dreamloom

Leverage Season Preview

rporter — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:08:09 +0000

After last season’s very big, very destructive finale, the Leverage Group disbanded and went to the four corners. Their operation was in ruins and their names and faces were exposed to the authorities by Jim Sterling; going underground was the logical move.

We return six months later in Boston. Nate has accepted a job working in insurance again and is being taken on a tour of the company’s offices when the walls close in and he runs. Runs right into a case made for the team, if only he were interested in getting the band back together.

The band wants to get back together. Desperately. Hacker, hitter, grifter, and thief have been adrift without their mastermind. Sophie has been acting, Parker stole (and returned) the Hope diamond, Hardison hacked and Eliot whacked, but none of them feels the thrill or satisfaction from crime anymore. They’ve been infected by Nate’s do-goodness. So they suck Nate back in.

Of course it doesn’t take long before the team is up and running out of Nate’s apartment in Boston.

The move of the production from LA to Portland gives the show a fresher, unique look. The Electric Entertainment team is shooting Portland for Boston but even in the premier it’s clear they are taking advantage of the city’s individual charm. Wetter, brickier, funkier, and more fun than last season’s backdrop, the move north should be invigorating.

As for what we can expect to see this season, here’s a short list of the goodness coming up:

Wil Wheaton. Shockingly, Wheaton hadn’t worked with his old hockey buddy Dean Devlin before but the fan of the show gets to be a guest on an upcoming episode.¹
The return of Jim Sterling. What, you thought Mark Sheppard wouldn’t be dropping by?
If you’ll notice in the premiere, Gina Bellman is looking a little…pregnant. She was probably a month or two along when 2.1 was filmed and as Sophie isn’t pregnant, later on this season she’ll be spending a lot more time sitting, standing behind counters, and generally hiding her belly. Around that time Jeri Ryan will join the cast as a con artist friend of Sophie’s to help the team out.
Nate struggling with his demons. He’s dried out. Will he stay that way or will the stress of working with these thieves prove too much?
New, slick credits using the “hitter, hacker, grifter, thief, mastermind” phrasing. In a few seconds they give just enough information for a new viewer to jump in.

Leverage was a fun diversion last winter and doesn’t miss a beat starting off this summer. Season two premieres this Wednesday, July 15, at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Here’s a short preview to whet your appetite.

Check his blog for production posts of his guest stint, starting here.

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Dark Blue premieres on TNT

rporter — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:35:38 +0000

I’ve been a fan of Dylan McDermott since way back. Back when I couldn’t quite keep my Dylans and Dermots straight¹ I still knew when I saw him that I’d probably enjoy whatever he was doing. I put up with The Practice long past its DEK half-life,² when it had degraded into a self-referential stew of inanity, because of his dark, brooding charm.

So I was looking forward to his take on a broken cop, walking the line between law and lawlessness in LA’s dark underbelly with a good deal of anticipation. That, despite coming from Jerry Bruckheimer and a slew of his disciples - five executive producers and a co-EP. I knew it would be slick and fast and loose with reality but hoped McDermott would keep it afloat.

TNT has done a good job to this point of rolling out shows that fit tonally. Even when they broke the pattern of “woman tougher than the men around her” shows to air Leverage, it wasn’t with a deep, dark show. This time I think they’ve pushed the envelope a bit much, as this makes a very uncomfortable pairing with Leverage on Wednesday nights.

But how was the show?

I found the pilot an awkward and unpleasant affair but thought the second episode was just enough of an improvement to give the show a (short) chance.

McDermott plays Lt. Carter Shaw who runs “a unit that doesn’t technically exist” of undercover officers. He used to do deep cover work himself and it effected him greatly. While that’s a fairly common trope, it could still be interesting if it were used to say something new or deep about the human condition. In this case, it feels like a character checkbox was filled in. That might change in the future; right now it’s hackneyed.

Shaw’s team is small. Tiny, in fact. He’s got one officer under cover and a second who just came off a long assignment and is on R&R at home with his wife. When an FBI agent is shot and left for dead on the side of the road, the heat is turned up on Shaw’s man inside, Dean Bendis (Logan Marshall-Green). The FBI has to dig deep to break through Bendis’ cover and tie him to Shaw. Meanwhile, Shaw recruits a new fourth for the team, Jaimie Allen (Nicki Aycox), a patrol cop who has fabricated a past to cover up her criminal youth.

So, we’ve got a team of four - a player-manager and three cliches - with no tactical support and apparently only one man in all of the LAPD who knows they exist. This stretches credibility to the breaking point and telegraphs the big mid-season/end-of-season event…When their captain is shot and falls into a coma, the team is left out in the cold!

Yeah, I’m picking. The show, as written, is dark in the way many comic books of the ’90s were dark, ie: dark for the sake of it. The characters are humorless, there is a deep undercurrent of paranoia in each player’s actions, and its claims on realism are countered by the unreality of the setup.

Those claims are most tellingly countered by the episodic nature of the show. I don’t know if it was a decision on the part of the creators or of TNT, but having deep cover agents finish assignments in one episode’s time is inane. Had the creators taken a look at the greatest show about an undercover operative ever - Wiseguy, for those of you too young to have basked in its glory - they might have considered adopting the long arc model to give us an opportunity to get to know the characters and the pressures they’re under over time. Instead we get shorthand and lazy characterization.

Lazy, like Ty Curtis (Omari Hardwick) slipping out to see his wife in the middle of an assignment. Which stupidity is actually the driving engine for the plot of the second episode. It’s a credit to the actors and a fine guest turn by Gregg Henry that I found the second episode less grating than the pilot, despite the Shield-light³ behavior of the team.

Like I said, there was a noticeable uptick in quality from the pilot to the second episode and I’m willing to give the show a few more weeks to try to show me it has something important or original to say. I just don’t know if they’ll get there.

Dark Blue premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. (ET/PT) on TNT.

I’m not the only one.
The number of episodes it takes until half the ideas are still original and half are rehashes of Ally McBeal and Picket Fences story lines, a value calculated by telephysicists at Fermi labs using science to be 21 episodes.
Carter Shaw is Vic Mackey, Dean is Shane, Ty is Curtis…

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Burn Notice: “Signals and Codes”

rporter — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:45:17 +0000

My name is Michael Weston. I’m an actor. When you’re a busy actor you’ve got a lot. Cash, credits, job history. You’re stuck working in whatever city they decide to film in. Like Miami.

Out from the shadow of the Paxson arc, Michael’s back to trying to find his way back into the Company’s good graces. Fortuitously, he is tracked down by a slightly anxious, slightly overwrought, slightly…oh, who am I kidding. He’s batshit. Spencer is the ever popular trope of the brilliant mathematician who suffers from schizophrenia.¹ He sees patterns everywhere and is able to track down Michael for help with a little alien/spy/treason problem.

Weston vs. Westen is a hoot and I’m happy to see the writers left plenty of room for Spencer’s return. Because tonight was fun.

The Recap

Michael and Sam have spent days staking out the airport, looking for off-the-books flights. Those would be the covert ops. They finally find one and Michael goes to the airport to find out more about the plane and its owners. By sweet talking an employee he gets his hands on a copy of the file of the mystery plane, hopping out a window to elude security when they come in response to a frantic call from Washington. The file was red flagged and Michael’s query raised an alarm.

While Barry heads upstate to get information about the shell company, Michael and Sam take a break at the gun range. And that’s where Spencer finds him. He’d calculated a high probability that Michael - the cause of the various controlled explosions and strange happenings around town - lived within five miles of this gun club. Knowing he’d need to practice all his skills to keep them sharp, he waited and watched.

One of the VPs at his job is a killer. Specifically, a traitor selling intelligence secrets about the identities of American covert operatives. And too, Spencer’s friend Barry was killed after Spencer used his computer to try to hack into Shannon’s files. Because Spencer doesn’t have a work computer, despite the PhD. He’s a little too crazy for that. After talk of aliens and an outburst at the restaurant, Sam calls the police and Spencer is hauled off to the psych ward. From which he quickly picks a lock, hacks the DMV, and shows up at Michael’s loft the next day.

It’s hard for the gang to take Spencer’s rants seriously as he shows them his walls and ceilings covered with newspaper clippings, until Sam spots the most recent clipping confirming a prediction Spencer had made earlier. The timing was TV contrived but I’m willing to let it slide. At some point the team would have found the piece of evidence that corroborated Spencer.

Michael distracts Shannon by acting like an arrogant IT guy² long enough for Spencer to slip into her office to install a keylogger. They can’t access her computer remotely without being traced; they’ll have to break into it locally. After Shannon goes back into her office, Michael borrows the bathroom key from her secretary so he can know what type it is in order to make a bump key later.

With the bump key in hand, Michael and Spencer break into Shannon’s office while Sam drags everyone in the department to the conference room for a team building meeting. Unfortunately, while they find the encrypted emails Shannon has intercepted, she does not have a copy of Zydeco - the encryption software - on her computer. Spencer realizes she must use the copy in the SCIF room³ instead. They copy what they can and get out.

Michael confronts Shannon and tells her he’s a cleaner tracking down a leak in her department. He tells her the Feds are bearing down on them and takes her to a boat - Virgil’s - telling her it belonged to Brad. There he shows her printouts of the emails he and Spencer had gotten from her computer.

He hands her a cellphone - primed to work as a bug - and says he needs to see the SCIF access logs the next day.

Shannon moves quickly, sending her hired muscle to kill Spencer. Fi and Michael get the call from Sam and race there to save Spencer. Unfortunately, this pulls Fi off her stakeout of the office building and Shannon gets a chance to clean the access logs, covering her tracks completely. That leaves only one play. Spencer has to con Shannon.

Which con he successfully pulls off - with some help from Fi and Michael - and save the day with a quick thinking ad lib about Venezuela.

From there, it’s a trivial matter for Michael to get Shannon into the SCIF room, handcuff her after he gets the copy of Zydeco, and decrypt the emails on her computer with it. The last time a criminal was tied up in such a neat package it had a note on it reading, “Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Spider-man.”

On the B-story front, Barry tracks down a real business tied to the mystery plane, an import-export front company. Diego Garza, the spy who runs it, is upfront with Michael; subterfuge would be pointless. He’s happy with his safe and cushy assignment and won’t help Michael, so Michael motivates him. He motivates him by robbing the operation and putting the artifacts up for online auction under the screen name “Michael♥sDiego”.

Diego tells Michael the Company doesn’t care that he cleared up the Stone Kittredge mess as they want it swept under the rug. They will look at his file again, though.

Character

Barry’s troubles with his mother and Michael’s understanding and empathy about them were humorous and helped ease an episode without Madeline. Michael knows what it’s like to have a mother who is annoying.

I was particularly touched by Fi’s very sweet interactions with Spencer in this episode. She was the only one able to calm him by speaking softly and reassuringly. Along with her lioness-like maternal instincts we’ve seen over the past year or so, this said a lot about Fi’s character. I’ve always been interested in what her childhood was like - I imagine her father as a rake, rapscallion, and con artist extraordinaire as played by Peter O’Toole - and now I’m even more curious. Little brothers or sisters? Maybe a socially awkward sibling? Why is Fiona, Fiona?

For his part, with anti-psychotics in his bloodstream Spencer has a bit more perspective and reminds Michael how lucky he is to have people he can trust. People like Fiona.

You know what, I am like Spencer. We both see the world a certain way and we both have skills to make it a better place. That’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to keep ducking this so let me be straight with you. This job, what we just did, saving American lives, this is the type of work I was made for, Fi. It’s what my old job gave me a chance to do every single day. So no, getting back in isn’t just a way to survive, to protect the people I love, it’s what I want. And if you truly care about me, you should damn well want for me what I want for myself.

Chyrons

I figure if they’re going to be consistently excellent, I should start taking note of them. So here we go:

Spencer: The Client
Shannon Park: Murderer, Traitor. Probably Not an Alien.
Diego Garza: The Spy Michael’s Looking For

Chin Bits

“Oh, Mike. You just wrecked the most amazing dream. All these beautiful nachos were coming right…”
“See the olive?”
“Okay mister computer. Is she out of your league?”
“My name is Charles Finley. You can call my Charles.”
“Did I mention ice cream cake?”
“Has anyone here heard of the seventh sigma? This is the newest commandment in the business bible, people.”
“You ask me, something’s wrong with the world when we don’t hang traitors anymore. Doesn’t seem right.”
“I actually am kind of a sweetheart.”

Important Lessons in Spycraft

“Nobody wants to hear from a burned spy…your best bet is to find an active field operative who can’t hang up on you. If you’re on domestic soil, the airport’s not a bad place to look.”
“When you get cornered, there’s a rush of adrenaline as the fight or flight response kicks in. In those moments you can’t listen to your body. There are some circumstances when flight just isn’t the right option. Fortunately with a little training and the right kind of hitch knot, all that adrenaline can make you pretty capable of something pretty close to flight.”
“A money launderer’s natural habitat is near rich people. What they save by avoiding taxes they usually spend on overpriced drinks.”
“In medieval Europe, spies used to pose as lepers and plague victims so they could snoop around without being bothered. In today’s corporate office, posing as IT works the same way.”⁴
“All you need to beat a modern tumbler lock is a little information and some stone age tools. If you know the basic type of key you need to spoof, pick out a matching blank, file down the valleys to the center ledge, and you have a bump key. Apply torque, whack it with anything handy, and you’re in.”
“They send out guns and supplies and get back goods to sell. Native antiquities are favorites because their subjective prices make money laundering easy.”
“Doing a job in broad daylight means easier access but more witnesses. You can walk right in with your unwanted audience but you’d better have a plan to entertain them.”
“Cellphones are basically wireless computers. Upload the right program and you’ve got a roving bug you can turn on remotely.”
“Front companies generally make easy targets for burglary. They don’t want people wondering what they have to hide, so they tend not to install a lot of lights, alarms, and security cameras. And of course they’d never invite the police in to investigate, so there’s really no need to be shy about leaving clues.”

Final Thoughts

In his third outing behind the lens, episode director Jeremiah Chechik brought a few new colors to the palate. In the sequence where Michael explains how to craft a bump key there are a few heavily processed shots - also during Michael’s robbery of the hangar - but the most interesting to me was the skyline shot at :38. I’m impressed that the production team is still playing with the formula with as much verve and energy as the writers. That’s a hallmark of a truly fine show, unwilling to settle.

What did everyone else think?

I swear, one guy goes crazy and has Russell Crowe play him in a movie and all mathematicians are suddenly crazy.
Never. Never seen one of those before. Oh no. Never.
Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. I Google so you don’t have to.
Yeah, that sounds about right. IT = leper.

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Warehouse 13 premieres on the network with the stupid name

rporter — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:55:28 +0000

It was a big night for The Syphillis Network.¹ They debuted their new name in the morning, ran their interminably long promo which looks like every other promo they’ve produced for the last five or six years, and premiered new summer series Warehouse 13. Sorta one out of three ain’t bad.

Progeny of shows like The X Files and Friday the 13th: The Series but without the added draw of a redhead, Warehouse 13 follows the adventures of Secret Service agents Pete Lattimer (Eddie McClintock) and Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly) as they track down missing artifacts to put in safekeeping by dropping into a box of goo.² The facility is intentionally reminiscent of the Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse as this show relies on familiar touchstones and tropes to support its light entertainment.

It’s nothing great, but a good match for The Syphillis Network’s other summer fare, Eureka. The shows are similar in tone with quirky characters, hunky but not booksmart male leads, smart females, and an older and wiser genius around to help out in a pinch.

Since this is formula, the important thing is to work the formula in innovative and creative ways. The premise pilot was a bit lackluster and Kelly came off as rather stupid and brittle, but I’ll give the show a few episodes to find a groove. Hopefully after five or six episodes Myka will stop disbelieving everything she sees and the writers will have come up with some interesting twists.

The one place they already succeeded was in imagining the types of artifacts housed at the facility and loose in the world. It’s clear they’re going to mix familiar old things - magic lamps/jars or hair combs that are effectively cursed - with new - Houdini’s wallet helping people commune with the dead was original³ and I was pleased to see Tesla’s Teleforce raygun. More of that inspired craziness and this might turn into something good.

What did everyone else think?

Yes. That will be the only way I’ll ever refer to them henceforth, unless I somehow got a staff job on one of their shows. Pick a juvenile name; suffer juvenile taunts.
Slimer, how far you’ve tumbled.
Quite funny too, as he was the leading skeptic of his day and spent much time debunking clarivoyants.

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Virtuality Premiere, Pilot, or One and Done?

rporter — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 23:16:36 +0000

The Virtuality pilot aired on FOX last night but I didn’t get around to watching it until this morning. I’d been looking forward to it a great deal due to its pedigree - Ron Moore, Michael Taylor, Gail Berman, and Peter Berg in various creative capacities - and the promise held in its premise: a dozen scientist/explorers aboard an experimental interstellar ship who were also the focus of a reality TV show and who were also dealing with a VR system with some glitches. With Ron Moore at the helm the risk of the show being an amalgam of every bad holodeck episode of ST:TNG was as possible as the show exploring the edge of reality and humanity.

So what was the verdict?

I didn’t like it.

I mean, it was fine and all for FOX. Better than Dollhouse for sure¹ and probably better than FOX’s other science fiction-ish shows. But not really very good.

I don’t watch reality TV because I don’t enjoy watching idiots doing stupid things; likewise, I try not to watch scripted television where people behave in irrational ways. I don’t like when someone runs upstairs to escape the crazed killer or when a master criminal lets his nemesis escape² Watching Virtuality I saw a lot of idiots and stupid behavior. I also saw a lot of very, VERY wrong science and organization.

If Ron Moore wants to do a TV show where a dragon flaps its wings to make the spaceship made of cotton candy and faerie sweat travel 17-times the speed of light, I’ll be there. I’ll accept the premise because it’s fanciful and makes no attempt at scientific reality or veracity. Hell, if he wants to tell me about dilithium crystals and spacewarps, that’s fine too. But the more a show tries to ground itself, even wrap itself, in scientific plausibility the more I expect from it.

The various Stargate incarnations had this problem in an interesting way. The movie and then first few seasons of Stargate: SG1 dealt with the gates as though they were almost magical devices. As soon as they’d reached the point where they could interface with the DHDs with their Dell laptops, could read the control crystals and reprogram them, the show lost a lot of its charm and became less plausible rather than moreso.

Here’s a rundown of the bad science and bad understanding of command in Virtuality.

The pusher plates weren’t anywhere near thick enough to shield the ship from the radiation of the nukes. Or, for that matter, to actually hold up and provide acceleration. There was no indication of an EM bubble so I’m pretty sure we were supposed to accept the physical plates were all the structure provided.
That’s not how “go/no go” works. Period. When you have a long-range mission with a flight surgeon (emphasis on the word surgeon for a good reason) you can’t go if he is sick. Particularly when, in this case, he has Parkinson’s and can’t perform surgery anymore.
On a ship with medical officers, those officers actually have the power to make some decisions (for good reason.) So the psych officer wouldn’t need the commander’s consent to shut down the VR; he’d have the power to do so unilaterally.
Unless they were truly worried about the performance of the ship and needed a six month shakeout cruise, there was no reason to go to Neptune. The gravity slingshot from the planet would be negligible relative to the acceleration from the Orion drive. And if they really wanted a slingshot, Venus, Mars, or Jupiter would probably work well enough (depending on their position in orbit relative to the final destination.)
Oh, and if you can get to Neptune in six months, you’re already using a pretty advanced propulsion system. That’s an average speed of ~.09% c which, for a ship that size, would require a hefty amount of energy to achieve. That much acceleration would pretty much dwarf the slingshot you’d get from Neptune. Assuming they’d taken a straight shot to Neptune and hadn’t used the planets closer in to accelerate. In which case they were maintaining an even higher average speed.
Oh, and if you’re closing in on Neptune, which is just over four light hours from Earth, it wouldn’t take 90 or 100 minutes to deliver a message back to Earth. It would take, you know, just over four hours.
To quote Spock: “his pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.” If you can accelerate your large ship so fast, why stay in the plane of the ecliptic at all? Why not just use your super-fast propulsion system to get out of the plane and then engage the Orion drive? And again…what the hell is this other crazy powerful engine?
When whatshername - the botanist/psych’s wife/commander’s mistress person - commented that the piece of equipment she and Pike were carrying into the airlock was heavy it made me realize they were operating under a full one gee of acceleration in the rotating pods. Why? Why not rotate slower? And why not slow down the acceleration temporarily since they were going to be exiting for their EVA from that pod? I know it’s a pain to film zero gee but you could definitely do much less, comment on it, and not have to do anything special to film it. A throwaway exchange like, “I feel like I could leap a tall building in this low gravity.” “Keep your tights on, Superman,”³ would have been enough to explain it to the audience.

I don’t feel bad that FOX passed on this. If the numbers were really great or Peter Berg convinces his buddies at DirecTV to do a co-pro and this becomes a series, I doubt I’ll watch it.

All this did was make me wish AMC would hurry up and get cracking on their Red Mars miniseries already. If that’s done right, we’ll see science fiction with an emphasis on the science.

I’m speaking pilot to pilot comparisons here. I couldn’t stomach watching more than that one hour of Dollhouse, despite the claims of spontaneous regrowth of hair by bald men who watched the fabled sixth episode.
The exception of course being cartoonish villains such as Blofeld, The Riddler, or Dick Cheney.
Except funny and not crap like that.

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Burn Notice: “Fearless Leader”

rporter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:51:22 +0000

And so the saga, nay the tragedy, of Detective Paxson comes to a close. I’m surprised she didn’t literally whimper as she trudged off the screen. For a show that rarely missteps, Paxson was a rolled ankle, stubbed toe, and nail fungus wrapped in a somewhat pretty package.¹

After the first two episodes of the Paxson arc I thought Bloodgood and her character showed some promise; seeing how the arc played itself out I’ve had to reconsider my position. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Imdb only has Bloodgood listed for the three episodes in which she’s already appeared, indicating this arc is complete, though I expect we’ll see her later this half-season or sometime in the following half as an ally to Michael and the team. I do not look forward to her return.

At least we had some fun moments with Nick Turturro, my favorite being Fi’s lobster/bug line and the whole of the bush league smash and grab at the dry cleaners.

The Recap

Not a super episode but there was some fun to be had. Michael’s got a tail - which he can lose seemingly at will² - making life difficult and dangerous now and for the future. In order to permanently lose the tail and cool Paxson’s interest in him he decides to help her take down the other guy she hassles non-stop.³

Michael gets in with Tommy to get close to the public enemy, Matheson. In the process he realizes Tommy’s a decent human being in way over his head with a ruthless thug. Bringing Tommy under his aegis is the natural reaction from this Michael. The Michael of three years ago might not have cared about Tommy’s survival, but his time in Miami and out of the spy game has returned a bit of humanity to him.

After the twists, turns, and setbacks of last week’s superior episode, this week was pretty humdrum. The stakes never felt particularly high and Matheson never seemed particularly dangerous. In the end he wasn’t this big bad Paxson and Tommy had made him out to be; he was just a smalltime hood running a little gang. As an anonymous commenter noted on Alan Sepinwall’s review, big bad Matheson is so smalltime he’s bagging meth on this big heist. A gangster should be sending in his henchmen while he sips mojitos on the beach.

Character

As if we didn’t already know Sam’s a great guy, we get confirmation in the guise of Stacey Conolly, IRS. It takes Sam a while to figure it out but an old baseball card amongst Stacey’s files triggers his memory of the young son of a woman he used to date.⁴ Of course Sam wanted to keep hanging out with the little guy after the breakup but mom wanted nothing to do with Sam; Stacey’s been going through life without a father figure or drinking sensei since.

If this is a one-shot it was a weak C-story⁵ for Sam. If Stacey is going to recur it could prove to be an interesting development. I’ll reserve judgment.

On the Fi front, things are cycling through a pattern we’ve seen before. Michael is out, free, unencumbered, and unwatched. Fi wants him to stay that way even though Michael knows full well someone else will surely be coming after him next without an agency’s protection. She’s not thinking of consequences, only of her wants and needs. Something’s got to give.

Chin Bits

“It’s been building up for a while. Something about deducting mojitos.”
“Alrighty! Can you bring us another spoon? You’re not going to eat that cherry, are you?”
“Time to deploy the Sam Axe arsenal.”
“There was this thing…and then the gun didn’t have an owner anymore.”
“I have a headache in my eye.”
“You were the little boy with the girl name.”
“By standing in between them?”
“It’s called a fuzzy navel. It’s not really my kind of thing but we’ve got to start you off easy. Work your way up to the good stuff.”

Important Lessons in Spycraft

“To the educated eye, a prison tat tells a story. Where you did time. Why you did time. And who you did it with. It’s a little like a job resume for criminals.”
“Every kid who ever went to a new school knows the secret to fitting in: copy everyone else. Spies do the same thing.”
“If you really need to make a point, sometimes there’s no substitute for a good shiner.”
Placing a bug on someone is easier “if they always carry something you can reproduce.”
“Superglue is cheap, quiet, and powerful. Lay it on thick and force dry it with canned air and you can cut bonding time to less than a minute.”

Final Thoughts

Wow. You know sometimes I’ll watch an episode a couple of times to put together one of these recaps and on the second or third viewing I’ll start to appreciate it a lot more than on first viewing. A good episode will suddenly reveal itself to be a very good episode. Tonight is a first. I actually think this episode was worse now that I’ve rewatched and written this. Why? Easy enough to figure out. Take a look at the lessons in spycraft. Michael’s voiceovers, usually so entertaining and interesting, could not possibly have been more banal and boring. What’s worse is that they’re not even well written.

Every kid who ever went to a new school knows the secret to fitting in: copy everyone else.

Really? Every . . ever . . . . . everyone? If it had a nice meter to it I could excuse the repeating pattern but it doesn’t. It’s begging for a red pen.

Oh well. There have to be duds to make us better appreciate the brightly glowing gems like last week. But what a fall, to go from the Cantenna to “superglue is sticky.”

On a personal note, sorry about taking last week off. I’ve been slammed at my paying gig of late and needed a little break. I’ll do my best not to miss any more of the summer’s great offerings, especially not ones as phenomenal as “End Run”. If you want my take on it, think how much you enjoyed it triple it.

If you think that metaphor’s tough to parse, you should see the convoluted mess it was *before* the edit.
I’d like to comment here on how silly Paxson’s approach is. It’s trivial - really frighteningly so in most jurisdictions - to get a legal warrant to secretly install a GPS tracker on a vehicle. After all, when your car is on the road it’s in the public and you’ve “given up your expectation of privacy.” It’s less exciting than the mano a mano scenes of cop and suspect we’ve all come to expect but it’s better police work. A real detective would have quietly gotten the warrant and would keep track of Michael’s wherabouts from afar. Which could have led to an interesting hack from Michael to jam the GPS or trick it or remove it undetected. Oh well.
Yeah, it would be pretty easy for Michael to convince the department that this cop - who already has a complaint for harassing a suspect - was harassing him as well. More unusual sloppiness from the writers.
And I’ll say it for the third and final time tonight…Stacey’s mom has got it goin’ on.
B prime?

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Hawthorne

tjonsek — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:17:08 +0000

Just when I think I could give up on TV and walk away forever, TNT creates a new medical drama, Hawthorne. I was skeptical. Grey’s lost its appeal once Isaiah Washington left and Izzie started sleeping with her ghost lover. ER lost me nearly a decade ago and Private Practice always has been a bit on the goofy side. Added to the mix is the fact that almost every great drama or comedy I became attached to in the last two years has been cancelled prematurely. I’ve not been willing to spend time caring about yet another new show, especially another medical drama.

But, Jada Pinkett Smith, as Christina Hawthorne, is a great, talented actress. Based on the pilot alone, I would say the show has strong promise. The characters and dialog feel real to me. Having grown up with a mom who spent her entire career in the operating room, I heard a lot about what goes on at a hospital. I know about the real struggles of nurses and surgical techs, the clashes between staff and doctors and power plays between other nurses. Many of my own friends were also nurses. What I can appreciate about Hawthorne is they accurately portray many of the gripes and joys I’ve heard from my own mom and friends. The dialog felt real and the characters believable.

Hawthorne also has plenty of drama. From dealing with the one year anniversary of her husbands death, trying to talk a suicidal patient, and friend, off the hospital ledge, to parenting her headstrong daughter all while struggling to keep the reins as Chief Nurse at Richmond Trinity Hospital, Christina has her hands full and struggles to find balance.

If I was disturbed by anything, I did feel they tried to throw too much drama into the show. What distracted me most was when police officers carry Christina away in handcuffs after she breaches hospital security and rather softly assaults a security guard in her attempt to keep a patient from jumping. Perhaps the guard would really call the cops. Perhaps they would really show up. But I couldn’t help but think she wouldn’t have been arrested in the real world in the middle of a trauma center as she just finished assisting with the efforts to save the jumper’s life. I didn’t buy that part. I kept wondering why no one was speaking up for her, why no one bothered to explain to the police officers the nature of the medical emergency behind her actions, why the guard didn’t just request backup. Surely he couldn’t be the lone guard on duty at a large hospital. Aside from that one scene, the show was very entertaining.

Joining Jada Pinkett Smith is Michael Vartan as Dr. Tom Wakefield, Chief of surgery, Suleka Mathew as Bobbie Jackson, fellow nurse and one of Christina’s best friends, David Julian Hirsh as Ray Stein, a male nurse struggling to be accepted in a female-dominated profession, Christina Moore as Candy Sullivan, and Hannah Hodson as Camille, Christina’s daughter. Joanna Cassidy from Six Feet Under, also makes a guest star appearance as Christina’s mother-in-law and hospital board member.

Hawthorne comes to TNT from Sony Pictures Television in association with Pinkett Smith’s 100% Womon Productions, John Masius Productions and Jamie Tarses’ FanFare productions. John Masius created the series and wrote the pilot, which was directed and executive produced by Mikael Salomon of TNT’s The Company.

Hawthorne premiered Tuesday, June 16^th on TNT at 9 PM ET/PT.

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Tawnya Jonsek is an ex-programmer spending her time blogging, working on her novel and haunting karaoke bars. She can also be found online at her personal blog and wasting time on Twitter.

Burn Notice: “Question and Answer”

rporter — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:00:48 +0000

Things are heating up in Miami, Eff El A. Michael’s got a new admirer in Detective Paxson, she of the sly smile and withering looks, and some C4 in storage. If Paxson finds out what Michael’s got stored, things will get downright explosive.

Oh, and there’s a kid in peril and a birthday party in the works. It’s a busy day.

The Recap

Detective Paxson comes by to introduce herself to Michael and invites him to spend some time chatting at her place with bars and handcuffs. In the process, she takes away Fi’s bail jumper and costs her a commission. Which of course leads her to jump at another job on a referral from one of her former jumpers. Apparently a real sweet guy, he holds no ill will to Fi and sent his sister her way when she needed help with her estranged husband and missing son.

Bad things gravitate to Michael, so of course this is a kidnapping.

Bad man Santora beats up Howard, beats up Michael, and eventually tells Sam and Michael everything they need to find Brandon. A little reverse interrogation of a tweaking Michael by Santora and Chuck Finley: Dirty Cop first brings one of Santora’s goons out in the open for Fi to tail. Then, with a cellphone picture courtesy of Fi, it leads to Michael convincing Santora that his goon’s turned against him.

When Michael escapes and absconds with Santora’s car, the only choice Santora thinks he has is to go with Sam straight to the hideout, giving him the address on the way. A call from Sam, ostensibly to the security office on the island, gives Fi the info she needs to get Brandon to safety.

And as for the baddies…Sam ends their Mexican standoff by firing his gun outside the house, lighting the fuse inside.

Oh, and speaking of fuses, Miami cops aren’t very good at stakeouts. They neglected to watch the back of the storage containers so Michael used a water saw to get in and get rid of the C4.

Character

The XTreme flirtation between Paxson and M is interesting to watch. While it’s too angry to buy as true flirtation, I still felt Paxson was titilated by it all. I think Moon Bloodgood’s going to be a nice addition to the cast and I look forward to seeing how she complicates Michael’s life in the weeks ahead. I’m also interested to see how Fi is affected by the sexually charged competition between Paxson and Michael.

It’s Michael’s birthday and Madeline wants to celebrate. She wants to have a nice little dinner with Sam and Fi. She even wants to cook. Assuming Michael can stop being shot at and blown up long enough to come by that is. Before the birthday dinner, she gives Fi a piece of advice about Michael that speaks volumes to her, to him, and even to Fi: “Loving Michael is always trench warfare.”

Fi’s present to Michael is a WWI bayonet. She’s in the war for the long haul.

“Loving Michael is always trench warfare.” But Mad’s cooking. That’s something. I mean, *really* something.

Chin Bits

“You know my new girl, she rebuilt this engine by herself. I’m telling you, just put a nice sturdy tool in that woman’s hand…”
To his new girl’s vintage Buick: “I got you, baby.”
“Man, I can not get over this leather. It’s handtooled, right?”
Who wouldn’t want a five-pack of beer for their birthday?

Important Lessons in Spycraft

“Smart criminals have a variety of ways to find out if a meeting is under police surveillance. Some are more subtle than others. Throw a few punches and any cops in the area have to come running.”
“When you’re concerned you’re walking into a police stakeout, there are a number of things to look out for. Parked cars or vans, workers that seem unusually preoccupied, and curious kids. No matter where you go in the world, little boys like candy, puppies, and cops.”
“When it comes to cover IDs, impersonating a bad cop is much better than impersonating a good one. An honest cop follows policies and procedures…”
“While snorting lactose isn’t pleasant, it may put people’s minds at ease.”
“Interrogation professionals don’t ask questions directly. They hide what they know and don’t know.”
“When people are desperate for information they start filling in the blanks, often without realizing it. It’s something fortune tellers rely on. It works pretty much the same way for spies. Although fortune tellers usually don’t get smacked around so much.”
“Searching for a concealed enemy who could be anywhere is a waste of time. Usually, your best bet is to stay put and give your enemy a reason to come to you.”
“To tail someone, you need both skill and instinct…it takes good instincts to know when to stop following.”
“More battles have been decided by pennant races than people imagine.”

Final Thoughts

Episode scribe Alfredo Barrios, Jr. must really enjoy writing for Gabrielle Anwar. In addition to her little bayonet scene, she had two fantastic lines tonight, funnier even than Bruce Campbell’s:

“I want you to close your eyes and breathe deep. Picture a peaceful mountain stream. Can you do that? Picture yourself drowning the kidnapper in the stream.”
“This is a valuable lesson for you. C4 is meant to be used, not stored. I’m serious. All those times you told me to make the explosions smaller, I shouldn’t have listened to you and Paxson wouldn’t have anything to hang you with.”

And finally, am I the only one who’d like to see Michael whip out Shep again sometime? He plays someone tweaking really well.

What did everyone else think?

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Royal Pains: Pilot

rporter — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 03:15:37 +0000

Light. Frothy. Summertime fun. If you like your summers the way I do, with frosty drinks and evening breezes off the ocean, you might have enjoyed the premiere of Royal Pains as much as I did. Then again, if you’re in the camp who finds Mark Feuerstein bland and uninteresting, you might not have liked it. To each his own.

Me, I like Feuerstein quite a lot and have been waiting a long time for him to get a show that fit his persona. I liked him fine on The West Wing, but he doesn’t strike me as a Sorkin lead. He’s been good in some bad things and servicable in some good things, but this time I think he’s found the show in which he’ll shine.

Plus, he’s got the luck of a TV doc.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’ve played a lot of pickup ball in my day, against significantly less healthy competition than Doctor Hank, but not once has someone collapsed with heart failure. And at all the posh parties I attend, as filled with supermodels as they may be, never has one of them sniffed a flower and gotten poisoned.¹ What I’m saying, is that Doctor Hank sure does find himself near a lot of critical people. I’m not sure I’d walk next to him in a thunderstorm.

I would walk next to his brother, though. Paulo Costanzo brings a much needed bit of zaniness to Evan and steals almost every scene he’s in. His manic energy contrasts with Hank’s at the same time it forces him to break out of his funk.

It’s a reasonable funk, I suppose. Fired, blacklisted,² confronted with the fact that his fiancee doesn’t see the world the way he sees it, debts mounting fast…I don’t know if I’d be watching daytime TV, but I’d be downloading a LOT of porn off the internet if that happened to me. In some ways, Evan is the Barney to Hank’s Ted here. He’s more of a cariacture than a real person, more interested in Dionysian pleasures than much else, but has enough heart to know his brother actually needs to be dragged into fun against his will. Costanzo is no NPH (though I did like him,) but I could see Evan as Barney’s wingman.

Once the boys get out to the Hamptons the look of the show settles - sunny, swooping cameras, a little bland. I was hoping for a bit more style with Jace Alexander behind the camera, but maybe a more interesting house style will develop over the course of the season. Then again, with supermodels, beaches, and beautiful homes as eye candy, maybe a more straightforward style is appropriate.

Thanks to Hank’s superhero abilities - attracting medical emergencies and heightened senses³ - he’s able to spot diagnose and save the girl’s life, just to have her fall hard for her hero. And to get Dr. Silver, the current resident of Boris’ guest house and concierge doctor to the rich and infamous, kicked out.

All of this is fine and dandy, but what really matters to Hank is his meet-cute with Jill Casey outside the party. You see, the two cutiepies drive identical older cars and bond at valet.⁴ Why, if anything could keep this gloomy gus from leaving the Hamptons it might just be this here gal…

Of course it turns out that Jill is the administrator of the local “taco stand” hospital and checked up on Hank. His phone number made the rounds of Hampton society faster than Hank’s hair kinks up on a humid day, and word is he’s the new concierge doctor of choice. It was Jill’s community responsibility to find out that Hank was a reputable doctor who’d been screwed over by his hospital. It has nothing to do with his dreamy eyes, I’m sure.

Once Divya Katdare joins HankMed - Evan’s prefered name for their new venture - the ball is rolling downhill too fast for Hank to stop it even if he wanted to. Oh wait, he does. Until his date with Jill. Then I guess it’s lucky he likes fried seafood.

There is definitely something mysterious and dangerous going on with Boris. It’s one thing to want to avoid police and scandal at your party because something big is in the works. It’s something entirely more disturbing when you pay someone with a gold brick. That’s flashy, but most importantly it’s not readily traceable. Boris was too quick to offer the guest house to Hank, kicking out Silver. I wonder that he doesn’t need a doctor on hand for whatever is coming down the pipe.

Overall, I found the pilot engaging and entertaining, hitting the summer sweet spot clean in the middle. I do hope we might see a bit more panache in the direction moving forward and get to see more of Campbell Scott’s Boris and a lot of Christine Ebersole’s New Parts Newberg. My only concern is that there might be some big mystery arc to muck up the works. I don’t want to learn that Hank’s termination was part of some conspiracy involving Boris and dancing bears that have escaped from a traveling Russian circ…

Well, maybe if the conspiracy really did involve dancing bears.

What did everyone else think? Should I recap these each week, or just touch on them when something interesting happens?

My ex-Mossad bodyguards do carry Mark 1 Kits for just such an emergency, however.
I noted this the other day as well. Thursday nights on USA is now The Blacklist Block.
Okay, here’s the deal. This is summer escape theater, so I don’t really care how realistic it is, but they might have stepped a bit over the line with the girl at the party. Did he see the girl’s pupils in a dark room from ten feet away? How did he recognize the security as ex-Mossad? Their accents plus the shoes they wore? Was there a krav maga move used against a party crasher we didn’t see?
This is genius. Seriously. GM might be bankrupt, but Saab’s advertising agency should be given a parade. In the single slickest product placement ever, Saab manages to stick two twenty-year-old 900 convertibles into a show where they’ll definitely stand out and be commented on. Saab, the same company that sponsors Burn Notice and gets weekly benefits everytime Michael or Fi drives the hell out of her Saab. Genius.

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.

Burn Notice: “Friends and Family”

rporter — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:00:19 +0000

Fiona, he did his government work, as you call it, for a reason.

For what? His country? And what have they done for him lately, other than betray him, leave him for dead, ruin his life?

The fact that you have to ask means you’re never gonna get it, Fi.

It seems like ages since Michael Westen jumped out of that helicopter, but the long wait is over and he’s finally coming in from the wet. Not in from the cold, however. If anything, the blanket of protection his mysterious benefactor-betrayers had provided has been lifted exposing him to the elements and the scrutiny of people it would be best ignored him.

It doesn’t take long - less than two minutes, in fact - for Michael to attract the unwanted attention of a bicycle cop at the beach. Things are definitely going to be different this season. Maybe.

The Recap

With the police hot on his tail, Michael steals a pink tee and sunglasses and ducks into a hotel to call Fi. She’s been listening in on police radio and suggests he not blast his way out. Fi. Suggests Michael not blast his way out of something. So Michael takes that seriously and turns himself in nice and calmly. At the police station Sam gives him the good news: cops and foreign agencies are now investigating Michael.

Michael gets released and his “old buddy” Harlan comes up to him. As Michael eyes him warily,¹ he tells him he’d been looking for him for a while and when his name popped up on databases he figured he could come help get him out of jail. In fact, he’s got a job he could use some help with, so Michael’s release is just a side effect.

Corrupt officials in Venezuela are engaged in a massive land grab and their bagman, Rufino Cortez, is local. The authorities want Cortez abducted and taken south for trial and Harlan is happy to help. His girlfriend Marta lost her home and her father was thrown in jail by one of the dirty judges.

Harlan and Michael had worked together for about a year and Sam had done four or five ops with him before. His strength is his strength. He’s not so much a thinkin’ man. But he’s got a plan for snatching Cortez, using a key he socially engineered out of a storage company and Cortez’s desire for conjugal privacy. But he’s not so much a thinkin’ man, so he sets off an alarm before he and Michael get the hell out.

Sam meets with Barry over mojitos to discuss Cortez. Barry’s not a fan of Cortez, “a rob and kill for hire and call it an investment kind of guy.” They put together a cover identity for Michael as Tom Wellington, Esq., a lawyer for a mysterious investment group that wants to buy a lot of land from Cortez’s associates.

One dislocated shoulder shoulder later, Michael has convinced Falcone: The Gatekeeper to get him a meeting with Cortez. But it doesn’t go as expected when Cortez turns out to be more security conscious than they realized. He doesn’t show for his first meeting, but sends Falcone to tell Michael there will be a rolling meeting.

So Fi and Harlan steal a garbage truck, Sam and Michael figure out the most likely route for the meeting and plan their attack, and Michael hides knives in the base of a briefcase and taped to the inside back of his belt.

The grab goes (mostly) according to plan and Harlan brings Michael and Cortez to the docks to wait for the commando team. And now we have our not-so-big (but still enjoyable) twist. Harlan’s been hired by Cortez’s associates to kill Cortez before he is forced to testify. They can always hire another bagman.

Pop quiz. Show all your work for partial credit.

If you’re a villain, should you explain your plans to the hero?
If you’ve got the hero tied up, should you feel safe?
Is it wise to let your personal feelings guide your villainous actions? For example, if you believe you’ve been underappreciated as a mastermind, should you seek vengence against those who’ve treated you as mere muscle?

Oops. Harlan failed the quiz. I hope the rest of you did better.

Character

The explosion at Madeline’s, the death of Victor, the long-awaited, sweet bullet Fi put in Carla, all these things should be high on everyone’s list of things to talk about. But these are people good at repression, so we get Fi’s, “Michael, I’m glad you’re alive. Try to keep it that way,” and Madeline’s focus on her house what was blowed up.

But there are signs. Fiona wants Michael to quit. At least to quit trying to get back in. She still doesn’t understand who he is, not even as well as Sam does. Fiona talks to Harlan, asking him to try to convince Michael life can be good when you’re not working for the government.²

And it’s Fiona who first suspects Harlan might have turned on Michael, because people change. Seems to me she’s aware that people change because she’s looking for any way in to convince Michael to change.

But we know he won’t. He tells Sam he needs an agency, not a bodyguard. He needs back in, or at least believes he still does.

The one true, unguarded moment in the episode came from Madeline when her voice wavered as she told the team, “you three need to stick together.” But even that was a small break in Madeline’s cool cover.

Chin Bits

“I took it over there to drop it off and well, we got a little friendly. So she’s letting me hang onto the car.”
“Mrs. Reynolds? You’re romancing an 80-year-old woman for her car?”
“I’m talking about her daughter, Miss Reynolds. 39 going on 22. Great lady. Great car.”
“Hey, you wanna pick the names you’ve gotta go to the meeting and listen to Barry talk about his skincare regimen.”
“Easy on the explosives, Fi. We’re trying to nail this guy on corruption charges. Could be tough if he’s in little pieces.”
“Hey sister, don’t be throwing explosives at me just ’cause you can’t take the cold, hard truth!”

Important Lessons in Spycraft

“Danger isn’t always obvious. It can be as subtle as a glance from a friendly-seeming tourist, a car that slows down at an odd time, or a cop that suddenly seems a little too interested in you.”
“The backbone of most hotel phone systems is secured by nothing more than a door and a cheap lock. Which makes them convenient for people who need to make quick, untraceable phone calls.”
“Just because you can escape from a situation doesn’t mean you should…sometimes you have to remember it’s easier to dodge questions than bullets.”
“Security devices are generally one-way. They keep people in or keep them out. Most high security locks are a lot less secure if you come at them backwards.”
“High-status cover IDs are rarely effective. Claim to be a big shot and people get suspicious. Claim to be a big shot’s errand boy, people don’t think twice. Act like you don’t want to be there, because you’re tired, you’re under-appreciated, or you’re sick and people tend to trust you even more.”
“Security levels vary widely for different kinds of vehicles. Garbage trucks, for example, are expensive but the fact that they’re hard to hide and harder to sell means you don’t find a lot of garbage truck alarm systems.”
“In close spaces, a knife’s often more effective than a gun. Easier to handle, easier to hide, and in the right hands: scary.”
“When you’re trying to hide in the water, fire is your friend. The light turns the surface of the water into a mirror. Then it’s just a matter of finding a place to surface where the fire isn’t consuming all the oxygen.”

Final Thoughts

Guest star Brian Van Holt is a big guy, so it’s possible Harlan’s callsign was chosen for that reason, but when I hear Bruce Campbell ask, “see anything, Hercules?” I expect a response like, “not yet, Autolycus.”

What did everyone else think?

Foreshadowing alert.
Not the best advocate for her position, in retrospect.

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R.A. Porter is an aspiring television writer who currently toils away in the software mines. He can be found at Sketch War, his personal blog, and stalked on Twitter.