What I've Been Watching

Finally gave up on No Ordinary Family as there just seemed to be at least one phenomenal stupid bit of storytelling per week. Such as Chiklis' character never makes any attempts at keeping his identity a secret except for specific stories that deal with the whole idea of keeping his id a secret and usually have him blowing it anyway.

The Cape is the superior superhero show. In some ways it is a little bit cliche especially as origins go. Cop is framed for a crime he didn't commit, is believed to be killed and thus lets the world believe he's dead while he fights crime disguised as a comicbook superhero, trying to clear his name.

David Lyons plays Vince Faraday, an honest cop and a married man with a young son in a city where the police are almost all corrupt, and the city is being over-run by a master criminal calling himself "Chess". A mysterious person called "Orwell" is posting messages concerning police corruption over the internet and the city is considering to privatize the police force under the control of businessman Peter Fleming. Faraday is convinced by a buddy to go to work for Fleming, but later he receives a message that Fleming and his "police" are not as honest as they are thought to be. Investigating, he discovers that Fleming is as crooked as they come, using the cops as cover. Betrayed by his friend, he is captured and finds that Fleming is Chess himself. Faraday is set up to be disguised as Chess and have his death while resisting arrest be filmed by the news crews. It works out almost as planned, only Faraday manages to survive the attempt and is taken in by Max Malini, ringleader of the Carnival of Crime, circus-types using the Carnival and their own skills to commit flamboyant robberies.

For reasons of his own, Max and Faraday form an alliance to bring down Fleming. To that end, he outfits Vince with a special cape that with the right training can be used as a weapon. Each member of the Carnival inner circle train Vince for his future as a mystery man: hypnosis, fighting (by a midget), and stage magic tricks. Mastering those, he puts on a costume patterned after his son's favorite superhero and sets out to fight crime, letting the world believe he's dead until he can clear his name.

He soon meets up with Orwell in person, who happens to be a young woman with money, sports cars and all sorts of inside information.

There are some interesting bits such as the rather fragile relationship between him and the Carnival of Crime who are unrepentant criminals. The idea behind Orwell will probably remind comic readers of Oracle, DC's former Batgirl who feeds the superhero set with intel. However, the tradition goes back almost a century. Frank Packard's Grey Seal novels had the hero blackmailed into the life of a hero by a mystery woman known as the Tocsin. Over the course of the stories, he slowly figured out who she was and married her. Later, the pulp version of the Green Lama had him likewise helped and fed clues by a mystery woman named Magga. Orwell will most likely turn out to be Fleming's daughter, there have already been a few subtle and not-so subtle hints as to that. I like the idea of a midget being the toughest guy in the show.
It's nice to see a superhero wearing a costume that looks actually believable and not costing millions of dollars. The show also from the start features colorful badguys with names like Chess, Scales, Cain.

The show balances the heroics against the idea of a man who must stay away from his family as well as his wife and son trying to piece together a life against the backdrop of a last name that has become a pariah. You see it eating away at all involved.

The show has some mis-steps. The principle one, if the show is to have a long life, is tying the hero's mission to that of the big villain. Once Fleming is exposed and captured, there's no reason to have the Cape continue. Of course one way to continue that is just have him exposed but escapes, so that Faraday still cannot reveal he's alive nor his identity until Fleming is captured.

The 2 hour-long pilot also throws a lot of different elements and subplots out at one time. In addition to the Carnival and Fleming, we get a couple of other colorful bad-guys and the existence of a secret group of assassins called Tarot. There's the mystery of who Orwell really is (might have been nice to not reveal she's some hot girl for a couple of episodes, letting her just be some mysterious information broker for a while). Other things are painfully left out such as when Cape does stop a villainous assassin hired by Fleming, he only leaves him tied up. What can he effectively do stopping villains when the cops are in the employ of the guy who sends them? Just stopping their deeds isn't really enough. He needs a plan. This becomes clear again in a later episode when he stops a psychopathic Russian and former student of Max's from getting the cape. He won't kill him but it's obvious that he cannot be just let go nor can he turn him over to the police. And, he'd probably escape as he's a master escape artist anyways. And, he'd never stop coming back. Faraday makes a point of saying that he's not willing to kill him but he lets the Carnival take the guy away. What they do with him is unknown.

And, there are the lazy writing bits too. While Vince has a background in Special Forces training, he undergoes extensive training under the Carnival, mastering things that should take years. And, since he does have specialized training, why does he need to learn to outfight the midget Rollo? We have a scene of a villain going across town in a car, yet somehow the Cape manages to get on top of the car AND rip the door off. It's a stupid scene.

The most recent episode has Fleming going to the Tarot group again, only this time to hire a pair of hitmen: one who does the research and provides tech and the other that does the killing. As villains, they are the most charismatic so far and providing a bit of psychosis for the duo as they first must get to know the target and all his secrets before killing him.

However, the show doesn't seem long for this world. NBC has not declared it dead yet, but has already shortened the season by several episodes, indicating a lack of faith that it will catch on.

FOX seems unsure about the Human Target as it rushed its season by showing two episodes a week and thus the show has its season finale episode in time for the roll-out of mid-season replacements. A shame as it has been an entertaining action/adventure show with interesting character dynamics. The addition of Indira Varma and Janet Montgomery have added a little more character conflict of the group although both women seem to suffer from being strong and capable in one episode and liabilities in the next. And, sometimes both in the same episode.

So far, unlike most of the action and thriller oriented shows, it has minor sub-plots weaved through the show but no over-arcing plotline to drive the episodes to the point if you miss one, you are behind in the story. I love shows like Supernatural and Fringe, but their mega-story plot lines bog down the episodes, the best ones being those done-in-one. A little ironic since I could have swore that Abrams originally conceived Fringe as not having all of that internal continuity that ultimately plagued Alias to the point that even he had a hard time following along and realized it would be impossible for new viewers coming to the show halfway through a season a couple of years into the series.

The season finale was typical of Human Target and to that end, enjoyable to watch. It centered on finding the truth behind the death of Mrs. Pucci's husband and they find themselves against a rogue CIA agent with all of their technology and resources at their disposal. Like most of the episodes this season, the situation for the group doesn't seem merely dangerous but with them completely behind the eight ball for most of show. Thankfully, it does not end on a cliffhanger, indicating that its status may be up in the air. Jack Earle Haley's character Guerrero is the most fascinating of the group as he is always comes across as the most dangerous man in the room despite everyone else towering over him. His association with Chance and the group and working for the greater good threatens to soften the edges of the character, but the finale takes care of that. When seeking leverage against him it is uncovered that he has a son, he goes off the reservation, becoming a one man strike force and then killing in cold-blood the mastermind that uncovered this chink in his invulnerability. It both humanizes Guerrero while also reminding us that he's not a man to look up to, he's not a "good" man.

Haley's performance reminds me a bit of James Nesbitt in BBC's Jekyll and Murphy's Law. Like Haley, he isn't physically imposing, but he is able to impart the unquantifiable air that he's someone not to be messed with just by standing still. In Jekyll especially where his transformation from a harried family man caught up in an insane situation to dangerous sociopathic madman with nothing more than changing his hair style was utterly convincing and unnerving.

Big Bang Theory is finally back on with new episodes! Yay! Still, one of the funniest shows on tv. I especially loved the scenes of this past week's episodes with Raj day-dreaming all the different situations of Howard giving him his girlfriend to "take care of". The final daydream is a parody of a Bollywood music-dance number. However, being Indian, Raj would not have made a comment about a dance number being gay though as that's a staple of their culture's cinema much as the Greek Chorus. Notice, even the acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire despite much of its stark realistic depictions manages to include a dance number though it's not part of the plot or story. So, it's interesting that the writers managed to do a scene that made sense for the character while also getting it wrong and out of character at the same time.
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Does it seem cruel to anyone else that Courtney Cox's screwball comedy Cougar Town would be bumped by Matthew Perry's new show Mr. Sunshine? Hope he sent his former on-screen wife flowers.

From Big Bang to Fringe (and a little Shatner too)

Aah, remember the days of Thursday night comedies? Well, Big Bang Theory has now moved to Thursdays, serving as lead-in to William Shatner's $#*! My Dad Says. Big Bang Theory does not disappoint though I had mistakenly watched clips previously online. One of the things that makes comedy work is the set-up and surprise, which is kind of ruined if you see the set-ups and punchlines beforehand, especially if almost immediately before. Still the characters and actors are in top form, from Penny's door-knocking soliloquy, Raj's musings of toilets in Aquaman's Atlantis, the mathematical calculations of Penny's sex life and of course Howard's robotic arm that he swipes from work.

$#*! My Dad Says has the advantage of almost all of the shows on the other channels are an hour long starting at 8pm, so there's not really another half hour show to turn to. Surprisingly, it was a funny show. While his character's spoutings are the groundwork of the show, it relies on more than that. Time is invested in giving his character some heart as well as making his sons sympathetic and not bitter. There's also some good moments of fast paced banter and dialogue, not relying solely on the comments to generate laughs. Indeed, the funniest, most laugh-out loud moment comes at the end when his son Henry delivers a William Shatner impersonation in the classic Kirk dramatic pauses mode. Like How I Met Your Mother, the basic concept the show is built around may seem dubious, but the execution shows there may be some legs to it. As an aside, if there is some doubt at the Pearly Gates of me getting in, I want the guys arguing my case to be the ones that managed to convince the networks that a concept of flashbacks of one very long story being told to his kids of "How I met your mother" was a great concept for an ongoing television sitcom series . And, then made it work.

Then for strangeness' sake, the return of Fringe. A little disappointed in the episode focused almost exclusively of Olivia's time in the other reality. However, it was played well. The other reality is convincingly done, with little changes to technology and lingo, a world that is so close to ours but very different. Almost like living exclusively in rural, small town America and waking up one morning in London, England. Last season we saw it in comic book covers on Peter's apartment's wall. The Dark Knight Returns became being about Superman instead of Batman, Green Arrow and Green Lantern went red. This time one of the subtle ones was the taxis advertising the Broadway show, "Dogs". John Noble continues to amaze playing the simple, mostly cheerful boy-like Walter Bishop of our reality and the ruthless serious one of the alternate. I normally don't like it when shows go from being episodic with mostly self-contained plot episodes to being about an over-arcing uber-plotline. For one, it just doesn't hold up on watching in syndication or re-runs. And, if you miss an episode or two, it quickly becomes impossible to catch up. A reason why shows like Law & Order, Bones, NCIS, CSI, Criminal Minds, Ghost Whisperer and their various franchises air almost continuously in syndication but 24, Lost and Alias do not despite their being immensely popular shows at one time. If Networks were looking at the long game, they'd see the wisdom would be in fewer shows like those despite their initial big numbers and water-cooler talk. Have over-arcing themes and subplots, but keep them mostly in the background and have each episode itself a satisfying story.