TV Review: Lucifer

The saying goes that the Devil can assume a pleasing shape.  I guess that may be true because FOX has a new series on called Lucifer and, God help me, I liked it.  Not “liked it” like it’s the new Mad Men, but it breezily passed an hour with enough giggles to justify the cost of the electricity running my TV set.

The show is one of those that a brilliant Hollywood Reporter column dubbed Fox’s “quirky consultants aid law enforcement.” The premise is so obvious it is amazing it hasn’t been done before: the Devil gets bored running Hades and decides to vay-cay in El-Lay, and then starts solving crimes.  As played by British actor Tom Ellis (of course the Devil is British) Beelzebub is a walking pile of smarm who used to revel in sin and debauchery but now finds everything so “been there, had sex with that.”  But then a former . . . customer?  Protégée?  I’m not sure what to call her, but someone he cared about is shot while hugging him, and he decides he wants to find out who is responsible.

He keeps bumping into Detective Chloe Decker, the detective assigned to the case (Lauren German), a former actress famous for doing topless scenes (of course the LAPD hires former soft-core porn stars), to their mutual annoyance.  Of course they team up, bouncing from suspect to suspect until the case is solved 5 minutes before the end.

As has been noted elsewhere, the show is basically Castle with the Prince of Evil, but is that so bad?  Aside from the standard police procedural aspects, and the rather vague theology (D.B. Woodside pops up as a winged angel and makes veiled threats that maybe will be explained in later episodes), I like the surprising way the Devil, who calls himself Lucifer Morningstar (the detective asks is that’s a stage name), connects with several of the mortals he encounters. 

He immediately bonds with Detective Decker’s young daughter, despite his stated aversion to children, and manages to scare the bejeezes out of a bully who was abusing her on the internet.  When a middle-aged, mousy psychiatrist has a key piece of information, Lucifer uses his one supernatural trick—he asks her what she wants most in the world, and she says it’s to have sex with him.  So he cheerfully agrees, but since he and the detective have to follow up on the clue he leaves, but promises to come back saying, “My word is my bond.”  At the end of the episode he does go back, and agrees to fulfill his part of the bargain but asks her for some therapy while they’re at it.  He does have major daddy issues.

I’ve said before: it is hard to evaluate TV shows based solely on pilots.  This could easily become a show with an intriguing premise that is just content to slog through standard police procedural scripts.  I hope they can keep the novelty alive and not settle for being just another “quirky civilian contractor to aid law enforcement” show.  Based on Tom Ellis’ performance and the wit displayed in the pilot, I am willing to give Lucifer another few episodes to prove itself.  The pilot also makes great use of the soundtrack, from “Ain’t no rest for the wicked” to David Bowie’s “Fame.”

Speaking of “quirky civilian contractor to aid law enforcement” shows, the Hollywood Reporter article applied that trope to the seven dramas on Fox and found it fit six of them (all but Empire).  But I find it applies as well to shows on all broadcast networks.  ABC has the aforementioned Castle.  CBS, which has a bunch of actual police procedurals, has Elementary (Sherlock Holmes is the original QCCALE), Scorpion and Limitless.  NBC has Blindspot and Blacklist.  Going back in history, there’s Monk and Psych.  I have rarely found a trope so useful in understanding where TV shows are coming from.  I tip my cap to the author of that blog post.

Flint Michigan teaches us about the parties

So, the collective outrage of millions has been activated and people are shocked, SHOCKED that unelected Republican leaders in Flint, Michigan knowing switched to a toxic water supply in order to save some money.  Who could have forecast that putting Republicans in charge of the health and welfare of 100,000 low income African Americans could have turned out so tragically?

Semantics and philosophy aside, Flint demonstrates the two biggest problems with putting today’s Republican party in charge of any government, local, state or federal.  The first is that Republicans will always grasp at any plan that purports to save taxpayers money, ignoring any tiny details that would lead a logical person to believe the plan was nuts.

Back in the 1980’s the Reagan administration had a plan to save taxpayers millions of dollars: they could fire all those pesky bureaucrats who oversaw the savings and loan industry.  Fewer bureaucrats in Washington; the banking industry free to innovate and make America strong again.  What could go wrong?  Well, anyone with common sense would have pointed out that the savings and loan industry were a bunch of rich yahoo playing with other people’s money, and that they could speculate in any nutty scheme and keep the profits if it paid off while getting bailed out if it failed.  The result of the GOP’s penny-pinching?  The plan to save taxpayers a few million dollars a year ended up costing taxpayers $160 billion.

In Flint, the plan to switch to a different water supply was supposed to save taxpayers $19 million over eight years.  The Michigan governor has proposed that the state will spend $28 million to fix the problem.  Once again the GOP plan to save money is penny-wise and pound foolish and will end up costing taxpayers more.  No doubt the governor will eventually use the “unexpected” cost as an excuse for cutting spending on social services.  Maybe he’ll suggest raising taxes on the rich, but I’m not holding my breath.

The second GOP problem in governing is the ingrained belief that the government CANNOT help people, and any attempt to help people will make them worse off.  In any sane person, the prospect of thousands of people drinking toxic water supplied by the government would have triggered an immediate, “Oh my god, we’ve got to do something!” response.  But these were Republicans, and so instead of bursting into immediate action (as Republican icon Teddy Roosevelt would have done) they dragged their feet, assuring everyone that nothing was wrong and insisting things were fine in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence (*cough*globalwarming*cough*).

The EPA found that the water coming out of Flint taps contained 13,200 parts of lead per billion; the acceptable level was 15.  So it wasn’t really a close call.  Yet the Michigan department of environmental quality contended that the EPA measurement was wrong because the tap they used had a filter, which is a strange claim given that a) the tap was taken off during the test; b) the filter would have reduced contamination, not increased it, and c) presumably the EPA knows a little something about testing water (distrusting all government functionaries is another GOP failing). 

The administration of Dubya was going fine until Katrina hit New Orleans.  It was Bush’s congratulatory “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” to disaster Czar Michael Brown that was the “Emperor has no clothes” reveal for the Dubya administration.  Brownie hadn’t been doing a heck of a job; he’d been doing almost no job at all.  But the Republican administration looked out and saw, not people in need, but a bunch of moochers who wanted government largesse because of some random event.  Brown’s inadequate response, with an inadequate price tag, was just what Dubya and his advisers wanted, not a well-designed, adequate and expensive response to a national catastrophe.

The Democratic and Republican parties can debate back and forth about how the nation should be governed, but the bottom line is that the Republicans don’t want to govern it.  They want the free market to run free, and if Flint’s water is toxic then the free market response is to buy bottled water at the store.  Why should government provide safe water to residents for free anyway? 

All the high-falutin’ philosophy of the two parties is mostly irrelevant.  What matters is which party seeking to govern actually wants to, and which just wants to sit back and let the campaign contributions keep rolling in.  All the punditry in the world is irrelevant when there is a natural disaster, or a man-made one.  If an emergency happens where you live, do you want the director of emergency services to be a Democrat or Republican?  I know who I’d trust more.

TV Review: Second Chance

There are no new ideas.  Okay, there are a few, but in the entertainment industry they are few and far between.  I loved season one of Mr. Robot, but its philosophical connection to Fight Club (not to mention plot similarities) was obvious from the first episode.  It’s a great show, but it’s not completely new.  There is an old saying among writers that there are only 7 plots; if so, imagine how much recycling goes on when who divide 7 plots into 400 scripted television series.

Fox premiered a new show on Wednesday with the bland, boring name Second Chance.  The plot is largely recycled from a previous show on CBS in 1999 called Now and Again.  Both deal with an experiment that essentially puts the brain of an old, out of shape man into a young, healthy, exceptionally strong body.  Only the details are different.

Second Chance was initially called The Frankenstein Code, then Lookinglass, until the suits at Fox settled on Second Chance (which sounds like a sitcom remake of Green Acres).  Phillip Baker Hall plays Ray Pritchard, the 75-year-old father of an FBI agent (Tim DeKay, basically reprising his role from White Collar) who is murdered to cover up a break-in at his son’s home by a gang of jewel thieves.  Because he has a 1-in-10 million marker in his DNA, his body is appropriated by the male half of a pair of brother-and-sister twins who own Lookinglass, a $10 billion social media website, who then puts him in a tank and does something that makes him young and incredibly strong.  The reason, it turns out, is that his twin sister is dying of cancer, and this experimental treatment is the only possibility of saving her life.

Nothing about the pilot is terribly plausible (the science behind Pritchard's transformation is one of the least implausible points).  Pritchard takes very little time to adapt to his new body, even though I would imagine that a 75-year-old man would find being young and incredibly strong disorienting.  The twins, supposedly Indian or Pakistani, have the bland names of Otto and Mary Goodwin.  Otto is supposedly some freakish genius, but all the pilot manages is slightly odd.  Mary’s illness is apparently related to Ali McGraw disease, that rare illness named after the actress from the movie Love Story that causes young women to become more beautiful as the disease progresses.  The plot deals with a vicious gang of jewel thieves who escape for over a year because they are paying off higher ups in the FBI, which doesn’t strike me as a plausible jewel thief MO.

I’ve said before one shouldn’t read too much into pilot episodes.  Sometimes pilots are brilliant but the creator has nowhere to go; other times pilots are rushed into production and it takes time to flesh out the characters and find the right plot points.  The creator of Second Chance is Rand Ravich, who created the series Life that I enjoyed quite a bit.  Based on that pedigree I am willing to give the show a few more episodes to find its footing, but the pilot does not look terribly promising.