Television Yak

Not much to say about “The Three Bears,” except for a throwaway line that struck me and stuck with me just as much as the apparently bolted-to-the-desk laptop from the second episode. While the agents are trailing Becca in Prague, Cliff Curtis (a.k.a. Ethnically Ambiguous Guy) reports that she’s at the Charles Bridge and “heading north towards the university.” Okay, except that Charles University is south and east of the bridge.

So I assume the writers are all working out of a windowless converted warehouse in East L.A., that they’re all resentful of how the production crew got to go to Europe, but they couldn’t have taken fifteen seconds to type “Prague” into Google Maps and get the geography right?

Also, again Becca earns her World’s Greatest Mom mug by leaving six-year-old Michael alone in Old Town Square with some random puppeteer. Nothing molestery about that.

I didn’t understand the modern-day Doctor Who resurgence, the popularity of what marked the cheapest of cheap-ass science fiction. I remember twenty-year old public television re-broadcasts of the old Doctor Who and wondering how this amateur stagecraft — banal and minimalist even by public television standards — got on my TV. As a kid, I never would have bothered to discover that the empty sets reflected the show’s conceptual shallowness, the nonsense background of alien Time Lords and the TARDIS looking like a police box for some reason, and what’s a police box anyway? Wikipedia has this to say about the Daleks:

The Daleks are a fictional extraterrestrial race of mutants from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Within the series, Daleks are cyborgs from the planet Skaro, created by the scientist Davros during the final years of a thousand-year war against the Thals. They are genetically engineered Kaled mutants integrated within a tank-like or robot-like mechanical shell.

I wouldn’t have bothered with “Blink” had I realized just how much I’d have to willingly suspend my disbelief. The Dalek description, the “genetically engineered Kaled mutants” and the thousand-year war, all sound like the hazy ramblings of a stoned Scientologist. Just like you might look at the black scrim background and have to imagine how it’s part of a larger, albeit cheeseball, universe or hear the tinny “ex-ter-mi-nate” catch phrase from a Dalek’s sound hole as if now, now that we realize it plans to exterminate, the lumbering trash can on wheels is menacing. It’s the sixties and the robo-alien technology symbolized everything that was novel and foreign and poorly-understood, but why aren’t they just pushing the Daleks over on their sides?

I’m assuming the production values on the modern Doctor Who have evolved somewhat from the early days, and “Blink” mercifully features not a single overgrown Roomba stumbling around the protagonists. “Blink” is pretty compelling, even if it does open with a blonde chick walking into a haunted house for no good reason. Exploring the house, Sally Sparrow finds a decrepit room, peeling wallpaper and scrawled underneath, “Beware the weeping angels.” There is a stone weeping angel statue outside. Then on the wall, “Duck. Duck. Duck, Sally Sparrow. I mean it, duck now,” as a brick comes flying through the window at her head. It’s a phenomenally gripping opening — especially for someone who’s new to Doctor Who and not in the mentality of time travel and ontological paradoxes.

“Blink” is unexpected, off-kilter and scary enough to turn me into… not quite a fan, certainly not a Whovian. I don’t know. “Blink” married spectacular plotting and imagery, grounded enough to let me drop my objections to a few unearned sentimental moments and to keep me from wondering, “Who came to that haunted house and put up wallpaper over the message?” The resolution to why beware the weeping angels stayed out of the half-assed backstories characterizing the Dalek history above, and it did a great job of making the denouement less creepy but more scary. The only thing I had real problems with in Doctor Who was, unfortunately, the Doctor.

He’s fairly absent through most of the episode, but David Tennant just irritated the hell out of me with his garrulous nerd personality and inane British-isms. He’s delivering exposition most of his lines, but I wanted to slap him when he was describing, “Time is not a straight line. It’s more of a wobbly-bobbly timey-wimey thing.” As if that makes his existence as a time traveler any more clear or easy to swallow. The only thing worse than a twitty nerd is a twitty nerd who won’t shut up, and I’d hate to spend more than a couple of minutes with this weirdo.

Apartment 23 is all subversive when it comes to throwing the word “bitch” into its title, but any true rebelliousness stops at the title card, clearly too scary for ABC to handle. Not to demand that Apartment 23 mutate from a somewhat dopey coming-of-age story into something that challenges the status quo, but it wasn’t all that hilarious either, and that’s really disappointing. Also, that Apartment 23 is enormous, with two bedrooms and exposed brick and do you have any idea how much a place like that in Manhattan would rent for? Not since the ridiculous hipster penthouse in Friends…

Krysten Ritter plays the titular bitch, Chloe, with a habit of picking up new roommates, collecting their rent money, and then turning into an antisocial weirdo till she drives the new roommate out. But on the spectrum of irritating people you never want to meet in real life, Chloe is closer to the wacky neighbor with an underdeveloped sense of boundaries than she is to total bitch. She walks around the apartment naked — or, well, pixillated. She steals your food even though you clearly labelled it. She sells sketchy Chinese herbal pills out of Apartment 23. Not pot, not ecstasy, either of which I’d totally get from the character, but something essentially harmless, just like Chloe.

The latest roommate is June, one of those chipper midwesterners, straight off the bus, full of optimism and pluck and honestly bland as the miles and miles of cornfields back in whatever middle American hellhole she came from. The narration is June’s, and she opens by walking in on her fiance and Chloe in a frenzy of heavy petting, shrieks, and voiceovers that “it was the best thing that ever happened to me.” See, the bitch in apartment 23 really has a heart of gold.

When the toothlessness of Apartment 23 really started gnawing at me — so to speak — I actually thought a lot about the Community pilot, which asked the audience to identify with a protagonist far more sociopathic than Chloe, and which I found a lot more effective. Part of Joel McHale’s brilliance on that show, and frankly on The Soup, is his ability to be simultaneously above the Greendale nonsense that surrounds him and a totally willing enabler of it. There’s no way that Ritter, who was cast in the Gossip Girl prequel that never happened, is going to bring that much detachment, or even that much awareness, to Chloe. She mentions her lingering bitterness with her own early days in New York, then transitions right into a story about conning James Van Der Beek into buying a condominium from her.

Oh, did I mention that Chloe’s best friend is James Van Der Beek? Playing himself, so there were a few Third Eye Blind jokes that I’m embarrassed to say I chuckled at. I thought my Dawson’s Creek jealousy died ten or so years ago, when the show did. Just like Chloe, the Beek is kind of neutered, half the time playing the ex-celebrity who won’t exit the spotlight gracefully and half the time the ex-celebrity ashamed that he peaked as a thirty-five year old teenage shitty filmmaker living near a creek. He needs to pick a persona and run with it.

I’ll check out the next episode since it’s free on Hulu. The episode description is, “June begrudgingly lets Chloe set her up on a date.” The pilot ended with Chloe exposing June’s fiance as a cheater, so I’m guessing in this episode, it’ll be a good guy. He’s probably some kind of mark for Chloe, and setting up June is part of some trick. But then June falls for the guy and after moral equivocation and some girl talk with James Van Der Beek, she calls off her con so she doesn’t hurt June. If I’m right, I’m done with Apartment 23. And if I’m wrong, I’ve got my Apartment 23 spec script right there.

I gotta show some love to the razor’s edge of big-budget camp that Missing teeters on, plodding along, oblivious, as the most half-assed show on television. It’s ironic love, of course — a quickie, no strings attached back-alley fuck, as if I could ever cheat on my beloved Community. But sometimes you watch Ashley Judd’s histrionics and think, “Goddamn that scenery looks delicious!” Yes, I would like a bite or two, maybe something sweet, like a honey cake or our heroine collapsing to her knees, weeping, because her son is Taken Missing.

As the latest iteration in ABC’s long and proud history of housewife-fantasy dramas, Missing is naturally dumb as box of rocks. Judd, who you’ll be shocked to learn only co-starred in three movies with Morgan Freeman — WTF?! — here would like to inform you that she is “NOT C.I.A.” With caps lock on. She is “A MOTHER” — insert gratuitous fat-ass comma here — “LOOKING FOR MY SON.” Poor Ashley could not be emoting more if she were playing a jilted drag queen mistress on a Mexican telenovela. I believe there’s my Missing spec script — Becca has to go undercover, playing a jilted drag queen mistress on a Mexican telenovela to retrieve… I don’t know, let’s just say microfilm. No one steal that.

That’s pretty much it. Not C.I.A., check. Mother, check. Looking for her son, check.

Missing hits every beat you’d expect from its two-sentence concept. Your standard nameless, incompetent henchmen get knocked out. It cuts to a room of people at their computers and describing aloud what’s on their monitors, as you do. Ashley Judd tries a few one-liners, which… crickets.

Then this scene came on:

I do not talk to the characters on the TV set, because I have long ago realized that they cannot hear me. The medium only goes in one direction. And no matter how hoarse I make myself yelling at these idiots, they always wind up doing what’s in the script. I’ve come to accept my powerlessness over the television people. But nonetheless: “Mon ami, you are aware that is a laptop, right? You don’t need to sit there, in plain sight, in what is literally the world’s most transparent secret intelligence agency headquarters, waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing the hard drive. You can take that computer with you, somewhere else, and do that when you’re not being chased by utterly disposable guards.”

Missing isn’t camp. That’s what’s so fucking bizarre about the show. It’s filmed on location and there’s a ton of money thrown at the screen, not to mention whatever Ashley Judd commands by not starring in Along Came a Spider — again, WTF?! But aside from its clunky, obvious, exposition-heavy writing, its humorlessness, its one-dimensional characters’ scenery chewing, are you telling the production designer couldn’t plug up this gaping plot hole by putting a desktop computer in that office?

Of course, if you ever need to break into a heavily-guarded government facility, Missing has some ideas for you:

That’s right, if it’s good enough for clearing a junior high school cause someone didn’t study for their math test, it’s good enough for sneaking into French national intelligence headquarters.