If you’re wondering why I’ve spent the week vacillating between terror and joy, then I should remind you that the new TV season has begun. Every night brings a new companion to my home, and I never know if our dalliance will end with a passionate embrace or call to the local police.
So far, I’ve watched the pilots of 2 new series, and I’ve liked both of them enough to give them another try. One of those repeat visits will be utterly joyous, and the other will be marked with caution. Read on to find out which is which…
(1) Up All Night on NBC
I’m totally on board with this family sitcom starring Will Arnett and Christina Applegate as new parents who are a little dubious about having baby… yet totally in love with their child and each other. As Linda points out over at NPR’s Monkey See, neither of the characters fit the standard sitcom mold of Chilly Yet Skilled Mother and Hopelessly Adolescent Dad. Instead, they’re both people I recognize: People in their late thirties who have just gotten around to having a baby, who feel bad about cursing all the time, and who still want to have sex with each other. There’s something relaxed and generous about the way these people are written and performed… they’re relatable folks with good and bad points who are trying to be good parents without losing touch with their adult lives. Â My personal television landscape is defined by aggressively stylized comedies like 30 Rock, Community, and Raising Hope, so it’s nice to find a show that feels “real.”
“Real”… for the most part. Maya Rudolph plays Christina Applegate’s Oprah-esque, talk show host boss—Arnett left his law firm to stay at home with the baby—and her exaggerated character seems to belong in a show like 30 Rock, what with her loopy narcissism and long tangents about Stevie Nicks. I can deal with that for the moment, though, because Rudolph made me laugh out loud several times. In a scene where Arnett and Applegate force themselves to go out for an “old times” night of drinking and karaoke, Rudolph waltzes into the karaoke bar with two bottles of champagne. With almost no expression on her face, she goes, “Ooh-oooh!” and the Disaffected Pimp delivery just cracks my shit up.
So… yeah. The tonal imbalance could be a problem, but I think it’ll get worked out. I expect gentle humanity to prevail and make this show a bright spot in my week.
—
(2) Ringer on the CW
I’ve never watched a CW show before, but something told me that Ringer was going to be trashy fun. It’s reasonably fun, I guess, but it’s six kinds of trashy. Tacky, sudsy, and apparently made for $25, the pilot is almost a parody of soap operas: Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a pair of twin sisters, and one of them is posing as the other while they’re both on the run from their dark secrets.
Honestly, though, the plot is not the reason to watch. Instead, you should come for the shots of SMG trying to serve “hardass bitch” by clenching her mouth into a flat little line, looking over her shoulder just so, and running her finger down the edge of a mirror. I mean… just look at that promo image up there,which the pilot essentially recreates in several scenes. Add some shoulder pads and bangs, and you’ve got Erica Kane’s best subplot from the 1980s.
Oh… and can we talk about the mirrors? They’re in every damn scene. Because the twins reflect each other both inside and out. DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY’RE GOING FOR?
I don’t know if I’ll spend an entire season with this K-Mart weave, but as I’m waiting for the return of The Walking Dead, it’ll do just fine.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Kara // Sep 15, 2011 at 10:51 am
HA! K-Mart weave. And yeah, the special effects budget was apparently some change some people found in the couch. That green screen when Siobhan and Bridget were on the boat? Daaaaaaaaamn.
Fall is my favorite season for many reasons, and one of them is new TV. I don’t watch CW dramas and I was never a Buffy fan, so I had no emotional stake in Ringer going in. I’ve read reviews that say it doesn’t live up to the hype. For me, since there’s no hype to live up to, it was a typical CW drama. I might keep watching it, I might not – if there’s something I like better that competes with it, it’s getting bumped.
“Up All Night” is probably what my friends and I are going to be like if we have kids. We’re late 20s/early 30s, white-collar career-oriented urbanites; this demographic tends to marry late and have kids later (and this is true, based on my small representative sample). My best friend and her husband have a kid and a lot of what Arnett and Applegate were saying was stuff I’ve heard come out of their mouths, which was refreshing.
Maya Rudolph was the standout, though, although she feels disconnected.
2 Emily // Sep 15, 2011 at 1:14 pm
“Up All Night” had my husband and I laughing out loud and reliving our past. That’s exactly who we were with our first child 9 years ago, sans the gorgeous house and the Oprah Lion-Tamer job. I, too, was relieved to see that the parent characters weren’t shoe-horned into the typical tropes. I’m in for this one.
3 ferretrick // Sep 15, 2011 at 2:04 pm
“Honestly, though, the plot is not the reason to watch. Instead, you should come for the shots of SMG trying to serve “hardass bitch†by clenching her mouth into a flat little line”
She should have just watched the DVDs of herself as Buffy in Season 7.
“I’ve never watched a CW show before”
Cough, splutter, choke. WHAT? You never watched Veronica Mars? Never watched Vampire Diaries? Duuuuude….my faith in you as a pop culture critic has been damaged.
Anyway, I know you watched Buffy, which was on the WB and UPN before it became CW, so more or less you have.
4 Mark Blankenship // Sep 15, 2011 at 2:37 pm
ferretrick, I hope you can forgive my shameful lack of CW knowledge. If it helps, I AM in a support group.
5 Roommate Joe // Sep 16, 2011 at 11:06 am
The tonal imbalance in the “Up All Night” pilot is at least partly a consequence of Maya Rudolph’s character being totally revamped between the original pilot and the one that aired. Originally, Maya owned a talent agency that Christina Applegate worked for; she was still loopy and crazy but the “Oprah” stuff wasn’t there yet. The changes were smart — with the talent agency, they had to spend unnecessary time on whatever client they were working on; with Maya as Oprah, we just get to focus on Maya.
Anyway, she totally won my heart with the Stevie Nicks stuff.
6 Roommate Joe // Sep 16, 2011 at 11:09 am
Anyway, I forgot to make my actual point, which is that the show will likely be much more cohesive from episode 2 onward, now that they have their whole concept down. That was the one concern I had with the pilot: it seemed more like a disjointed highlight reel of a story than an actual story. I’m pretty confident that gets ironed out now that we’re past the pilot phase.
7 Kelly // Dec 3, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Hi Mark – Long time reader of your True Blood blog over at Huffington Post. I am here to respectfully plead for you to start a blog regarding The Walking Dead. IMHO – one of the best shows on TV right now. The season finale was like no TV show I have seen recently.
I know you’re a busy man, but I bet I’m not the only one that would LOVE to hear your insights regarding this great show!
Leave a Comment