TV: Three Pilots
Jun. 9th, 2005 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentI've watched more TV tonight than in the past month, I think.
The Inside - 'Pilot'
Story by Howard Gordon and Tim Minear; screenplay by Tim Minear; directed by Tim Minear
If you've not been paying attention, this is a show I've been looking forward to for a while. It's not just the fact that Tim Minear's name is in the Executive Producer slot, though that's a big part of it; it's the number of other Mutant Enemy alumni he's recalled to active duty that makes things interesting. Jane Espenson, Ben Edlund and David Fury writing; Rob Kral providing the music; Ross Berryman handling the cinematography. There's even a role for Adam Baldwin.
Watching it proved to be a slightly surreal experience.
But first things first: The Inside is a dark, psychological crime drama. It's set in LA, and revolves around an FBI unit charged with hunting down serial killers. Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols) is the unit's newest recruit, a two-years-out-of-Quantico rookie who applied repeatedly for behavioural profiling duties but was turned down every time until Virgil Webster (Peter Coyote) found space for her.
It becomes clear fairly quickly that he did not do this entirely out of the goodness of his heart. Webster's unit has an unusual degree of autonomy, and Webster is a pragmatist for whom solving the crime comes before most moral concerns. The reason he recruited Locke is the same reason everyone else turned her down: as a child she was abducted, and abused. Everyone else thinks it would be too risky, or simply too cruel, to have her working day-to-day on similar cases. Webster thinks it gives her a gift, and he might just be right. Or, as Minear puts it on the show's website: "This is a show about damaged people--the only interesting kind there is--and about how their damage sometimes makes them especially suited to the work they do."
It's not just Locke, mind; everyone in the Violent Crimes Unit seems to have been hand-picked by Webster for their particular damage, though we only get an insight into one or two of the team in this first episode. The result is that The Inside has its feet firmly planted in the greyest of grey areas from the start, with Webster coming off like he's got Holland Manners for a cousin and the Cigarette Smoking Man for a brother.
There are good and bad things about the episode. The plot does what it has to do, and avoids doing it in the most predictable way possible, but is nothing spectacular. The performances are solid, although the largest strike against the show is that too few of the characters, beyond Locke and Webster, have immediately memorable personalities. The subject matter is pretty meaty stuff, and exactly the sort of thing Minear is at home with. There is, in other words, potential.
But if you're particularly familiar with Angel, watching it is, as I said, slightly surreal, because it looks and sounds ... well, not the same, but strangely similar. 'Billy' is the episode that kept coming to mind. The colours are similar, the music is similar (although I think at some point Minear got Kral to listen to the Firefly soundtrack and told him 'I'd like some of that as well, please'), the camera angles are similar. The villain is played by a guest star familiar from other Minear episodes of Angel. There are the same flashy-flash-whizz-cuts between scenes. There's even a shot of the Sixth Street Bridge in the opening credits. It gets to the point where the nice Angel in-joke (although not as nice as the fact that in the original script, the abandoned hotel they visited was the Hyperion) seems almost redundant.
It's not Angel. It's very much not Angel: not in subject, not in format. And the style works for the show, it really does. But it didn't half give me a few moments of cognitive dissonance.
Global Frequency
based on the comic by Warren Ellis
The Inside has style, but Global Frequency has cool. Think of it as being a bit like 24, but on drugs.
Warren Ellis' comic dealt with a sort of 21st-century International Rescue: a thousand and one freaks, geeks and secret agents from around the world marshalled into the ultimate life-saving smart mob by Miranda Zero, her communications chief Aleph, and a lot of bandwidth. They handled plenty of your regular terrorists, but also more exciting things, like men with psychic bombs in their head and invasion by alien memes. As such things go, it was all very satisfying in a multiplex flash-bang way. The cast of each issue was a movable feast; the whole point of the Global Frequency being that it can call on a thousand and one operatives, picking whoever has the skills for the job at hand.
This is a concept made for TV, a genuine near-future sf thriller show, and when you watch the pilot--made for the WB, but never picked up--it's hard not to grin at the insane genius of it.
The episode is a relatively close adaptation of issue one of the comic, the ex-Soviet psychic bomb story. Sean Flynn (Josh Hopkins) is an ex-cop who stumbles across a corpse, picks up a funny-looking phone and finds that he's on the gobal frequency. Dr Katrina Finch (Jenni Baird) is the physics-and-everything-else expert pulled in by Miranda Zero (Michelle Forbes) and Aleph (Aimee Garcia) to help out. They have fifty-five minutes before their target detonates, and takes half of San Francisco with him. Only problem: they don't know who or where he is.
When I said 24 on drugs, I meant lots of drugs.
There are things that don't work. Some of the effects work is ropey, and I don't think it's just that it was unfinished. Flynn and Finch are caricatures more than characters. Some of the direction and exposition are a bit clunky; for the most part the show has a surprisingly down-to-earth feel, but every so often it loses that and becomes just ever so slightly silly. The soundtrack ain't the greatest.
But ... the casting of Forbes is spot-on (if perhaps looking a little too much like she's just walked out of the Matrix), as is that of Garcia. And the central conceit--this meta-intelligence agency, with access to everything and everyone--is still fantastically cool. And they kept the comic's ending, which emphasises a hard choice, and I always like those.
This should've been picked up. It could've been great fun.
House
'Pilot' written by David Shore; Directed by Bryan Singer
House is a show a few people have been talking about. It's a hospital drama; the lead character, Gregory House, is played by Hugh Laurie (putting on an American accent). And I find I have much less to say about it than either of the other two shows.
That's not to say it's bad; there just isn't much about it that excites me, and I'm not sure why. I should like it. House is cynical and misanthropic (given to saying things like 'treating illness is why we became doctors--treating patients is what makes most doctors miserable' and 'humanity is overrated'), but he's smart. There's something almost Holmesian about the relentlessly logical way he approaches his medicine. There's also an echo of The Inside in the way that he's handpicked his team of assistants, although here it's clearly pure pragmatism, with no sinister overtones.
Maybe that's why I'm not wowed by it. It's got some good lines, but it feels a bit too safe. The episode sets up a clear formula; if that's kept to in subsequent episodes, there's really no reason to tune in except to watch House do his schtick, and as good as Hugh Laurie is I'm not sure it's quite enough for me. If it goes the other way, it could be a really interesting show that actually examines how a sense of humanitarian compassion interacts with medical science. There are some interesting nods towards how dehumanising it can be to be a patient in this episode, and more of that would be better.
So I might try to watch a few more, but it hasn't grabbed me as much as the other two shows.
Also watched recently: the first episode of Veronica Mars. I'm not going to write anything about it just yet, but it's very, very good and if you get a chance you should try it out.
The Inside - 'Pilot'
Story by Howard Gordon and Tim Minear; screenplay by Tim Minear; directed by Tim Minear
If you've not been paying attention, this is a show I've been looking forward to for a while. It's not just the fact that Tim Minear's name is in the Executive Producer slot, though that's a big part of it; it's the number of other Mutant Enemy alumni he's recalled to active duty that makes things interesting. Jane Espenson, Ben Edlund and David Fury writing; Rob Kral providing the music; Ross Berryman handling the cinematography. There's even a role for Adam Baldwin.
Watching it proved to be a slightly surreal experience.
But first things first: The Inside is a dark, psychological crime drama. It's set in LA, and revolves around an FBI unit charged with hunting down serial killers. Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols) is the unit's newest recruit, a two-years-out-of-Quantico rookie who applied repeatedly for behavioural profiling duties but was turned down every time until Virgil Webster (Peter Coyote) found space for her.
It becomes clear fairly quickly that he did not do this entirely out of the goodness of his heart. Webster's unit has an unusual degree of autonomy, and Webster is a pragmatist for whom solving the crime comes before most moral concerns. The reason he recruited Locke is the same reason everyone else turned her down: as a child she was abducted, and abused. Everyone else thinks it would be too risky, or simply too cruel, to have her working day-to-day on similar cases. Webster thinks it gives her a gift, and he might just be right. Or, as Minear puts it on the show's website: "This is a show about damaged people--the only interesting kind there is--and about how their damage sometimes makes them especially suited to the work they do."
It's not just Locke, mind; everyone in the Violent Crimes Unit seems to have been hand-picked by Webster for their particular damage, though we only get an insight into one or two of the team in this first episode. The result is that The Inside has its feet firmly planted in the greyest of grey areas from the start, with Webster coming off like he's got Holland Manners for a cousin and the Cigarette Smoking Man for a brother.
There are good and bad things about the episode. The plot does what it has to do, and avoids doing it in the most predictable way possible, but is nothing spectacular. The performances are solid, although the largest strike against the show is that too few of the characters, beyond Locke and Webster, have immediately memorable personalities. The subject matter is pretty meaty stuff, and exactly the sort of thing Minear is at home with. There is, in other words, potential.
But if you're particularly familiar with Angel, watching it is, as I said, slightly surreal, because it looks and sounds ... well, not the same, but strangely similar. 'Billy' is the episode that kept coming to mind. The colours are similar, the music is similar (although I think at some point Minear got Kral to listen to the Firefly soundtrack and told him 'I'd like some of that as well, please'), the camera angles are similar. The villain is played by a guest star familiar from other Minear episodes of Angel. There are the same flashy-flash-whizz-cuts between scenes. There's even a shot of the Sixth Street Bridge in the opening credits. It gets to the point where the nice Angel in-joke (although not as nice as the fact that in the original script, the abandoned hotel they visited was the Hyperion) seems almost redundant.
It's not Angel. It's very much not Angel: not in subject, not in format. And the style works for the show, it really does. But it didn't half give me a few moments of cognitive dissonance.
Global Frequency
based on the comic by Warren Ellis
The Inside has style, but Global Frequency has cool. Think of it as being a bit like 24, but on drugs.
Warren Ellis' comic dealt with a sort of 21st-century International Rescue: a thousand and one freaks, geeks and secret agents from around the world marshalled into the ultimate life-saving smart mob by Miranda Zero, her communications chief Aleph, and a lot of bandwidth. They handled plenty of your regular terrorists, but also more exciting things, like men with psychic bombs in their head and invasion by alien memes. As such things go, it was all very satisfying in a multiplex flash-bang way. The cast of each issue was a movable feast; the whole point of the Global Frequency being that it can call on a thousand and one operatives, picking whoever has the skills for the job at hand.
This is a concept made for TV, a genuine near-future sf thriller show, and when you watch the pilot--made for the WB, but never picked up--it's hard not to grin at the insane genius of it.
The episode is a relatively close adaptation of issue one of the comic, the ex-Soviet psychic bomb story. Sean Flynn (Josh Hopkins) is an ex-cop who stumbles across a corpse, picks up a funny-looking phone and finds that he's on the gobal frequency. Dr Katrina Finch (Jenni Baird) is the physics-and-everything-else expert pulled in by Miranda Zero (Michelle Forbes) and Aleph (Aimee Garcia) to help out. They have fifty-five minutes before their target detonates, and takes half of San Francisco with him. Only problem: they don't know who or where he is.
When I said 24 on drugs, I meant lots of drugs.
There are things that don't work. Some of the effects work is ropey, and I don't think it's just that it was unfinished. Flynn and Finch are caricatures more than characters. Some of the direction and exposition are a bit clunky; for the most part the show has a surprisingly down-to-earth feel, but every so often it loses that and becomes just ever so slightly silly. The soundtrack ain't the greatest.
But ... the casting of Forbes is spot-on (if perhaps looking a little too much like she's just walked out of the Matrix), as is that of Garcia. And the central conceit--this meta-intelligence agency, with access to everything and everyone--is still fantastically cool. And they kept the comic's ending, which emphasises a hard choice, and I always like those.
This should've been picked up. It could've been great fun.
House
'Pilot' written by David Shore; Directed by Bryan Singer
House is a show a few people have been talking about. It's a hospital drama; the lead character, Gregory House, is played by Hugh Laurie (putting on an American accent). And I find I have much less to say about it than either of the other two shows.
That's not to say it's bad; there just isn't much about it that excites me, and I'm not sure why. I should like it. House is cynical and misanthropic (given to saying things like 'treating illness is why we became doctors--treating patients is what makes most doctors miserable' and 'humanity is overrated'), but he's smart. There's something almost Holmesian about the relentlessly logical way he approaches his medicine. There's also an echo of The Inside in the way that he's handpicked his team of assistants, although here it's clearly pure pragmatism, with no sinister overtones.
Maybe that's why I'm not wowed by it. It's got some good lines, but it feels a bit too safe. The episode sets up a clear formula; if that's kept to in subsequent episodes, there's really no reason to tune in except to watch House do his schtick, and as good as Hugh Laurie is I'm not sure it's quite enough for me. If it goes the other way, it could be a really interesting show that actually examines how a sense of humanitarian compassion interacts with medical science. There are some interesting nods towards how dehumanising it can be to be a patient in this episode, and more of that would be better.
So I might try to watch a few more, but it hasn't grabbed me as much as the other two shows.
Also watched recently: the first episode of Veronica Mars. I'm not going to write anything about it just yet, but it's very, very good and if you get a chance you should try it out.
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Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-06-19 11:53 am (UTC)Also, how schmaltzy and ill-fitting was the ending to episode two (the one with the La-Cross player)? I do hope that's not a trend.
Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-06-19 02:26 pm (UTC)You mean House's ability to act normally? Yes, it appears organic, seamless, and well-written to me. When he runs out of other avenues of approach, House sometimes drops the reflexive fencing and abrasiveness and, as a last resort, just deals directly with the person in front of him like a normal person would, with normal affect and everything (though don't expect him to cry buckets or break out laughing). It doesn't happen often, but he can do it and he knows he's doing it. The most notable early example I know of is in "DNR," the ninth episode, when he talks straight with a patient.
> Also, how schmaltzy and ill-fitting was the ending to episode two (the one with the La-Cross player)? I do hope that's not a trend.<
Before I respond to this, first tell me exactly what you think happened in the ending to episode two: who was doing what, when, and where. I've heard approximately twenty-five other people weigh in on this, and so far, I think that only two of them were right. (I also don't get why this scene poses such a problem for people.)
Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-06-19 02:50 pm (UTC)That's good to know.
Okay. Well it's somewhat unclear as to exactly what we're seeing (which I guess you've already established): but my take on it was that House goes and stands in the deserted LaCross field - and recalls his boyhood memories of playing the game. Am I right?
Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-06-19 04:43 pm (UTC)> Okay. Well it's somewhat unclear as to exactly what we're seeing (which I guess you've already established): <
I don't think it is that unclear, but I needed to make sure we were on the same page since so few people agree.
> but my take on it was that House goes and stands in the deserted LaCross field - and recalls his boyhood memories of playing the game. Am I right? <
Well, House stands on the sidelines, not in the field itself, but apart from that, that's my sense as well, and the evidence supports it. (The team names and jerseys are different and the numbers of the players are different, so he's not recalling a game played by the patient, and since he cheers on a specific player by number, he's not just having a random fantasy about the thrill of the game, both of which seem to be popular theories.) The first word that came to my mind was "downbeat," though, not "schmaltzy" nor "ill-fitting." (O.K., maybe the music was drippy, but not the subject matter.) Whether literally or figuratively, he does not recall his own memories of having once been athletic firsthand anymore. He now cheers his adolescent self on from the sidelines. That's kind of twisted.
We hear more about the leg injury later, and on reflection, maybe having seen the backstory first before seeing the second episode made me more sympathetic to House's depressing nostalgia. Perhaps I would have been more put off if I had seen the episodes in the proper order.
Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-06-19 04:58 pm (UTC)Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-06-26 01:19 pm (UTC)> I really don't think it fitted with the rest of the episode. <
On the rare occasions when House demonstrates that he has feelings beyond work, they're not necessarily going to be seamlessly integrated into the rest of the episode, because (except for Wilson), he doesn't share with the other characters. (The only exception in subject matter I can think of at the moment is religion, but that ties into the philosophy that guides his work, so it's not really an exception after all.) I think that isolating him for those occasions is a deliberate choice on the part of the writers. If healing an injured lacrosse player makes House envious over the fact that his once able body is denied to him, he's not going to bring it up at the hospital with either the patient or his coworkers. The writers are going to have to find a way to visit that subject without dialogue. The other instances I can think of when they completely isolate him have him home alone sitting at the piano, but I don't see that working too well with this particular subject.
> We see him reliving his memories; in a deliberately overly sentimental manner. <
Since I didn't feel invited to relive the memories with him from his point of view, I found it more stark than sentimental, although I did watch the scene again and disliked the music more than I had remembered. But then maybe I'm too little of a sports fan to be moved by memories of sports. Any middle-aged but otherwise able-bodied person reliving the athletic triumphs of youth is going to strike me as a bit pathetic. House's injury is the one thing that gives that scene depth to me, because it signifies that there's so much more that's denied to him than simply playing games.
> Maybe I'm too English to be comfortable with that level of emotional manipulation in movies. <
Well, sentimentality is a good thing to be on guard against. I just wonder if there isn't a danger of throwing the baby of genuine feeling out with the bath water. :)
Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-06-26 03:37 pm (UTC)Retrospectively (and with the benefit of now having seen the third episode as well), I think I am now starting to understand this point. The more I think about that scene, the less inclined to think ill of it. I still don't really like it - but I certainly think I understand what the writers were trying. Perhaps episode two was too early for this scene to work well - since we the viewer haven't entirely settled on what we think about House?
"I did watch the scene again and disliked the music more than I had remembered."
The music certainly didn't help the scene at all.
"Sentimentality is a good thing to be on guard against. I just wonder if there isn't a danger of throwing the baby of genuine feeling out with the bath water."
That is always a danger, I think.
Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-07-02 06:02 am (UTC)> Retrospectively (and with the benefit of now having seen the third episode as well), I think I am now starting to understand this point. <
(sigh) You're one up on me, since Fox isn't going to repeat the third ep. this summer. But it is a consistent point of characterization. On rare occasions, House will make a fearlessly candid confession to Wilson, but for the vast majority of the time, he keeps his personal thoughts to himself, which means the writers haven't given themselves an easy, conventional way to externalize him.
> The more I think about that scene, the less inclined to think ill of it. I still don't really like it - but I certainly think I understand what the writers were trying. <
As I watch it yet again, I wonder if what I was getting from it was an authorial intention, a directorial intention, or just an interesting accident. There's something almost creepy to me about the way House stands on the sidelines and mentally cheers, rather than standing in the middle of the field and going into a direct, first-person point-of-view memory. I'm not sure if the writers meant to relegate House to the sidelines in his own memories or if the director did, or if it's really just a curious coincidence resulting from the staging.
> Perhaps episode two was too early for this scene to work well - since we the viewer haven't entirely settled on what we think about House? <
I can believe that. I'm way too spoiled by seeing the end of the first season to judge the second ep. with completely fresh eyes now. On the other hand, I'm both amused and bemused by how radically different interpretations of the character spring from different fans on the Fox-sponsored _House_ board, even among those who have seen all the episodes. Characters who don't share tend to turn into Rorschach tests for the viewers.
>> I did watch the scene again and disliked the music more than I had remembered. <<
> The music certainly didn't help the scene at all. <
The music is a bit like milk, isn't it? Bland to start out with and goes further off the longer you keep it around.
Re: _House, M.D._
Date: 2005-07-02 12:36 pm (UTC)It's certainly a more difficult character to write for, than a more "conventional" emoting character.
I can believe that. I'm way too spoiled by seeing the end of the first season to judge the second ep. with completely fresh eyes now. "
I'm sure that will influence things. Certainly going back to it last week, after having seen the next episode; I did find that scene had a different feel to it.
"Characters who don't share tend to turn into Rorschach tests for the viewers.
Indeed.
"The music is a bit like milk, isn't it? Bland to start out with and goes further off the longer you keep it around."
That would seem to be exactly right! :-)