I’ve spent the better part of this week at the Toronto Film Festival, and coming from a person who loves TV, I have to say it was a pretty successful trip. Not only did I get to see Joss Whedon’s latest feature, Much Ado About Nothing; I also had the pleasure of viewing Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul and Parks and Rec’s Nick Offerman in their bleak but honest film Smashed.
Now, anybody who loves the Whedonverse or Shakespeare for that matter, should/must see Much Ado. I didn’t get to see Whedon in person (heart-breaking, I know) but it was still my favorite of the festival. Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof, better known as Wesley and Fred, play Beatrice and Benedick, and they are the standouts in the film, both for the chemistry between them and their ease with Shakespeare’s iambs. But there are Whedon characters all over the place and they are wonderful to watch. Fran Kranz plays Claudio; Reed Diamond, Don Pedro; Nathan Fillion, Dogberry; Sean Maher, Don John; Clark Gregg, Leonato; and Tom Lenk, Verges. That’s, respectively, Topher and Dominic from Dollhouse, Captain Malcolm Reynolds and Simon Tamm from Firefly, Agent Coulson from The Avengers and Andrew (my favorite) from Buffy. Basically, I geeked out hard. Oh, and it’s also a really good movie.
Smashed was very different from Much Ado, but no worse in quality. It is the story of a woman, Kate, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead of, in my mind at least, Scott Pilgrim fame who decides that she is an alcoholic and must stop drinking. The movie is honest, poignant, and ultimately gut-wrenching, especially when it deals with Kate’s marriage to Charlie, played by Aaron Paul. I have made it no secret that Jessie is my favorite character on Breaking Bad and in this movie, Paul brings the same bravado mixed with naiveté that makes me love him on his TV show. Nick Offerman also plays a role in the film as Kate’s well-intentioned mentor. It’s a departure from his comedy work, but he does a good straight man as well. So, if you like the either show, or if you are a glutton for punishment and you like movies about couples falling apart (think Blue Valentine), then I say get thee to a theater come October 12. You won’t be sorry.
Having spent all that time at the festival, without access to regular American television, I have only just caught up on this week’s premieres. Imagine my joy when I get to come home from a two hour drive, plop down in front of my TV, and watch The New Normal, Go On and Guys with Kids. Honestly, what could be better? Besides, you know, a root canal, or a bikini wax or watching the scene from Siriana where George Clooney gets his fingernails ripped off (oof, I shutter just thinking about that scene). 
Ok, ok, it’s not actually that bad. But I wouldn’t call the experience good either. All three shows are flawed, severely in some cases, and it makes me wonder how many are going to make it past the three episode hazing period I give them.
Guys with Kids
Let’s start with the worst. Oh, there are so many things wrong with Guys with Kids. Pace, characterization, cliché, originality. It’s a total mess. First off, it doesn’t help that the show is filmed in front of a live studio audience. Does that make me a horrible person to say that? I used to love shows with audiences. I grew up on them. But then again, those shows were better in every other area. And tastes have changed. The live studio audience to me indicates that I’m going to find tired, cliché jokes that are delivered by actors hamming for the camera. And that’s exactly what Guys with Kids delivers. Think Scrubs’s “My Life in Four Cameras” but not funny.
Jesse Bradford especially is subject to overacting, dropping jokes like they are very heavy bricks, while Anthony Anderson clings on to the joke that he hasn’t been out of the house in years like it is his last cookie. And the women, Jaime-Lynn Sigler and Tempest Bledsoe come off as one-note characters just there so the men have something to complain about. There was a funny moment with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, but it wasn’t enough to save it for me. We’ll see if I can last two more episodes. D
The New Normal
My first thought about The New Normalwas that it was disorienting. Then I realized that because of Hulu’s annoying configuration, I had watched episode 2 before seeing the pilot. Realizing my error, I went back and rewatched everything in the correct order, and things made much more sense.
Now, The New Normal is one of the shows that NBC has been advertising heavily ever since the Olympics, and I would imagine that it is the one of the new shows that the network is proudest of. I mean, it’s got the gays, and a movie star (Ellen Barkin), and a sort of movie star (Justin Bartha) and a Broadway star (Andrew Rannells, aka, the guy from The Book of Mormon), and did I mention the gays? It’s so edgy and progressive that it has to be good, right? Well sort of.
My first thought, actually, was that besides the whole surrogacy element, the show is pretty much a rewrite of the well-conceived, poorly executed Running Wilde. You have the single mom who is trying to teach her daughter how to live and you have the kind-hearted benefactors who are kooky and a little profligate. Luckily for us, this show was more watchable than its cancelled predecessor. It’s flawed, definitely, but let’s start with the good things.
The best thing? Andrew Rannells, hands down. He is perfect as his character, Bryan, campy without being hammy, shallow without being cruel, different without being alienating. He sold me in the first scene where he talks about his future child calling him “Daddy.” The genuine emotion in that scene made me care for the character, and if I continue watching this show, it will probably be for him.
The rest of the cast is pretty great as well. Georgia King plays a very believable, struggling single mother and Bebe Wood is rather adorable as her child. Plus she does a really spot-on impression of Little Edie. Justin Bartha isn’t perfect yet – after The Hangover, I have a little trouble seeing him in this role – but there is definite room for improvement from what I see. As for Ellen Barkin, she is the person that everyone is going to latch onto for her over the top bigotry, and yes, it was enjoyable at times, but I hope that they tone her down in the future. You can only do so many “fudge-packer” jokes before it gets old. And then there’s Nene. I am a little loath to mention her because she is so bad that she’s really out of place in the show. From the two episodes so far, she’s thrown in for a few seconds at the beginning of the show to make a few poorly delivered one-liners and then she flies off into the ether. I hope it stays that way, or better yet, she disappears entirely because she completely lacks comic timing. But I guess we’ll have to see how things go moving forward.
The other flaws in the show? Well, I’m not a fan of the random talking heads, like the two mothers in the pilot on the playground or the doctors in the second ep. It seems out of place, like the showrunners can’t decide if they want to be a mockumentary or not and so are splitting the difference and muddling the storytelling. In that same vein, the 30 Rock-style flashback/fantasy sequences are a pretty jarring. They appear as jokes shoe-horned into the episodes because the writers couldn’t figure out a joke to fit in the actual storyline. In several of the Community commentaries, Dan Harmon talks about how hard it is to write a comedy without the cross-cutting and fantasies, and I agree. I wish that The New Normal would either commit to the element, the way that Scrubs and Family Guy do, or eliminate the style all together. The half-measure that they are using right now does not appeal.
Over all, though, I liked the show enough to come back for at least a few more episodes. We’ll see if things improve. B-
Go On
The final viewing of the night went to Go On, Matthew Perry’s latest attempt to regain televisionary relevancy. I had watched the pilot back in August when it aired after one of the nights of the Olympics. Both then and now I was struck by its similarity to Community, a show which NBC has tried to disavow since its very beginning. This irony was not lost on me. But really, both are shows about curmudgeonly guys who are forced to join a group of misfits and actually finds out that he might have a place there. However, whereas Community is bold and bizarre (and awesome) in its storytelling and boundary-pushing, Go On seems to be taking a much more pedestrian and accessible path. It will probably benefit from this, but I don’t see it reaching the incredible highs that Community has.
That said, of the three shows, I laughed the most at Go On. By far, the actors have the best comic timing, which isn’t surprising given their pedigree. Not only is Perry from Friends, but there is John Cho from Harold and Kumar, Sarah Baker from The Campaign, Bill Cobbs, from nearly every role that Morgan Freeman turned down, Tyler James Williams from Everybody Hates Chris, and Seth Morris and Brett Gelman from a handful of Cartoon Network shows and Will Ferrel movies. Oh, and then there is Allison from Kings – not a comedy, but something you should really watch if you haven’t already. It’s excellent.
So, there is definitely a lot of potential in this show. And storytelling-wise, the writers seem to know how to break a show. The pilot has a clear focus of getting Perry into the group, and I feel that each character was given a moment to present him/herself through the bracket-type pain-off. And you can definitely see how things will move forward, with Perry accepting the group more and more and the group changing for the better because of the his saner, un-Stockholm-syndromed influence. The end of the episode was especially impressive, with the group chasing after the Google-car. If future episodes have that type of heart, I think I could latch on to it.
The second episode was rockier; while trying to up the ante, I think the writers bit off a little more than they could chew. Instead of the one, well-defined story, there were three: Ryan and Sonia with her cats, Ryan, Steven and George with the basketball and Ryan and Carrie with his still-present grief over his wife’s death. The cats storyline was the best and by far the funniest. I laughed not only when everyone kept showing up with yet more felines, but also with Perry on the phone surrounded by cats and even more when Perry had to give the cats away on the side of the road. (I currently have a friend who is trying to do the same thing, and the image was just great.)
The George story of an blind man being robbed of his precious signed basketball was also great. The image of George sitting in the group circle with all his worldly possessions gave me a chuckle, and then when he started to play Coltraine, I really laughed. So random, yet so funny. This was probably the smartest joke of the episode, but I have to admit, the whole story nearly fizzled out after it. In fact, I thought they forgot about it until Ryan takes George to the basketball game. And even then, it was strange when the whole screen went black so we could hear the game. Nice in theory, not so effective in practice.
And then there was Carries’s story. This was the least effective for me, just because it is the most well-tread. We have all seen the lonely person latch on to another friend, only to drive said friend crazy. It was done on Scrubs in “My Persepctive”; it was done on Community in “Home Economics”; and it was done on Friends in “The One with the Princess Leia Fantasy” Yes, it was sweet when Ryan got the text saying that Carrie was thinking about him. But it wasn’t enough to save the whole plot.
At this point, I think I might add Go On to my weekly viewing, but it will take a few more episodes to say for certain. Until that time, I think I will enjoy myself. Either that or NBC will cancel it before giving it a chance, which would be about my luck. We shall see, won’t we? B
Happy viewing!!
-Mary
Mary the TV Maven 