This week, we've got The Mighty Boosh, The Apprentice UK, Glee & The Real Housewives of New Jersey. We've also got our first "Did I miss something important" take on Bones, courtesy of Martin Brown.
Wait, The Real Housewives of New Jersey?
The Real Housewives of New Jersey by Nina Stone
Two weeks ago - my husband walked in on me. He walked in on me while I was indulging in my pleasure. My Secret Pleasure. My pleasure called The Real Housewives of New York City. That's right. My name is Nina, and I'm addicted to The Real Housewives.
Much to my surprise and delight, my husband is tickled to death to see that I have a little pop-culture obsession. I mean, got on this train late, and then couldn't stop trying to catch up. Bravo repeats and my DVR are my best friend now. And did you see that reunion special?! SEVEN hours of taping! They had to break it into two parts! Oh, man, just when I got caught up it's all over. I bought Bethany's book because I just LOVE her - and can't get enough. She's the soy milk in my organic coffee.
So, I was flipping through channels and there it was, on Bravo, The Real Housewives of New Jersey. I mean, it was 8pm, a new episode was beginning and BANG! I'm back in. Hooked. I mean we all know that New Jersey is NOT New York - but this shit is just mind blowing in its criz-aziness and shallow factor. Oh - and my favorite quote that's in all the previews? "Let me tell you something about my family - we are as thick as thieves." Because, as I and the rest of America have already figured out, you ARE thieves!
I mean, c'mon. We all just watched 10 years of the Sopranos, living in NJ, in houses just like that. You're all Italian? Your husbands own construction companies and restaurants?! Gimme a break! NO, wait, don't. This is gonna be HILARIOUS! I'm gonna go catch up now, and I'll catch you next week with the latest. TTFN!* *Ta-Ta for now.
Nina's racist opinions on The Real Housewives of New Jersey are her own, and TFO in no way assigns criminal behavior to the show's "characters."
Also, Nina is a Jew.
"There's things in here you've never dreamed of"
"Rubies?"
"I've dreamed of rubies"
"Lesbian ham?"
This episode Howard eats vomit.
Cut - the opening, which at this point is just going to happen. The biggest problem is that in the first season, there is almost always a callback to something said with Howard and Vince in front of the curtain. This week - there's a shot of Vince with goat's legs which makes no sense, but it's still here. Bob Fossil giving all his employees shit for their appearances, such as "Hey Kerouac you gona do something with that hair?"
The inciting incident for the whole episode - with Dixon Bainbridge and Bob Fossil yelling at Howard and Vince - is out, which sucks because it's mostly Matt Berry making fun of Howard's mustache. They kept in Fossil and Bainbrige's acapella rendition of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in it's entirety, because they goddamn better. Fossil and Bainbridge's relationship on this show is pretty much Matt and Rich's relationship on Snuff Box. Only Bob Fossil wants to have sex with Dixon Bainbridge. And Dixon Bainbridge seems to be more of a schemer, and Snuff Box Matt Berry can't deal with that shit. The first of many references to Fleetwood Mac's Tusk are made here - Naboo listening to it, and Berry's reaction at it's mention is like someone stomped a cat to death in front of him. Which, hey, is understandable. Naboo haggling for Kit Kat's is out though. Everything after the halfway point is 100% intact, which is probably only indicative that they cut so much in the first half they hit their time restriction.
"Tundra" the song may only be # 2 on the list of best songs the Boosh have ever written, but it is definitely the catchiest. Like, mindworm catchy, like spacing out waiting for something inevitably finds you drumming "ICE! FLOW! NOWHERE TO GO!" on counters and things. It's has the distinction of being the only song that's made its way through the Adult Swim cuts in it's entirety. Which, hey good choice on their part. (It's probably just because a) it's short and b) it's actually important to the "plot".)
Vince talks a lot about Gary Numan in this one, which is fantastic. The Boosh head up to the arctic by hitching a ride on Numan's jet, looking for a magical egg or something. Vince finds a dead body, which gives them a clue towards finding the egg. Howard goes crazy, gets kidnapped by jawas in parkas. Vince also spends a lot of time with a friendly polar bear. They get tied up by the jawas for the Black Frost to kill. The Black Frost is Noel Fielding dressed up like the big god thing from Nightbreed in cowboy boots, with Drum and Bass blaring everytime he does anything. He freezes people with his genitals. Then he's beaten up by a polar bear. There's a lesson in that. Speaking of lessons, the ending here getting cut off before a morale is deliberate - was stolen from the Simpsons.
There's a great super-simple joke of Howard saying "my only friend is the wind" and the wind responding "I hate you". Genius.
Glee: "Pilot" by Nina Stone
Oh man, I was so excited for this. The commercials looked so great. "Being a part of something special makes you special." My impression was this was going to be like the vibe of Buffy's high school, mixed with the feeling of Stuckeyville and Ed, with a side of Parker Lewis Can't Lose. With singing.
Thing is - something was off. I can't totally put my finger on it yet. It's like, we've got caricatures as characters. Which is fine. I can like that. But the emotional tumult, climaxes and resolutions happened too quickly, too obviously. Or, you know what? My problem is that the singers were all too good. Don't get me wrong. I love good singing. But just like in a song, you have to build up to the powerful high note. If everything's that pitch and volume, it loses the charm. Can't there be a struggle for some people to get into glee club? Let some of them really need to be there, but not be good enough--and then let them grow as singers and "team players" as the show goes on.
And likewise, when they were having a rehearsal and got all fed up at how bad they were - um...they weren't. Vocally? It was great. The choreography was bad. But they weren't. And from there, the lead girl storms off and declares she's going to quit? (Or something like that, I may have it a little out of order, but my point is still the same.) It doesn't really make any sense. If she's gonna get mad about them being bad, they need to be bad.
Likewise, our main character's wife? What's up with that? This guy would never be married to that girl. No way. They're not operating in the same galaxy. It's like some choices on this show are so wrong that they end up throwing off the calibration of the whole show. If she's going to be that much of a dumb narcissist, than our guy needs to exhibit this head-over-heels love that he has for her that rings so true we (the audience) just accept it and believe it. OR, she has to have something somewhat likeable about her. Like, Cordelia on Buffy. But it's all wrong with this girl.
I'm sure I'd have more to comment on, too, if I hadn't fallen asleep for the last 10 minutes. Yeah! I did. I figure I'll catch up with it in the fall and it'll still all make sense--this doesn't strike me as a Breaking Bad, where there's always important stuff happening that shouldn't be missed. I hope that by then they figure out what direction to follow. At this point it just feels like there's too many formulas being followed. Personally, I'm rooting for the Stuckeyville-Parker Lewis combination.
The Apprentice UK: Week 5 by Tucker Stone
For some reason, the episodes that BBC America airs each Tuesday evening are slightly different than the ones available on their On Demand service. Notably, that the episode's introduction aired on Tuesday evenings fails to include the "I don't like asslickers" comment from Sir Alan Sugar, the financial godfather/Trump character. There's also a considerable amount of non ass-licking commentary cut from each episode to allow for the Tuesday airing to include commercials, but at least five minutes of that are the arty fly-over shots of London. Seriously, the first episode? Five minutes of fly-over shots set to moody electronic music. I timed it.
Let's be blunt: the British versions of most television shows is better than the American version. It might be an irritating fact, but it's still a fact. Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares? Better in the UK. The Office? Better in the UK. Coupling?
Okay, I didn't watch either version of Coupling. I'm sure it holds true though. And yes, the Apprentice UK? It's better than the American Apprentice--or at least, it must be, because I can't physically sit through an actual episode of the American Apprentice, and yet I find this Apprentice UK show quite entertaining. The contestants are the same old mixed-bag, and so are the reactions--Saira is an obnoxious loudmouth with no self-awareness, she's easy to hate. Tim is the level-headed black guy who wears really cool clothes and probably will end up nice-guying himself out of the competition. Paul is the sort of sleazy salesman you could see convincing a terminal lung cancer patient to take up cigars. James comes across like a lug, which is why nobody seems to pay attention to how good he can be at the tasks they're given.
At the top of it all, covered on both sides by a couple of cantankerous seeming sycophantic geezers, is Sir Alan Sugar. Unlike Donald Trump, he's not a familiar American presence, and unless the Apprentice UK takes off in the States, that probably won't change. He's a bit of a cipher on the show--showing up at the end to deliver some banal maxims on business before laying out that week's challenges, and then playing the Simon Cowell voice of reason when the losing team tries to beg and blame their way out of the consequences. From what I've seen so far, he's not that witty, but he also doesn't seem terribly interested in being much of anything other than a heavy. It's kind of refreshing--obviously, any intelligent business mogul will have picked up by this point that Donald Trump struck a gold mine with the reality show gamble. Sugar, at this stage, seems content to collect a check while being an acerbic--but honest--prick. Considering BBC America is running the first season, and there's something like five more, that probably changes. For now though? He's fun.
This week's challenge was an interesting trick--the two teams had to pick a contemporary artist, set up a one-night-only showing of that artist's work, and whomever made the most money selling the work won. There's no charity--the money apparently went to the artist, as the contestants are shown negotiating price reductions at the eleventh hour with the artists--and an actual gallery owner, a guy whose whole life is tied up in the art world, makes it clear how pissed off it makes him to see some television show mucking around in his neighborhood, in direct competition with him. (The fact that this week's losing contestant spent a good bit of time hanging out in front of that guy's gallery stealing away his patrons had something to do with it.) This was the first episode won by First Forte, which used to be considered the "girl's team" until they lost so many challenges, and contestants, that Sugar was forced to mix the teams up in hopes of nobody focusing on the fact that they apparently stocked the male side a bit heavy on the talent side when they cast this thing. (Seriously, on what planet would Adele have been a good choice for a reality show involving not-being-an-idiot?)
It would be nice to say that First Forte won through a whole lot of intelligence and pizazz--they are made up of some of the most likable people in the competition--but the truth is that they won because they weren't saddled with motormouth Saira, who has the subtlety of a live grenade. The first thing she did was walk into the gallery of a husband/wife artist duo, ignore all of their work and begin demanding they answer a boatload of financial questions, all of which she did right on the tail end of First Forte's introduction to the same duo. And the thing about First Forte? They really liked the art. They hung out and talked about the art. It wasn't fake, it wasn't planned--they just gaped and smiled like a couple of loons, asked random questions about feelings and colors--all of which the artists loved--and then they walked out waving like little kids. Saira just screeched about costs, couldn't remember the term for her favorite color when asked--"Aqua....Aqua. Aquamarine? That's a color. Aquamarine." Later, when both teams decided they wanted that same artist couple, Saira's pitch opened with her asking the wife "First up, are you who I should be talking to? Can you make this decision?" Then she sputtered out some random platitudes, only to watch in shock as First Forte basically called and said "Look, we're fans. You know we're fans. You want to do this thing? You do? Shit, that's great."
During the actual sales portion of the show--where Saira called her team's second-choice artist "a fool" for not accepting a ridiculous 50% cut in price on one of her own pieces--First Forte got off to a slow start, and from the looks of it, they may have only sold three pieces. Still, those pieces were enough to pull in 19,000 Pound Sterling, and that thoroughly humiliated Impact--Saira's team--who only came up with 6,000. In the boardroom, project manager Rachel inexplicably brought in Paul and Matthew, blaming them for doing exactly what she had told them to do. Matthew's bizarre excuse--that being tall prevented him from being a good salesman, because it was hard to hear short people at parties--got him a couple of chuckles, but it wasn't enough to save him from the mildly amused wrath of the Sugar. In the car on the way back, Matthew admitted he had expected to lose, just "not this soon." Me too buddy. You were dumb, but you weren't obnoxious about it.
Bones – “The Soldier on the Grave” by Martin Brown
With the spring season winding down, and the summer programming not yet having kicked in, I—one of your trusty TV of the Weak columnists—have taken on the somewhat odious responsibility of checking in with some of the network programming that has been renewed for next season that we’re not already familiar with. Depending on how long my attention span lasts1, over the next couple of weeks, this may include anything from Southland to Wife Swap to seeing if Family Guy is as gut-wrenchingly horrible as I remember. I do intend on skipping everything on the CW, though, since that includes 90210, Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, Smallville, and Supernatural. I have my limits—even for this site. I’m starting off with Fox, since 90% of what I watch is on Fox anyway2—House, 24, American Idol, that Gordon Ramsay “You’re all donkeys. Get out of here, you’re a donkey” show, Glee—and a bit of a softball: Bones.
I caught my test episode3, “The Soldier on the Grave,” on TBS or TNT or TLC4. Actually, I caught two, but I didn’t start paying attention until the second one5—and, after two episodes, I couldn’t tell you the premise of the show. Not that it really matters—Bones is a by-the-numbers procedural6—but I like to keep my premises straight, so I can be all like, “House, you can’t solve a forty year old murder with maggots” screaming at the TV if I need to be, because how else are we going to keep these shows grounded in reality? Going into it, I thought that the show was about the dude who played Angel, as an FBI Agent/Homicide Detective/Fake Psychic. Turns out, “Bones” is actually his partner who leads some sort of forensic team, possibly run by the military. I’m betting that she’s an expert on the human skeleton, and that every one of the show’s set-ups has to do with (wait for it) bones7. Angel’s role in all this is unclear—but he is, like, a detective or something. That’s all I got.
You can’t really fault Fox for getting into the TV procedural game. That’s where the smart money is at. But you can fault them for putting together something so irredeemably shoddy8—especially, since they’ve had success in the procedural genre with House. Of course, House works because it has incredible writers, impeccable casting, a dynamic lead actor, and it has no problem either going way over-the-top or parodying itself. It’s elastic, which is why it’s a good show even when it’s not that great9. Bones, on the other hand, seems like it can really only be one thing, and that’s a forensic procedural—and not a great one at that, since it has no idea how to brand itself. With House, you know what it is within five minutes of watching it: Genius Asshole Doctor Saves Lives. Without a Trace: Missing People. Cold Case: Old Shit. CSI: Has the same premise as Bones, but it’s smart enough to drop the name of the show into the dialogue every couple of minutes.
Procedurals generally rely on set-up rather than a payoff; they’re more interested in creating intrigue than satisfaction. Law & Order, which pretty much created the genre, used to start with finding a body, but they’d usually clear up the mystery of who did it in the first half of the show, so that they could get to something deeper and more interesting. CSI ignored all that deep and interesting stuff, and usually provided fairly mundane solutions for their murders—but CSI always had irresistibly fascinating set-ups for their episodes, especially compared to Law & Order’s “Oh look, another body in the park” approach, and it was enough to hope for a satisfying conclusion, even if one rarely came. Yet the set-ups were always intriguing.
Bones doesn’t really bother with all that. The set-up for “The Soldier on the Grave” is right there in the title: Bones and Angel arrive at a crime scene at Arlington Cemetery and examine a body that’s been burnt down to the skeleton resting on the grave of another, famous soldier. Everything unravels exactly like you’d expect it to if you’ve ever seen Courage Under Fire or A Few Good Men—dead guy was murdered, he’s also a soldier, he was part of a military cover-up that Bones and Angel unravel, the soldier responsible for the cover-up believes he was completely in the right, somebody hangs himself, you know, the usual. But Bones tries to turn the episode into a referendum on the complexities of war—everyone’s got a different (bland, ill-informed) opinion on the war in Iraq, and no one’s afraid to express it. All this culminates in Angel tearfully confessing to Bones that he once shot a man in front of his kid. It’s pretty awkward. There’s a lot of cry-cry through the entire episode—people at funerals, crying; parents of dead kids, crying; soldiers, crying; one guy shows up to Angel’s office and cries; people getting interrogated break down in tears; one character shows up in two scenes in the episode—in the first, she breaks down crying; in the second, she’s the murderer. We never find out why the body was burnt, or why it was placed on the grave where it was found—and it makes little dramaturgical sense for the murderer to do either of those things. Or, at least, we never find out why the body was burnt *within the world of the story*. It’s pretty obvious why the writers of Bones wanted to start out the episode with a burnt body resting on a soldier’s grave—because they’d already come up with the title. Also, because they’re interested in sensationalism. They give the actors all kinds of clunky, soap-opera dialogue, but don’t care enough to cast anyone that can pull it off10. When the dude hangs himself, the camera lingers on him, just hanging there, for a minute or so—when any other show would have just shown a glimpse of him and panned away. The hanging guy didn’t even look especially harrowing or ugly—so they wasted all this time and energy on trying to be sensational, and then didn’t even make the extra effort to, you know, actually be sensational.
So, that’s Bones. It’s a pretty lazy show, and it’ll be back around in the fall if you want to check it out.
[1] If history is any indication, it won’t last long, but it’ll be, like, really intense.
[2] And by I, I mean Tucker.
[3] Testpisode?
[4] Where I sure as hell wasn’t watching Jon & Kate Plus 8… but, man, is their marriage in trouble, or what?
[5] Of course, it’s also entirely possible that I was paying attention, and just chose to erase it from my memory immediately after watching.
[6] Or as I like to call them, comfort television.
[7] But then, I am a gambling man.
[8] Or, at least, something so shoddy that doesn’t have Gordon Ramsay screaming, “You’re a donkey” in people’s faces.
[9] Except for that goddamn Mos Def episode.
[10] And they’re not even casting pretty people, they’re casting “edgy” people!
Good points on Glee. I watched it with my wife, since she likes that sort of thing, and while it was entertaining enough, you nail exactly what could have been better about it. Like, the school that they went and watched was supposed to be amazing, on a whole other level from them, but the only real difference was that they had more people.
As for the guy and his wife, I think we were supposed to get the sense that he used to be head-over-heels in love with her, but he's realizing her faults. I did think she had the best line in the episode: "I'm on my feet for four hours a day, three days a week!"
Re: Bones - I think you confirmed exactly what I thought this show was about just from seeing commercials. Oy. People eat that procedural stuff up, don't they? I don't know much about the show, but I think the gimmick is that they dig up and investigate bodies, and that's where the "Bones" nickname comes from. Or whatever, I don't care.
You know, I thought about trying to do an epic column for TFO in which I watched whatever episode of every mystery show that aired in a week (which would include Castle, the various CSIs, the various Law & Orders, Bones, Cold Case, NCIS (does that count?), and, I dunno, House?) just to compare them all, but I don't think I could take it. Plus, I'm lazy.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2009.05.27 at 14:54
Nina, you should really track down the last part of "Glee". They cover Journey. It. Is. Awesome...
Of course the show doesn't air again until Fall. Which for FOX is like November, so plenty of time...
Posted by: LurkerWithout | 2009.05.27 at 23:14
Lurker - The acapella Journey cover didn't really have shit on Petra Haden's - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_8Iy2PiH7g
Posted by: Sean Witzke | 2009.05.27 at 23:20
"...it’s smart enough to drop the name of the show into the dialogue every couple of minutes." - Dude, her nickname is "Bones." Angel calls her that all the time.
I would definitely agree with your comfort TV description, although for an entirely different reason. This show is about the characters, not the plots. It's why they are so hoakie and up front ("The dead ___ in/on the ____"). The plots are there to give the characters reasons to interact. This doesn't always work out the best, especially in an episode like this with the soap-boxery. The best is the Bones/Booth...ahem...Angel dynamic which is essentially Spock/Kirk. Only Spock is attractive, Kirk has some angst, and he have heterosexual tension. I actually see this as a closer relative to House than CSI because the procedural aspect of the show is a red herring.
Posted by: mr. rendon | 2009.06.04 at 19:13