Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005 - 3:04 a.m.

I'm a pretty fair tv junkie, so it is not without some anticipation that I wait for each new fall season. Unfortunately, by and large, the last several years have failed to offer more than one, sometimes two, new shows that capture and keep my attention.

This year, the only two I've seen so far that I actually solidly like are the WB's Supernatural and Criminal Minds on CBS.

Supernatural is good and creeeeeepy. Like, nightmares and nightlights, if you're a scare wimp who needed the hall light on and the door cracked for the first 15 years of your life. (hey, YOU try watching horror movies with your dad late at night on Saturdays when you're 6 and see how well *you* sleep without a nightlight) The plots (okay, the pilot...I still haven't seen the second episode, because after the first one, I have decided my viewing should probably occur early in the day so that I have the entire daylight period to get over the creeps, so the second episode is still tivo'd and waiting to go) are decent, the dialogue is snappy, and Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles have good chemistry as ghost-hunting, demon-slaying brothers in search of their missing Van Helsing-like father. There's also a nice creeeeeepy backstory about a demon who killed their mother that I won't get into in case you haven't seen the first episode yet - though how you could miss it is beyond me with the number of replays the WB gives all its new shows, but whatever. I like the show.

CBS' Criminal Minds has the single, very real drawback of resembling a Bruckheimer show, which is a severe and serious detriment, but luckily the writing is waaaaaaay better than any of the lame, rehashed crap the Bruckheimer camp insists on spewing out show after show. Seriously, anything past the original CSI, and I have no use at all for Bruckheimer, and that show has been gradually sliding down slope since CSI: New York hit the scene and pulled focus. Bruckheimer has the uncanny ability to take a hit show, subtract every single thing that works about it, and turn what's left into a spinoff. I'm not sure how he does it, because he seems to take the writers from the show that works and puts them on the new show which doesn't work, but there you have it. Unfortunately, the new CSI writing team - or the newer members of it - kinda suck, and CSI is starting to make less and less sense and getting more "slick" with every single episode. Y tu mama, Bruckheimer. But this isn't about Bruckheimer, it's about Criminal Minds, and Criminal Minds is sharp. It's like Monk, but without the campy humor and with actual nasty crimes. Mandy Patinkin plays this profiler recovering from PTSD, and like just about everything else Patinkin does, his character is sharp, precise, a tad sardonic, a bigger tad egotistical, and a serious mental ass kicker. His version of Sharona is this wunderkind he calls Dr. Reid who is Rainman without the freakouts, while Thomas Gibson (who was adorable as Greg on Dharma & Greg, but who I don't really tend to like, otherwise) is his watchdog Captain Stottlemeyer character. The soap opera guy on the show does a way better job on this than he did whatever that horrible soap was he used to be on (which I hasten to add I did not actually *watch* but have seen parts of), and the token chick is okay. The real action is between Patinkin's character Gideon and his sidekick, Reid. (Or, for that matter, any scene Patinkin is in.) Everyone else is sort of along for the ride, though Gibson holds his own. It might be hard to keep his character from turning into a smarmy prick, though, so the jury's still out on him. His family man plot doesn't really work for me either, so I'd be happy if that got scrubbed altogether. There's really no place for it on the show. But anyway, Criminal Minds is sort of like a darker, more brooding Monk meets Silence of the Lambs. I dig it.

The only other two shows I've seen that I can tolerate at all are How I Met Your Mother, which will be good if it ever gets over its forced zaniness and staginess, and Out of Practice, which has the effortless cool of Stockard Channing and the quiet but capable presence of Henry Winkler, who is, by the way, one of the nicest men ever. I met him at workplace from hell once, and he was da Bom', yo. Plus, dude, the Fonz *hugged me*. Jennifer Tilly also had a killer scene in the pilot episode, playing Henry Winkler's floozy receptionist Crystal, and she totally stole it. The woman knows how to chew scenery without looking like she's chewing scenery. More and more, I like her, and I've never been a Tilly fan, Meg or Jen.

The WORST two shows I've seen so far - and bygones if you liked 'em, but holy crap, are they awful - are Ghost Whisperer and the David Boreanaz forensics mystery show, Bones.

Ghost Whisperer was bad on so many levels it defies description. I watched it at my friends' house, and seriously, at one point in the show, the cat threw up, and they actually fought over who got to go clean it up. (The loser had to stay and keep watching.) A few times, we were howling with laughter at the sheer atrociousness of the stilted and corny dialogue and the complete and utter lack of any chemistry whatsoever between J-Hew and her newly-wedded hubby. They get married during the pilot episode, and I'm tellin' you, they must be brother and sister, there's such an utter lack of chemistry - or anything - there. Of course, it would help if either one of them could act, but that's beside the point. I actually let my head fall forward into my hands more than once and moaned in pain while I shook my head at the horrendous acting. It was bad. It was a bloodbath of bad. It was some of the worst acting EVER, and that includes that horrible Peter Coyote thing I ripped on a few months ago AND every single episode of the WB's One Tree Hill that I ever saw (okay, fine; all *2* of them). We all agreed the only actual acting that went on in the entire episode was in the first scene, by Eddie Jones and the little girl who plays J-Hew as a child, and in another scene later by an older woman who asks J-Hew to tell her husband the key to the safe deposit box is in her blue raincoat. Everyone else either sucked pondwater or might be a decent actor but had really horrible, melodramatic lines they acted really horribly and melodramatically. Perhaps it was the director's fault. J-Hew, though, J-Hew gets sole responsibility for her own suckage, which is immense.

As for Bones, uh, wow. I wanted to like this show, because it has David Boreanaz, and I really miss Angel, so I thought, dark, brooding, David Boreanaz...it might work. Unfortunately, while he himself is pretty good in it, the writing is forced, trite, clicheed, and predictable, and the lead actress, Emily Deschanel, is an even worse, albeit angrier and faster-talking, actress than Jennifer Love-Hewitt. Deschanel's line readings are so flat, you can, as Jonny C is wont to say, serve drinks off of them. Not only that, but she appears to have never met a comma she didn't like, while simultaneously never having heard of the period. She runs thru her lines in a lip-splitting, emotionless fashion most actors save for memorization (it's called a speed read) and does not so much actually utilize a period as just runs out of words. Half of her lines end like she's right in the middle of a sentence. At first I thought it was some kind of Shatner Technique, but then I realized no, her lines were just over. She also delivers every line like she's angry...or would be angry, were she to actually experience emotion. The lines themselves are very contradictory, whiny, angry, or negative, along the lines of "I don't like you because you work for Homeland Security and think you're so hot so I'm not going to tell you anything even though it's my job to tell you because you work for Homeland Security and aren't in my department and I'm so much smarter than you anyway and have I mentioned I don't like you because you have a penis and you're in Homeland Security and now I'm going to go in my office and slam my door rudely in your face because I'm bitchy like that and". And I so wish that was an exaggeration. It also drove me insane that her nickname is BONES - because, you know, she works with bones - and so everyone makes sure to drop her name really, really obviously every odd-numbered sentence they speak to her so that we the viewers, who are woefully stupid and must be told often that her name is BONES, will make the connection between her name, BONES, and the name of the show, Bones. Because, you know, it's totally a show about BONES. Not bones, which also make numerous appearances in the show, but BONES the person. And yes, when everyone says her name, they say it like that. It's the most fake, uncomfortable thing ever.

And on that note, I am going to go to bed, now. I have one more day of work on the documentary and then I'm through for a few days and can do stuff like take care of my fix-it ticket, which I almost forgot about, and resume job hunting and maybe make some more jewelry.

Oo, ah.

Peace out,
Katie

11 comments so far

*HUGS* TOTAL! give katiedoyle more *HUGS*
Get hugs of your own

Yesterday's News - Next Stop

In which Katie shares sad news - Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2015
In which Katie returns after a very long absence - Monday, Jun. 25, 2012
In which Katie pokes her head in and brushes some of the cobwebs away - Thursday, May. 06, 2010
In which Katie asks you to write your congressman again. - Monday, Jun. 02, 2008
In which Katie asks you to please click the link and send the message to protect the rights of artists - Wednesday, May. 21, 2008