ABC will air Paradise, which bowed in January on its sister platform Hulu, over eight Mondays starting tonight at 10 p.m. ET.
I’m not sure I recommend it even to those who love everything in the pilot because,
for me, it all falls apart too much as the season concludes.
The series has a big twist at the end of its first episode that reviewers have rightly if sometimes backhandedly praised for at least not coming halfway through the season or more. A number of recent shows have belated reveals that reframe their plot or their very premise — for example, 2023’s miniseries The Crowded Room (which I’ve not seen) and the first season of 2024’s Sugar (which I have and I still might write about), both from Apple TV+. Game-changing information can undoubtedly blow a viewer’s mind while blowing up the heretofore perceived status quo in exciting ways: see USA’s Mr. Robot early on, HBO’s Westworld maybe, and for sure NBC’s The Good Place in the hands-down best rule-breaking “Holy shirt!” cliffhanger ever cliffhung on a half-hour comedy. Yet when you take so long to get to a twist, or in another recent trend use most or all of your first season just to set up the actual series premise, you risk not only turning away viewers before they experience full-on the show you ostensibly wanted to make but possibly alienating viewers who enjoyed the series they were watching prior to the colossal switcheroo.
NBC ran the pilot for Mockingbird Lane, Bryan Fuller’s revamp of The Munsters, last Friday. At this writing you can still watch it via that link.
I took in the hour-long episode as a Halloween treat after hearing positive word. The premise and talent involved definitely had me curious, despite rebooting or reimagining a familiar property for TV being a dicey prospect (Battlestar Galactica at one recent extreme, Wonder Woman at the other). Even after it was passed over for this season, Lane apparently had an outside shot at being picked up for 2013 if it turned out to be an October surprise. I’m not sure that a 1.5 rating/5 share in the 18-49 demo, 5.47 million viewers overall, is enough to do the trick but this was a Friday on a tentatively resurgent network.
Anyway, I’d like to see more.
While the original 1964-66 Munsters was a childhood staple in reruns, I’ve never watched the various spinoffs or revivals. Mockingbird Lane not only recast the parts; unlike the 1988-91 sequel series The Munsters Today it reworked the nuances within the familiar broad strokes of the concept. Its pilot introduces the Munster family as if for the first time, with Marilyn finding the perfect residence for herself, cousin Eddie, his mom Lily, his father Herman, and Grandpa in the form of a condemned mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane in Mockingbird Heights, California (I think). The Munsters need to relocate thanks to the unfortunate side effects of Eddie, unaware that he’s a werewolf, going through puberty: During the full moon he wreaks havoc on a scout-troop camping trip.
Grandpa is slightly desiccated thanks to no longer “drinking” — a habit that he threatens to resume — and Herman does have visible scars, yet the family otherwise nearly looks as normal as Marilyn, the non-supernatural black sheep. Mason Cook’s Eddie doesn’t have the fangs, pointed ears, or widow’s peak of jet-black hair sported by Butch Patrick; Jerry O’Connell’s Herman lacks the flat head and neck bolts worn by Fred Gwynne in parody of the creature played by Boris Karloff in Universal’s Frankenstein movies.
I found O’Connell as Herman to be the pilot’s weak link. Perhaps due to O’Connell’s passing resemblance to Jason Bateman and the presence of the divine Portia de Rossi (so perfect a foil of Bateman’s in Arrested Development) gone brunette as Lily Munster, I kept expecting O’Connell to have Bateman’s subtle charisma and bite. The show would’ve done better to cast the pilot’s pivotal guest star Cheyenne Jackson as Herman and retain a smidgen of the galumphing puppy-dog feel that Gwynne brought to the original Munsters. Eddie Izzard as Grandpa was similarly poles apart from the beloved Al Lewis, but in ways that worked. For me the big surprise was a certain indescribable tartness brought to the role of Marilyn by unknown Charity Wakefield.
Mockingbird Lane came with a pedigree that frankly outclassed its source material. Bryan Fuller, who developed it and wrote the pilot, is the creator of Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies as well as the co-creator of the too-short-lived Wonderfalls. This pilot was directed by Bryan Singer, famous for The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men films, less so for Superman Returns. Guillermo Navarro, frequent collaborator of Guillermo del Toro (including on Pan’s Labyrinth, a personal favorite), served as the pilot’s cinematographer. I wish that I could say that the pilot was at least the sum of its impressive parts, but honestly I was underwhelmed. And yet the pilot did its job, because I genuinely want to see where the series would go from here and I’m sorry
that I probably won’t get to.
Did you watch Mockingbird Lane, and if so, what did you think?
Related: A Curious Case of Bedrooms and Buttons •
We Got a Live One Here • Bedtimes and Broomsticks
I’ve had strong opinions about Smallville ever since its 2001 debut. My hope was
to share the long and the short of it all back in May on the occasion of the series’ finale — but I only managed the short.
Here’s the long.
What follows is chock-full of spoilers on the show’s ten seasons, as of last month available in their entirety on DVD. If you haven’t (a) seen this divisive, enduringly popular yet much reviled take on the the Superman mythos begun in 1938 by creators Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, or (2) at least cared enough to keep tabs it through articles or conversations, then you’re awfully polite to keep reading.
Photo: Bob Mahoney © 2011 AMC Studios.
The Walking Dead begins its 13-episode second season tonight at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.
Its character work — the hallmark of AMC’s original series, born of brilliant contributions on both sides of the camera — makes Dead appointment television for viewers who can stomach the viscera and suspense-laden filmmaking that are endemic to a show set in a post-apocalyptic future (or present, really) overrun with zombies. You don’t have to be a horror enthusiast to enjoy it, though, any more than you have to know or care about the advertising industry or crystal meth to get hooked on the stellar storytelling in Mad Men or Breaking Bad. Sure, The Walking Dead is about survival in a world where a global outbreak has left living, breathing people the minority amidst hordes of shambling corpses whose only instinct is to feast on fresh human meat and transfer their disease, but the emphasis is on the stark reality of our protagonists’ existence.
You needn’t be familiar with the comics that are the show’s source material, either — created by writer Robert Kirkman with artist Tony Moore, now drawn by Charlie Adlard, published monthly by Image since 2003. Credit where it’s due, however; their work is what led Frank Darabont to develop the series (and serve as showrunner before departing this past summer).
For those who missed the 6-episode first season that debuted last Halloween, or want
to rewatch it, AMC is airing it in order today starting at 2:30 p.m. ET (1:30 p.m. CT). The 90-minute second-season premiere follows, repeating at 10:30, after which comes a live special discussing the show called Talking Dead. Extras — including behind-the-scenes videos and six brief “webisodes” — may be found at the above-linked site.
Related: ... in Thought • Panel to Frame • North Mythology
I find this post’s title most apt given the options, but Fringe’s Season Four premiere didn’t actually bring us back to the point at which the rewritten timeline we’re viewing diverged from the familiar one decades ago.
... picked up shortly after the Season Three finale, with Peter erased from reality due
to actions he undertook to save his native and adopted universes. Over Here and Over There both still exist; in fact, they coexist in the room that houses the First People’s machine — where members of each side’s Fringe Division meet to compare notes, as we see Olivia and her counterpart Fauxlivia do grudgingly.
Yeah, I’ve decided to write up some musings on the episode, despite the near certainty that I won’t be doing so weekly. Partly it’s an imperfect salve for the fact that I didn’t get to finish out the brief run that I began at the end of last season — not that there aren’t plenty of other unpublished or just plain unwritten posts in Blam’s Blog history whose absence irritates me — and partly it’s because if I do get to resume Fringe reviews I’ll likely appreciate having this as a foundation. In case you’re new to these posts, I should explain that having named my Lost analyses for Beatles tunes I decided to name my ‘Fringe’ Thinking installments for John Lennon songs (Beatles or solo); unfortunately, a few titles perfect for this post were already used for ‘Lost’ in Thought.
Here’s what got me cogitating:
I watched the premiere of The Gates last Sunday, and caught up with the off-season repeats of The Vampire Diaries as well.
The Gates, which airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, barely kept me locked in. As a guilty pleasure to screen on a hot, lazy night, well, it’s more guilty than pleasure — not quite the melodramatic mash-up of Twilight and Desperate Housewives those making it might have hoped for, but probably engaging enough to keep anyone who enjoyed Eastwick coming back for its limited run.
A few weeks gone by, Nikki Stafford declared June to be Vampire Month on her blog, Nik at Nite. The primary topic of conversation — a TV show which I’m observing a moratorium on speaking about — had begun to eat itself, and Nikki had fangdom on the brain for at least two good reasons: (1) ECW Press, where she’s an editor and which publishes her Finding [censored] books, has a True Blood companion coming out. (2) She was preparing to attend Slayage — an academic conference devoted to the work of Joss Whedon in general and Buffy the Vampire Slayer in particular. I think there was also something to do with The Vampire Diaries in there.
I was surprisingly late getting into the adventures of Buffy Summers.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon each premiered a new series on Fox last season, to considerable anticipation from genre buffs and admirers of quality television in general. Fringe, created by Abrams with his Star Trek screenwriting team of Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci, has just gone on midwinter hiatus. Whedon’s Dollhouse ended its erratic run of just over two dozen episodes last week.
I began writing this post an entire year ago — the same month this blog launched.
This post is currently down for maintenance but I’ll point you towards Nikki Stafford’s recap and the literally hundreds of comments that follow including mine.
It’s about time.
The final season of Lost begins tonight with a two-hour episode starting at 9 p.m.
ET on ABC. You probably either know this already or don’t care; while casual viewers
of the program are rumored to still exist, at this point it’s hard to imagine they outnumber the Oceanic 6.
Lost was one of the first things I wrote about on this blog.
I’ve found recently that Mondays are getting crowded where my TV schedule is concerned. Used to be I’d check whether Castle and How I Met Your Mother were repeats, then either in-between or instead of them catch up with other shows on tape. Now that 24 and Chuck are back on the schedule, plus the new Life Unexpected, the night is more likely to feed the backlog than help clear it out.
Castle, which airs 10-11 p.m. on ABC, is basically the same show I reviewed back in August. Fine by me.
I saw the, um, original repeat of Glee’s first episode the other day and wish I’d been able to post a review before the encore encore tonight. Was it music to my ears? Not entirely, but I’m rooting for it.
Glee photos © 2009 and logo TM 20th Century Television.
Uneven but interesting, that pilot is certainly worth sampling before the series
finally continues next Wednesday, Sept. 9th, at 9 p.m. ET. It was previewed last spring — in prime real estate after American Idol — even though the show’s actual debut was always scheduled for this fall. Fox must have felt it had an offbeat winner and hoped
to stoke buzz throughout the summer; indeed, reception was generally favorable and songs from the series have been popular downloads on iTunes.
