Ryan on TV: Fall 2007

TV is back! After a summer full of reality shows I don’t care about and cable dramas I can’t see, network TV came roaring back last week, and it promises to be more fun than a barrel of… of… Britney Spearses? Or O.J. Simpsons. Whichever is funnier.

You know, most fall TV previews are penned by writers who have actually seen some of the new shows they’re writing about, but not me! You’ll never catch me putting on airs, copping an attitude of “Oh, I’m so much better than everyone because I’m a big fat legitimate TV critic!” I’m not even remotely legitimate! All of my opinions of as-yet-unaired shows are based on 1. Commercials and 2. Reading Entertainment Weekly and The AV Club.

You know also, over the summer I’ve gotten used to not having appointment TV. My evenings have been so wide open without television taking up weekly half hours and hours – I’ve watched DVDs, gotten some reading done, and learned Cantonese and the sarussaphone. Two of my favorite shows are over now (Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls) and Lost doesn’t return until February, so maybe this is an opportunity. Maybe I should cut back on TV this season, so I’ll have more time for other pursuits.

Nah.

Now it’s time for me to make my prediction for the four new shows that are Most Likely to Get Cancelled by the end of the season. In the past I’ve had about a 50% success rate, so expect at least two of these shows to get axed, much like the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood: Cavemen, Samantha Who?, Viva Laughlin and The Bionic Woman.

Cavemen is based on a Geico commercial. Advance buzz has been pretty uniformly negative and the last sitcom to be based on a commercial (No, not The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer… I’m talking about Baby Bob) didn’t do so well, so expect Cavemen to go extinct pretty quickly. Although a guest appearance by Fred Flintstone might help.

Similarly, I predict that The Bionic Woman will be just as successful as other recent attempts to revive old shows (Night Stalker, The Fugitive, The Twilight Zone) and will be beaten in the ratings by shows that are better, stronger, faster.

As cute as Christina Applegate is, there’s no way the premise of Samantha Who? — a cantankerous woman gets amnesia and rediscovers her life – can sustain a series, so I think it’ll be forgotten pretty quickly.

Viva Laughlin takes place in a casino and is, apparently, a musical. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if it catches on just because it’s so different, but viewers don’t always tend to go for “different” in a major way. I could be wrong, of course. Laughlin could start a trend of TV musicals, much like the post-Simpsons animation boom or the post-Millionaire game show explosion. This time next year we may be getting new shows about singing doctors, singing lawyers, and singing hitmen. Maybe even a singing animated game show host!

No, which new is the New Show I’m Most Looking Forward To? I’m going to go with Pushing Daisies, and not just because ABC gave me a free daisy a few weeks ago as part of the show’s promotion. The creative team includes Bryan Fuller (of Wonderfalls and Heroes) and Addams Family movie director Barry Sonnenfeld, and among the cast, you got your Lee Pace (from Wonderfalls) and your Ellen Greene (who will always be Little Shop of Horrors’ Audrey to me and millions of others). The story is about a piemaker who can bring dead things back to life by touching them. It’s certainly not another procedural crime show.

And which is the Returning show I’m Most Looking Forward To? Well, Scrubs was disappointing last season and probably should have ended, and I’m having trouble remembering everything that happened on Heroes, so it’s going to come down between 30 Rock and The Office… I think I’ll go with The Office, because last season’s finale gave us some great developments (Ryan is Michael’s boss, Jim asked out Pam, Jan moved in with Michael), and seeing them play out should be fun.

And now I will bestow the award for Worst New Show Title. I’ve known what it was going to be for weeks now… Dirty Sexy Money. What were they thinking? For me, it conjures up images of a $50 dollar bill dressed like a streetwalker, and I have no doubt that everyone else in America will get the same impression.

Other thoughts – and I have a lot of them:

• The game show hosted by Jeff Foxworthy is called Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? for the second year in a row. I guess it got held back… maybe it got in trouble for pulling Power of 10’s pigtails.

• The new show Moonlight is about a heroic brooding vampire. I liked it better the first time… when it was called Magnum P.I.!

• You may be asking yourself, Without Gilmore Girls, where will I get my alliteration fix? Well, the CW has Gossip Girl and Gilmore creator Amy Sherman-Palladino is working on the new comedy The Return of Jezebel James, starring the alliterative Parker Posey, so there’s no need for fear a lack of lots of lovely letters.

• Did anyone watch the premiere of Back to You last Wednesday? Was it any good? I’ve been saying for years that a talented bunch of writers and actors should get together and create a show that brings the multi-camera, studio-audience sitcom format back to its former glory. Could this be that show… or is it just half an hour of Patricia Heaton and Kelsey Grammer insulting each other?

The jokes they showed in the promo don’t make it look so fresh. Why do all commercials for comedies show the stupidest jokes? Is it just that dumb jokes are easiest to understand quickly, or do the networks believe the majority of viewers are dodos? Are they right?

• I wish I could say Andy Barker, P.I., the Andy Richter vehicle from last midseason, was returning, but it’s not. You know, Andy Richter is great, but his greatest success so far has been as a sidekick, so maybe he should think about being part of an ensemble, rather than the lead, in his next series.

• The one-word title craze continues, with new shows like Cane, Reaper, Moonlight, and Carpoolers joining the returning likes of Shark, Bones and House. Who wants to write a story using only the words of current TV show titles?

• From what I’ve read, this season of How I Met Your Mother will be special because he’s finally going to meet your mother. As the show enters its third year, it’s about time. Maybe your mother will convince Alyson Hannigan to let her hair go back to its natural red color. She doesn’t look so good with dark locks.

• If I were a real entertainment journalist, I would write this sentence about Kate Walsh’s new show: “There are big expectations for the new Grey’s Anatomy spinoff, but will Private Practice make perfect?” But I’m not, so I won’t.

Okay, I think that’s all I have to say about TV today. Tell me what you’re watching and liking and recording and hating!

Meditations and Reflections on That “Eat It” Guy

On Thursday I saw “Weird Al” Yankovic at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan. I’d like to give a shout-out to the groovy Michal, who was largely responsible for my getting a ticket for a reasonable price.

I own all of his albums and I’d seen him three times before, so I wasn’t especially excited about hearing Al and his band play the older big hits like “Fat” and “Eat It” again, although I knew it was inevitable that those songs would appear. There were people besides me in the audience, and many of them were seeing him for the first time, so they would have felt gypped without hearing the Yankovic standards.

But I was pleasantly surprised when the first half of the show skewed toward the three most recent albums. There was “Close But No Cigar” and “I’ll Sue Ya” from the new album. They even played “Why Does This Always Happen to Me?” a non-parody album track from Poodle Hat.

Weird Al has managed to pull off a pretty amazing, long-running career for a guy who writes funny songs. During the show, as I glanced around at all the 10-year-old kids in the audience, it occurred to me that “Beat It” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” are oldies to them, which makes me marvel at Weird Al’s perennial appeal and makes me feel old.

Of course it’s possible for young fans to be aware of music from before their time — I certainly appreciated “I Love Rocky Road” and “Another One Rides the Bus” when I first became a Yankovic fan at the age of 12, even though “I Love Rock & Roll” and “Another One Bites the Dust” debuted when I was 1 and -1, respectively. Still… maybe I’m too young to be going on about how old I feel, but it struck me when I realized that for a fan who’s 10 now, “Fat” came out 10 years before they were born. Yikes.

Anyway, Weird Al puts on a great show, with lots of costume changes and video clips projected onto a giant screen at the back of the stage. It’s always fun seeing the reactions of audience members who have never seen the fake interviews from the Al-TV specials as they realize that the interviews are not only fake, they’re hilarious.*

The only problem with the structure of the show is that with all the carefully rehearsed transitions between songs, there’s no room for patter. Just once I’d like to hear Al speak to the audience between songs, just speaking without reciting scripted lines. It would terrific if they would do a smaller concert tour aimed at the true Weird Al geeks, maybe hitting just a few major cities, featuring some of the more obscure tracks, like “I Was Only Kidding” and “Generic Blues” and “Slime Creatures From Outer Space” and “Since You’ve Been Gone.” And they wouldn’t have to play “Eat It” or “Fat,” because we’ve all heard them before.

But I’m sure a tour like that will never happen. So maybe instead, Al and the band could come over to my place and do a set.

Other thoughts:

• There was a big to-do when Atlantic Records refused to let Weird Al put the “You’re Beautiful” parody “You’re Pitiful” on the new album, but I think it worked out for the best. Could a video of “You’re Pitiful” possibly have been as entertaining, or as hugely popular on the internet, as the video for “White & Nerdy?” I really don’t think so, especially because so many of Al’s fans are exactly the Halo 2-playing, no-date-having dudes mocked in the James Blunt parody. “White & Nerdy,” on the other hand, celebrates and glorifies geeks rather than taunting them, which made it a much better song to help give Weird Al his first-ever top 10 debut on the Billboard charts.

• A section of “Couch Potato” was left out. I wondered why until I remembered it included a reference to Anna Nicole Smith. What amount of time is appropriate for something like that? How long after Kurt Cobain’s death did Al go back to playing “Smells Like Nirvana?”

• Speaking of “Smells Like Nirvana,” at the end of that song I happened to be watching Steve Jay, the bass player, as he threw his bass way up in the air. I don’t know if that’s something he does during every performance, but if so, I hope he always catches it.

• My friend Matt (aka the Muuj) once remarked that the instrumental track “Welcome to the Fun Zone” from Weird Al’s movie UHF proves that Al is a musical genius. Matt knows a lot more about music than I do, so I can’t really music theory explanations for that claim. But they play that song at the very beginning of every concert before the band comes out, and it always gets me so jazzed I’m inclined to agree.

• I didn’t catch any of the Yankovic dollar bills that rained down on the audience during “I’ll Sue Ya.” Maybe next time.

So, yeah. Weird Al is cool.

*Like these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHaq1PlfJXU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHEFLLUMsdk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTggMSPnRUo