Valentine: Cancel It

I made the mistake of watching the new television show: Valentine the other night.

The only special actress in this show is Autumn Reeser and she plays a relatively minor role. The actor behind the Cupid character isn't bad either, but the lead actress, Jaime Murray is about as diverse and adaptable as a pet rock.

I loved to hate her when she played the mildly insane, obnoxious twisted love interest in the last season's Dexter. In this series she is singularly responsible for completely stripping this show of what very little merit it has. For someone who has a real English accent, it sounds pretty fake. I've met quite a few people from Britain, none of them sounded like that.

Anyway, on to some of the core problems with this terrible hour of television. The show is about a family of Gods who live on earth in a classic Greek style house who get soul mates together. That's about as original as a Night Rider remake. The acting and production quality is barely par with network fare, there's no chemistry between this "ensemble cast" and visually the show is stylistically barren. The set design, costuming, directing and lighting decisions made for each and every scene are boring, standard and I'd love to see what a pair of film school graduates could have done to make this fun to watch.

As for the writing, well. Embarrassing. Aphrodite gives a character an orgasm by touching her (that was the only funny part of the show), but then she goes on to call it "a straight shot of unconditional love." Pardon me, but unconditional love has very little if nothing at all to do with orgasms. I have to give a few of the younger actors credit, by the way, they managed to perform admirably through very wooden dialogue.

Again, things come down to the lead actress, who will be in our faces for the whole run of the show, picking the missions (yes, these love matches the family make are assigned like missions), for the whole gang is a terrible choice. Look, Jaime Murray has a great body (Aphrodite traditionally does, but it would have been more interesting if they had chosen someone with curves, not near anorexia), and her accent is constant enough not to irritate most viewers, but there are literally thousands of actresses that would have been a better choice.

Valentine: Cancel the damn thing, let the few good actors in this series find work we can enjoy them in.

RL

Smallville: Love The Actors, Hate The Writers, Directors and Makeup People

After watching the Smallville season 8 premiere I was in complete shock. Actress Cassidy Freeman is now cast as the Lex Luthor stand in, the regular villain. Not bad, she's a lovely woman and a decent actress.

What had me in utter shock was the abysmal makup job the crew did with her! Maybe the lighting was bad for as well, because for the first time in my entire life I exclaimed; "HOLY SHIT SHE'S UGLY!" It was out loud, I'm sure neighbors heard me. The makeup and lighting people must hate her. I hope her agent is looking for an out clause in her contract and a better job.

I understand the concept of taking a lovely, talented actress then using makeup and lighting to make her look freakish. It's an old, cliche, tired visual device that belongs in films that can actually pull it off like Monster, for example. In this situation the worn out quality of "uglying up" your actress shows in spades, turning this actress into just another example of cheesy visuals. The more brilliant turn in a villain, to me, was taking something absolutely beautiful and demonstrating that the character at the core of that visual presentation is absolutely rotten. Why not challenge and surprise your audience? Smallville has done that in the past and the ratings were fantastic.

These new producers, writers and costume designers fail in such a painful fashion that the premere of this season's Smallville is very near a good example of what not to do with a long running series. Sad costumes, terrible lines for the Justice League folks, and yet another power for Chloe. On top of it all the directing style was like a cross between 24 and Xena Warrior Princess. I love Smallville, I think there is a lot of talent working on the show as well. I hope with the departure of the original show runners this thing doesn't tank.

I expect this will be the last season for Smallville. They should have let the original show runners write and execute the ending. This is turning into a bad ripoff of Lois and Clark (the Superman TV series that came before).

RL

Fringe: CW Network Screws Up Big!

Fringe is a new science fiction television show created by J.J. Abrams that has been compared to the X-Files by pretty much everyone. I like it, it's a quality show with a diverse set of characters and built in conflicts that could stretch those interesting relationships for years while they delve into the strange, wonderful, terrifying and sometimes gooey realm of science fiction.

I think it's worth watching and they should give it a year.

There's a problem, however. The Nielson ratings system (which is a pointless, outdated, overpriced, bloated, service the television world worships as gospel), reported that fewer than ten million people tuned in for the premiere. This is a problem because J.J. Abrams is also one of the creators of Lost, which posted over eighteen million viewers for it's premiere and has done amazingly well every year since, even when the show had "lost it's way" according to most viewers it posted premiere numbers well above Fringe. (That was season three for everyone who isn't hooked into the Lost phenomenon).

Fringe had some serious obstacles to overcome on its premiere night and it's important to take them into account, though I doubt the networks will. Here's a few of them.

The full pilot episode was "leaked" on the Internet almost two months ago. I saw a clip of it and it was in high defenition, perfect sound and picture. You honestly couldn't do better on the quality. Piracy of this premere was so pervasive that it made it to the Russian DVD market, where thousands of copies were sold marked as; "created by the director of Star Trek". Even though the upcoming Trek film isn't out, it must have worked. Bootleggers made a fortune, there are even subs in a dozen or so languages available online. So perhaps the right phrase here is: "The pilot episode was projectile vomited across the globe" instead of "leaked."

The advertising sucked. I knew exactly what this show was about since I had read up on it but after watching the first television ads I couldn't imagine anyone on earth understanding the premise behind the show. The 30 second long ad was also very irritating. It told you nothing, looked like a badly edited clip show and there was almost no dialogue. Even I was turned off and I already liked the idea behind the show. Advertising following that terrible mess included more dialogue, more descriptive narration but still didn't tell anyone what the premise of the show was in a clear way that the common IQ 85 viewer could understand. That's your audience advertisers! Those are the only people left on the sofa when the advertising comes on, because anyone with an IQ over 85 is smart enough to have something else to do while your ads are rolling or they used their TiVo and don't watch the commercials.

Here's another problem: The audience most interested in this type of programming are also most likely to use their DVR (Digital Video Recorder, for those of you still living in the 80s), and those figures don't count in the Neilson Ratings system. They're lightly considered after the fact.

The critics generally didn't like this show. Considering most of them are out of date and no longer in touch with the general audience themselves, I don't respect their opinions much. The sad fact is that people see these bad reviews and are too lazy to tune in and find out for themselves whether or not the show is good for them. Three's Company got terrible reviews back in the day, but it had massive ratings. Eventually the critics gave it good reviews just so they could save face a little.

Anyway, hopefully the CW Network (what a terrible name), gives Fringe a season to show it's stuff. I'm sure J.J. will gladly give it his best shot and it'll be the best oddity show on television for a while. I will be surprised if they do give it a chance, however, since the CW Network is already in big trouble and they're sorely disappointed with Fringe's performance. Since the whole network is run by corporate hacks who don't care if it's a good show, only that advertisers are interested, I expect to maybe see 6-13 episodes of Fringe before they flush it.

I'm starting to think if I ever get an opportunity to produce my own intellectual property in a visual medium I might just want to do it on a straight to Internet and DVD basis. Sure, the advertising budget has to be pretty high, but hell, at least I won't have to deal with Corporate heads who would rather sit around and watch the commercials.

RL