KMK: Fall TV Bonanza!

Trust me when I say I can leave all those CSIs behind and I especially don’t want much to do with Crossing Jordan’s Grey Anatomy or going to her House to play Law & Order or a risque game of Prison Break. You know that Jordan is quite a kinky gal. I figure that if I want to see open heart surgery or criminal masterminds that I’ll just go down to the local Hospital or Police station and bring some popcorn and a box of milk duds.

 

When I watch TV I want something I can’t see down the street or through my neighbors window with some high powered binoculars. I want outer space battles, super powered vixens, sexy brooding vampires, or, at the very least, a bunch of pill popping, man stealing, manical housewives. I want my Doctor to be a time travelling cheeky scamp not a winsome, love sick know-it-all torn between her McDreamy and McSteamy. Yeah, lets just say I’m not feeling her pain at all.

 

So with the new fall season debuting in the States I thought I would check out the most promising of the new shows and give my oh so humble opinion.

 

Lets get the ball rolling with a remake of one my childhood favorites: Bionic Woman!

The trouble with remakes is that they have to live up to, if not surpass, the original. It’s not nice to muck about with peoples’ childhood memories and I have to say that the folks who delivered the new Bionic Woman to my television screen stomped all over my fond childhood memories of Jamie Summers and turned her into an unlikable boor.

 

This Jamie Summers is not a fun loving compassionate tennis player, no, she’s a blank bartending cipher with the emotional range of a brick. Can the actress even form an expression on her face or has she been boxtoxed to the fifteenth degree so that the makeup can apply smoothly? Whatever the reason the people who put Michelle Ryan in the role should have used some of that fifty million it took to make her bionic and signed her up for some acting lessons. Her delivery is so wooden the other actors probably got splinters whenever they were in the same scene.

 

It’s all such a shame too, because the premise is actually a great one! To bad they had to make such a great character into a morose mouse. Jamie, they just saved your life and transformed you into a one woman wrecking crew, stop bitching and listen to what they have to say unless you want to pay that fifty million dollar hospital bill. How many mojitos would you have to sling to pay that bill? Better yet, maybe they have an off switch so they can just pack your butt into storage at the local Best Buy store.

What highlights the blunder of casting Michelle Ryan as Jamie is the brilliant performance turned in by Katee Sackhoff. Look how Katee even outacts Michelle in a photo. Katee plays Sarah Corvus, the first and best, Bionic Woman and the nemesis of Jamie. This show should have been all about Sarah. Katee gives her character more depth and poignancy in five minutes than Michelle does in an hour. Bad Choice NBC, Bad!

I’m hoping somehow that Sarah Corvus has some redemption arc that sets her up as the lead and leaves Jamie as a fifty million dollar mannequin for Barneys in Manhattan.

While still spitting out the bad taste of nuts & bolts that was the Bionic Woman I tuned in to see NBC’s other offering Journeyman otherwise known as Quantum Leap 2.0.

Am I dating myself? You all do remember Quantum Leap with the ever lovable Scott Bakula, right? He played a physicist who becomes lost in time leaping into the lives of different people in order to set that person’s life back on track.

 

Well, that show was great and Journeyman seems to be on the same track. The show stars Kevin McKidd as Dan Vasser, a reporter who travels in time against his will. Vasser just blinks out whether he’s driving his car or falling asleep in a taxi and finds himself in another time where he has to discover whose life he’s there to fix. Unlike Quantum Leap, in Journeyman Vasser stays the same person. So far he’s only traveled in his lifetime and doesn’t leap around space; he stays in the same spot just a different era.

 

I like this show. McKidd delivers a strong, but endearing performance as a man whose life is unraveling by an unexplainable phenomenon. It doesn’t hurt that he’s easy on the eyes either. The sexy factor rises further with the appearance of Moon Bloodgood as Livia, Dan’s seemingly deceased fiancée who turns out is a time traveler herself. Too bad that Dan has married his brother’s girlfriend and had a kid. The drama! I’m hooked. Maybe you will be too.

 

Vampires: Sexy, mysterious, and oh so delicious and I’m not talking about my Count Chocola cereal. When there’s a vampire show on television I most likely can be found glued to the TV like a kid during Saturday morning cartoons. Shows like Blade the Series, Forever Knight, Dark Shadows, Blood Ties, Buffy, Angel, and even Kindred: The Embraced have got my number.

Moonlight is a new vampire show premiering on CBS. I was excited, but after what amounted to Angel-lite I’m only half heartedly psyched up about this show. I’ll give you one guess what the star vampire, Mick St. John (if that’s not a porn name I don’t know what is), does for a living. Yes, you guessed it, he’s a private detective. Is there some requirement that TV vampires must be private detectives? Can’t one be a banker or a lawyer or hey how about an actor or restaurateur? You would think the market would be tough with all those vampire detectives running around.

 

The actor Alex O’Laughlin possesses the rugged good looks of someone who survived a week in the outback, at a spa, and pretty much has the sex appeal of a Fabergé egg. Things slide further into the abyss with his buddy, Josef, a supposedly four hundred year old vampire who just happened to go to school with Veronica Mars. That casting just mystifies me.

 

It’s also a bad sign when you can’t sit through the whole episode. I kept pausing and just stopping it to watch later at least five times. When I finally got through it all I just had to wonder why Moonlight is on a prime time network while Blood Ties languishes on Lifetime! The world is too cruel. Oh, and did I mention Tammy from Real World Los Angeles is on this show? Another reason to skip it.

ABC, bless them, knew me so well that they presented, what I hoped would be a warm up for Desperate Housewives, the intriguing sounding Dirty Sexy Money. I should have known my hopes would be dashed. I mean, really, anything named Dirty Sexy Money not on HBO or Showtime could not possibly live up to the expectations. It should have been called Two Dollar Ho, because that’s exactly the way you feel after being taken for that lame excuse for a ride.

 

DSM, stars Peter Krause, from Six Feet Under (yay!), as Nick George the son of a man who finessed the affairs of New York’s obscenely wealthy Darling clan until his untimely death. The Darlings, from what I can gather from the pilot, are like the Kennedy’s without the style of Jackie or the charm of John Junior. Basically they just plod around like escaped zoo animals while Nick stumbles after them cleaning up the mess. Trust me this isn’t Dynasty and its too bad because DSM could really use a scene stealing bitch to liven up the place. No Alexis Colby or Dominique Deveraux or even a slap worthy Krystle Carrington! Who’s writing this show, republicans?

 

Don’t get me wrong, things do veer to the edge with the intro of Patrick Darling’s mistress, the transgendered Candys Cane, but that evaporates as soon as she opens her mouth and you realize she studied under the Michelle Ryan school of acting. You know it’s bleak when a transgendered hooker comes across as about as tabboo as wearing white after labor day. Dirty Sexy Money? More like Smudged Listless Buck.

 

Wait, there was one moment by Jill Clayburgh, who plays Letiticia Darling, when she’s reminiscing about Nick’s father. She plays that scene so well that you could actually start to tear up yourself. So that’s one bright flash in a void of forgettable tripe. To wrap things up I want to take you on an outer space trip to the planet Mongo. Yes, I said Mongo, and snicker if you want but that’s the place where men quaked in their boots in the prescience of Ming the Merciless. Of course, that was back in the Thirties when Flash Gordon made his debut as a series of serial black and white movies. Ah, the good old days where Ming the Merciless was a ruthless murderous melomaniac rather than the present day media suave GQ pressurized Ming we get in the SciFi show Flash Gordon.

 

Flash Gordon stars Eric Johnson as the title character, a runner who lives with his mother in Maryland. His father was a scientist who disappeared while putting together a top secret project. Flash unexpectedly finds himself in a dimensional battle when he falls through a rift to the planet Mongo.

Now they have all the elements right: Flash, Mongo, Ming, Dale, Dr. Zarkov, but the end result just doesn’t gel. Once again bad acting rears its ugly head, but this time its joined by bad writing. I mean, its Painkiller Jane bad, and if you’ve seen Painkiller Jane on SciFi then you know how bad that is. No, wait, Flash Gordon makes Painkiller Jane seem like Must See TV. That’s how bad it is. At least PKJ has Kristanna Loken and believe me the KL is the only reason to even consider watching Painkiller Jane.

 

Thankfully my space faring fix can be sated by Battlestar Galactica or Dr. Who. Well, that wraps up my fall season review.

What do you think of the new fall season? Let me know! I think I missed a few other new shows like Aliens in America that look promising, but until then happy TV surfing.