) and is staffed with young residents who are all Americans. My willing suspension of disbelief really falls apart on this point.

It’s a fact that I didn’t expect much from Off The Map. I was hoping that I was wrong about the show but I don’t think I was. Even though I am basing my opinion on just the pilot, and it is entirely possible that the show could improve, I don’t expect it to improve so much that I would be able to buy into the premise of the show. I may keep watching it for a while – my mother sort of likes it, and I can catch this and another show that is on in the same time slot thanks to time-shifting – but how long that will last is anyone’s guess. For those of you who don’t have this option, there’s at least one better show on in the third hour of Wednesday nights. Give Off The Map a pass this week and watch Blue Bloods instead.