The sitcom follows Leonard and Sheldon (Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons), two physicist roommates with Mensan IQs but—naturally—limited social skills, especially when it comes to the opposite sex. To demonstrate just how absorbed they are in their intellectual endeavors, both have dry-erase boards in their apartment where they work out “Good Will Hunting” equations in their spare time.
The gist becomes clear: Leonard and Sheldon are book-smart yet have experienced very little of the world around them. It’s a shame there isn’t a gorgeous woman nearby to shake them out of their routine. What’s that? Kaley Cuoco just moved in next door? That’s convenient! Cuoco’s character, Penny, moves into Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment building after breaking up with her meathead boyfriend. She’s a blonde, but not a particularly dumb one, so kudos to show creators Chuck Lorre (co-creator of “Two and a Half Men”) and Bill Prady for avoiding the urge to make her the object of ridicule.
It’s a shame they couldn’t resist that urge with Leonard and Sheldon, who burn through so many nerd jokes in the first episode that there can’t be many left. A few of those jokes are funny, but because 90 percent of the punch lines stem from the fact that Leonard and Sheldon are socially inept bookworms, it becomes clear that we’re supposed to be laughing at them, not with them. Maybe it’s Judd Apatow’s fault, but no one likes one-dimensional dorks to play target practice with. “The Big Bang Theory” might have worked on paper, but not in practice.
It’s easy to forget how good Christina Applegate can be. She’s had fantastic minor roles in “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” as well as on “Friends,” where her hysterical turn as Rachel’s sister Amy earned her an Emmy. Unfortunately, her biggest career missteps have been starring vehicles. Remember “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” and her short-lived sitcom “Jesse”? If not, count yourself lucky. But with her new series “Samantha Who?,” Applegate finally has a starring vehicle that could allow her to realize her full comedic potential.
Applegate plays Samantha Newly, a woman who awakens from an eight-day coma with retrograde amnesia after being struck by a car. With the help of her well-meaning but moronic parents (Jean Smart and Kevin Dunn) and her boyfriend Todd (Barry Watson), she starts to piece her life back together, only to find out that prior to her coma she was an awful person. The role is one that requires the actor to be zany and earnest in just the right balance, and Applegate nails it.
The supporting cast complements her well. Jennifer Esposito is hilarious as Andrea, the evil Samantha’s best friend, and the best razor-tongued lush since Karen from “Will and Grace.” Smart, a sitcom veteran, is coolly masterful as Sam’s mom, and the adorable Melissa McCarthy (“Gilmore Girls”) steals each scene she’s in as a childhood friend who Sam dumped when they got to high school. In addition to setting up its promising premise, the first episode hints that the series will quickly develop serial elements—the question of who ran Sam down is key—so it’s best to jump on this one early.
What’s the best show of the new fall season? It’s probably too soon to tell. But it’s not too early to bestow the title of Most Polarizing Show. That dubious distinction belongs to the new comedy “Aliens in America,” which is both an ambitious skewering of intolerance and an example of intolerance, all in one. It’s also, rather inconveniently, one of the more consistently funny new shows. But the laughs don’t come without a price. “Aliens” can be hilarious, touching and infuriating in the span of a single scene, so it’ll definitely split audiences. That is, among the people who can form a solid opinion of it.
The main character is Justin Tolchuck (Dan Byrd), an archetypical pasty, awkward teen outsider living in fictional Medora, Wis. He thinks his junior year is going to be the turning point of his social development when he gets his braces off. And just when he thinks his first day of school is going well, he discovers that the senior guys made a list of the “10 Most Bangable Girls,” and put him in eighth place. Ouch. A guidance counselor convinces his mother Franny (a pitch-perfect Amy Pietz) that what Justin needs is a foreign exchange student, one who will be his friend out of necessity rather than choice. Franny, in cougar mode, is hoping for a downy-haired Nordic hunk. Instead, the Tolchucks get Raja (Adhir Kalyan), a Pakistani Muslim, and are mortified. That’s when the show’s intentions start to become muddled.
The audience is meant to understand instantly why this family would be terrified to have a Muslim in their home—presumably because they’re Midwesterners—but they’re also from Wisconsin, a traditionally Blue State. So even if one were going to play into the dangerously oversimplified notion that conservatives don’t like Muslims, the Tolchucks’ panicked reactions just don’t make sense. At this point it’s hard to tell what to think of the Tolchucks. Are they post-9/11 alarmists or Klan members? As we follow Raja through his tormented first day of school, it becomes clear that Medora is the type of town where the fact that Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein would be an actual topic of conversation.
The one-note portrayal of the townspeople has a purpose: to bond Justin and Raja through their shared social exclusion. The scenes in which the two bond are very sweet, but it’s hard to forget what they’re sugar-coating, which is offensive, buffoonish portrayals of the Americans. Raja’s character is no more layered – he has to be all sweetness and light so that the audience can see just what a polite, kind boy is being shunned by the racist community. The whole thing reeks of good intentions, but that excuse isn’t about to start working now.
It’s important to note that a pilot of any show is all about economy. There’s a limited amount of time in which to deliver a lot of information. Painting in broad strokes is almost unavoidable. It’s possible that these characters will show more depth as the show progresses, but given the social and political climate, viewers may not be willing to give it more than an episode’s worth of slack. But when “Aliens” is funny, it’s very funny, so there’s good reason to see how it sits in your stomach before making a final judgment.
It’s downright ballsy to set a show in post-Katrina New Orleans. Only two years have passed since the storm drowned the city, and the emotional wounds are still scabbed over. But the freshness of that tragedy is precisely why Fox’s cop show “K-Ville” works so well. The characters have baggage, but there’s is an emotional burden they share with anyone who sat helpless and horrified watching dead bodies float through the streets on the news. We don’t have to be told why these characters feel the way they do; we understand them on a gut level.
Anthony Anderson plays Marlin Boulet, a cop who is tragically tethered to New Orleans. He’s built a career on protecting it, has seen it through its darkest hour, and can’t bear to leave, even though so many others have fled. His wife and daughter have relocated to Atlanta, and his partner snapped under the pressure during the storm and walked off the job, a betrayal that still haunts him. Boulet gets a new partner, Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser), a former soldier who’s harboring a tragic secret that could jeopardize his new partnership, and the two set off to investigate the murder of a popular jazz singer. The details of the case are barely worth paying attention to. The procedural element of “K-Ville” is its weakest element; Cobb and Boulet get into a good cop/bad cop rut, and the focus of the show is the characters, not the crime, so viewers expecting a just-the-facts-ma’am cop show will be disappointed.
But the meticulous investigative details are glossed over to explore something far richer: the emotional wake of a cataclysmic event, and as a drama about victims of devastation, “K-Ville” is exceptional. Anderson’s performance is almost good enough to warrant a moratorium on “Kangaroo Jack” jokes. Boulet is brash and a bully, a “cop who plays by his own rules” cliché that’s saved by the show’s context. After seeing the wreckage of Katrina, Boulet is committed to making New Orleans safe again, even if it means violating the most basic tenets of law enforcement. Cobb, meanwhile, is laconic for most of the episode, until finally spilling the details of his past to his new partner. Again, another cliché that works in this context: the partners aren’t just an odd couple for dramatic tension’s sake, they symbolize two styles of dealing with abiding grief. Some people lash out, while others absorb the pain.
The danger here is that changing the balance of the show’s elements could ruin what’s great about it. If future episodes focus more on the crime of the week, “K-Ville” could become a better cop show, but does the world really need another procedural? If it keeps the balance and tone of the pilot, “K-Ville” will be a poignant, powerful portrayal of two men clinging to a skeleton of a city.
There are two action-comedies this fall that follow an ’80s-movie plot structure: slacker schlubs working soul-crushing retail jobs are unwittingly thrust into a high-stakes, high-responsibility adventure for which they are ill-prepared. Both shows (NBC’s “Chuck” and the CW’s “Reaper”) are worth watching, but which is more appealing comes down to which flavor of implausibility—reality-based or fantasy-based—is your preference. “Chuck” is built on an implausible premise that could kinda-maybe-in-theory actually happen, which seems to raise the stakes for the characters.
The titular character, played by Zachary Levi, is a computer technician at a big-box electronics store with more than a passing resemblance to Best Buy. His only companion is his co-worker Morgan (Joshua Gomez), because an unrequited college love has ruined him for the dating scene. Chuck receives a cryptic e-mail from his dreamboat college buddy Bryce, and things start to get weird. A series of strange images flashes on Chuck’s screen, and suddenly he feels as if he knows things he isn’t supposed to know. As it would turn out, the images were embedded with vital government secrets, and with the computer that held them destroyed, Chuck is the new computer. Sarah (Yvonne Strzechowski), a gorgeous CIA agent and John (the ever-stodgy Adam Baldwin), an NSA agent, play tug-of-war with Chuck, determined to do with him what better serves their respective uncooperative agencies.
But the bigger struggle is within Chuck, as he tries to jerk himself out of arrested-development mode in order to save the world. Like “Alias” before it, “Chuck” is mostly a show about how someone lives a double life and the strain that puts on relationships. Unlike “Alias,” “Chuck” is riddled with slapstick humor and killer punch lines. A woman at a party asks Chuck what he wants to do beyond his retail gig. His response? “I’m working on my five-year plan. I just have to pick a font.” Season-pass this one.
Before you ask: yeah, pretty much like “Quantum Leap.” The biggest obstacle facing this time-travel series is that people will inevitably compare it to Scott Bakula’s ’90s series about a man leaping through time and space and helping people through their problems in the process. That’s because, well, “Journeyman” is about newspaper reporter Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd, formerly of “Rome”), who leaps through time and space helping people through their problems. But unlike in “Quantum Leap,” in which Bakula’s character participated in an experiment gone wrong, Dan’s time travel just sort of happens. There’s no warning and no explanation, which makes it difficult to explain to his wife and editor why he’s disappearing for days at a time. It also makes it difficult for the viewer to invest in the show.
The ramifications of his disappearances create some slightly interesting tension. Dan’s friends and family assume he’s on drugs, and if he explains to them what’s actually happening, it will only reinforce their theory. Complicating matters is the fact that when Dan bolts back in time, he winds up back into the arms of a lost love, Livia (Moon Bloodgood), which makes him yearn for the past even as he tries to get back to the present. He happens on a man about to commit suicide and slowly discovers that when he’s in the past he’s supposed to prevent a tragedy.
But all this takes a back seat to a more pressing question: why is he time-traveling in the first place? The show doesn’t deal in dramatic irony. The audience knows as much as Dan does and therefore is just as disorientated from scene to scene as he is. It’s a lot to ask of a viewer to accept the show’s time-travel device without clearly explaining the mechanism or reasoning behind it. Is it too soon to be asking for that? Maybe, but the last time-bending show on network TV, the short-lived “Day Break” (also starring Bloodgood) made it through its entire limited run without explaining the central question of exactly what was happening and why. Fans of “Quantum Leap” may want to give “Journeyman” a try, but anyone else should probably adopt a wait-and-see attitude.
title: “Fall Tv Preview” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-23” author: “Mao Leclaire”
Admit it: you feel a naughty rush when those parental advisories before premium cable shows promise a glimpse of celebrity skin. You nail yourself to the couch and watch intently, forgoing all popcorn refills and bathroom breaks lest you miss the advertised “brief nudity.” There was bound to come a time when you would pay the price for your prurient interest, and with the arrival of “Tell Me You Love Me,” HBO’s explicit domestic drama, that time is now. There’s an abundance of full-frontal romps in “Tell Me,” but they aren’t of the romantic, softly lit variety. These sex scenes are mundane, awkward and unsightly. They are also, unfortunately, much like the sex that is the gilded reward of maintaining the type of stable, monogamous relationship we’re conditioned to seek out. It’s a chore to watch these couplings, and as is the case with the best bad relationships, there’s not much going on here other than the sex.
The show follows three couples: Katie and Dave (Ally Walker and Tim DeKay), a chaste husband and wife; Palek and Carolyn (Adam Scott and Sonya Walger), whose inability to get pregnant threatens their marriage; and Hugo and Jaime (Luke Kirby and Michelle Borth), a young couple whose engagement is jeopardized by their differing views of monogamy. The three pairs are loosely interconnected, randomly crossing each other, but their most formal connection is that they take turns on the couch of Dr. May Foster (Jane Alexander), a couples’ therapist whose marriage is beginning to show fissures of its own. There’s not much in the way of plot beyond this loose framework; the couples go through their lives having silly fights and overanalyzed sex (or nonsex.)
Because of the lack of traditional plot structure, profound patience is required to get through the first three or four episodes. After that, the show starts to get better, but only slightly, and it’s more to do with becoming acclimated to the format than developing interest in the characters. However, as is typical of this type of sprawling, scattershot ensemble piece, there are occasional fantastic scenes tinged with wry humor. Palek and Carolyn get the bulk of these, such as the one in which Palek has a fleeting moment of parental longing when he sees a father and son interacting in an electronics store, and another in which Carolyn drives to work while-ahem–talking Palek through a sperm deposit. But more often than doing something charming or funny, they’re firing off nauseating bits of dialogue like “When we were together, it was like I was on drugs. And now that we’re not together, it doesn’t feel good, but it feels right.” There’s only a miserly sprinkling of the clever moments in an ocean of the irksome ones.
But the problem with “Tell Me You Love Me” isn’t the batting average, it’s the basic premise. It depicts vanilla characters who are unexceptionally neurotic and heartsick and expects the audience to care about them down to the minor details of their slapping and tickling. If it earned buy-in from its audience, the show would be a ringing success. But it’s hard to imagine how a viewer could possibly be as absorbed in these characters as they are in themselves.
