The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Television.  Love it or hate it, it sure beats reading or taking out the garbage.  I don’t post all that frequently about TV on this site, but man do I spend a truckload of time watching it.  So here’s a breakdown of the shows I watched over this past television season, and what I thought of them.  Overall it was a pretty good year, and the spectre of the writers’ strike is already a distant memory.

American Dad! – I can only guess that more of Seth MacFarlane’s attention has been directed towards this show than Family Guy, which is the reason it has consistently been the funnier of the two.  Or maybe he isn’t overseeing it, and that’s why it’s funnier.  Either way, this season saw a drop in quality from the previous few but was still pretty good.  Any bit with a Roger/Steve pairing was usually pretty good, but there were good laughs to be had elsewhere as well (Steve and friends facing off against the cool kids at school and the inspired Roger/Hayley costume switching gag to name a few).

One of the best elements of American Dad! is its willingness to explore Roger’s various neuroses and personalities for something other than comedy.  “The One That Got Away” is a prime example – Roger tracks down an unknown crook who maxed out his credit card, and it turns out to be himself living a completely separate life.  This kind of relatively nuanced writing has been done before on AD and I hope to see more of it. Final grade: B-

Read on Daddy-O…

As previously documented on this very site, Scrubs has managed to rescue itself somewhat from comedy purgatory.  After seven turbulent seasons on NBC (including a strike-shortened seventh last year), the show made its debut on ABC last night with a pair of new episodes.  So due to the fact that season 7 was somewhat respectable, and also due to the fact that not many shows have returned yet, I gave the show another chance.

So far so good I have to say.  While I think the gut-busting days of the first five years are long gone, Scrubs can still be entertaining.  On the plus side, the juvenile and somewhat scatological humor from the last few years was gratefully absent.  The writing style and stories reminded me very much of vintage Scrubs.  The cast is largely intact, save for the introduction of Dr. Taylor Maddox (Courteney Cox) as the new chief of medicine.  Dr. Kelso’s still around, though he pretty much sticks to the coffee shop now.

The two episodes (“My Jerks” and “My Last Words”) returned the series’ focus to the main characters of J.D., Turk, Carla, and Elliot.  They both had their share of laughs (I liked the new intern, Ed, as well the Steak Night song and dance routine), but the real winner was “My Last Words”.  It reintroduced an element of real human drama (focusing on a patient who is basically waiting to die) that the show lost as it spun off into the realm of the bizarre in recent years.

In fact, the only real negative I can think of was the brief but scary reappearance of Christa Miller, who looks more and more like one of the Joker’s “living art” projects from the 1989 Batman movie.  If that’s not botched plastic surgery, then we have real evidence of aliens living among us.

I’ve forgotten about 95% of the TV shows I watched growing up, which is probably my brain’s self-defense mechanism kicking in. But one thing I haven’t forgotten is all those nifty little bumpers I was bombarded with multiple times a day. Some of them are iconic, some just quaint and cheesy. How many of these do you remember?

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More out of morbid curiosity than anything else, I tuned in tonight for the series premiere of Cavemen. I’m already on record as saying this show was a bad idea, but I gave it a shot anyway. And speaking totally objectively it’s…well, it’s not good. As I feared, they completely failed to capture the vibe of the original Geico commercials, which was as critical to their success as the basic premise.

So what went wrong? Well for starters, the makeup was bad. In a puzzling move, the cavemen have perfect white teeth (the ones in the commercials have choppers more like Austin Powers). They looked less like ancestral man and more like twentysomethings with really bad grooming.

Then there’s the more puzzling change of the cavemens’ jobs. Rather than the urban sophisticates the commercials portrayed them as, they are now middle class schlubs (one works in an Ikea-like furniture store). Apart from the opening party scene (which was very reminiscent of the commercials), gone is the sense of snooty style mingled with righteous indignation. Big mistake. Having a Cro-Magnon Frasier could be funny. Having a Cro-Magnon King of Queens is lame right out of the box. Because then what’s the difference, other than the bad makeup?

A lot of the jokes fell flat, particularly when the writers attempted to fabricate caveman culture. I doubt we’ll be seeing the lines “crave the cave” or “keep your penis in your genus” on a t-shirt anytime soon. However, even great sitcoms aren’t great right away. Not that this will ever be one, but I have to be fair.

That all said, I couldn’t stop watching. And God help me, I may watch again. Of course that has more to do with the fact that there’s nothing else on Tuesday nights until House starts than with any redeeming qualities of the show. And since Cavemen will probably get 86′d in a few weeks it’s not like I’m making a huge commitment.

But hey, even if they only make it to the second episode they outdid that Heather Graham show, so they got that going for them.

Next to the NFL Draft, the most exciting administrative period of the television year is when the networks announce their upcoming schedules (known in the business as Upfronts). Sad, I know, but true. But before I turn my astute analytical skills on next year’s new shows, I’d like to take a moment to remember the fallen.

Some canceled shows are undeserving of their fate; they are taken off the air before their time thanks to a fickle fan base or clueless (gutless) network executives. Then again, some were around far longer than they deserved. Here’s a partial rundown (a full listing is available at The Futon Critic):

• The Class (CBS) – Some dismissed this as a poor man’s Friends, but I felt this was the most promising new comedy since Scrubs. I wasn’t totally sold on The Class at first, but it quickly grew on me. The writing was sharp and most importantly, I actually cared about most of the characters. Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Richie Velch) was easily the funniest of the group, but I was pleasantly surprised at the comedic chops of Jason Ritter (Ethan Haas), son of the late John Ritter.
• Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (NBC) – I can’t compare this series to previously acclaimed Aaron Sorkin efforts like The West Wing or Sports Night, because I didn’t watch them. But for all its flaws, I enjoyed this show. Yeah there were some glaring weaknesses – the forced romance between Matthew Perry and Sarah Paulson’s characters, as well as how almost every episode became a vehicle for Sorkin’s rants – but even with all that I still looked forward to new episodes. It seems NBC will at least air the remaining episodes, much to the chagrin of the show’s detractors I’m certain.
• Andy Barker, P.I. (NBC) – At what point will network executives realize that Andy Richter’s career peaked on Conan O’Brien’s couch?
• The War at Home (Fox) – This was a show of many mysteries, but two in particular still puzzle me. The first is how this show actually made it through two seasons, and the second is why I watched most of the episodes. Michael Rapaport, who I enjoyed on Boston Public, continually looked as if he had literally wandered onto the stage just as taping started, without having read the script at all. I have a hard time believing he is really that bad an actor, but I guess it’s possible. The fact that I watched this for as long as I did speaks more to the dearth of good comedies on TV than to the quality of this one. It won’t be missed.
• Show Me the Money (ABC) – Stupid premise and botched execution aside, this country needs more William Shatner, not less.
• The Winner (Fox) – This show wasn’t just unfunny, it was aggressively unfunny. I’d rather be kicked in the groin after taking a calculus exam than watch another minute of this abomination. The Winner took place in 1994, which I suppose was a setup to allow the writing staff to till the fertile comedy soil of AIDS and O.J. Simpson jokes. Because we never really got enough of those, you know. I really hope for Seth MacFarlane’s sake his name was only attached to this steaming turd because he lost a bet or something.
• Standoff (Fox) – I’m not going to sob in my pillow that Standoff isn’t coming back, but it was a decent series that had potential. Once they moved away from the Tuesday night schedule (and away from House), the writing was pretty much on the wall however. Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt were a good pairing, although this was another example of a not-quite-believable romance. But when the show was on (as in the episode where they found themselves in a literal Mexican standoff) it was very good. But holy crap, the Queer Eye-style opening was horrific.
• The Real Wedding Crashers (NBC) – Hmmm, someone remind me why NBC is the fourth-rated network again? How does garbage like this get greenlit in the first place?

Because I get more laughs from a 30-second Geico caveman commercial than I did from this preview clip on ABC’s website. Mistake number one was not getting the actors from the commercials to star in the series. They are actually a big reason why the ads work so well. Mistake number two was hiring a makeup designer from the local community college. With the possible exception of the one in the passenger seat, they look more like really tan guys with horrible grooming habits than prehistoric men. And although I can’t tell from such a brief clip, I will bet money that another crucial aspect of the commercials – that the cavemen are actually rather urbane and sophisticated yuppie types – will be lost as well.

Oh well, at least it can’t be any lamer than According to Jim. I think.

If ABC’s promos are anything to go by, you’d think the only shows on that network are Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and Lost. But tucked away on Tuesday night is a wonderful show that has been toiling in relative obscurity for three seasons – Boston Legal.

Well perhaps obscurity is a bit strong. The show has been nominated for and won many industry awards (Outstanding Single-Camera Sound Mixing for a Series, baby!), and was recently renewed for a fourth season. Still, it has never been a ratings blockbuster, and even suffered the ignominy of having almost half of the first season postponed until the second season when the aforementiond Grey’s Anatomy took over its time slot.

Read on Daddy-O…