Dollhouse and Flashforward fail to ignite, The Office (US) misses its chance and Stargate: Universe impresses

These last few weeks, a host of shows have returned.  First off, let’s consider Dollhouse, the Joss Whedon’s offering that takes a lump of  Baudrillardian ponderings, digests it along with his usual cast of hip, All American actors (with a glossy edition of OK! magazine on the side) and shits it out.  The resulting dump is a thing of two sides.  On one hand, the concept of reprogrammable avatars (the dolls) living inside a brothel and used by its clientèle for things as varied as romantic engagements to bank heists to rewaking the dead to solve their own murders is rich with potential.  On the other hand, each episode feels plucked from the air with little interest in maintaining a strong narrative arc and impetus in being watchable.

Instead, episodes usually revolve around Echo – a doll who, as her name suggests, finds echoes of her past and the echoes of the personalities which inhabit her over the course of the series – on a mission, with Eliza Dushku playing a variety of characters to various levels of success.  The thing is, every single week there seems to be a hiccup during the process of acting out these missions, so we follow the same procedure of the Dollhouse’s “handlers” – those who look after the dolls while on these missions – as they try and sort out the mess caused.  One wonders how the Dollhouse can be a successful business enterprise and what its customer approval rating is.  Ultimately, the shows first season felt like a very long, extended pilot, whereby only the final reels indicate that the show is going anywhere.

Season Two, starting again after the mysterious 13th episode “Epitaph One” was placed on the first seasons DVD, dawdles about in the same manner as half the first seasons episodes, which is again a shame, because “Epitaph One,” set in an apocalyptic future where the technology programming dolls has run out of control, should have galvanised the shows creative energies.  One can despair already that Dollhouse has been a bit of a spoil sport for ideas, rendering the chance of a similar premised show, executed better in the near future unlikely.

Flashforward unlike Dollhouse has a very clear premise, and one in which the whole show is built around.  The thing is, as I have noted before, everyone is so bloody boring in it.  There may well be genial orchestration in the construction of its overall narrative and mythology – although that has yet to be seen; I’m just saying – but the show insists on only dripping tidbits of information regarding the mysterious flashforwards, and in the mean time documents the ongoing crisis these many characters are dealing with.  That, in itself, is not a bad thing and is a proven formula for success, and indeed that loathed beast Lost does it well with its compulsory flashbacks, but it requires the characters to be more than cardboard cut outs.  Characterisation requires more than everyone having their own dark secret – as contrived as Fienne’s Mark Benford having a drink problem – their one fatal flaw which apparently gives them a depth and  humanity lacking in the perfectly ordinary, average human beings such as ourselves.  Domestic American life has been proved a tale of status, depression and discontentment so many times before that its starting to become incredibly dull, especially when you have to sit there and wait it out to catch a glimpse of the greater narrative arc.  However, Jack Davenport is nice to see onscreen as always, and here brings a standard (for him) knowing performance to the table of absurdity that is Flashforward, a table that no one else seems to cotton on exists.

Jim and Pam finally got married in The Office (US).  Their romance has gone on for a while now and the writers have built upon expectation after expectation that this would be something like the icing on the cake for a very good show.   They seem to forget that the icing on the cake needs a chef to expertly lattice that fluffy pink drizzle over the rest of the cake.  The episode had a feeling of self-gratuitous contentment which just came across lazy; let’s put all these characters which have slowly developed to varying levels of success over five seasons and put them in a hotel near Niagara falls.  Let’s see what happens then.

And it happens pretty much as you would expect it to, in a way one could probably suggest it would after seeing merely the first season.  Michael will embarrass everyone with a speech.  Dwight will have to interact with other people.  Pam and Jim will through off convention with a secret wedding.  There seemed to be little effort or interest in writing a comedic show to it, and as Krasinski and  Fischer’s onscreen chemistry arguably rivals or even betters that of Tim and Dawn’s (which is definitely one of the most underplayed yet wonderful romances of recent memory) to have such a predictable effort for what should be a landmark moment in the shows chronology is a waste.

It’s not all doom and gloom, disappointment and disinterest though.  The Sci-Fi Channel (now regressed to the oh so postmodern moniker of Sy-Fy) has reinvigorated the Stargate franchise, a franchise which I must admit to have never cared for much to the extent of never watching more than a handful of episodes of SG-1 and completely avoiding Stargate Atlantis.  Why I began watching Stargate Universe is not something I can really answer considering my record with its precedents, but the casting of Robert Carlyle probably had something to do with it.   That’s right, taking up the mantle of the game-changing Battlestar Galactica, respected thespians are flocking to Science Fiction television regardless of the baggage of their original hammy incarnations.

Time seems to have moved on in the Stargate mythos – although only a few years to be fair – and us humans have spaceships and shit, with offworld military installations, and all this still unknown to the world at large, and yet we still have no solution to the increasing gut of Richard Dean Anderson.  Carlyle plays a Scientist figuring out what some 9th chevron on the Stargates does, which is something they obviously haven’t achieved yet.  What follows is that some kind of alien force attacks Icarus, the base that Carlyle works on this mysterious Stargate at, and events are pulled into motion that elicit the survivors of the attack to jump into the Stargate and thus into the unknown.  They end up on an old, old ship drifting through space with no way home.  Indeed, we soon learn through a modestly awe-inspiring slideshow that the ship is no longer even in the Milky Way, the zoom of the images drifting outwards until dozens of galaxies fill the screen.  I’m a sucker for stuff like that.

Carlyle, as a source of knowledge among a rag tag bunch of bureaucrats and grunts, occupies a situation similar to Gaius Baltar in BSG, although instead of James Callis’ effete manner, Carlyle rockets around the ship with the kind of fury a bookworm Begby might radiate.  It’s quite hard to stop with the BSG comparisons, and the look of Ron Moore’s remake is obviously a starting point for Stargate Universe, with the Destiny (the name of the ship they are stranded on) replicating not only the interior look of the Nostromo but that of the good old Galactica too, and any comparisons are only likely to do Universe favours considering the acclaim BSG commanded.  The situation too, gives a similar potential for collisons of morality and politik among the crew.

Where it falls short of Battlestar Galactica for this viewer is that while Robert Carlyle is a great actor to watch week in week out, none of those around him carry the same kind of gravitas as Mary McDonnell, Edward James Olmos or Michael Hogan.  Perhaps an arbitrary or ungrateful criticism, but it means that those opposing Carlyle and his brusque manner are unknowable and somewhat tame actors, without the bite of Edward James Olmos glaring and snarling at you, or Michael Hogan giving his excellent pirate impression.  They are certainly capable actors, but they don’t have the extra edge that the aforementioned BSG aluminaries give, and you get the feeling you could pick up remarkably similar performances from any line of queuing Hollywood actors, and a line that will not include revelatory talents like Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer and Jamie Bamber.

What it does provide however, and very well, is the sense of wonder and awe that Battlestar Galactica, in its metaphysical, philosophical mutterings, ignored.  Not having been a fan of Star Trek in any sense until the new film (which borrows heavily from Star Wars, so criticise me for that) I’m loathe to reference a major part of that franchise, but the wonder of visiting these new, strange worlds and being alone in a very alien universe is a major part of what made me connect with Stargate Universe.  It’s a very strong start, and one that I will be following.

TV that will be ingrained into your faces and TV that may slip through the gaps

Often with TV, it’s all a matter of Marketing.  And so is the entire world.  Marketing. Yes, seated atop their utopian skyscrapers with their Gorden Gecko coffee mugs and their smarmy expression, smug Surrey accents and Patrick Bateman haircuts, the Marketing people control everything.  Oh, what a well observed point there young one, for it was a mystery that lingered only in my dreams until you brought it forth into reality with unequalled clarity.

Well, it’s still true, and none more so than in the ratings obsessed media frenzy that is now television, a medium so fragmented and screaming for cash that even ITV has its iPlayer equivalent, which just goes to show that even the channel catering for the elderly has to broaden the way in which its content and advertising can reach the viewers.

This means more than ever that television must cater for  ’key demographics’  and leave the risk of producing oddball comedic mash ups like Man to Man With Dean Learner to the banal fairies who haunt the BBC archives at night.  Those fairies don’t exist by the way; I made them up to illustrate just how rare a TV company willing to take a risk for niche programming is.  Instead, British TV concentrates on homogenised gurn fests like Doctor Who or the BBC’s other Saturday night serials.

Of course, when you have something quite unusual you have to live and let live with the production firms and hop up to the marketing level and that’s really where the gulf widens.  Take the example of Lost, a high concept scenario in which the survivors of a plane crash land on a deserted island and I won’t bother going on because if you don’t know the basic premise behind the show by now you’re either too busy with your life that haven’t had time to watch it – and good on you for that – or you’re a total moron.

Of course, the plane crash turns out to be the most pedestrian thing about the show as things get going.  Bundles of uncanny and mysterious things occur over the shows seasons, including hippy spiritualism, the Zeitgeist and, I’m told, time travel.  It’s a melting point of different paranoia’s.  There’s only so many enigmas I can take personally, and I’m glad to say I bailed on Lost at the advent of its second season.

One of the many twists of 'Lost.'

However, my point is this: these ideas are far removed from your average show and potentially too diverse and scattered to package in one normal sized box – and it probably is to the shows credit that it has managed to keep them all relative control (even if to the discerning viewer, its all completely contrived).  Yet ABC’s Lost has reached its place in the cultural spectrum of the naughties not only with plenty of mysterious to tease the audience with, but with the help of a marathon advertising campaign that seems to rear its head only for air once every year like a bloody werewolf.

The same beast carries the burden of Flashforward, another high-concept ABC drama with weird ideas (what does the kangaroo mean? How zen!).  Flashforward has modelled itself closely upon its forebears rise to prominence.  Of course, one of Lost’s most powerful allies has been its irritant internet fan base, and Flashforward’s very premise seems to draw on the same kind of narrative mysteries that led idiot Lost fans to link together in the first place, forming a cult to ponder its meanings (if there is any that is).  The premise is somewhat simple, but ultimately bizarre: the world’s population, from Swindon to Shanghai, mysteriously pass out for roughly two and a half minutes and then wake up again.  Basically, if you’ve seen the first series of the perennially-disappointing-but-potentially-mind-blowing Heroes, think of Isaac’s premonitory paintings being the ENTIRE premise of the show.

Joseph Fiennes got lost on his way to the new RSC audition.

Of course, when they wake up, bad things have happened.  Aeroplanes lie submerged in the oceans, millions of cars have collided with each other, helicopters shudder and splat into skyscrapers like there’s no tomorrow – the list is endless.  In fact, its a shame it doesn’t show more of the stranger, banal kind of death which would probably run like a tasteless Youtube playlist of stunts gone wrong.  Most horrifyingly, the two minute black out affects surgeons on the operating table, leaving their patients good and dead by the time they wake.  It’s no surprise that the show revels in this chaotic dismantling of our fragile world and that no CGI is spared when visualising the destruction, but because it seems to enjoy itself too much, we have trouble taking the devastation seriously.  True horror this isn’t, and as our characters run through the streets littered with debris, we are left to look at the dead bodies simply as window dressing for the greater mystery of the show.

As soon as Joseph Fiennes turns up, crawling out from the overturned car he’s passed out in (a situation much like we were with Jack the Doctor in Lost’s pilot) we know we’ve found our compulsory straight laced hero with compulsory flaws and compulsory resources to get the job done.  One would hope that Flashforward can offer the diversions from the straight laced type in the same manner as Lost did, because Fiennes character is quite a bore as it is, and all in all, Fiennes just looks a bit lost in a production like this.  Turns out however, that Fiennes’s character (the name is quite forgetful) wasn’t simply dormant while unconscious, but that he was having a vision in which he was cowering in a nightmarish future, looking lost again – but this time with a gun – as tatooed men approach him with bigger guns.

It’s soon established that it wasn’t just Fiennes’ character who experienced a vision during the black out, but everyone in the entire world.  And it soon turns out that these visions take place in the future at precisely the same time on the same day, even the same month! It’s kind of like being beaten over the head with a genetically modified marrow of Truth, and it’s quite unpleasant.

Soon, Fiennes  is revealing to a room of empty suits in the FBI office  - did I not mention that hero comes equipped with Federal Bureau badge? – that in his dream, he was working on a case piecing together the information about the black outs.   Now, I can’t say I know much for the inner workings of the FBI, but I know they are not investigators of the paranormal, and I at least expected the old cliche of the hero being ridiculed by his seniors.  But no, instead of the benevolent boss giving our hero twenty four hours to prove his cases worth despite protestations from colleagues, they just out right believe him.  Of course, most of them had dreams too, but the FBI work with reason and logic, and I find that they adapt to the idea of a global mindfuck so fast just silly.

More on Joseph Fiennes, I guess, who’s followed the likes of Dominic West and Idris Elba (of The Wire, the former an Eaton toff, the latter an ex-employee of Dagenham Motors), Hugh Laurie, Jamie Bamber (Apollo, Battlestar Galactica) to Hollywood and probably landed in a show that is most likely to succeed due to its advertising on every screen on the North American continent.  He’s the aforementioned FBI man, also a family man, with a wife (doctor), kid (small girl) and a house straight out of the Truman Show.  All is well, all is white and middle class and America is alive and well.  But with America in peril, Middle America must once again save the world and Fiennes – a perfectly good actor who  has nailed the accent – is the man for the job.

Sadly, from the pilot, the character is a bore as mentioned.  So is his wife, a doctor, and his daughter, who just smacks of the Dakota Fanning vibe that means Daddy will have to come and save her at some point.  And Daddy spends most of us his time on the show looking pensive and glum, and you almost think that Fiennes was picked because he fits in the bill for cheap, potentially bankable star rather than the character.  It’s probably too much to hope ABC would present to us a progressive casting choice in the form of a black or asian family, but frankly we’ve seen all of this before.

Toilet Trouble

Perhaps though, the lack of characterisation, the lack of a realistic reaction to spectacular events and the glee its takes showing us all the bodies of the dead, Flashforward just wants to power ahead and get the real story going, and it does try hard.  We’re given a few threads to follow, from the revelations of peoples own visions, from Doctor-Wifes dream that in six months she’ll be with another man to a friend* of Fiennes revealing that he saw his daughter alive in his vision despite recently burying her. We get John Cho (more famously Harold from Harold and Kumar (and Sulu!)) as a fellow FBI agent confiding to Fiennes that he never had a vision at all, to the end that he believes he will be dead in six months.   Harold is in fact, one of the good things evident in the pilot, but mainly because he seems like quite a nice bloke rather than showing any massive talent for the small screen.

*Actually, this is supposedly Fiennes’ sponsor from the rehab clinic, and vice versa.  How we were ever supposed to believe Joseph Fiennes was an alcoholic, I don’t know.  But I suppose there’s nothing more heroic than Jack Bauer in rehab.

Flashforward isn’t bad per se, it’s probably perfectly watchable to most, but the pilots got none of the thrills of the extraordinary pilot for Lost or the determination to really get into the hearts and heads of its viewers like the Battlestar Galactica pilot had.  Of course, this is precisely my point: we’re so inebriated with average shows marketed and advertised as if they are the second coming, that we miss the truly great television that’s out there.

One of these is Breaking Bad, a dark comedy-drama that has a lot more to offer than its name suggests – and yes, it sounds like Saved By The Bell, Part II.  Covering both familiar territory in the form of a disillusionment with suburban life and new, stranger turf, its a show that really won’t pull enough interest to be shown anywhere but a backlot digital channel in the UK.  It stars Bryan Cranston, who might be vaguely familiar to anyone who’s ever watched Malcolm in the Middle.  Now, Malcolm in the Middle may have passed some by, it may also have turned off viewers with Malcolm’s frequent confessionals of teenage angst to the camera, but the show had some great moments and some even greater performances from both the young cast and the adult cast (Bryan Cranston was Hall, their Dad).  This is completely different territory, even if Cranston plays the father in a matriarchal suburban family again.

Paedophile Moustache

Cranston is Walter White, a Chemistry teacher who seems to moonlight as an employee of a local garage at night to keep up the family funds while his wife is on maternity leave.  They have an older child, Walter Jr, who has cerebral palsy, and who has a remarkably quick tongue and charismatic presence when compared to portrayals of other sufferers of cerebral palsy on TV.  Skyler, Walter’s wife, has a bigoted sister who’s marriage to a DEA narcotics officer means that although Walter Jr may have a solid role model in his father already, he also has a successful, righteous yet ultimately alpha-male role model also vying for his attention – and by extension threatening Walter’s masculinity.  The monotony of his suburban life however, is placed into perspective, or perhaps even dwarfed by the revelation that he has inoperable lung cancer.

Unlike, say, Kevin Spacey in the familiar set up of American Beauty, Walter takes an altogether extreme path to reasserting his position as family breadwinner, accompanying his ass of a brother-in-law on a drug bust at a Meth Lab – Walter previously witnessing the amount of money to be earned from selling Crystal Meth on a news report in the presence of his gloating brother in law, who was the officer interviewed by the channel.   After discovering one of the dealers of the Crystal Meth is an ex-student, he sets about preparing a mobile Meth Lab with the help of the dealer, Jesse, in order to produce and sell Meth, stocking up enough cash to provide for his family after he has past.

It’s a series that manages to keep both the drama and comedy on an even keel, so you aren’t just yawning through melodramatic ramblings until something outrageous happens.  It’s smart, but not to the extent of alienating its audience, and incredibly well acted by Cranston, who compliments and tones down the more exaggerated gestures and postures of Hall with unexpected layers of depth, self disgust, warmth and determination.  As a show, it explores the psyche of the reluctant criminal, the good, family man turning to the dodgy side of the tracks to provide for his family and yet the characterisation is completely different from previous incarnations of the type,  where the good man will turn to crime to help his family and come out of it with his principles intact, or the good man who turns to the dark side and falls prey to its indigenous natives.  It instead shows easily it is for a normal man like Walter to turn to the other side of the tracks, and keep going.  Walter looks like those men you see on the news, tried for crimes that seem beyond their means.

I’ll soldier on with Flashforward.  It’s at least provoked enough empathy from me in its poor execution that I want to see it flourish, but while I’m sure it will be plastered across the screens of the UK soon, keep in mind Breaking Bad, and watch it.  That is if you haven’t already.

You can catch Flashforward on Five I think, but Breaking Bad remains confined to the FX digital channel.