Changing Channels

'No Ordinary Family' is no comic-book silliness

When ABC unveiled its fall lineup during meetings with advertisers last spring, you didn't need superhero eardrums to hear the groans prompted by No Ordinary Family. A family survives a plane crash in the Amazon and returns with super powers? Why not just call it The Bionic Couple? And don't forget the platform shoes and a cutting-edge KC and the Sunshine Band soundtrack.

But somewhere on its march back to 1974, ABC went off track and came up with a good show. No Ordinary Family is no comic-book kiddie show but a perceptive and engaging comedy-drama about domestic dysfunction. Read my full review in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

'Lone Star' is about to twinkle out

A lot of critics are signing on to a campaign to save Lone Star, the Fox nighttime soap about a charming Texas con man that debuted last week and is almost certainly going to be canceled after Monday's second episode. I liked Lone Star well enough, but it's already a dead man walking. Watch the video to find out why.

'Blue Bloods': Cops with a generation gap

Scenes from a Sunday family dinner at the Reagan house.. . . Daughter Erin, an assistant D.A.: ``The laws are there for a reason!'' Grandfather Henry, a retired cop: ``Yeah, to protect the criminals!'' Father Frank, the current police chief: ``No strangling on Sunday!''

Welcome to Blue Bloods, the most interesting new take on police dramas since FX unleashed the concept of rogue-cop-as-anti-hero in The Shield eight years ago. A potent brew of family melodrama, crime-thriller tension and conspiratorial intrigue, Blue Bloods may actually bring some viewers back onto the sinking ship of Friday-night television. Read my full review in Friday's Miami Herald.

Thursday night TV: An ode to American disaster

When the going gets tough, the tough go to musical comedies. That, at least, has always been Hollywood's conventional wisdom -- that Americans in rough times turn to entertainment to escape, not to be reminded that their economy is turning to dog poop before their eyes.

But what amounts to a revisionist counterattack gets underway as the fall TV season continues to roll out Thursday night. ABC's drama My Generation and NBC's sitcom Outsourced practically revel in the wreckage of war, economic blight and millennial-generation angst.

Outsourced is the odder of the shows. Call it an anti-workplace comedy: It stars stage actor Ben Rappaport as Todd Dempsey, 25-year-old manager of the phone center at a company that sells novelty items. He arrives at the office one morning to discover that everyone else has been fired (``We had to do a little right-sizing,'' explains a corporate suit), and he's being transferred to India to supervise their replacements.

My Generation, meanwhile, uses a high school's 10-year reunion as a launching pad to remember what a brutal decade we've just passed through, from 9/11 to the dot-com collapse to the rise of reality TV shows. Amid all the melancholia, it does pass along a sure-fire millennial generation dating tip that all you guys will want to put to use on eHarmony. Read my full reviews in Thursday's Miami Herald.

 

Wednesday TV: Attack of the clones

Sometimes we love our television sets. Other times we want to throw them out the window. And there are even times we cheat on them with the saucy young videos on the Internet. In short, our televisions are like spouses. Only better, because spouses, no matter how much you might pray for them, do not come with mute buttons. (Microsoft's Wife 3.1 completely flopped in beta testing.)

The point of this little sociological discourse is that if you want to take the metaphor to the next level and marry your television set, which is legal as long as you're both heterosexual, Wednesday is the night to do it.

We've got something old (two lawyer shows), something new (a sitcom based on a Twitter feed), something borrowed (a ripped-off spy show and a fiercely derivative sitcom) and even something blue: The title of $#*! My Dad Says, in which the nonsense characters represent one of the seven words that we once quaintly thought you couldn't say on TV.

Read my full reviews of Undercovers, Better With You, $#*! My Dad Says, The Defenders and The Whole Truth in Wednesday's Miami Herald. MEDIA CRITICISM BONUS: The review has the long-awaited answer to the oft-asked question, who does CBS hate more, Andy Rooney or Wolf Blitzer?

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.

 

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.

The cutest 'Nikita' since Khrushchev

One hesitates to use a word like "primal'' in connection with The CW, a network whose core ethos appears limited to the transformative powers of fashion and product placement. But Nikita, The CW's new action drama about broody chick assassins, undeniably taps into some profoundly mythic stream in Western consciousness.

In the past 20 years, this fable of teenage angst coupled with feminist rage has been the basis of a hit film (La Femme Nikita, 1990), a hit American remake (Point of No Return, 1993) and a hit U.S. cable TV series (La Femme Nikita, 1997-2001). Freud asked what women want; the answer, clearly, is a 9mm Glock with a good silencer.

But, putting aside for a moment questions about whether it signifies the imminent collapse of Western civilization and even the human reproductive impulse, this version of Nikita can still provide a rollicking, if slightly psychotic, good time. Read my full review in Thursday's Miami Herald.

TV's going to the dogs, at least for the night

Possibly influenced at an impressionable and hormonally vulnerable age by Julie Newmar's tight (I mean, tight) Catwoman costume on Batman, I have always favored cats over dogs. But with regard to Wednesday's new TV shows, even the most rabid feline-ophile is going to side with the dogs.

The case for the canines: Terriers, FX's comedy-drama about a pair of bargain-basement private eyes, is a piquantly funny sojourn among lovable losers. Watching the CW's cheerleaders-gone-bad Hellcats, on the other hand, is more like being confined to a ward full of terminal PMS victims. Read my full review  of the shows in Wednesday's Miami Herald.