I watched the pilot. I never mentioned it because, well, it wasn’t worth mentioning. The characters were okay, but every time I thought the show was getting somewhere, it would do something that would totally annoy me. Like the fact that the main character was named Bella Bloom, and she owned a flower shop. We no longer live in an era where people’s surnames are derived from their occupation, otherwise we’d all be named “Blogger,” and we wouldn’t have any way of distinguishing our families, and we’d all be inbred. Also, in the pilot, Bella’s BFF totally showed Bella her pubic hair. On purpose. Do guys think that girls actually do that?
Really, though, I think the problem was the premise. A psychic tells Bella that she has to find her true love in a year otherwise she’ll never get married–and that her true love was someone she’d already dated. I know that most girls would do what Bella did–namely, start going in search of all of her exes in hopes of finding her true love BECAUSE SHE MUST GET MARRIED OR DIE LONELY AND SAD–but I personally would’ve been more impressed if she’d said, “Go back to one of those losers? I’m happier by myself, thank you very much.” And then, in my fantasy scenario, she would’ve gone on to live a happy and fulfilling life.
Also, doesn’t it seem a little cruel that this show aired on Friday nights? I’m sure it left no comfort to the dateless.
Thus marks the first and only time TiFaux will use a tag for The Ex List.
Marisa addressed the more interesting points of the new Christian Slater series My Own Worst Enemy a while ago, but after the second episode I’ve got some loose observations left to make.
On the whole though, it’s a decent thriller made ‘pretty good’ by my low expectations. Those low expectations are the result of the fact that the superhero-by-night, PTA-parent by night genre is well-trod territory.
My concerns:
Is Alfre Woodard slumming it? She’s one of those actors who always seem to lend dignity to whatever show she’s in, thereby elevating her scenes in My Own Worst Enemy (she plays the steely intelligence officer who keeps Edward on track and Henry under control). I’m sure she could lend gravitas to anything — even pre-destined duds like Gary Unmarried. However, she did star in that one season of Desperate Housewives…
The thing that made me happiest in the series’ pilot was the moment when Henry was walking around the building after being freed from the Russian terrorists. He was walking around amid gunfire and then someone got shot, spraying blood all over his face. In that moment, I knew that this wasn’t going to be Medium — meaning we’re not going to have to endure precocious breakfast banter with ridiculous children. We weren’t necessarily going to have to be burdened with plot lines about the kids standing up to bullies at school or being nervous about a school play. Children are what ruin shows like this.
This show is much darker than I ever would have expected (not that it can’t get darker — a choice I wouldn’t frown upon). I’d like to see more characters, more Mission Impossible-style intrigue and, yes, more gunplay.
Remember that song by Lit called My Own Worst Enemy that they played for an entire summer? Thank God we don’t need the radio anymore.
I can’t remember the last time I watched an episode of SNL hosted by someone who I had more or less never seen before (discounting his roles as the cable guy on an episode of The Sarah Silverman Program and as a skydiver in David Wain’s The Ten, which I never, ever would’ve remembered despite my general “that guy” identification skills). Checking the invaluable SNL Transcripts site, I can safely say that yes, Jon Hamm is the least recognizable-to-me host since Andy Roddick turned up in 2003 (other sports stars nose ahead because they usually do commercials at some point). Based on the show, though, this Hamm kid, he seems like a good egg. I mean, I’m not going to start watching Mad Men or anything, but Hamm definitely makes it look more appealing than The Shield. Incidentally, does it seem kinda like everything on FX is pitched as “TV — TO THE EXTREME!”?
Anyway, maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I felt a palpable sense of relief this week over no longer having to deal with an obligatory quick-turnaround debate sketch for political content; the writers seemed to be looking for more inventive ways into ribbing the candidates in these waning days of the race. Facing the limited availability of Tina Fey and lacking a single killer political impersonation performed by anyone in the regular cast, the strategy this season seems to be to spread the material around and not give anyone a chance to tire of Fred Armisen’s technically OK but entirely uninspired take on Obama, Darrell Hammond’s close but centerless McCain, or the physically vague Jason Sudeikis version of Joe Biden.
The latter got more screentime in the opening sketch, and though Sudeikis isn’t much of an impressionist — he’s too much of a deadpan everyman to disappear the way Hammond or Bill Hader can — his style is perfectly suited to the writers’ take on Biden as a dude who can’t help but take his honestly into nutbar territory. The writers also got around a middling Obama impression with an inspired musical-variety format; Lorne Michaels may have long insisted that Maya Rudolph would have to come back to play Michelle Obama, but I think we can all see that she really came back to sing. Incidentally, I would consider buying a Maya Rudolph album.
Neither of these sketches hit the spot like that Ferrell/Fey bit on the final fun-sized Thursday edition of the show — but then again, Ferrell and Fey don’t actually work for SNL anymore. The actual cast members worked well within their grooves this week: Will Forte’s sketch about a trick-or-treating sex offender (funny, but could’ve gone further); Bill Hader’s welcome return as an eternally put-upon Vincent Price (funny, but not the best Price sketch he’s done); and Andy Samberg’s Digital Short about a faux-rasta college student (funny, but kinda hard to parse on a basic level). It was all pretty good: rarely better and rarely worse, until around 12:45.
The final sketch, a trio of campaign ads with Hamm as the unfortunately named Pat Finger, candidate for office in the town of Butt, NY, was a wash-out; instead of building, the joke got lamer and more predictable as the ads progressed. It mainly served as a reminder of a far better version of the successive-campaign-ad gag which, upon further research, aired ten years ago this weekend: When Ben Stiller hosted, he and Tim Meadows played rival mayoral candidates airing ads about who is best-qualified to wipe out the town’s “bat problem.” It’s a brilliant sketch, and the kind neither favored for best-of collections, nor even archived on NBC’s website, nor, I’m guessing, even kept in the one-hour rerun versions (I may be wrong about this, but generally if there’s an amazing stand-alone SNL sketch from the late nineties, it gets cut out of the reruns).
Anyway, it was almost at that exact moment that the episode seemed to sort of fall apart: the lame Pat Finger sketch was followed immediately by a third Coldplay performance, as if to say: we give up, let’s run out of the clock. Maybe there were some killer Poehler-starring sketches that had to be canned when she went into labor on Saturday, or maybe Coldplay is, you know, one of the biggest rock bands in the world (I’m still coming to terms with that one and I couldn’t work up the interest to even try to check out any of their three songs). But it left the episode feeling perfunctory and thin. This feeling may stick around when the election dust clears, with Amy off raising her kid and doing her sitcom and, I assume, the guest spots from the likes of Fey, Ferrell, Parnell, and Rudolph becoming less frequent (though hopefully there will be reason for Rudolph to keep popping up). The current cast is a talented one, and soon enough they’ll be on their own again.
Marisa