TV Review: Benched

Networks have brands, just like floor cleaners or potato chips.  CBS has crime procedurals where people hug at the end (see my blog posts about Scorpion).  Fox has comedies that are so crude that commentators on Fox News complain about them.  USA has programs about attractive people having career crises.

That description of USA programming applies to Royal Pains (attractive doctor with career crisis), Suits (attractive fake and real lawyers having career problems), Burn Notice (attractive spy has career crisis) and White Collar (attractive thief has career crisis).  That format is now being applied to a sitcom about lawyers that is the antithesis of Suits; the lawyers in Benched buy their suits off the rack (Macy’s is probably outside their budget) and they don’t drink 30 year old scotch after settling a multi-million dollar case.

That sort of practice was the career of attorney Nina Whitley (Eliza Coupe) before she melts down at a law office meeting where she is passed over for a promotion (only on television do women as gorgeous as Coupe get to complain about not getting a promotion because she isn't attractive enough), which happened moments after her ex-fiancée told her he was getting married to someone else.  Of course a talented, highly trained lawyer like Nina would have no choice but to go to work for the Public Defender’s office.

Her first day at work does not go well; her clients are not Fortune 500 executives but the scum of the Earth, the assistant DA is her ex-fiancée, and she manages to get herself stuck straddling the swinging door to where the prisoners are held.  But she improbably pulls out a victory at the end, so she won’t quit and look for an even more demeaning job.

I've said before that you can’t judge a pilot by its premise.  In the hands of the right people, the silliest premise can be turned into gold (Lost had probably the stupidest premise of all time and it won a bunch of Emmys).  If Benched can flesh out the characters surrounding Nina, there is comedy potential only hinted at in the first episode.

The fact that the show stars Coupe is a huge plus.  She was the only late-season cast addition to Scrubs that I cared for, and I liked her a lot.  I tried to like her next show, Happy Endings, but I just couldn't.  A lot of people loved the show; maybe I couldn't get past Elisha Cuthbert not in a bear trap.  Coupe is beautiful but not in a cookie-cutter way, and she has comedic timing and a way with physical comedy.

It also helps that her co-star is Jay Harrington, looking much scruffier than he did when he starred on Better Off Ted, one of my favorite sitcoms of this century. I don’t think Harrington and Coupe will be this century’s Sam and Diane, but they have an easy chemistry similar to that which Harrington had with Andrea Anders, his blonde co-star on Ted.

USA has created a nice cottage industry creating shows that rarely get Emmy consideration but last long enough to find syndication. The pilot has too much exposition to carry to have much time for laughs, but with the entirety of the criminal underworld at their disposal there is room for development, and Coupe is a gifted verbal and physical comedienne. Given the dearth of decent sitcoms on television, this potential is something I hope they don’t squander.

The TV Season Thus Far

I would say that this television season has been a disappointment, but that would imply that there were some positive expectations to begin with.  There were no shows with enormous “buzz,” like last season’s Agents of Shield.  There were no unknown quantities that had network support, like Lost.  Everything was vaguely familiar, and nothing looked like it would break out as a hit.

What can you say when the best new comedy of the season is already gone? I am referring to You’re the Worst, FX’s boundary-pushing comedy about two horrible, terrible people who discover they have “feelings” for one another [insert air quotes and eye roll].  In most fiction love makes good people better, but in this case two self-absorbed, emotionally stunted narcissists actually reinforce each other’s baser natures. Chris Geere and Aya Cash play Jimmy and Gretchen; he’s a pretentious British novelist (although no one is buying his book) and she’s a publicity manager for a rap group with the worst case of arrested development since the characters on Arrested Development. Both of them are shocked when a one night stand (that pushes the limits of what can be shown on basic cable) turns into something more.

Making Jimmy and Gretchen look relatively respectable by comparison are their friends; his roommate Edgar is a Gulf War vet with PTSD (and who may not have been playing with a full deck before being sent overseas), while her friend Lindsay is a coke-snorting sex addict.  Lindsay, trapped in an unhappy marriage to a dweeb she has nothing in common with, spent the 8 episode run descending further and further until she ended up abandoning her husband, frantically trying to do coke off her own boobs. 

You’re the Worst managed to make the two main characters grow while not falling into the trap of “love making them better people.”  She finally cleaned up her apartment, which looked like the inside of a teenaged boy’s closet, and he gave her a key to his place when hers burned down. Because the show had done the heavy lifting on their character development, it felt like progress and not a plot device.

The only other new show I am enjoying this season is The Flash, the second attempt at adapting the DC staple to television. The 1990 version was campy, while this version is (dare I say it) more realistic.  Grant Gustin as the titular character (known as Barry Allen when not in costume) does a great job of balancing the over-eager youth in a system where letting things slide is the norm (I like the detail that he is actually a very good crime scene technician).  Cavanaugh exudes oily charm as the scientist who is ostensibly helping him but has a hidden agenda, and Jesse Martin provides a solid anchor as the cop who is a surrogate father to Barry.  The villains of the week have been a tad silly, but maybe that’s not a bad thing compared to some other overly-serious shows.

This brings me to Gotham, the biggest disappointment of the season so far.  The premise, characters, and setting are all absurd in the extreme, but every character in the series (and every writer writing it) appears to be oblivious.  One of the dumbest plot contrivance of all time was the reaction of the police to a vigilante who kills people by attaching them to weather balloons that fly away; it never occurs to the police, not even “good cop” Jim Gordon, that the people will eventually come back down one way or another. No one sends up a helicopter to track the balloons, no one checks wind patterns to see where they might be blown, everyone just considers the victims as good as dead as soon as they float off, and both Gordon and his no-good partner are shocked when someone points out the balloons will eventually pop at high altitude, letting gravity take its course.  The performances are still entertaining, but they need to get off of origin stories and establish a more complete environment.

I am frustrated with CBS’ Scorpion, because I want to love it and CBS is watering it down to where it is difficult to like (I had the same reaction to last year’s Intelligence).  The CBS format is like the opposite of the Seinfeld “no hugging, no learning” mantra.  One character has to learn a lesson in every episode, usually something about trusting oneself or trusting ones friends.  It doesn’t help that the “geniuses” in the show don’t act like geniuses; they act like what stupid people think geniuses act like. I’m sticking with it, but it is on thin ice.

Constantine is obviously designed as a Friday night companion piece with Grimm (and if you had told me when it began that Grimm would last four seasons, I wouldn’t have believed you). I’ve only seen the pilot, and it was obvious that the show was re-tooled after it was completed, so we will have to see how it develops. I generally don’t like shows or movies where evil is all powerful, yet can be defeated by muttering something in Latin. I want rules, rules that make sense and are understandable within the fictive universe. Constantine may develop those rules, but until then I am skeptical.

I have given up on Forever, which was conveniently plotted and relied too much on the charm of its lead actor. In one episode the medical examiner who lives “forever” (played by Ioan Gruffudd) investigated a bogus anti-aging clinic, and when he got their client list his adopted son’s name was on the list; it turned out he had just asked for some information. First, the fact that out of the 8.5 million inhabitants of New York City he would know someone on the list was absurd; second, the potential danger was diffused so quickly it was as if it was only put in the show to create the promo for the episode. I wish that New Amsterdam had lasted longer and was available on DVD.

I don’t see things improving on network TV anytime soon.  But the good news is that HBO and CBS just announced independent streaming services, so many soon I won’t have to get 500 cable channels to watch 13.

Tanks but no tanks

One of the best quotes about sports is Herm Edwards’ oft repeated statement, “You play to win the game.”  It’s a great quote because it’s true; you may say you’re doing it for the exercise, to build camaraderie, because it’s a way to reduce stress, but the fact is, if winning wasn’t the reason to play the game, you wouldn't keep score.

That is why I think some people getting overly worked up when they see someone breaking the code and not trying to win.  There is reportedly a great deal of animosity aimed at the Philadelphia 76ers, who seem to be going out of their way to not win basketball games.  In the parlance of sports, they are “tankers,” a team that intentionally loses in order to have a better chance of getting a high draft pick before the next season.

The main source of annoyance seems to be the fact that in the 2014 draft the 76ers’ first pick was Joel Embiid, an excellent player who just happened to get seriously injured at the end of the college season, meaning that the 76ers will be playing without him this season.  Their other first round pick, Dario Saric, is committed to playing in Europe for two years.  So the worst team in the league used two top ten picks on players who can’t help them immediately, increasing the odds that they will get a high draft pick next year.

There’s the rub—the phrase “increasing the odds.”  The NBA knows something about tanking, and so invented a lottery system to discourage the practice.  Being bad doesn't guarantee you a number one pick, only a higher probability of getting a high pick. But the 76ers’ action seem to demonstrate that the NBA didn't go far enough, and some teams (and apparently commissioner Adam Silver) wanted to go further. They proposed “reforming” the lottery to give the worst teams a lower chance of a great pick, and some better teams a shot at a pretty good draft pick.

But there are two problems with what the NBA proposed.  First, it doesn't eliminate the incentive for tanking.  If you are willing to tank for the certainty of getting the number one pick, you’ll also tank to increase your odds at getting the number one pick.  If you are a lousy to mediocre team, you don’t have a lot of options: try hard for an 8^th seed and get blown out in the first round of the playoffs, or sink down and increase the chances of snagging a future superstar for next to nothing.

The second problem is that weakening the NBA Draft undermines the very purpose of the draft—to equalize the distribution of talent by giving bad teams the chance to force the best players coming out of college to play for them.  Under the current system, since 1985 only four times has the team with the worst record gotten the number one pick. That means the lottery system has failed 25 out of 29 times. If the point is to give teams with bad records a chance to become good, you have to reward the worst teams whether they are bad through incompetence, bad luck, or design.

If you want to discourage tanking, the draft is not the way to do it.  It probably isn't feasible, but the way to stop tanking is something akin to relegation, where for example if you “win” one of the NBA’s four worst records three years in a row, the franchise would be kicked out of the league and replaced by the best D-League team.  Or take away revenue sharing money from teams that don’t spend it productively, or create a rookie contract system that means winning the lottery equals paying big bucks to an unproven college player. The draft is for re-distributing talent, not punishing teams for not trying.

Besides, “tanking” is subjective.  The Spurs have been penalized by the NBA for not playing their best players in every game; is that “tanking” or merely an excellent strategy for not over-working players? Are fans of the Charlotte Hornets or Orlando Magic that disappointed when the visiting 76ers lose by 20 points late in the season?  And it’s not like TNT will be broadcasting a Sacramento Kings/Philadelphia 76er match on Christmas Day.

The issue isn't settled, and most NBA insiders expect the league to try and solve the tanking problem again sometime during the season. Thank God our best minds are trying to solve this problem instead of developing a vaccine for Ebola.

The NBA Solves the Problem of Quarters Divisible by Four

They played a very special basketball game a couple of nights ago. How special?  Each quarter was 11 minutes long!  I know, wow, what great mind thought of that!  The evil geniuses at NBA Inc., that’s who.

Was there such a hue and cry for shorter basketball games that this bold experiment was necessary?  Not really.  People mostly complain about baseball games lasting too long, and football can get a little long, but few people were writing angry letters to Sports Illustrated about the length of basketball games. So what does shortening a games from 48 minutes to 44 minutes accomplish?

Well, over the course of the very long NBA season (basketball, which was invented as a winter sport to be played indoors when the weather was bad, now has its season end in late June) a lot of very valuable players get injured.  Derek Rose has been out two years; Kevin Durant has a stress fracture in his foot; that sort of thing.  Shortening a game by 4 minutes would shorten the overall season by 328 minutes (82 times 4) or the equivalent of nearly seven games, not even factoring in the interminable playoffs.

The genius if this plan is this—if the NBA spared its player’s seven games worth of stress by shortening the season by seven games, then each team could sell 3 or 4 fewer season tickets, costing owners money in lost revenues from tickets and concessions.  Owners might be tempted to ask players for an adjustment on their contracts, paying them 8.3% less than they had agreed to. The television networks which just signed a hefty contract with the NBA might want some of their billions back for having 8.3% fewer games to broadcast.

But shaving a mere 4 minutes off each game saves the delicate balance.  Owners keep their revenues, players keep their salaries, and networks have the same number of games to air. The only person getting screwed is the fan, who gets 8.3 less product for his entertainment dollar. And the athlete who might have a shot at setting some lifetime statistical record who now won’t because his seasons will be 8.3% shorter; John Stockton’s lifetime assist record and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring records are safe.

Leave it to sports team owners to face a problem with an obvious answer (players break down during a long season; shortening the season by seven or eight games) and find another answer that lets them keep all their money. The next thing you know they’ll be selling small beers for the price of a large; oh wait, they've done that already.

TV Review: The Flash

Once Upon a Time, comic book heroes used to be fun. There was such a thing as camp. The absurdity of super-villains being fought by a guy in a cape and colored underwear was treated as the silliness that it, in fact, was.

Then Tim Burton turned Batman into Goth, and Christopher Nolan transformed the story of young Bruce Wayne becoming the Caped Crusader into an opera.  Gotham continues this tradition on Fox, although the show has been pushing the limits of unintentional comedy lately (when a vigilante starts killing people by attaching them to ascending weather balloons, it never occurs to Detective Jim Gordon or his partner that eventually, somewhere, the bodies will return to Earth).

But the newest incarnation of The Flash, on The CW, brings the funny back. It promises to out-camp the 1990 version, thanks to better special effects technology and a somewhat more accomplished cast.

For the uninitiated, The Flash is about a crime scene analyst named Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) who acquires the gift of super speed when he is struck by a lightning bolt caused by a strange experiment at a nuclear laboratory.  Treating a premise like that seriously would work about as well as putting on a Chekov play with chimpanzees.

The cast includes the always reliable Jesse L. Martin as a police detective who learns Barry’s secret (and is the father of the girl Barry has an unrequited crush on).  Martin invests his character with immediate gravitas thanks to his time on the Law and Order TV series. The cast also includes the wonderful Tom Cavanaugh, with his patented quirkiness dialed down from eleven, as the brilliant physicist responsible for the nuclear accident who now wants to help Barry harness his potential.

But unquestionably the most brilliant stroke of casting is John Wesley Shipp as Barry’s father, serving time in prison for the murder of Barry’s mother.  Shipp played Barry Allen/The Flash in the 1990 series, and it is a hoot seeing him now play the parent of the same character. Barry’s mother died under mysterious circumstances, and with his new powers Barry hopes to uncover the truth and free his father.

There are some other bits of business set up in the pilot, such as an unsmiling woman scientist and a happy-go-lucky technician who work with Cavanaugh to monitor Barry’s development, and the fact that Barry’s crush is having a secret affair with her father’s partner.  And Cavanaugh’s character is harboring a Great Secret.

I hope The Flash doesn’t go the way of its parent show, Arrow; that show started off interesting, but then the backstory started to make no sense and I couldn’t distinguish the star of the show (Stephen Amell) from a block of wood.  Gustin imbues Barry Allen with some of Andrew Garfield’s vibe in The Amazing Spiderman, and if he doesn’t take things too seriously this show could be a lot of fun.

Interestingly, the tone of the show meshes somewhat with that of Marvel’s Agents of Shield, which follows it on another network.  Tuesday nights just got a lot more interesting.

TV Review: Mulaney

So, exactly how bad is the new Fox sitcom, Mulaney? It reminded me of what a bad Saturday Night Live sketch would be if they decided to do a parody of a stereotypical bad sitcom. It wasn't like they tried to make it funny and failed; it was like they tried to make it awful and succeeded.

The show has been compared, favorably and unfavorably, to the classic Seinfeld, and you can’t help but recall the early Seinfelds when every show began with Jerry Seinfeld doing stand-up. John Mulaney begins his show with his stand-up act, the only difference being that jerry Seinfeld is maybe one of the five best stand-up comedians of all time (George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor . . . okay for now) and John Mulaney is not.

It is the sort of sitcom where the main character’s wacky friend bursts into the doctor’s office where the main character is waiting, yells “I’m not crazy!!!!!!” to the assembled crowd, and then squirts massive quantities of hand sanitizer on her hands.  Why is she going to her friend’s doctor’s appointment? Who enters a doctor’s office full of strangers yelling, “I’m not crazy!!!!!!”? Why would anyone remain friends with someone who behaved like that? Then again, why would a man tells his doctor he suffered from “frequent urination” when he wanted anti-anxiety medication because he was nervous about a job interview?

Seinfeld drew laughs from taking real life situations and blowing them up to gigantic proportions. Mulaney bears no relationship to anything remotely resembling the universe the rest of us inhabit. Every character on the show behaves like no one you would ever meet in real life, or on a bad acid trip.

I've said before that it is sometimes difficult to judge a sitcom by its pilot. Mulaney is so cynically constructed to be a carbon copy of other not-very good sitcoms that I can’t imagine it improving. Lucky for me, I don’t have to waste my time finding out.

TV Reviews: Selfie and A to Z

Pilots for sitcoms are hard to evaluate, because they not only have to be funny, but they have to establish the premise, introduce the characters, and leave the door open for more wacky adventures next week. Often, one of two things will happen: either the pilot will be lovingly crafted over years by the writer, creating a brilliant half-hour playlet that subsequent episodes can’t come close to; or the writer has to make a bunch of compromises with corporate suits just to get the pilot made, but then when the suits are too busy to hover over the series, the true quality can emerge.

One hopes the latter will happen with Selfie, a modest new sitcom on ABC’s Tuesday night line-up. The pilot shows signs of corporate meddling. “Hey, can we get a gratuitous shot of Karen Gillian in her underwear? You know what’s funny? People spilling barf on themselves. Can you put that in?”

On other hand, the show is a variation of Pygmalion, which was once turned into a little movie called My Fair Lady. So there is definitely room for growth.  The show also features two extremely likable stars, Karen Gillian (Doctor Who, also Guardians of the Galaxy although you’d never recognize her) and John Cho (the Star Trek movie franchise, the late lamented Go On, Sleepy Hollow). A lot of sitcoms have lasted longer than a season with worse casts than that.

The twist on My Fair Lady is that there Eliza Doolittle’s burden was her poverty; in Selfie, Eliza Dooley’s problem is due to affluence.  Gillian’s Dooley is a top sales person at a pharmaceutical company (I think; I wasn't quite clear on that) who has a bad social media day (see the reference to barf, above) and realizes that she needs fewer Facebook friends and more friends that actually like her. The pilot spent so much time setting that up that they neglected the back story on Cho’s character, Henry Higgs (the names aren’t exactly subtle), a marketing analyst (again, I think) whom Dooley begs to help her connect more with real people.

It’s plain to see what Dooley hopes to get out of the arrangement, but it is less clear why Higgs wants to help her.  Other than the fact that she’s gorgeous, but that doesn't seem to penetrate his consciousness in the pilot, so who knows? Higgs finds everything about her annoying, yet he seems to feel the need to help her because the plot demands it. One can only hope future episodes flesh out this relationship more thoroughly (speaking of flesh, did I mention Gillian was in her underwear in the pilot?).

The producers of How I Met Your Mother did the nearly impossible; after a build-up of eight years, they cast an actress as the titular Mother who was as wonderful, charming, beautiful, and winning as advertised. They then killed her off, but never mind. It is with that background that I approached the new NBC sitcom A to Z, starring the Mother herself, Cristin Miloti.

This pilot strikes me as the first kind I mentioned, so cute and precious that it feels like someone spent a long time getting all these details just so. But once the pilot is over, even though we are promised 25 more episodes (each named after a letter of the alphabet, just like a Sue Grafton novel). The pilot for A to Z is intricately plotted with lots of flair, from flashbacks to voiceovers (for the record, I am in favor of anything that provides work for Katy Sagal), but one doubts the writing staff can keep up that level of intricacy.  How cute is the pilot? The male lead’s name is Andrew and the woman’s is Zelda (A to Z! Get it?).

While the show lovingly spools out the details of the relationship of the central couple, played by Miloti and Ben Feldman (almost unrecognizable from his brilliant turn as Ginsberg on Mad Men), it relies on standard sitcom tropes for the supporting cast, including a stereotypical obnoxious best friend for him, a stereotypical over-sexed best friend for her, and an oafishly obnoxious boss for him. Since she works for what she refers to as a horrible law firm in the pilot, one assumes she’ll have an obnoxious boss in the future.

The pilot is too cutesy to be laugh out loud funny, and when it swings for the fences it whiffs big time. Feldman and Miloti have great chemistry (I suspect Miloti would have chemistry with a spice rack) but people don’t watch sitcoms for chemistry. Sam and Diane had chemistry on Cheers; they were also really funny.

The NFL and blackouts (that have nothing to do with concussions)

The United States was a simpler place forty years ago. The United States Postal Service had a monopoly on mail delivery, any questions you had could be answered by looking in an encyclopedia, and the only performance enhancing drugs athletes took were uppers. Oh, and football teams really wanted you to come to the games.

The threat of expansion of cable networks (remember when TBS and WGN were exotic?) led the Federal Communications Commission to promulgate a rule that allowed all major sports in America to prevent the broadcast or dissemination of the descriptions or accounts of a professional sports contest unless that game had been sold out 72 hours in advance. This was actually progress over prior rules, which had blocked the broadcast of local sporting events even if they had been sold out.

However, the FCC just voted 5-0 to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that says that they want to repeal the rule. The fact that this decision will have very little impact on the nature of sport fandom sort of proves just how antiquated the rule is in the first place.

Why the change of heart? The FCC Notice provides a detailed history of the blackout policy, which was a temporary law that expired in 1974 and was then perpetuated as an FCC rule in 1975. You have to remember that when baseball games were first broadcast on radio, some owners felt that if you gave away the games for free on the radio no one would go to see the games any more.  It never occurred to them that the radio broadcasts were free advertising for the games (a book titled Lords of the Realm nicely details the history of baseball owners being complete idiots; it didn't start with George Steinbrenner).  Initially even sold out football games were blacked out, which seems overkill.

But lest we dismiss these concerns too cavalierly, at one time NFL games not being 100% sold out was a more common fact of life. Yes, last year only one game was blacked out, but in 1974, before the current rule was adopted but statute enforced the policy, 59% of NFL games were blackout out on local television. However by 2011 only 16 games would be blacked out, and then only in four cities (Buffalo, Cincinnati, San Diego and Tampa).

In 1975 the FCC found that “[g]ate receipts are the primary source of revenues for some sports clubs,” a fact that is no longer true for the NFL. Testimony before the FCC established that gate receipts now account for a mere 20% of team revenues, while television revenues are three times more important at 60%. The sad fact is that in places like Tampa, they show the NFL Red Zone cable channel on their jumbotron, trying to lure fans to the stadium with the promise of televised highlights.

What is the NFL’s response to this seemingly reasonable acknowledgement of the evolution of NFL marketing? According to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy, “The NFL is the only sports league that televises every one of its games on free, over-the-air television. The FCC;s decision will not change that commitment for the foreseeable future”  That’s great. However, as I posted a few weeks ago, less than 10% of households still watch a TV set attached to an antenna, so that’s sort of irrelevant (and makes me wonder about the Monday Night game shown on ESPN). Second, the teams in the NFL play only 16 games per season, compared to 82 for basketball and 162 for baseball (to loosely quote great Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver, “This isn't football; we do this every day.”). So the number of football games telecast is still paltry compared to the number of NBA and MLB games. Third, as pointed out in the FCC Notice, football is the only sport with an exclusive contract for network coverage of its games; baseball allows teams to make individual contracts with local broadcasters (that are NOT blacked out; the Commissioner’s office testified that MLB teams broadcast 151 out of 162 games per season).

So the NFL spokesman appears not to know what he’s talking about.  No surprise there.

What the NFL is saying is that it is committed to broadcasting all its games for free, and to do that it needs a rule blacking out the game if it isn't sold out. So, in order to make all games available, some games will have to be unavailable. That logic is similar to that of the US in the Vietnamese war when we said the only way to save a village was to destroy it.

Today, the blackout rule does seem to be a relic, given the NFL emphasis on TV revenues over gate receipts, and if it goes away not many people will notice. However, given how newer stadiums are emphasizing the TV presentation by installing bigger jumbotrons, and that many fans seem to prefer the home theater experience to paying high parking fees to pay large amounts for bad tickets at a stadium with limited replay, cut ins from other games, and (God help us) fantasy updates, maybe in the future the NFL will have increased difficulties selling out games. Instead of denying fans the chance to see the game, the NFL should try and find ways to make the stadium experience better.  Like lowering prices.