Thoughts from the Paley Center
Amanda and I attended a few “parties” thrown by the Paley Center last week and this. These were small events thrown by Paley and TV Guide where each network had a night to trot out their new shows, do a panel about them and then screen them for the audience. Open to the public but very small scale and not highly publicized.
The Paley Center is a nice building in Beverly Hills, formerly known as the Museum of Television and Radio. Its walls are really quite stark, with some great framed Hirschfeld caricatures and a few illustrations from a recent Hanna-Barbera event being the only decorations. Fun fact – it seems the Legion of Doom from “Challenge of the Superfriends” was, at one point, going to include The Joker, Catwoman (seems redundant to have her AND Cheetah …), and Sivana instead of Braniac, Riddler, Giganta, Toyman and Bizarro. Also, Sivana was all-chalk white, like he was a ghost or something.
The real “musem” aspect is the video library, I guess, which I suppose you can call up on the computers they have everywhere. But we have never done that.
Anyway, at these events you come in, you can watch celebrities pose for photos and do quickie interviews. Some people clamored for autographs, but that’s never really been my scene. Not because I’m too cool or anything, just because I can never keep anything in decent condition, so collecting pieces of paper is unwise.
Free drinks and hors d’oeuvres are served by aspiring actors trying desperately to charm you in case you might be in the business (look at my shoes, kids, there’s no way anyone making Hollywood money would wear these). Then you find a place to watch, either in the library, on the roof, or down in the lounge. Before the evening starts, you watch an endless loop of stars of new shows talking about them. At one point the guy who plays Finn on “Glee” says the show is like “’Gossip Girl’ meets ‘Magnum: PI’” … if he was joking, that’s pretty funny. If not, I seriously question his sanity.
Here’s a rundown on what I saw
NBC
The first night it was just me, because Amanda had to work, and I was actually in a rush because I had another thing to go to and the garage I’d parked was closing early. So I only saw the first half of “Community” before leaving. It’s quite good, as you’ve heard. Joel McHale does have an uncanny ability to be endearing and likable while playing a total sleaze. This stands him in good stead on “The Soup” where he manages not to seem mean while mocking stupid people being taking advantage of on television and it works here. Supporting cast is solid, too. I don’t know if they did a panel after the screening but McHale, Chevy Chase and the other actors I didn’t recognize were all there.
CBS
We got stuck on the roof for this one, which is beautiful, but was a little cold and didn’t really offer good seating. The panel was for “Medium” a show I’ve always liked just fine, but, well … find me one person who would call it their favorite show.
Well, apparently it was the favorite show of the moderator, who fawned rather a lot over the cast and creator. He also pointed out the real Alison Dubois in the audience, who is a “real psychic” who works with the Phoenix police department. Of course, to me, this meant he was introducing a shameless liar who pollutes the criminal justice system and steals money from taxpayers and it reminded me that this show glorifies this woman who should probably be in jail or a mental institution. But, hey, that’s just me.
Still, the cast and creators were pleasant enough and the child actors were engaging without being cloying, but the panel was way too long.
“Medium” of course, is not a new show, just new to CBS and the episode they showed was no big change from before. Apparently they have abandoned the plotline featuring my old high school friend Ebon Moss-Bachrach, so … well, that sucks.
Next was “NCIS: Los Angeles” and … wow … Okay, I have never seen an episode of regular “NCIS” nor of “JAG” off from which it was spun. But, well, let’s just imagine writers for “The Simpsons” or The Onion or somewhere like that were trying to come up with an absurd cast for a cop show. Could they create anything better than Chris O’Donnell, LL Cool J, and Linda Hunt?
That’s right LINDA HUNT! She, of course, plays the hard-edged boss of the NCIS: LA squad and they just love putting her in scenes with LL Cool J, because she is small enough to use one of his absurdly tight t-shirts as a house.
O’Donnell’s character, by the way was raised in an orphanage and only goes by “G” because “nobody ever told” him his full first name.
Is satire dead or just obsolete?
So, yeah, the show is ridiculous, including the bizarre headquarters of the team which seems to be a high-tech fortress built on top of an open-air Anthropolgie store full of wicker and Persian rugs, where it is apparently always just before sunset.
I’m sure the show will be a big hit and I want to offer some suggestions for future spin-offs:
NCIS: Houston – Judd Nelson and Gerardo are the leads and their tough-as-nails supervisor is played by Alf. Nelson’s backstory is that he was found washed up on the shore as a baby, wrapped in seaweed and has webbed toes.
NCIS: Seattle – Elizabeth Berkely and the Iron Sheik are the leads and their tough-as-nails supervisor is old footage of Charlie Chaplin, spliced in with Judy Dench’s voice. Berkely’s backstory is that she was abducted by aliens as a child and forced to appear in a teen Saturday-morning sitcom.
NCIS: Guam – James Van Der Beek and the Fat Boys are the leads and their tough-as-nails supervisor is played by an orange with googly eyes. Van Der Beek’s backstory is that he is actually a hyper-evolved osprey developed in a lab by NASA but only his “father” Sammo Hung knows the truth.
Anyway …
“The Good Wife” is quite good, with Julianna Margulies as the ex-wife of a cheating, now-imprisoned politician (Chris Noth), putting her life together as a defense attorney Great cast, fairly smart pilot script. This might be the feminist legal show that “Ally McBeal” tried and failed to be.
ABC
Got there early enough to get library seats. Go us.
This one had a massive panel representing four different shows. Each one got limited time and “Flash Forward” seemed a little out of place surrounded by three family sitcoms. But it was kind of cool to see David Goyer (who cowrote the recent Batman movies) Sonya Walger, Busy Philipps (I missed “Freaks and Geeks” when it was on, but I’m watching it now and I’m not sure if I love her, hate her, or love to hate her), Patricia Heaton (who is a first-ballot-inductee into the Hall of Fame for actors whose plastic surgery didn’t make them look like freaks – she looks fantastic), Julie Bowen, and Ty Burrell interacting – Heaton seemed fascinated and baffled by the premiise of “Flash Forward.” Nothing terribly interesting revealed in the panel, though.
“Hank” – No cast or creator representative for this show, and no wonder why. It’s terrible. This is the one with Kelsey Grammer as a New York executive laid low by the recession who has to move back to Virginia. No need to worry that the rebounding economy will hurt the show’s premise, as I’m pretty sure it will be canceled by Christmas. Grammer, one of the best sitcom actors of all time, is awful in this, trying madly to oversell weak material. The rest of the cast is unrecognizable and unremarkable except for David Koechner, who is reasonably funny as Grammer’s brother-in-law.
“Flash Forward” – In the post-“Lost” world, there have been a lot of shows that have tried to capture that same sense of ongoing mystery. The first season of “Heroes” did it, but nobody else, to my estimation. “Flash Forward” seems likely to pull it off though. The premise is more convoluted than “Lost”’s was at first (remember, in the pilot all we knew and all we needed to know, was that a plane had crashed on a weird island with a monster, some polar bears and a recording of a French woman), and they explain it a bit ham-handedly. Briefly, everyone in the world blacks out for two minutes and has a flash-forward to six months in the future. Of course, planes and cars crash and rioting ensues but life picks up more or less as normal, except that everyone knows what’s going to be happening in late April, 2010 … or DO they? Also a good cast and fun mysteries. Special effects in the pilot don’t look great, but presumably they won’t be relying on them for the rest of the series run. Amusing to see Joseph Fiennes and Sonya Walger playing scenes as husband and wife, both doing very good but not quite flawless American accents.
Amanda and I wondered what would happen to us in this scenario and … well, since people passed out at 11AM, we’d both just be slumped at our desks at work and, at worst, wake up with post-its stuck to our foreheads. And, since the flash forward was to 10PM at night, we’d probably just be watching TV … ah … the bliss of one’s thirties.
“The Middle” – Patricia Heaton plays an overworked mother of three kids with an uninvolved husband. Yeah, I know, wasn’t that show called “Everybody Loves Raymond”? It was, but this is different. Heaton is not playing Debra Barone again by a long shot and the tone and premise are really quite different. I like this show a lot. To be honest, working/lower-middle class sitcoms have never grabbed me. I won’t argue with you if you say “Roseanne” and “Malcolm in the Middle” were great shows, but I just didn’t like watching them very much. This one works. Maybe it’s a little over-directed, but even with some broadness the characters and situations seem honest and relatable. Quirky without being precocious, this was probably my favorite of all the shows we saw.
“Modern Family” – This one has more buzz than “The Middle” and it’s also very good. This is the one with three families – a gay couple raising a baby, a 40ish couple with three kids, and a 60something guy married to a much younger woman with a son from her first marriage. Generally funny and charming with a few howlingly funny moments. Good characters and a pilot twist that I should have seen coming but didn’t. Julie Bowen was clearly quite pregnant when they shot this, but there was presumably a long lag before they shot the second episode so they’ll be able to show her below the neck for the rest of the episodes. It does rely on characters speaking to the camera in “interviews” which is getting a little old-hat now, but since we’re in pretty different territory from “The Office” or “Parks and Recreation,” I think it has potential.
“Cougar Town” – Not as good as the other two, but WAY better than its name or premise and only slightly disappointing compared to its creators’ previous show, “Scrubs.” Courtney Cox was probably the weakest actress on “Friends,” but is an able enough comedienne here as a 40ish divorcee raising a son and trying to have sex. The kid from “Aliens in America” plays her son and he and their relationship seem genuine and funny. The show is probably a B at best, but I liked it much more than I expected to.
So, yeah, amazingly there are three family sitcoms on ABC that I actually want to watch. The last time this happened I probably still had braces on.
Okay, more than enough said.
