NEW SUMMER TV ROUNDUPHey! It's Gardner. Remember me? I used to write stuff here. That got a little sidetracked because of work, and also because I've been watching enough new TV to choke a horse (whose respiratory functions were affected by watching TV). There's as much stuff crowding my TiVo now as there was in the fall--in addition to new seasons of
Deadwood,
Rescue Me and
Entourage, all of which are off to great starts, and reruns of
The Wire Season 3, there's a whole slew of new shows. Are they any good? Let's find out together! But first...
Important Televisual Public Service AnnouncementIf you liked
Shaun of the Dead and you get BBC America, then tune in this Friday, June 23, at 8:00 to see the first two episodes of
Spaced, the 1999 sitcom from the
Shaun team of Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright. It's a brilliant show about twentysomething geeks that cleverly riffs on all the major geek touchstones (lots of great
Star Wars references) while still being drop-dead funny and even a little moving. I imagine BBCA will run through both seasons over the next few weeks, so fire up the TiVos, because
Spaced is still unavailable on DVD in the US.
And now, back to the regularly scheduled Roundup:
Windfall (NBC, Thursday, 10:00)
Twenty pals and hangers-on win $386 million in the lottery; drama ensues. Money changes their lives--but is it for the better? Oh noes, could the money actually make things WORSE? Do you think? Unfortunately, even $386 million couldn't make this show much worse. Lifeless characters, dialogue that sounds like it came straight from the series pitch ("You can't raise a kid and work two jobs!" etc.), and the most annoying, treacly soundtrack choices imaginable. I hate it when a great premise like this is wasted on such a boring show. I'm borrowing
LD's rating system and giving
Windfall a big fat
YOU'RE FIRED.
Saved (TNT, Monday, 10:00)
Med-school dropout Wyatt works as a paramedic, delivering patients to the hospital where his dad is the Chief of Medicine and his ex-girlfriend is a doc on the rise. When he's not speeding around in an ambulance, saving lives and befriending abused moppets, he plays poker and gets beaten up by the henchmen of his gay loanshark/former high school buddy. Creator/writer David Manson has a 30-year TV resume (and most recently worked on
Big Love and
Thief), so he knows how to keep a story moving along, and
Saved is a perfectly decent piece of 2006-vintage TV, all fast-talking sardonic slackers with hearts of gold and hyperactive camera work. The problem is, "perfectly decent" isn't enough when something like
Deadwood is a few clicks down the dial.
Saved is trying to be
Rescue Me with paramedics (note the nearly identical wordplay of the titles), but it's missing the two key ingredients of that superior show: real characters and Denis Leary's voice. The characters on
Rescue Me, from the beginning, felt lived-in; they felt like guys who spent all their time together, guys you would like to hang out with (also a large part of the appeal of
Entourage). They're interesting without being annoyingly quirky. And though Leary's voice may be 90% Bill Hicks's voice, it at least gives
Rescue Me a point of view. The characters on
Saved, though, feel like the same types you've seen on every other on-the-job drama, and so far there's no strong voice to hold it together. I'll give it a few more weeks to see if it goes anywhere interesting, but I'm not gonna get all broken up if it's cancelled.
Okay! More later! Maybe tomorrow!
