Falling Angels

I wasn’t sure if I should start writing a review of ABC’s revival of Charlie’s Angels. There is a definite sense that the show is not long for this world. I certainly wouldn’t bet on it getting a full season order. Based on what I’ve seen it doesn’t deserve one. It is one bad piece of television.

The original Charlie’s Angels ran from 1976 to 1981 and featured Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as she was then known) and Jacklyn Smith as three young women who had gone through the police academy but found the reality of their lives as cops less than fulfilling – writing parking tickets, acting as crossing guards and doing office work – until the mysterious Charlie Townsend took them away from all that. The show used the same plot all the time; the women go undercover to solve the crime of the week along with their “handler” (for lack of a better term) Bosley. Somehow the cases all took place in locales where the women had to be skimpily dressed and with minimum of “support”. Farrah Fawcett-Mjaors once said, “When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.” It was the epitome of T&A TV from Fred Silverman. In fact when Shelley Hack replaced Kate Jackson on the show and ratings started to fall, Hack was fired; it was rumoured at the time that super-model Hack was fired because she didn’t have enough to jiggle. She was replaced by Tanya Roberts (who did have a lot to jiggle) and ratings continued to fall. ABC insisted that the show was empowering to women by showing them as being capable and in non-traditional roles. The series was later rebooted as a pair of theatrical movies starring Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz as women who, although not trained as police officers, had various skills that the never seen Charlie (played in the original series and the movies by John Forsythe) felt would be more useful as private detectives than in their traditional fields. While the original series played it fairly straight – well as straight as any show featuring three women solving crimes wearing as little in the way of clothing as the broadcast censors of the time (who were apparently more liberal than they are today if Farrah Fawcett’s comments about bras is accurate) – the movies are described as “action comedies.”

The new Charlie’s Angels has ex-criminals as it’s lead characters instead of former cops or experts in various fields. Abby Simpson (Rachel Taylor) is a former cat burglar, Eve French (Minka Kelly) is a former street racer, and Kate Prince (Annie Ilonzeh) is a former Miami detective who was caught taking bribes. Even Bosley (Ramon Rodrigues) – now given the first name of John, and not looking at all like David Doyle or even Tom Bosley – has a past. He’s a hacker who now uses his talents for good. He still acts as the Angel’s handler but in this version of the show he goes out on cases and even goes undercover. Canadian actor Victor Garber supplies the voice of Charlie (replacing Robert Wagner) and is not seen at all; in the original you nearly always saw Charlie, or at least his hand or the back of his head or the women who surrounded him.

In the most recent episode of the show, Charlie has an assignment for the Angels. They have to find a missing investigative journalist, who just happens to be the woman who broke the story of police corruption that resulted in Kate being caught. The woman, Amanda Kane (Tahnya Tozzi) was last seen aboard a cruise ship. So naturally the Angels go undercover on the ship. Kate becomes a cruise director on the ship while Abby temporarily takes on the role of a IT tech on the ship. This allows her to break into the ship’s security office and hack into the video records, which she downloads to Bosley. Eve takes on the role of a passenger. Abby gets her upgraded to the suite that Amanda had previously occupied. This not only gives them a base to operate from but also gives them the chance to search the room at their leisure. In the room they find a mysterious plastic cylinder. On the security files they find Amanda on the ship and discover her being manhandled by a man who they identify as the croupier in the ship’s casino. Eve goes to the casino and wins a lot of money playing Blackjack – card counting of course – which attracts the croupier’s attention. they head back to his suite, which gives Eve the chance to search it. She finds a cylinder like the one they found in Amanda’s room, this one containing an unusual flower. She takes a photo of the flower with her cell phone.

Bosley and the Angels somehow link the croupier with four major crime figures who are also aboard the ship. They decide to have Bosley replace the one man that the croupier hasn’t met by having Eve “incapacitate” during a massage. Bosley is given one of the flowers by the croupier which gives him entry into the suite. They’re there to bid on a mysterious product but to ensure security, not only are they stripped of their weapons but any electronic device they may have and then are drugged. They disappear from the ship only to wake up on an island.

Needless to say, the Angels and Charlie are anxious when Bosley doesn’t check in. Conveniently there are only three islands near where the ship was when Bosley disappeared. They’re privately owned but while two are owned by Hollywood celebrities, one is owned by the mysterious Morgan Finch. Moreover they are able to determine from satellite imaging that one of the buildings on the island is radiating a great deal of heat. Somehow Charlie arranges to get the Angels off the cruise ship and onto a boat which allows them to infiltrate the island to find Bosley and hopefully Amanda.

The big building that is radiating so much heat is a huge greenhouse and refining operation. The mystery flower – still unnamed – produces a drug that Morgan Finch (D.B. Woodside) calls Island Ice, something that he describes as being like Heroin on steroids. Finch is auctioning off exclusive distribution rights for the whole country to one of the four criminal cartels represented by the people brought to the island by the croupier. Everyone but Bosley seems eager to bid without even knowing that the drug was legitimate. He was the only person to ask for evidence that the drug was as potent as Finch said it was. Finch provides proof in the form of the only person currently addicted to the drug: Amanda Kane. Unfortunately when the auction restarts it halts again when the croupier brings in a cell phone with the picture of the man that Bosley is supposed to be replacing, who of course looks nothing like, him.

On the island, armed with high powered weapons the Angels infiltrate into the combination greenhouse and processing lab. They proceed to split up with each taking on a different job. Abby will look for Amanda, Kate will search for Bosley, and Eve will try to destroy all of the plants by connecting the irrigation system into a barrel conveniently labelled “Poison.” In short order all three of them get captured before they even have a chance to use the fancy weapons that they brought with them. And in equally short order they are able to administer a major ass-kicking to the people who captured them. I think the most laughable example of ass-kicking comes when Eve and the guard fight in the greenhouse as the irrigation system – you know, the one now pumping poison to the plants – is drenching them, and incidentally getting into Eve’s mouth. In short order the bad guys are all subdued, Amanda and the captive labour is freed and the Island Ice is destroyed. All by four people. In the coda, Charlie calls to tell the Angels – minus Kate – that the Bahamian government has agreed to extradite Finch to the United States (for reasons I’m not entirely clear on; he operated his growing and processing operation on an island presumably in Bahamian jurisdiction, and the ship that he abducted Amanda from was registered in the Bahamas so that crime was “legally” committed in that country. Frankly I’m not sure what crimes he had committed in the United States. Meanwhile Eve was meeting with Amanda, now going through rehab, although they’re apparently not meeting at the rehab facility. Eve wants to tell her that she’s really happy that she was caught as a dirty cop because it was a wake-up call about what she was becoming. The end.

There are any number of things about this episode and the show in general that I find to be just wrong. In a lot of cases things happen with little or no explanation, as if someone had waved the magic TV wand and no explanation was needed. Except I needed a little bit of explanation. Just as an example, how did the croupier, apparently working alone, manage to get four people from his suite (and incidentally I believe that cruise line employees are required to live in staff cabins on board ship, but that’s minor) to whatever boat took them from the cruise ship to Finch’s island without someone from the ship – passengers, hotel staff or crew – noticing that he was moving four unconscious people around the ship. The magic wand reappeared when Charlie – or someone was not only able to get the Angels off the cruise ship in mid-ocean but also got them a boat and some hi-tech appearing weapons. And of course Charlie apparently has access to real-time infra-red satellite imaging for the island which allows them to find the heat signature of the greenhouse facility. That goes a bit beyond willing suspension of disbelief.

It goes beyond that of course. I’ve watched two episodes of this and quite frankly I don’t really understand the characters because there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of character development. In the second episode (the first that I saw) we met Eve’s former fiancé Detective Ray Goodson, played by Isaiah Mustapha (who should hang on to the Old Spice gig) who may be a recurring character if the show lasts long enough – which I doubt, and in this third episode we met the woman reporter who turned her in. I still don’t feel like I have any grasp of their characters. Of course that may be because the character development of these people are thinner than the actresses who portray them. That’s a real problem. I don’t know if Taylor, Kelly and Ilonzeh are doing a good acting job because I don’t know what the characters are supposed to be.

The writing is bad, as we’ve established, but the concept is also badly realized. The two Charlie’s Angels movies were billed as “action comedies.” The modern TV version of Charlie’s Angels isn’t an action comedy. I was going to say that it would be more accurate to say that it isn’t deliberately trying to be an action comedy, but I can’t because that would create the impression that the show was so bad that it was funny. It doesn’t even qualify as funny by accident. Show producer Alfred Gough, who with his partner Miles Miller created Smallville, has said that he wanted to avoid doing anything “retro” or “campy.” In other words they’re playing it relatively straight. This is a problem because for all that Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg who produced the original series paid lip service to the idea that their show had some sort of feminist quality back in 1976, it was never meant to be taken seriously. I don’t think you can get away from that in a revival – particularly thirty-five years later – unless you do some serious re-imagining of the concept. That’s what Miller and Gough did with the Superman mythos by approaching it as the story of Clark Kent’s development into a superhero. I think a different sort of approach could have worked here as well.

In the past thirty-five years a lot of things have changed. Women’s roles have evolved far beyond what they were when the original Charlie’s Angels debuted, and television’s portrayal of women has evolved as well. In fact television has evolved in a lot of ways. I have to believe that this show would not have been made if it weren’t called Charlie’s Angels. I’m not sure that we needed Charlie’s Angels back at all, but I am absolutely sure that we didn’t deserve to have this version of Charlie’s Angels. Between underdeveloped plotlines with holes that you could march Godzilla through, gossamer thin characterizations, and a determination to make the show much the same as it was thirty-five years ago, the result is indescribably bad. I am literally unable to express just how bad I think this show is forcefully. The good news is that I don’t think it will be around much longer. The bad news is that it took the place of a show that could have been better. The really bad news would be if ABC didn’t have anything better available to them.

Update: As a lot of people expected, Charlie's Angels has been cancelled after airing its fourth episode. ABC will air the remaining four episodes that have been shot. There's no word about what will replace it once the remaining four episodes have aired. At least we found out something about the "new" Bosley and his link to Charlie before it was cancelled.

Too Unusual For Me

Sometimes you run into a show that sort of reminds you of another show but is totally different from that show. For reasons that I can't really explain beyond the setting in the detective's part of a New York police precinct, The Unusuals reminds me of NYPD Blue sort of, kind of, in a way, but not really. I get the feeling that this is going to be hard to explain. And that, somehow, seems oddly appropriate.

Pilot episodes are inevitably about introducing characters and setting up the premise for the show, and the pilot of The Unusuals is no different. We first meet Detective Casey Schraeger when she's posing as a street hooker in a "John sting." Her career as a Vice cop comes to a sudden and surprising end when a supposed client comes up. He's Sergeant Harvey Brown, who runs the detectives unit at the 2^nd Precinct. He needs a new homicide cop since one of his cops has just been murdered – as in the body was only found a few minutes ago. Casey's the replacement. As we'll discover it's not as random a choice as it seems. The first person that Casey meets at the precinct is her new partner, Jason Walsh. Walsh is in the process of "sanitizing" his old partner's locker to get rid of stuff that his wife – not to mention Internal Affairs – would find objectionable. And there's a lot that would upset both the widow and the investigators. Our initial impression of the late Detective Kowalski is that he was a corrupt cop who wasn't very good about hiding the drugs he stole, or the cash that he got as pay offs or the girls he had on the side. They go to see his wife, who knows that Kowalski had at least one mistress but loved him in spite of it all. She tells them that there had been some mysterious hang-up calls. Walsh and Casey then go to visit the mistress, who greats them at the door wearing a bra, panties and a smile – she thinks they're the pizza guy. Walsh makes it very clear that she's not to attend the funeral, and pays her off with money that he found in Kowalski's locker.

By the time that Walsh and Schraeger get back to the precinct they've missed the morning meeting where we meet the rest of the detective squad. This includes partners Eric Delahoy and Leo Banks. Banks constantly wears a bullet-proof vest. This seems to be because he's 42 and most of the men in his family die when they hit 42 – usually by accident. Banks figures that he's in a high risk occupation so he'd better not take any chances. Delahoy is the exact opposite of Banks in that he seems to court danger. We know that this is because he has a brain tumor and has no intention of treating it since he figures that if he gets treatment he'll end up only delaying the inevitable. No one else in the squad knows this of course. The other detectives are Henry Cole, a born again Christian who will pray at the drop of a hat, Eddie Alvarez, who speaks of Eddie Alvarez in the third person and hijacks any opportunity to get himself into the public eye, and Allison Beaumont who seems to be the most normal one of the lot. She fills Casey in about some of the quirks of the others, including the fact that Walsh doesn't stare at her boobs like the rest of the guys, which is different but kind of suspicious because she's got great boobs.

Naturally Eddie Alvarez makes Eddie Alvarez the lead detective in investigating Kowalski's murder, because cop killings are high profile cases and that means publicity for Eddie Alvarez. Not that Sgt. Brown is disagreeing too loudly. I suppose that's because he knows that Walsh is going to be investigating no matter what he says, and he's smart enough to derail Eddie Alvarez and Eddie Alvarez's theory – that it was a random attack. The first lead they track down from the contents of Kowalski's locker is a storage space the cop, who lived in the Bronx had in Brooklyn. There had been a fire in the locker, but much of the stuff didn't burn. There was plenty there. Kowlaski had been keeping files on his fellow cops. What he knew about Walsh is that he had been a baseball player with the Yankees at least for a short time (long enough to get his own baseball card at least), but the big surprise is about Cole. He is linked somehow to someone called Navan Granger who stole an armoured car out in the Midwest. When Walsh, con his own, confronts Cole about it, Cole admits that he in fact was Navan Granger but that he hadn't been able to break into the armoured car to get the money and that the experience had led to him being born again. Then they went after the person who has been calling and hanging up on Kowalski's wife, a 16 year-old drug dealer that Kowalski busted. They figured that he had motive, but it turns out that the kid is in a wheelchair and the elevator at his apartment building, where he lives with his mother, was out of order, so even if he wanted to kill Kowalski he couldn't. And he most assuredly didn't want to kill Kowalski because after the accident that put the kid in the chair Kowalski had become something of an unofficial big brother for him, taking him to Yankees games and helping him get his GED.

Figuring that if Kowalski had mentored one kid he might have tried to help others, Walsh and Casey look through some of his cases. They find a guy named Leon Wu who had been arrested by Kowalski along with Wu's brother. After the brother died in Joliet, Kowalski wrote a letter of recommendation for Leon's early release. Someone resembling Leon was seen leaving the scene of Kowalski's murder. So the detectives head off to arrest Wu – or at least confront him – along with a SWAT Team. However Banks is so terrified at the prospect of going through the door against a heavily armed guy that he loses it and just can't go in. We later see him emptying his guts into a garbage can. The cops go in and shots are fired, with Casey eventually gunning down Wu. But did Leon Wu kill Kowalski? It's made pretty clear that he didn't because we see Cole slipping Kowalski's gun and badge into a hole in the wall at Wu's place and then "suddenly" discovering them. But of course no one bothered to ask how or why the files in Kowalski's storage space got torched, and more specifically how Leon Wu could get at them.

The "B" plot in the episode concerns Banks and Delahoy. They're called out to a city councilman's house, supposedly to investigate a threat against his daughter. As it turns out it has nothing to do with the guy's daughter...someone has killed his cat and "obviously" it is meant as a warning/threat directed at him. Banks and Delahoy refrain from telling this guy what he can do with his cat and his threat – he is one of the people who votes on the NYPD budget after all – and go off to find out who killed the councilman's cat. Outside, they notice a lot of notices about cats who have disappeared with rewards posted. Maybe there's something more than meets the eye here and it isn't just related to the councilman. Looking around the neighbourhood they find a guy trying to stuff a cat into a bowling bag. Clearly this is the guy they're after (because anyone who knows cat's knows that stuffing a cat into a bowling bag is a good way to get your arm shredded). And so they give chase. They chase him into the subway and Delahoy follows him across one of the tracks when he sees a train coming. Figuring that this was a better way to go than a brain tumour he stands there waiting for the train to hit him. It stops within inches of hitting him. Meanwhile Banks has stopped the cat-killer in the next train, using a taser so he doesn't risk contact with the guy who might someone kill him. Once they get the guy back to the precinct they start interrogating him. They use the old "photocopier as a lie detector" trick (with an all-in-one printer instead) that some of the more knowledgeable reviewers link back to The Wire and Homicide: Life On The Street, but I've never seen The Wire. This gets him to admit some of the things he's done, but they get him to break by spraying him with something to attract cats and sticking him in a cruiser filled with them. Turns out his wife had lost their unborn child as a result of a disease she caught as a result of cleaning a cat litter box.

A major theme in the show is the secrets and mysteries that the cops have. These are the things that Kowalski was collecting. Some we know, like Banks and his fear of dying at 42 like the rest of the men in his family, Delahoy and his brain tumour. Delahoy's resulting death wish leads to him going into the raid on Wu without a bulletproof vest. (The real mystery with Delahoy is how he survives: the subway train stopping within inches of him; a shotgun blast from Wu, fired at point-blank range, misses him entirely but leaves a pattern on the wall of a human body with a halo – seeing it Cole says "Jesus.") Some are well hidden. Walsh was a New York Yankee but why did he become a cop, and why does he "run" a deli (that he lives behind) where he only cooks when he feels like it and whatever he, and not the customer, wants? As for Casey, she has a secret she's desperate to protect. She's rich, or at least her family is. We get hints of it throughout the episode – her mom calls her claiming that the maid is stealing from her; Eddie Alvarez's girlfriend recognizes Casey from a high end prep school, and Casey makes it abundantly clear that if she tells Alvarez, Casey will reveal every little secret about her to him – before the big reveal at her father's birthday party. (And a special tip of the hat for the casting of Chris Sarandon as Casey's father. He's the husband of Joanna Cassidy who played her mother. Of course if Monty Hall – Cassidy's father – shows up as Casey's grandfather it will be too much of an in-joke.) Turns out that the fact that her family's rich, and that she was booted out of six private schools and dropped out of Harvard to become a cop is exactly why Brown wants her to help him clean up his squad. Because of all that, she can't be corrupted.

I can't really recommend this show, based on the pilot (and that may explain why it has taken me so long to crank this review out). A press release from ABC claims that the show is, "like a modern day M*A*S*H that explores both the grounded drama and comic insanity of the world of New York City police detectives." I don't see it. ABC has hyped this series as a "dramedy." I really don't see the "...medy" part either. The writers are clearly going for a black humour sort of comedy which is apparent from the Banks and Delahoy characters. The idea of partnering the vaguely suicidal Delahoy – who presumably wants to die in the line duty so that his badge will be retired (as explained by Walsh at the wake for Kowalski badges get passed from officer to officer until the badge "kills" its owner) – with Banks, who is obsessed with staying alive to the point where he constantly wears a bulletproof vest and becomes physically ill at the prospect of going through a door presumably struck the writers as funny, but it didn't work for me. The way that Delahoy survives certain death – when he's nearly hit by the train and when Wu shoots him – seems to fit in the same sort of black comedy mould. Eddie Alvarez reminds me of Frank Burns from M*A*S*H, the character that you absolutely know will be the butt of every joke in the precinct. The business of Walsh running his deli when he felt like it, and feeding his customer whatever weird combinations that he wanted (food that no one but he could possibly stomach), felt tremendously forced. Making the character of Casey Schraeger a rich girl hiding the fact that she's wealthy to be "one of the guys" is frankly rather trite. As for the "dram..." part of the show that was probably a bit better but not by much. The contrast between the serious case of tracking down Kowalski's killer and the "comedy" case of tracking down the cat killer didn't work for me.

Turning to the acting, I'm not really impressed. None of the four principal actors – Amber Tamblyn as Casey, Jeremy Renner as Walsh, Adam Goldberg as Delahoy, and Harold Perrineau as Banks really didn't impress me either. In Tamblyn's case, she's meant to be something of a blank slate, without any of the quirks that has left the precinct in disarray. Renner basically has a weary, deadpan quality about the way that he plays Walsh. It's fine and probably works for the character but it doesn't excite me. He seems bland. Goldberg's Delahoy is brash, loud and annoying to me but the truth is I've never really been a fan of Adam Goldberg's so I'm prejudiced. The one actor that I really didn't mind was Harold Perrineau. The fear of dying that Banks has is irrational and mostly only somewhat less annoying than Goldberg's Delahoy. However there was that one moment when Banks broke down to his partner about not being able to go through the door that worked for me, and that was largely due to Perrineau being able to really make us feel the terror that Banks had of dying in that situation.

I'm more disappointed with The Unusuals than I probably have a right to be. I suppose it's because at some level I bought into the hype that ABC built up for this show and it really doesn't work all that well in my opinion. My hope is that it will improve with time; that they can make the characters more dynamic and the quirkiness at once more realistic and less heavy handed. That's my hope. My expectation is that the show will continue on the course that was set in the pilot, and that's a shame because there are better shows out there than what I saw in the first episode of The Unusuals, including a number that look like they're going to be cancelled, and while I'll keep watching the show for a while in the probably vain hope that it will improve, I much rather be devoting my time to the shows that I really prefer.