The Box in the Living Room: Round 1

September 20th, 2005 by ironsoap

I have a feeling the cast is bound to expand past the two leads (although I wouldn’t be particularly upset if it didn’t get all serialized and managed to just stay a “monster of the week” kind of show) and while of all the new suspense-style shows this was the one I cared the least about what happens next, it was the one I cared the most about what happened within the one episode.

Despite it being high quality cheese, it’s on a crummy network and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it fade quietly from the lineup in January, a victim of being lost in the shuffle of other, higher-profile but ultimately lesser shows. Don’t get too attached to this one, but you might as well enjoy it while you can.

Surface

Weird stuff starts happening in all sorts of bodies of water and people race around trying to figure out what they are. Maybe they’re… aliens!

Surface really, really needed to go the Threshold route and do a two-hour pilot. Or at least air the first two episodes back to back because there was just too much stuff going on to possibly follow. Although Lake Bell (get it?) gives a decent performance and some of the effects worked on a basic level (I admit the show was quite a bit more freaky to me than it was probably even intended due to it hitting my phobic buttons; sort of like someone with an irrational fear of spiders watching Arachnophobia) I don’t think this show has much of a future.

The problem here is that most of the suspense relies on the audience not knowing what the creatures are, or even really what they look like. But at some point they’re going to have to show the creatures, and once they do, where’s the suspense? What’s left then? Are they aliens, aren’t they aliens? That’s really a very secondary issue behind what are they, what do they look like/do and what do they want? It won’t take long to answer those questions… at least, it shouldn’t, but I guess if that was actually the case there wouldn’t be much of a show.

Come to think of it, there isn’t much of a show here. This will probably be the first of the new TiVo season passes that I dump.

Bones

A forensic anthropologist and a G-Man flirt their way through cases where the majority of the evidence lies in small bits of bodies.

I’ll give David Boreanaz this: He can separate himself from the character he played for so long on Buffy and then the eponymous Angel. He shows a pretty solid sense of comic timing and while his co-star, Emily Deschanel—ehm, how do I say this? Sucks, she manages to not suck so bad as to ruin the show. So I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to pilot episode syndrome.

The first episode actually kind of bored me once it settled into a fictionalized Chandra Levy plot, but there were a few moments (the opening scene in the airport was surprising and amusing) where the show displayed enough promise. One thing that gets me is how they’re going to make an entire show out of this: CSI barely works because they give the labrats a liberal dose of creative license by having them present in the interrogations, pulling guns, and serving warrants. Real crime scene techs process crime scenes, do evidence procedures in the crime lab and testify in court. That’s it. Now we’ve narrowed it down even further to the point where we have a forensic anthropologist going out and doing police work? Uh-huh.

I’ll give this one another try or two, but I’m keeping it on a short leash.

How I Met Your Mother

This is the only comedy I’ve tried so far this year, and I admit I was extremely skeptical when I hadn’t even cracked a smile by the first commercial break. But the show picked up pace and managed (once they let Neil Patrick Harris’ character to get in some lines) to be laugh-out-loud funny in parts. I’m surprised that this was the first time I’d heard a “This is so going in my blog!” joke. It even sounds like a catchphrase to me.

The twist at the end of the episode was a nice touch and the narration/flashback angle was interesting (although ultimately unnecessary). I just wish they’d try something else for once with TV comedies. The only other comedy I watch is Scrubs because it seems like a real comedy to me and not some corny canned-laughter-laden rehash. The best comedies are dramas with funny writing anyway: Buffy was a great example of a show with smart, funny writing that didn’t have to rely on gag-a-minute tedium. Alias, in its heyday, did this well also.

How I Met Your Mother is perhaps worth a half dozen episodes of cheesy chuckles, but I seriously don’t see how they can make an entire series out of this: At least not without it grinding into even worse sentimental muck than Friends did starting, oh around halfway through its run.