The Winter 2013 Television Thread

So, something is very quietly happening in television in this half of the season in particular that I'm really taking notice of. I probably missed the start of this effect because I don't usually make time for NBC comedies unless and until I hear that they are spectacular or they remind me of something that I thought was very funny when I was fourteen, but I'm pretty sure that homosexuality has...well, rounded some kind of corner, anyway. Cases in point:

1600 Penn - It's actually turning into quite a good little comedy, which is a shame, because nobody's watching it and it's way, way too much in the Parks and Recreation vein for NBC to be comfortable trying to make regular people consume it, and the latest episode that I recorded settled something for me that seemed a little bit subtle in the pilot. The president's youngest daughter is a lesbian. It's not really a big secret, and the show hasn't (so far, anyway) treated it like it's something that needs to be hushed up any more than a...I dunno, thirteen?...year old kid would want to keep her crush to herself, but the biggest deal here is that nobody on the show gives a shit. I'm really spectacularly impressed with this, because I was still watching Glee when they were doing the whole Kurt and....errr....Finch? rooming together scene and it was all about how the gay kid was some kind of big deal. It's magnificently refreshing to watch a show that absolutely does seem to give it completely equal treatment. Granted, that's still a thing that the show could easily fuck up, but still - good on you for now, show.

The Following - And in this show, which is a slasher movie done by a guy who does slasher movies on a network that's trying to pitch this thing right to the biggest audience they possibly can, that has to run commercials for this during NASCAR events and professional football games, last Monday we had two hot dudes making out. On camera. In a way that makes me feel really old to remember how big a deal that was not too many years ago. I'll concede that The Following gets a little bit pulpier with it (the two dudes began their relationship as a facade to get close to a third party, and now it has become complicated as their little routine is basically done and they don't have to act anymore, but one of them now has his psychotic girlfriend also living in the same house with them and she and the boyfriend who's still very obviously into it don't get along too good), but, still - that's impressive.

Good job, television. I give you shit a lot, but sometimes you get it right.

And also, watch 1600 Penn. As it's gone on, the show is having a little bit of an issue figuring out how to juggle the cast (Gad, MacIsaac, Elfman, the press secretary, the two kids, and, you know, the president sometimes have a hard time fitting into the same show), but it's only gotten better, and more people need to watch this show to keep it from, you know, ceasing to exist. It even got me a little in that Parks and Recreation way with Jenna Elfman and the kid in the latest episode.

Wow, massive kudos to 1600 Penn for that. TV is getting better in regards to that, though it's still mostly with minor characters and mostly with men--but the general forward movement is fantastic.

Am I the only one watching Ripper Street? It really is a great show, what with the proto-forensics, Bronn and dirty London-ness.

I'm led to understand that it's a perfectly good show by all the critics I listen to, but British shows are screwed up enough online (airing at different dates domestic and overseas) and the cable package upgrade to BBCHD costs enough that I've basically written those off.

This week's premieres: Zero Hour (ABC) on Thursday, I think Southland is resuming on TNT, which I sometimes think is a show I should have picked up, and then I notice the remaining episodes of The Wire and The Shield and whatnot I still have to process and quickly decide not to.

I wanted to watch Touch and report back as to precisely how stupid it goes, but there was a recording issue, so I won't have that before Thursday. I can say that the episode description for this week mentions the Four Dozen Virtuous Mentally Disabled or Disadvantaged People again, so I'm hoping that it's still as laughably, ridiculously jewy as it was near the end of the last season. Because that was pretty hilarious. Also, Maria Bello (sans ludicrous hat and scarf) is a regular. For this season. But not 3, or so we are assured by some people at the show who are entirely too confident about America's appetite for this particular brand of terrible.

CW Renewals: VD, Supernatural, Arrow.

I'm cool with all of those, though I'm a little bit behind on Vampire Diaries.

Well, they've added God's Assassin, Lucas Haas as big-eared Steve Jobs and Skynet to the show, so they've shaken things up a little bit. I can't help but like the show.

I disagree, I watched either the first or second episode and gave up on it, but then I watched this last one because Dave Anthony was on it. The show has not gotten better, or if it has it certainly hasn't gotten good. It feels like an 80s sitcom the way it beats you over the head with everything. I don't think I can overstate how much I hate the little boy who acts like a tiny adult right down to wearing a suit and playing out a ham-handed parody of a presidential election. You know who's a great child character? The girl on Ben and Kate. She actually acts like a kid. It's revolutionary, for American entertainment.

1600 Penn is neither compelling nor funny. It's great that lesbianism isn't a Big Deal, but that's no reason to watch a sub-par show. The only way I would compare it to Parks and Rec is as a backhanded way of saying "Maybe give it another chance in season 2".

I like 1600 penn, but this sure doesn't seem good...

http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/20...0-penn-next-week-for-hour-long-office/168913/

The preemption isn't particularly good news. Some of it is just a side-effect of the time slot, but it's obviously not great. That said, we won't really be able to make any call until the season is mostly done and the pilots are in, because I guarantee you right now that if NBC doesn't immediately reverse their decision to go at comedy on two nights, they're going to need to bring back at least one show that doesn't deserve it numbers-wise, just to fill time.

So far as the show's quality goes, suffice it to say that I disagree. It's about five episodes old and it's improving in all of the ways that it needs to as it goes forward. It's finding its particular voice, it's reigning in Gad a little bit, and it's doing its best by the people that are on it. I agree that the boy is problematic at times, but there's really not a whole lot you can do about that. Finding boys in his age range that can act worth a tinker's damn is virtually impossible. Giving him something exaggerated to do covers for that to an extent (above and beyond the fact that a ten year old boy acting like a ten year old boy in the White House is both boring and, in a show with Josh Gad, redundant), and doing a political campaign in miniature was the ideal way to get Elfman involved with him over the span of an episode. As for the hamfistedness, I honestly don't know what you're talking about. I'll grant that the show is hardly subtle in its newly discovered desire to be nice to its characters and audience, but neither is Parks and Recreation. I like that show too, but come on. The Proposal? The Debate? The episode immediately after The Debate? I wouldn't call much of anything that it does (anymore, anyway) particularly subtle, and that's perfectly fine. It works for that show, and I think that with this cast and a little bit of development, it can work for this show as well. Sitcoms on broadcast generally take time to grow and develop, and the fact that this one is so quickly becoming something that I look forward to watching is an incredibly positive sign.

I really don't see the parallels with Parks and Rec. Parks and Rec has brilliant comedic actors like Chris Pratt, Adam Scott, Nick Offerman and Rob Lowe. 1600 Penn has a cast which, while not quite 2 Broke Girls level bad, is a hell of a long way from an impressive ensemble. And the writing just isn't good. It's not terrible, but the show has not made me laugh out loud in two episodes. Nothing they've done has surprised me, from a line to a joke to a plot turn. That's a fail for any sitcom.

As far as the kid, a much easier way to compensate for a shitty child actor is by not focusing half an episode on him.

Forget it, Shadarr. It's Seilertown.

Bullshit. It's not just possible, it's easy judging from the number of good child actors out there. Movies do it. Other network shows do it. Childrens Hospital manages it two or three times a week. Even commercials frequently have very good child actors of all ages. I haven't seen 1600 Penn so I don't know if this kid is good or bad, but if he's bad the reason for that is absolutely not "there just aren't any good child actors."

I can't really say whether he's a good actor or not, my problem is with the character. Does he do a good job of portraying a 3-foot-tall Gen-Xer in a suit and tie? Maybe he does.

My point isn't that there aren't good child actors - it is that there is a disproportionate lack of male talent in that age bracket working in television. A quick survey of the talent on display right now is kind of sad. Carl from Walking Dead seems to have improved a bit over last year (though it's a little unclear how much of that has to do with him and how much has to do with better plotting and dialogue), but The Tumor on OUT continues to be a constant irritant, whassisface from Homeland continues to exist only for the purposes of karate, and not one Bobby Draper to date has been particularly noteworthy (aside from The Tumor, who is noteworthy only because he had the poor judgment to mouth off about January Jones perhaps not having the warmest personality in the universe). For whatever reason, it just seems to be hard to find a good boy these days.

So far as the character himself goes, I suspect it's a matter of differing taste. I don't think that you can have Josh Gad on a show where he's not acting maybe a little bit dumb and immature, and since he's an EP you were pretty much stuck with him, so I have a hard time thinking of any alternative that the show actually had for a second boy. He has to be serious, to avoid overlap with Gad, but he also had to be cartoonishly so, to give him a hook for humor, since the decision was apparently made that the normal, unexaggerated child should be the second daughter - a decision of which my approval has already been stated. Granted, it could have skipped writing him in at all (and raising the rather uncomfortable question of just precisely when it is that Pullman and Elfman started fucking, given that the kids' mother was alive and presumably still married to her governor husband as recently as that youngest child, but Jenna there has been his pet consultant for what is implied to be a significant amount of time - dating all the way back to his gubernatorial campaign), but it's a family comedy. I get why he's there. I'll grant that there's certainly a lot of room for him to grow, and he certainly needs to if he's going to show up more often than every fifth episode (you may or may not be happy to know that the smaller children basically vanished for other episodes, and I suspect they will continue to do so), but I'm willing to cut him some slack, and when that particular episode got to its payoff, it got me. That was probably more Jenna Elfman than whatever his name is, but it still got me, so he's not enough of a fuckup to completely derail the series.

As for the comparisons to Parks and Rec, I think that they're apt because both shows are aiming to be sort of the same thing. Parks and Rec is a comedy that is frequently not funny on purpose, but is consistently and thoroughly kind to its characters. It's like a twenty two minute hug every week that it's on. It's also funny on regular occasion, but the show has very deliberately staked out the position that it can sometimes stop being funny and maybe make you a little verklempt because that's the kind of show that it is. Comparing the pilot of 1600 Penn to the latest episode, I can clearly see this show also staking out that claim, and I think that they're doing a good job of establishing it, as with the end of that episode. Some comedies want you to laugh at their characters (Two and a Half Men, Don't Trust the Bitch, Archer, etc.) and some comedies want you to actively love and root for their characters (this season of 30 Rock, Parks and Rec since early in the second season, and, I would submit, this show - case in point, Josh Gad's patented buffoonery has steadily changed from something to be pointed at and ridiculed to a sort of lovable oafishness). 1600 Penn feels like from the pilot episode to now it has made the conscious decision to be one of the latter, and I like shows like that. That's the parallel I'm trying to draw.

I completely agree. The kid may be a decent actor, but the character is just so obnoxious that I want to punch him in the face. This television program makes me want to punch children. He stands out even more against his sister, who (much like the aforementioned kid on Ben and Kate) is written like a believable kid but is given so little in the show that she may as well not be on it.

I think 1600 Penn could be a good show, but it's unfocused. There's the wacky son, the pregnant daughter, the other wacky son, the trophy second wife, the staff trying to hold everything together, the president caught in the middle. It's all over the place. They need to get rid of at least two kids and focus better on the characters instead of trying to do so much in each episode.

In other, less verbose news, FX's other new drama for the year will be The Bridge this summer. I haven't seen a bad hour-long show yet on the network, so I'm kind of optimistic by default, though I'm not immediately grokking the point behind the setting at the conflict in the pitch (Mexican detective and American detective team up to hunt serial killer who is hopping across the border). If the unique hook of this show is supposed to be its examination of law enforcement in the context of international law, I'm pretty sure that everything that can be, should be, and ever needs to be said about that was neatly encapsulated in that spectacular Joe Don Baker gem Final Justice. "Go 'head on," indeed.

Just to be clear - that's a joke. The Joe Don Baker part, anyway. The complications of multinational law enforcement cooperation is boring as hell, though, so hopefully they're aiming more for the cultural side of that.

Good point, the last episode basically had three totally separate stories that didn't really link up at all. They even took place in different locations, so there wasn't even the possibility of interaction. I don't think they need to get rid of any characters, because lots of shows have big casts, but they do need to have the characters doing things together instead of making three separate shows. On a show like Parks and Rec or The Office, there are multiple story lines but they all intertwine. If Jim goes off-site, he phones Pam and they show other people listening in on the conversation, and it may even directly impact the storyline happening in the office. 1600 Penn had none of that, it was just a bunch of unrelated stuff that could literally be broken off and spliced into any episode.

Border towns have an inherently interesting character, I think, and it should be pretty fertile ground for a show that really wants to delve into it. Plus as you said FX is pretty much the best channel these days so almost anything they do is at least worth a try.

Monday Mornings - Episode Two

The Good - Yo, they fixed Alfie's head. I mean, it's not the biggest improvement, but it's an improvement nonetheless, as anything would have been.

The Bad - Lord. So, a differential in the same room as the (still very conscious) patient, a ghoulish transplant surgeon stumbling directly into a donor's family as they are informed, and a still-coifed Molina getting all David E. Kelly prosecutor on a surgeon for supervising a resident performing a procedure with which she was intimately familiar as an assistant in a teaching hospital. Oh - and the entire episode featured three different medical professionals negotiating with a goddamn thirteen year old child to undertake an extremely necessary medical procedure when Hugh Laurie (from whose show this production appears to have taken a good number of its sets, though that's probably mostly because all hospitals look the same) would have slapped the stupid out of her and it wouldn't have been an issue.

I just dunno, man. There are elements and cast members that I like (Ving Rhames, Sarayu Rao, Jennifer Finnegan, Keong Sim - though not so much broken English him say, and even Bill Irwin to an extent), but...oy.

Hannibal = April 4. It's apparently going to be a Thursday show. You're getting a whole season, sink or swim, but it's hard to be optimistic about a 10PM Thursday show on NBC.

I watched Zero Hour. The pilot was pretty terrible, BUT .... I really like Anthony Edwards, and the concept looks a little intriguing (secret societies, nazis, etc,) so I'll give it one more episode.

Zero Hour - The Pitch: A Michael Shermer action figure (Anthony Edwards) gets wrapped up in an international magic Nazi clock conspiracy after his wife buys it at a flea market. For some reason, his two young reporter employees at National Skeptic or whatever it's called assist.

Right out of the gate, this show does not make a particularly good impression, with its strained exposition and whatever trick it managed to do to make the magical Nazis that were so interesting in Hellboy and Indiana Jones kind of boring. I kind of want to hand the show some shit for the sheer volume of bullshit that it manages to pack into the first ten minutes of the first episode of the first season, but since that's kind of the point, that's a little hard to justify. Suffice it to say that what of Rosicrucianism existed in the 1930s was, to put it lightly, not explicitly opposed to Nazism. Indeed - one of the occult inspirations for the philosophy behind the movement was Rosicrucian, and a lot of Nazi symbology derived therefrom. And also Rosicrucianism is mostly just another manufactured pseudo-religion like Scientology, invented (sort of) in the early 20th century when a dude in New York took some inspiration from a book or two from William Walker Atkinson, but I shouldn't let myself get carried away. Of course, it also doesn't help when one of the lead's early lines is an I/me confusion ("What would make Laila and I happiest" - I don't know if I have a super power or what, but people who get paid to write for a living shoved that into Anthony Edwards's face and I could tell it was wrong before it even finished falling out, and the show then proceeds to repeat the error again two thirds of the way through).

As you might expect, the plot is pointlessly convoluted, and why not? This is effectively the collision between National Treasure and The Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, quite a few of these convolutions are plainly inane. For instance, after Tony's wife gets nabbed because magic Nazi clock, the FBI comes into the picture and they get video of the abduction and they say that this super-dangerous terrorist (a specific guy) done took her. Then, later in the episode, while he's sitting with his priest friend Roc, Edwards gets a call from the captor, demanding magic Nazi clock as ransom. Roc, of course, strongly advises that this exchange not go down, mostly because he wants to keep the special diamond that has been engraved with the map to some diggety damned thing or another, but also, he suggests, because this terrorist won't allow anybody who can ID him to escape. Spot the problem, viewing public (even if you don't have a face shot of the FBI's most wanted fugitive - and you probably do - something tells me that a detailed description is not a significant threat).

Now, I've got no history with Anthony Edwards, but I have to say, I'd rather have Robert Picardo if we have to live with a Michael Shermer stand-in (old side of middle aged, bald, white). Robert Picardo looks like his hair is on purpose. Tony here seems more like a victim. The young reporter lady probably has a promising career as Robin Tunney once she lands on a show that anybody will watch (I mean, really - she's even got her own little Prison Break thing going here to start from), but otherwise the cast is largely unexceptional. They're not horrible or palpably lazy, though - just super duper unexceptional. The FBI lady is probably the worst of the lot, mostly because of her writing, but she's still tolerable. I went into the episode braced for it to be full-on awful, so my expectations were lowered, but this seems to me to be a pretty average thing. I don't know why it's on this network on this night (if you swept up all of the genre and male-targeted stuff ABC has tried over the past three years and launched them all at once, it might make a lot more sense than the way they've been dribbling things out one at a time to die), since it's really just magical conspiracy Missing with literally zero hooks for the audience the network has (women) and not enough standout appeal for the audience the network wants (men), but there you go. With Last Resort well and truly demolished and 666 Park Avenue an objective flop, if you go with the theory that a network will always pick up at least one of its new shows at the end of the season so as to avoid looking like complete incompetents, this seems to have as good a shot as anything, particularly if Red Widow totally misses the male audience when it shows up in a few weeks.





Also, I'm months behind on Chicago Fire, because, really, who cares, but I will give them credit for this: they got defibrillation right for a goddamn change. Hats off to you, Chicago Fire, like, six episodes ago.

Did you never watch ER? I was fine with Edwards in this, mostly because I watched a gazillion episodes of him on ER for like a decade.

Also, never watched Top Gun either? Goose, baby!

He was also the nerd in Revenge of the Nerds that didn't commit rape.

I did not watch ER. I want to say the glory days for that series was high school and college for me, at which time I could not possibly be assed to watch a medical procedural at 9 every night, and instead saw approximately every single episode of Next Generation (we had a mutant unbranded broadcast station where I lived for the longest time, and they really liked running those episodes at 9) at least seven times. I did watch Top Gun, but most of what I took away from that was the lingering suspicion that he and Tom Cruise might be secret boyfriends. There's a "Playin' with the Boys" joke sitting around there somewhere, but I just can't wrap my head around it. Nonetheless, I don't have a problem with the man. He's not my favorite person that could stand in for Michael Shermer (I'd stop drawing that comparison if the show weren't trying so hard to make me draw it - all they had to do was hire a big guy, or a guy with hair, or a guy who isn't white, and they did none of those things, so I'm assuming it's on purpose at this point), but he's perfectly tolerable. I've just got no attachment to him that I'm carrying into the show.

Premiers this week:

Tuesday Night - Both Cult (CW) and Body of Proof. Body of Proof is basically an entirely new series at this point, since they've fired half the cast, though I'm sure they'll continue to get diabetes wrong, because everybody loves it so much when I patiently explain to a show that isn't listening how they got diabetes wrong. Cult is allegedly just horrible, but maybe in that endearing way, and it's got Robert Knepper (I remember him from the combined universe of Prison Break and Breakout Kings as T-Bag) as a villain, which is about right for him to get really hammy, and Jo from Supernatural (Alona Tal, who is perfectly welcome to leave that Marcos asshole and come get with the winning team down here in my living room where I watch an unhealthy amount of television every week) is on this show instead of Powers, since Powers got reset and is going all the way back to pilot with a completely different script and cast.

At some point in the near future we'll be getting the backdoor pilot episode for the VD spinoff about the Originals in New Orleans, but that might be a month or two. I'll try to keep an eye out for when it happens.

TOO MANY THURSDAY SHOWS. Guarantees I won't watch this; I already record Elementary and Archer during that timeslot.

Yeah, no kidding, I have to use both DVRs in the house to be able to record everything on Thursdays, and I still have to shift Suits so that it records later!

Goddammit, Monday Mornings. Nobody directly injects anything into the heart through the chest, Pulp Fiction style. There's way too much risk that you'll either hit the wrong thing or pierce a blood vessel or any number of other things. The Kelly is starting to creep in, though. For instance, Dr. Vulture Guy has developed a pretty obvious tic where he rocks on his feet, and some of his regular players have started showing up. I've got no problem with this, since as bad as Kelly can be, I like the way he writes dialogue. Kelly could stand to recognize that he's on cable, though. The turn of phrase is "shit through a goose," dude. Embrace your forum. Also, you used a very, very, very bad word. No self-respecting medical show, with a guy who people think is a real doctor, should EVER have any character that I am supposed to take seriously talk with a straight face about how people consume too many "toxins" in their food. Hey Gupta - you're morally on the hood for every cent spent on dumbshit foot pads and colonics now, if only just a little bit.

The Jeselnik Offensive - So the pitch for this is....I guess Anthony Jeselnik makes jokes about things that are terrible? I think?

So, if you've seen Anthony Jeselnik, you probably know what to expect. The man's delivery is quite intentionally paced like he just threw back a forty and a bottle of quaaludes and the majority of his jokes take that sort of implicit, smirking, "You're gonna laugh at me" thing that you get out of a guy like Norm MacDonald and screams it into your ear. I get the impression that you're either going to like that or you really, really aren't. Personally, I like him better in situations where he's not the whole focus of the thing (dude needs some contrast), and I wonder how well this is going to keep over the long run. I also kind of wonder if he wouldn't be better as a Daily Show correspondent, given that one of the first bits he did on his first show was him interviewing an oncologist for laughs, and it was probably the part that felt most natural out of everything. I'm also a little concerned that his panel segments are going to turn into teaser ads for upcoming shows on the network (Amy Schumer this week, Nick Kroll next week), but maybe once he makes the rounds of the next wad of shows they'll get away from that.

The show itself...eh. It was awkward and the pacing felt weird and abbreviated, but it was also the pilot episode of a semi-live show (studio audience) and those never go smoothly from start to finish. I laughed a couple of times, which puts it ahead of the pilot to Kroll Show (and I have since become okay with Kroll Show, so if it's going to follow the same slope that's probably good), but if it's still the same thing it just was at me by the end of the season I'll be surprised. If you like the man, here you go - thirty minutes a week for however many episodes are in this order. If you don't, you're probably better off just avoiding it.

Just realized they put a Dane in the role of Lecter, so I'll have to watch this... even though there's just two good books in the series and even the author who invented the characters, didn't manage them well.

Historical spoilers below:

Also Vikings on HBO (but originally History Channel in the US?). The story of Ragnar Lothbrok with Gabriel Byrne as the biggest name in the cast... who'll most likely be killed so Ragnar can become king. I'm a bit worried that the show is based on his early days, since it's his big raids that are the coolest stories (but of course a 120 ship raid on Paris is a tall order) as well as the shit going down after/caused by his death.

On the other hand Michael Hirst has a lot of freedom in his writing, since not much is really know. There's just the sagas and a lot of speculation. Strangely it seems that no Danes are in any roles in the show about this legendary Danish king...

Same as me, I liked some things so I will give it another hour.

On the other hand........ CULT on WB was so horrible, I want my hour of life back. I should have realized it before hand being the WB and all, but ARROW is amazing this year so I was hoping for perhaps another amazing show. CULT is not it.

For a second there I thought you had misspelled Michael Hurst. I'm kind of sad that you hadn't.

Cult - So, there is a show (imaginary - named Cult also) that's kind of a lot like Supernatural or Lost in that there's a whole universe of fandom about it but it's got kind of a tiny audience. Whatsisface from The Vampire Diaries is a reporter whose brother becomes kind of obsessed with the show and then disappears. Robert Knepper is the villain of the show-within-a-show and Alona Tal is the hero of that show.

Now, going in, I was warned (as I tried to warn you all) that this was pretty awful, so I came in with low expectations, and I'm not totally disappointed with the show. That's not to say that it's not kind of bad, because it totally is - it's just got enough hooks in it that I think that it could actually be bad in an interesting way. There are problems, though. For one thing, the show inside the show is fucking godawful. There's no other way to describe it. I don't know whether that's on purpose or not, but it's hammy and overwrought and not at all like the actual shows it's trying to allude to (Supernatural, Lost, Buffy, and other stuff with significant and over-dedicated internet fandoms) and more like The Following on Fox right now, of all things, which is not the sort of show that I would expect to develop this kind of a viewership in the first place. The catchphrase ("Hey - these things just snap right off") is stupid in ways that I can't even begin to comprehend and while the mythical showrunner is supposed to be reminiscent of Eric Kripke (retiring, not scene by anybody), even he's more present in the outside world than what they're pitching, and in this day and age, it's impossible not to be.

So what's good about it? Well, I liked the male lead when he was on Vampire Diaries, and I continue to like him here. He's just a likeable guy. I also don't hate the female lead (a recently hired assistant on the imagination show), so that's two decent marks in its favor. I'm not a big fan of what the show has Knepper and Tal doing right now, but almost all you see of them is in the imagination show (there's one brief scene with Knepper in "the real world"), so I'll reserve my judgment on them until they're taken out of something that I have to think at this point is just supposed to be deliberately awful. The parts about how a television show gets produced are actually kind of interesting on their own - that's not a thing that you get much of these days (the only shows about shows coming to my mind in recent history are all about sketch comedy).

So, what's the verdict? Well, it's definitely better than Ringer. It's got problems that you would fully expect it to have and maybe a couple you wouldn't, but they're potentially intentional in some cases (everything with the television show) and I'm curious enough to see where it goes. If you refuse to watch anything that isn't immediately Mad Men right out of the gate, you're safe passing on this and waiting for the season to end to see what the show decides to do with itself, but I really want to believe that this will get better, and even if it doesn't, I'll probably still watch it just to see what it does (at least until it gets predictable). Plus, I have a hard time bailing out on a show that has special magic sunglasses that let you see the truth before they get a chance to have an extended fistfight over whether or not a person is going to put those glasses on, and I kind of think that this show would actually do that if it has the space in an episode. Maybe Vampire Diaries guy can go out to try and convince somebody at the top of the episode and stumble back into the room half an hour later, bruised and rumpled, and possibly bark out some quip about how he convinced the guy.

Body of Proof - So, this is a returning show, but it fired half its cast, so let's treat this like new. Sort of. What's changed is basically all of the police. Apparently That Guy Who Isn't The Dude on The Glades died at the end of the last season (I barely remember that), the lady cop quit to go do a recurring part on Burn Notice, and Steve Carey is just fired. They've been replaced by an Autumn-Reeser-From-No-Ordinary-Family stunt double that looks familiar but I just can't place, some guy I don't recognize who's probably been in some other procedural at some point, and Mark Valley (which somewhat suggests a grim future - I think he's been on one show lately that lived past the season he started on, and I'm not sure you could call the second season of Human Target the same show as the first). Medical side seems to be largely the same - Christina Hendricks's inexplicable husband, the bald funny tough quippy black guy, and Jeri Ryan are all still there. Some sort of romantic backstory exists between Valley and Delaney, because, you know, why not.

So....how is it? Well - I'd say probably not as good as it used to be. The master villain of the first episode is telegraphed (surprise - it's the most recognizeable guest star), her goddamn daughter manages to get kidnapped, and the whole "I'm sad about my other investigator dying) routine saps what mirth was present in the show way too much. When this show was worth watching, it was lighter and funnier - it sort of felt in the generral vein of Castle. As it is now, I dunno. The first two episodes are a two-part thing, so we'll see how stuff changes in the third, but for now I'm not understanding why this particular show was brought back in this form.

Ahahaha The Cult was awful. Like so awful that I almost wondered if they were doing it on purpose.

But they weren't.

Who read that script and was like "'You sure know how to show a girl an interesting time' is a great line to deliver in a non-sarcastic way!"

This interview on Vulture is largely skippable, but this section here pretty much sums up the show:

I thought the panel was a little awkward, because it was obvious some of the bits had been rehearsed but they hadn't been rehearsed enough to look natural. However, just the fact that they're getting people like Aziz, Schumer and Kristen Schaal on the panel puts it above Chelsey Lately where, aside from the occasional drop-in by Marc Maron or Chris Hardwick, most of the comedians are people for whom Chelsey is their biggest credit. If they can figure out how to make it more natural, just having that calibre of comedians on should make the show good.

I agree with your overall assessment, though. Anthony Jeselnik isn't for everyone and this is very much his show. If you're the type of person who gets offended by the fact that someone would joke about cancer before hearing the joke, you're not going to like the show.

I swear, Ripper Street is where Game of Thrones actors go between seasons.

Wow, that just sounds like such self-consciously "edgy" shock-jockery. I don't know who Anthony Jeselnik is, and it doesn't look like I'm about to. Also, "like Chelsea Lately but better?" Way to aim for the stars, guy. Maybe in between seasons you can produce a sitcom that's a smarter Two and a Half Men, and if you have some spare time in the summer maybe you can write a screenplay for a more highbrow Jack and Jill.

I'm not sure whether the show will stay in my rotation, but... if you don't know who Anthony Jeselnik is, it isn't exactly hard to find out.