As I sat down to watch TV last night for the first round of the hour long dramas to premiere this year, I almost lost my cool. Midway through Bones, my cable went out and didn’t come right back on. In fact, it was a near half hour before things got back to normal, with only minutes to spare before the start of the two new Monday shows that I was planning to cover here. So, though I was forced to watch Brennan and Booth in the wee hours this morning before work, I was able to catch The Mob Doctor and Revolution last night so I could write about them today.
The Mob Doctor
This is a show that I have been pretty excited to see ever since uprfronts last spring. This is also a show that when I mention to other people that I’m excited, they look at me, head cocked to one side and say “Really?” They just don’t get where I’m coming from, and I don’t get them. For me, it has so many things going for it: namely, Jordana Spiro, who I loved on My Boys, Zach Gilford, who is and always will be Matt Saracen from FNL, and medicine, which I am a sucker for. Give me a medical show over lawyers, cops, housewives, and forensic pathologists any day. I just love them.
Oh, and The Mob Doctor also has the mob. Fun, high concept, right? Well, turns out the show is far more Grey’s Anatomy than Goodfellas, but I’m still hooked. The premise is basic enough: Young, gifted surgeon gets in deep with the Chicago mafia in order to save her brother’s life. To pay off his debts, she must preform medical procedures for the members of the mob, who tend to get shot with some frequency. The pilot establishes this idea pretty handily in the first few scenes, especially with a comical bit where Dr. Devlin (Spiro) yanks a screwdriver out of a lackey’s head.
What sells me on the show, however, is not the plot of the pilot, which admittedly is a kind of muddy (the whole storyline of the girl Devlin used to babysit for getting pregnant was superfluous). We sells me is Jordana Spiro. I immediately connect to her as a the woman straddling two worlds, perhaps because she did something similar in My Boys. She has the gruffness to deal with the mob bosses and medical bosses alike, and she has the poise and intelligence to come off as a very gifted doctor.
The second episode of The Mob Doctor will really tell the tale for me. It’s easy to have a solid pilot and not know where to go from there. The next episodes will establish if the writers can strike a balance between the two worlds and if they can keep the action believable instead of melodramatic. I’m excited to see what the new boss brings to the table and if the show can rise above the medical problem versus mafia problem of the week. I would love for it to go dark, like, say, The Black Donnellys, a similar show which was cancelled too soon. We shall see. Until then, I have high hopes. B+
Revolution
The only thing more present in my mind than the onslaught of Revolution previews that aired on NBC all summer was the deluge of middling to downright bad reviews that came out this week about the show. It seemed everyone was predisposed to hate it. I tried, however, to watch the pilot with an open mind. I like JJ Abrams – despite Alcatraz and, yes, Super 8 – and the concept is pretty cool – the world simultaneously losing all electricity. The show, in theory, had potential.
Unfortunately, I have to agree with the crowd on this one. Revolution is not good. Its major failing is one that many high-concept shows of the past (especially on NBC) have fallen prey to and I call it the buckshot approach to tv making. Here’s how it goes: you take a cool concept, like aliens coming to earth (ie. V) or aliens living among us (ie The Event) or people living in the past (ie Terra Nova) and you create a big, sprawling cast, then give everyone interesting storylines that will eventually intersect with each other, and throw that all into the pilot. In concept, it should look like Lost. In practice, you shoot the audience in the face.
There is so much thrown against the wall in Revolution that everything ends up being mediocre. In 45 minutes, all the power goes out, we flash-forward 15 years, the father gets shot, the brother gets kidnapped, the sister gets attacked more than once, the uncle gets attacked and kills a dozen people and a lady talks to someone on a crude computer. On top of that, the sister meets her love interest, who, all star-crossedly, is part of the opposing militia. And did I mention that said militia is run by the uncle’s former best friend? It’s enough plot to fill an entire season, but stuffed into one episode, it feels hurried and unbelievable.
If you look back at high-concept pilots that worked, you realize that they only focused on one story and slowly introduced more as the season progressed. Lost only told the story of Jack, Charlie and Kate without much more than introductions to the other castaways; The Walking Dead only followed Grimes in the first episode; Mad Men didn’t even introduce Betty Draper until the last five minutes of its pilot. I wish that Revolution had learned from these superior shows, instead of following the vein of other failed shows. Nothing worked well, and the romantic entanglement, especially, was irksome.
The show has glimmers of promise – the science behind the blackout intrigues me, I love Giancarlo Esposito, and Zak Orth is pretty funny – but in the end, Revolution comes off as a bad, watered-down ripoff of The Hunger Games, and I would be surprised if I make it more than my requisite three episodes. D
Mary the TV Maven 