writhaus

Thank God for premium cable television. There are fewer boundries, few restrictions, and freedom to do as one pleases. For these reasons, HBO and Showtime draw some of the best talent and they tend to do their best work. The same is true for Showtime’s new series Californication.

Californication is a sexy, wild, and fun ride. David Duchovny stars as Hank Moody, a writer suffering from a crisis faith with an inability to write. He’s got an ex-wife (Natascha McElhone) and a daughter (Madeleine Martin) and the busiest sex life an unemployed, unmotivated, fucked up guy can have (and that’s A LOT of sex). He’s a perpetually self-loathing smart ass who can’t seem to move on from his split with his wife and after his soul-searching, dark novel was turned into a happy romantic comedy.

But Duchovny’s pitch-perfect performance adds intelligence and depth to Hank and a longing for something greater. What he is searching for, he cannot find, and the salacious situations he finds himself continually buried under make this a jilarios time. McElhone is not to be taken lightly either; she is Hank’s core and brings the right about of sexiness and nurturing quality to her character to nicely counterbalance Hank’s imbalance.

Some good twists and continuing storylines are well established in the pilot and certainly will play out in the future. The writing is strong, even though a little suprising from a writer whose only other credit that I can find is for Dawson’s Creek. Series directors, however, have a good pedigree and this may be a good instance of fresh scripts working well with established directors to make a fantastic episode. I think I’ll stick around for a while to see what Hank’s future holds.

6 outta 7.

When I was a kid, the Muppet Babies came along. It was then, combined with Scrappy Doo, that my detest for young versions of classic characters was born. Paul Dini must have had a similar experience because what he’s done with Batman Beyond is much, much different.

It’s the future, and Batman (voiced, as always, by Kevin Conroy) is on the ropes. During a fight, chest pains cause him to pick up a gun and aim it at a hooligan to save someone. This, combined with the age-related problems that created the problem to begin with, cause Batman to retire to seclusion in Wayne Manor.

We skip even further into the future and find Gotham a much different place. Without Batman to keep criminals in line, the underworld has flourished. Bruce Wayne’s corporation has been merged with a Lex Luthor-ish Derek Powers’. In this world, teenager Terry McGinnis (voiced by Will Friedle), is a kid with a bad attitude. When he blows off his dad’s orders, encounters a gaggle of gang members dubbed the Jokerz, has a fateful meeting with a reclusive Bruce Wayne, and returns home to find his father murdered, it doesn’t take long for someone new to be in the Batman’s cowl. Throughout the season, Terry will encounter classic Batman villains such as Mr. Freeze and Bane and establish his own rogues gallery of the likes of Ink, Shriek, and Spellbinder.

The transition of Bruce Wayne to a mentor with someone else in the suit works wonderfully. Wayne always played the father figure for his Robins, and perfectly eases into that role for Terry. He treats Terry as an extension of his own legacy, which fits well with the character. This is how the Batman of the future really should be.

Dini definitely knew what he was doing by this point, as the series is uniformly excellent. Even throwaway episodes explode to life. The settings are more futuristic, but they don’t overwhelm the general noir feeling established in previous series. I also have to add that the opening still impresses nearly a decade after the series premiered.

In the end, I think everyone enjoyed Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s Batman. Anyone sad with its ending got a huge present in the form of Batman Beyond. My only regret is that there are only three seasons. They are all available on DVD, so there is no reason not to enjoy them.

Ned finds out as a child that his touch can bring the dead back to life. He learns the hard way that after a minute, someone else has to die for them to continue living. Worse still, if he touches the person again, they die again.

As an adult, Ned (Lee Pace) eschews physical contact with everyone while running a pie show. A chance encounter with private investigator Emerson Cod (the always excellent Chi McBride) leads to an arrangement of resurrecting the dead, finding out who killed them, returning them to the dead, and collecting the reward. This works well until Chuck, Ned’s childhood crush, is murdered on a cruise ship, throwing a monkey wrench into Ned and Emerson’s arrangement.

Pushing Daisies is unlike anything I can remember ever seeing on television. Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, the show feels very much like a movie. The stylistic choices made in the shooting, editing, and music remind you of macabre productions such as Edward Scissorhands and The Addams Family.

The acting is terrific. Pace is sublime as Ned, trying to live in a world he cannot touch. McBride reminds me a lot of his role in Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, always there to help, but gruffly. The omniscient narrator (Jim Dale) adds a storybook feel to the tale, too.

I’m very eager to see how this series is received when it premieres. I hope audiences warm to its fairy tale aspects and the series lasts the whole season, if not many, many more.

Anytime you get to see the near-flawless acting of Holly Hunter, it’s a good day. And so it was that my week had a high point at 9:40 p.m. PDT as I watched the pilot episode of Saving Grace, the new TNT series.

It’s almost hard to keep up with all the Commandments Hunter’s Grace Hanadarko breaks in the opening minutes of the show. It’s only after she finishes having sex with a married man, sunning a neighbor, and heading off to work we discover she’s a cop, too. A pretty good cop from appearances. Unfortunately, it only takes her a few minutes to get into trouble, leading to an unofficial suspension. After a night of drunkenness, Grace hits and kills someone, and at last asks God for help. An angel named Earl (Leon Rippy) appears and tells her God has given her one last chance to straighten up, but that he will be there to help her stay straight, although he won’t be at her beck and call. Along the way, she works to solve the case of a missing child.

OK, I admit I am a Christian, so a premise like this really appeals to me. We all know people who have crossed lines better left uncrossed. Hunter is the perfect actress for this role, too. Cops see a lot of bad things daily. The temptation for them to cross over must be overwhelming sometimes. The exploration of this theme is long overdue.

The supporting cast has several standouts, including Laura San Giacomo who uses her medical examiner skills to deduce whether Earl is real or not. The show is shot in Alberta, Canada, which is a shame because the Oklahoma setting could have been legit. The show is shot well, though, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much.

In closing, this is a show I definitely want to see more of, so much so that I subscribed to the season via iTunes. Pretty much everything with Holly Hunter in it is a winner, with this being no exception. Tune your cable box to TNT on Mondays and see what all the fuss is about.

It was a little longer than a year ago, as I recall, when I stood at the assignment desk at CN8’s New Castle, Del., studio waiting for my first assignment of the day when, while flipping through the various daily newspapers on the counter, I read that This American Life was being developed for television.

I discovered the radio show while working in Raleigh, N.C. The radio stations in the Triangle didn’t play any music I wanted to listen to, so I gravitated to NPR. One Sunday while working, I listened to this program and laughed when the interstitial music was a children’s song about where the dinosaurs went. I was hooked from that very moment. It didn’t hurt that it had some of the most compelling journalism I had heard before or since.

Given that the show comes from radio, you might expect me to fear its transition to video. While I wondered how they would pull it off, I was hopeful from the start. The show is always so smartly put together that I had complete faith in Ira Glass. My worst fear was that video would distract from the narrative presentation. Even with that, I still felt pretty confident that it would work.

I just finished the first episode. I am happy to report that the transition is mostly problem-free. For those familiar with the NPR show, the formatting is the same. For the uninitiated, the show features a variety of stories on a set topic. This episode featured stories about people getting reality checks. The initial episode features two acts during the course of a half hour. I’d hope for more, but with the NPR-to-TV transition, I can understand timidity on the part of Showtime. The stories cover the Fisher family of La Grange, Texas, and their bull, Chance, getting a second chance at life and a New York-based improv group that attempts to give a Vermont-based band the concert of their lives.

Ira Glass has just as good a television presence as he does a radio presence. Best of all, I think he must be recording his track in his normal studio, so his voice is every bit as rich as it is on the radio. Both stories are presented by him, which is fine, although I hope some of the regular contributors make appearances as the series progresses.

These positives do not mean the show is without flaws, though. This American Life has its own almost jazz-like rhythm, which might be off-putting to regular television viewers. The production values appear sound, but I wonder about some of the camera and editing decisions made, not the least of which is why it looks as if it was produced fully with Final Cut Pro. I’m hopeful time will solve these issues as people get into their grooves. This criticism is limited to the first act, as the second is mostly footage shot by the improv group. The quality of that video is only OK, but that’s completely understandable.

In the end, though, the show is a success. Mr. Glass definitely brought his “A” game, delivering two stories that you won’t see on any normal news outlets. If this show is as successful as it deserves, who knows what will happen next? Will Car Talk be brought over? What about Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me? If nothing else, maybe this will help funnel money into the public radio stations that back these shows. It brought a smile to my face to see the WBEZ placard at the end of the show after the credits had run.

Notes: For more on the cloning of Chance, you can read this BBC article from 1999.