TV Eye: Fall 2011

I got as far as at least watching the pilots of most of the new series premiering this fall, and do have a few thoughts on some of the shows that nobody has paid me to write about:

UP ALL NIGHT: I actually have written about this at The A. V. Club, but there is something I'm curious about that I didn't mention there: why do the people who make this assume it's always a show-saving laugh riot to have one of the leads burst into an a cappella rendition of an '80s-'90s power ballad? Spontaneous a cappella renditions of '80s-'90s power ballads are to this show what overhearing someone talking about puppies or baking cupcakes and thinking they were talking about sex was to Three's Company/

WHITNEY: I do have weird little gaps in my store of cultural knowledge, and I confess that when I sat down to watch this for the first time, I had never heard of Whitney Cummings and had no idea that she's some kind of culture hero. If I had known, this might not be the only pilot I couldn't force myself to watch all the way though, but since I'd never seen her before, after ten minutes I just thought that she was a lazy non-actress with an arch manner whose TV show was unfunny as hell. Since then, I've learned that she's so beloved in some quarters as a bad-girl comic that someone who works at New York magazine felt the need to express bewilderment over the "backlash" to the show because, hey, aren't most TV sitcoms godawful? (That's a hell of a defense.) Apparently one of the big points of contention over Cummins is her looks; it seems that while I was out weeding the lawn, everyone else in America was arguing over whether she's good-looking, and one debating point is that she's the kind of women who makes other women confused and angry when they hear guys say she's attractive. I actually read that someplace, and though I have no idea what it means, if Cummings does, she ought to explore it in her work. It's got to be better than having a guy compliment a woman on her breasts and be told that it's actually "armpit fat."

2 BROKE GIRLS also bears a creator-producer credit to Cummings. Unlike Cummings' own show, it does have actual actresses--Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs--in the leads. It also has a comical-talking Chinaman, a Ukranian slob who makes comically inappropriate remarks, and Garrett Morris sitting in a corner of the set, wearing sporty colored shirts and waiting patiently for whatever mercy that death can provide. It is a CBS show that wants very, very much to be hip, and by trying so hard, it succeeds in looking like Disco Sally to How I Met My Mother's John Travolta. In the last year or so, network TV has discovered "hipsters"--usually depicted as snarky douchebags in funny headgear who hang out in cafes and celebrate things they think suck in the name of "irony"--in a big way, making this the hipster equivalent to whatever year it was that hippies bugged Joe Friday and Captain Kirk but tried to make up for it by teaching Gomer Pyle the words to "Blowin' in the Wind". 2 Broke Girls mainly tries to show how hip it is by having Kat Dennings, whose clued-in, saucy boredom would by some definitions qualify as the very media definition of hipsterdom, constantly being bothered by and expressing her contempt for hipsters. The nicest thing I can possibly say about 2 Broke Girls is that, if the smug, charmless, with-it characters from Whitney were to wander onto this show, Dennings' character would douse them in gasoline and light them on fire.

TERRA NOVA: To be honest, I didn't get why adding dinosaurs to boring shit was supposed to render the boring shit awesome back in 1993, either.

ONCE UPON A TIME: ABC's "What if fairy tale characters were exiled to the real world?" series does a pretty respectable job with a silly-ass premise, though not as good a job as the decade-old comic-book series Fables, which ABC executives really don't want to talk about in interviews. Here's what got my attention in the pilot, though: in the pilot, the most dangerous fairy tale character is Rumpelstiltskin (played by Robert Carlye), who is a bad enough guy that the heroes, Snow White and her prince, see the need to keep him imprisoned under heavy guard. When everyone is transposed to our world, he becomes the town's richest and most powerful man, who owns a pawn shop and goes by the name "Mister Gold." Is there any way this doesn't sound like an anti-Semitic caricature? Take it away, Leon Wieseltier!

BOSS: This Starz series, starring Kelsey Grammar as a Chicago mayor with a degenerative condition that he's keeping secret, and with a pilot directed by Gus Van Sant, sure does have impressive credentials, but the fact remains that in the pilot, the show's level of rip-the-lid-off sophistication about the nature of big-city corruption and power plays is established by having some guys who need to make it up to the Boss after a screw-up cut the ears off one of their associates and, after bandaging his head up like Bugs Bunny with a toothache, sending him to deliver them, in a little box, to the Boss in front of the all the people at a big dinner where he's just given a speech. The Boss goes home, goes into the kitchen, opens the box, sees the ears, and sticks them down the garbage disposal; a few seconds later, he's asking his wife for the number of a good plumber. I was sort of hoping that every week, somebody he's pissed at would try to make it up to him by forking over somebody's eyeballs, teeth, pinkie toes, etc., and he'd feed them all into the garbage disposal, and, by the end of the season, we'd at least know which body parts can and can't be smoothly gotten rid of in this manner. Sadly, in the second episode, nobody sent him shit, but it's not too late: maybe in the third episode, he can get pissed off at two different groups of people, and catch up.