Sci-Fi TV Goes Mainstream

Really, really mainstream. Like, without a paddle… Oh wherefore art thou, Lost? Your imitators are stinking up my new TV season.

Flash-Forward is arguably the best of the freshman bunch. It is literally Lost done by the geniuses who ran the Star Trek TV franchise into the ground, from the producers running the show all the way to casting two Lost actors in principal roles. Its (story) gimmick is that the whole world simultaneously fell asleep for 2+ minutes one day and all woke up having had visions of their lives 6 months from that day. The show follows around the FBI guys and gals tasked with figuring out WTF.

Joseph Fiennes, the brother of the actor who played the Nazi death-camp commander in Schindler’s List is the lead here, a British actor doing a tortured generic American accent. The result being, he comes off terse, monotonal and uninvolving. He’s the wrong lead man for this role. For God’s sake, I’m sure Hollywood is littered with toothsome young domestic actors whose whole performance wouldn’t boil down to nailing the accent every take.

Or hire a Brit who can pull it off like Damian Lewis (inset) from last year’s late, lamented Life, cancelled to make room for Jay Leno’s current 10pm yuch-fest. Or Hugh Laurie on House or Jake Weber from Medium. Or how about the British babe Sonya Walger, Penelope from Lost, also in this new show. She nails the accent effortlessly. The TV landscape is lousy with foreigners convincingly playing Americans, why didn’t Flash-Forward hire one of them for its male lead?

Seriously, little Joey Fiennes’ from-nowhere-in-America American accent takes me out of every scene he’s in, which is most of the scenes every episode.

A number of characters get their own storylines and legitimately interesting fate-vs-free-will questions are posed, mostly dealing with “can we change the future?” (I’m guessing if this show survives long enough to answer the question, it will come back ‘No.’) But it also features almost exclusively boring, stock characters like the suicidal terminal cancer patient (ooh, who’s also a doctor and looks good in scrubs!), the pair of recovering alcoholics whose sobriety is tested weekly, etc.… yawn.

The storyline moves quickly but feels slow, even though it serves up lots of pay-offs per episode. And most of the ‘reveals’ it throws at the audience every week are more likely to elicit shoulder shrugs than Lost’s “Holy shits”s. The whole show seems desperate to please and desperation is never the classy affair the show’s production values seek to instill in it. With every episode I grow less keen to continue watching.

The Hobbit Charlie from Lost also has a role and he’s the most interesting, convincing thing about this program. I’m very close to bailing altogether but I may stick around if his role is enlarged.

Also new this year is V, a retooling of the cheesey 80s TV show of the same name. File this one also under “why bother?” It’s still a cool idea, still lamely executed.

‘V’ stands for ‘Visitor,’ as in extraterrestrial. In this case, bi-ped lizards in human suits.

I kid you not.

Juliette from Lost is the lead here and makes an unconvincing FBI agent. Again, all the TV tropes are trotted out: Juliette has a rebellious teenage son who defies her by hanging out with the highly-placed hot blonde ‘V’ chick… a priest suffering a crisis of faith brought on by a UFO development his Bible never warned him about, they-look-just-like-us-so-no-one-can-be-trusted angst across the board… it’s the new cookie cutter.

And I have to mention the actor playing the priest, Joel Gretsch, formerly of basic cable’s late 4400 show. He looks and seems less like a priest than any Hollywood interpretation I’ve seen before. An unshaven Edward G. Robinson would have been more convincing in this role except he’d dead. As a recovering Catholic I can assure you, this guy just isn’t pulling off the parish-priest vibe. He seems less like the conflicted man of God he’s supposed to be and more like the B-List actor who can’t believe he’s in the A-List production that he is.

After re-reading this mini-review, I think I may have already watched my last V episode. If you’re not convinced yet of the mundanity of this show, here’s a line of dialog I wrote down from this week’s episode that encapsulates it perfectly: “Visitors walking around everywhere, angry protesters are getting pissed off!”

It’s Heroes-level writing. Need I say more? Speaking of non-freshmen efforts…

Fringe debuted last year, aiming to be this generation’s X-Files, and in its sophomore season is beginning to move closer to that goal. (Full disclosure, I was never a big X-Files fan. I saw a few that I liked but I arrived late to the party and never got into the show’s mythology.)

I sampled a few first-season episodes of Fringe last year and was casually intrigued but not necessarily impressed. This season has been much more consistent. Without abandoning their overarching mythology, they’ve crafted a number of compelling individual episodes this season. Cool sci-fi shit can be counted upon to happen in cool ways every week.

The cast is also strong, with the exception of the guy playing the mad scientist’s son. I don’t hate him, but I’m not interested in him either. But the mad scientist guy, John Noble, is terrific, as is the Fringe FBI agents’ boss, Lance Riddick, late of The Wire and, you guessed it, Lost. The head FBI agent is played by Aussie Anna Torv with another only-slightly wandering accent that might be distracting if her acting wasn’t so intense and she wasn’t so easy on the eyes. And the rest of the show so well done.

It’s probably no coincidence that Fringe is exec-produced by JJ Abrams, also of Lost fame, as well as the director responsible for resuscitating the Star Trek movie franchise.

Oh yeah, and Leonard Nimoy occasionally drops in to play a mysterious dude from a parallel earth whose twin towers are still standing. The first shot of Nimoy’s character in his office high in one of the towers was shocking, but not in a way that felt exploitative.

It’s a damned smart show. This week it began to reveal the secret of who the mysterious bald white guy was who kept popping up in the background of episodes last season. SPOLIER ALERT: The bald guy is one of a bunch of bald guys who function, basically, as the Time Police. They’re called Observers and they’ve gotta be an homage to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Watcher character from Marvel comics, Uatu (see inset). He was another bald white dude who showed up at pivitol moments in human history, except he dressed like Caesar, not a stockbroker from Wall Street.

My only complaint is that the actual broadcast is cut up into too many segments. I haven’t done the math, but I’d swear they have more commercial breaks, more frequently, than other prime-time scripted dramas. It’s giving me a bad case of TiVo Thumb. Boy, do I hate those bastards over at Fox.

One final word about sci-fi/fantasy/superhero television, concerning the long-in-the-tooth young-Superman show Smallville.

End it! End it this season! “Young” Clark Kent is now in his thirties. The series has been creatively dormant for at least the last 5 years if not lots longer. It’s time for Clark to slip into his red and blue peejays and Hero the fuck Up! This show has been cynically milked well past its sell-by date.

In the plus column, less TV-time means more time to blog!