Changing Channels

TV tonight: A tasteless hit and two big misses

If I were a network boss, the first thing I'd do would be to ban any show ever referred to -- by anyone, under any circumstances -- as "high concept.'' OK, that's a ridiculous exaggeration to make a rhetorical point. The first thing I would do would be to sign Jennifer Aniston to a big contract and then order her to date me. The second thing would be the high-concept ban.

The problem with high-concept shows is that almost invariably, nobody has put any thought into them past the gimmicky concept. Some idiot in a pitch meeting says, ``Hey, what about a crime-fighting car?'' and the next thing you know, trillions of American brain cells are dying an agonizing death in front of Knight Rider.

The dangers of high-concept programming are on gruesome display as the rollout of the fall broadcast schedule continues Tuesday. Fox's alleged sitcom Running Wilde and ABC's cop drama Detroit 1-8-7 probably sounded great over the Beverly Hills lunches during which they were conceived. On the TV in your living room, not so much.

On the other hand, Fox's sitcom Raising Hope is low in concept, lower in class and lowest of all in shame -- but relatively high in laughs, so long as you keep your living room curtains closed so no one can see you watching. Read my full reviews in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Five new (and pretty good!) shows on TV Monday

Clamp down your helmet, crawl into your fox hole, and keep your head low. Television's version of shock and awe begins Monday night, with 16 broadcast shows debuting over the next five days. Casualties are expected to be heavy.

Monday, the week's high point, includes two interesting dramas their networks hope will be breakout hits, a surprisingly successful new recipe for an old chestnut, a gritty throwback cop show and a comedy that will make you laugh (and possibly cringe) out loud. With all the shows airing within the same narrow two-hour window, your TiVo may be reduced to a smoking ruin.

The most intriguing offering is NBC's conspiracy thriller The Event. It starts with a crazed hijacker's aiming an airline at a presidential reception (intercut, of course, with close-ups of grim-faced Zoning Police pulling out their citation booklets to defend the president) in a Coral Gables mansion and gets wilder from there.

Read my full reviews of The Event, Lone Star, Mike & Molly, Hawaii Five-O and Chase in Monday's Miami Herald.

 

'Boardwalk Empire': Guns, whiskey, good times

Television déjà view in Boardwalk Empire: Lost in intense but inscrutable contemplation, a Jazz-Age crime lord leans on a boardwalk railing, gazing out at the Atlantic City coastline. Haven't we seen this before -- that look, that seascape? Yes, a decade ago in The Sopranos, in a memorably vicious episode in which Tony Soprano stood at almost the same spot planning the murder of an old friend turned FBI rat.

That's not the last time that echoes of The Sopranos will reverberate like gunshots through HBO's captivating new crime drama. Boardwalk Empire plays much like Sopranos: The Roots, a malignantly alluring exploration of the emergence of organized crime in the United States. A checkerboard of hazy intrigue and garish violence, of ruthless ambition and easy sexuality, it's an epic tale told darkly and well. Read my full review in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Screen Gems: TV the week of September 19

The Event (9 p.m. Monday, NBC) -- This new conspiracy-thriller series starts with a hijacked airliner aimed at a presidential reception at a Coral Gables mansion. And then it gets wilder.

Boardwalk Empire (9 p.m. Sunday, HBO) -- A sweeping account of Prohibition and the birth of organized crime, from some of the same exquisitely bloody-minded folks who brought you The Sopranos. Check back later for a full review.

Chuck (8 p.m. Monday, NBC) -- Slacker-turned-superspy Chuck Bartowski and his sizzling sidechick Sarah Walker are back for a fourth season, and now they get to kiss while they're killing people.

Lone Star (9 p.m. Monday, Fox) -- A con man who gets an executive position with an oil company intending to loot it decides to go legit instead. Not as easy as it sounds when you've got two jobs, two wives and two lives.

Hawaii Five-O (10 p.m. Monday, CBS) -- The iconic '60s cop show gets a millennial makeover -- and surprisingly, this is one remake that works. And don't worry, McGarrett still barks at Williams: ``Book 'im, Dan-o.''

Mike & Molly (9:30 p.m. Monday, CBS) -- Billy Gardell and Melissa McCarthy star as a plus-plus-plus size couple in a new sitcom that is basically one long barrage of fat jokes -- funny but oddly disquieting.

Raising Hope (9 p.m. Tuesday, Fox) -- Producer Greg Garcia, who managed to wring a lot of scathing laughs out of class warfare in My Name is Earl, tries again with this sitcom about a two-bit family of louts and lunkheads that finds itself with an unexpected baby.

Undercovers (8 p.m. Wednesday, NBC) -- They're sexy, rich and bored, so yuppies Boris Kudjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw go back to their old career . . . as spies. Kind of an upscale version of Chuck, and there are worse shows you could rip off.

The Big Bang Theory (8 p.m. Thursday, CBS) -- It may sound like a one-joke pony, but this comedy about a crew of hopelessly nerdy Cal Tech physicists and engineers who bond with the hot blond waitress who moves in next door is launching its fourth season, and the laughs keep coming.

Outsourced (9:30 p.m Thursday, NBC) -- In a sitcom based on the 2006 movie of the same name, a corporate boss discovers that his whole department has been outsourced to India. If this country's nine million unemployed people ewatch, it'll be a hit.

Fringe (9:30 p.m Thursday, Fox) -- As the third season of this spooky drama about an FBI squad that investigates weird stuff gets underway, one of the agents is trapped in an alternate universe. Dammit, I'm serious.

Blue Bloods (10 p.m. Friday, CBS) -- Tom Selleck, Donnie Wahlberg and Will Estes star in ethis gritty and intriguing series about a family with three generations of cops -- some of whom are investigating others.

Let me program your TiVo! Just click on my best bets for the week at www.tivo.com/guruguide.

The world stops spinning

 

 

As The World Turns faded out Friday for the last time, more than 54 years after it went on the air at CBS. The final scene featured Don Hastings as Dr. Bob Hughes, a role he's played since joining the show in 1960, closing his medical office to go into retirement. "I didn't think it would be so hard to say goodbye," he murmurs to his wife Kim (Kathryn Hayes, with the show since 1972.) "I don't think there should be any goodbyes," she replies. "Just, 'Good night.'" A moment later, Bob says "Good night" and turns off the lights. As he walks out, a globe on his desk -- a model of the one that's appeared in the ATWT opening since the beginning -- illuminates and starts spinning.

Bob's last words echoed the first ones ever spoken on ATWT -- "Good morning, dear," said by his mother Nancy. The plan had been for Helen Wagner, who played Nancy for the entire life of the show, to say "Good night, dear," in the final scene. But Wagner died in May at the age of 91.

My mother watched As The World Turns faithfully for four decades, which meant I often saw it, too. I can still remember the national suspense in 1962 when Jeff and Penny were hospitalized after a terrible car crash as they tried to elope. (Jeff died; Penny emerged from her coma with one of television's first cases of amnesia. That's them in the clip up above.) I thought of my mom a lot when I wrote a story about ATWT's glorious history of affairs, divorces, murders and even shrunken heads for its 50th birthday in 2006. We've put that story back up on the Miami Herald's website, along with a gallery of photos compiled by my Herald pal and ATWT consultant Steve Rothaus. Steve came into my office at the Herald Friday afternoon to watch the show's last few minutes. My mom would have liked him.

 

HBO's 'La Barda': Fences DON'T make good neighbors

What's the easiest way to get around that $3 billion fence the U.S. government built on the border with Mexico? Well, you could slither under it through a shallow tunnel. You could scramble over it with a makeshift ladder. You could even rumble up to it in a heavy-construction vehicle and drop a road-ramp across it.

Or you could just ignore it. ``The easiest thing to do, frankly, is if you go down this road here, there is no fence,'' a rancher who lives near the border tells filmmaker Rory Kennedy during one of the many amusing moments in The Fence (La Barda), a documentary airing Thursday on HBO.

That's right: The government went through 12 designs, 19 construction companies, 350 engineers, 7,000 construction workers and 120,000 tons of metal and still left holes in the thing, some of them stretching hundreds of yards. Read my full review in Thursday's Miami Herald.

Edwin Newman (1919-2010)

 

Grammar grump and preternaturally calm TV news anchor Edwin O. Newman died Monday at the age of 91. Newman, among the last living members of the first generation of network newsmen, started his journalism career with UPI before breaking into TV at CBS in 1947. He joined NBC in 1952 and stayed there until his retirement 32 years later.

Newman's early prominence stemmed from serving as chief of various NBC bureaus in Europe during the hottest part of the Cold War. Later he was news anchor on The Today Show and a frequent fill-in on NBC's evening newscasts. In a generation of broadcasters that prized icy, just-the-facts-ma'am calm rather than the theatrical emoting of today's cable news, Newman was the coolest. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 -- a day on which the cameras caught Walter Cronkite blinking back tears and Chet Huntley rasping bitterly of "pockets of hatred in our country" -- it was Newman who NBC chose to deliver a commentary, the wistful one you can see up above.

Newman was a cranky defender of what he saw as good English grammer and usage, fond of long, abstruse rants about the difference in "convince" and "persuade." But he was not without a sense of humor about it. He loved puns. (Typical is the one in his New York Times obituary, a man drying his shoes with newspapers with the explanation, “These are The Times that dry men’s soles.”) And while hosting Saturday Night Live in 1984, he played a suicide hotline volunteer who kept correcting the grammar of callers. Said former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw Wednesday: "Ed Newman was an early role model for my generation of NBC News correspondents -- worldy, erudite and droll."

 

Coming up on 'Top Chef: Texas'....

Cooking shows generally bore me, except when they're offending me. But now there's word of a Texas chef who has actually managed to deep-fry beer. The London Daily Telegraph reports that his ravioli-like little packets of fried beer offer a "delicious taste sensation," though I'm sure the Brits would like it better if it were boiled. This same fellow, Mark Zable, also invented jalapeno corn-dog shrimp. Bravo? Food Network? What are you guys waiting for?

NBC's 'Outlaw': The biggest lawyer joke of all

There are at least two good reasons to watch NBC's new legal drama Outlaw. The first is that it made me remember this joke: Q. What do lawyers and sperm have in common? A. One in 50,000,000 has a chance of becoming a human being. The second is that it made me remember this joke: Q. How do you stop a lawyer from drowning? A. Take your foot off his head.

Now that I've not only remembered the jokes but also written them down in a convenient clip-to-the fridge form, though, I can imagine no conceivable rationale in the known universe to turn on Outlaw. Silly, hackneyed and suffering from a lethal overdose of Hollywood political smugness, it's the biggest lawyer joke of all. Read my full review of Outlaw in Wednesday's Miami Herald.

TBS cancels 'My Boys,' which, honest, was still on

My Boys has been canceled after four seasons. TBS is offering free therapy to the 12 of you who were still watching it.