Fall TV Friday – 2005 – Hot Properties

Hot Properties – ABC – 1 Season (13 Episodes) – USA

In the fall of 2005 ABC had 6 comedies on the air. One year it later it had just 1. Of course it didn’t do itself any favours by having shows like Freddie, Hope & Faith and George Lopez stink up its schedule. While Freddie & George were busy sucking the laughs out of Wednesday nights, Hope & Faith were joined by Hot Properties on Fridays to completely kill off the ABC tradition of the Friday night sitcom.

Hot Properties is a sitcom described as a mix of Sex And The City and Designing Women. It follows four ladies who all work as real estate agents in the big city. They get together to talk girl business and complain about guys. Shows have been built on flimsier premises and Hot Properties at least makes an attempt to not completely suck by casting several talented women in the leads. Nicole Sullivan from MADtv and King Of Queens plays Chloe, the slutty friend who can never find a man. Gail O’Grady (the mother from American Dreams) plays Ava a forty-something woman with a twenty-something boyfriend (if this was 2009 the show would be called Cougar Properties). Sofia Vergara who is fantastic in Modern Family plays Lola whose main character trait is that she has big boobs. Rounding out the gang is Christina Moore, also from MADtv, as Emerson the new girl. In the ‘hey it’s that guy!’ side of things the principal from Glee turns up as a taxi driver.

Nicole Sullivan and Sofia Vergara in particular are very funny women and try their damnedest with such slight material. They come out better off than Gail and Christina who seem to be in constant competition with each other to see who is more wooden. Hot Properties delivers a crash course in how to do your best no matter how bad the writing as Nicole manages to squeeze laughs out of the flimsiest gags.

The jokes are a grab bag of bad puns and half assed innuendo. The second episode features a storyline where Lola’s chicken Mittens has died. One character genuinely asks “do they suspect FOWL play?” and then when the girls are caught out laughing at Lola’s loss Ava says “We are so PLUCKED.” If they weren’t groan inducing enough in the pilot Lola talks about how her family were all cabinet makers and says “I’ve spent my life surrounded by men with wood.” Every joke feels like it should be accompanied by a sound effect link ZING or WAHWAH or GAW!

Hot Properties isn’t awful; it’s just tired and lazy. The great Evan Handler and the not so great Stephen Dunham turn up as a pair of doctors who work in the same building, but they’re given nothing to do but ogle Lola. In the hands of better writers Hot Properties could have attempted to create real women with real friendships but these characters seem to hang out just because they’re complete polar opposites.

Ava is apparently a sexy older lady who could have anybody she wants. Lola was married to a gay guy because she is completely clueless when it comes to telling whether a man is attracted to her or not (which if you’ve ever seen Sofia Vergara is ridiculous). Emerson is a virgin even though Christina Moore seems completely miscast as a supposed ‘virgin’. The most ridiculous character though is Chloe who we’re supposed to think is completely revolting, as if “she could never get a man! She’s slightly less attractive than the others!” If there was a fat girl with no personality watching how toxic Chloe is made out to be, she’d be suicidal.

After completely destroying their comedy line up with shows like Hot Properties and Freddie ABC lay low for a while. In between 2005 and now they produced roughly one comedy a year, but since early 2009 they’ve amped up their comedy output with Better Off Ted, Modern Family, The Middle and Cougar Town. Of course there was the awful Hank (which could have fit perfectly alongside their 2005 monstrosities) but that’s been cancelled so everything is right in the world again. If trash like Hot Properties is the price we had to pay for ABC to see the error of their ways and bring us Modern Family then that’s okay with me.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad

Fall TV Friday – 2005 – Ghost Whisperer

Ghost Whisperer – CBS – 5 Seasons – USA

Who could have predicted back in 2005 that of the 31 new shows to debut one of the remaining five would be the ‘JenLove talks to ghosts’ show? Surely the success of Freddie seemed more likely than this Time Of Your Life meets The Sixth Sense series. Possibly the greatest testament to Ghost Whisperer’s success is that it’s survived for five seasons on Friday nights, a timeslot notorious for its high rate of cancellation.

I know this may be hard to believe but sitting down to the pilot of Ghost Whisperer was the first episode I’d ever seen in full. Sure, I’d caught the end of an episode where Jamie Kennedy and the fat lawyer from The Practice are busy talking about some ghost or another that needed to be reconnected to a loved one before JenLove walks in, flashes some cleavage around, and then solves all of the worlds ills. But I’d never seen an entire episode in full.

Ghost Whisperer is the sort of show that is always just there. Sort of like a Touched By An Angel for the new millennium; you see ads for it, you know it exists but you wonder if there’s anybody out there in the world that actually watches the show.

The pilot episode of Ghost Whisperer opens at a funeral. There’s a little girl named Melinda Gordon who sees a man sitting next to her, the very same man who’s lying in the coffin! Her grandmother quickly informs her that she has the family trait of being able to see dead people. Some folks get red hair, or a good throwing arm, but in the Gordon household you get to chat with ghosts. The dead man wants to pass on a message to his wife. The little girl has to deliver that message and thus sets up how the rest of her life will play out week to week. That little girl of course grows up to be Jennifer Love Hewitt and the next time we see her it’s her wedding day.

She’s very happy with her new husband, and he even buys her a house they can renovate together. Naturally as these things go he couldn’t have bought her a new house, or a caravan, or anything that couldn’t possibly have been haunted, instead he bought an old rickety shack that if it hadn’t have come loaded with ghosts would have been a real letdown.

Melinda starts getting foggy messages in medicine cabinet mirrors and hearing bumps in the night. At her antique shop she finds an old compass which we spend way too much time talking about for it not to come in handy later on when dealing with a ghost. Working at the antique shop with Melinda is her black best friend named Andrea (played by Aisha Taylor from Friends) which I mention only because JenLove also had a black best friend in I Know What You Did Last Summer so either Jennifer Love Hewitt won’t sign onto something without having a black best friend or she’s trying really hard to let people know that she’s totally not racist at all and she knows heaps of black people, hell her best friend is black. My bet: JenLove = total racist.

Anyway it doesn’t take too long for a dead soldier to show up (played by Wentworth Miller from Prison Break). This dead soldier wants to let his son know that everything’s okay. His son of course is played by Tommy from Brothers & Sisters – so those two fill out the ‘hey it’s that guy!’ quota from this pilot. Naturally enough JenLove is able to deliver the message and everything is hunky dory.

To be honest I surprised myself by actually enjoying Ghost Whisperer. I know, I kind of felt stupid writing that sentence but for a silly procedural starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and featuring ghosts it wasn’t too bad. Thankfully the writers have decided that Melinda is comfortable enough with her paranormal ability that she’s willing to discuss it openly with friends, family and strangers so we’re not forced to sit through episode after episode of her trying to explain away her vacant stares with ‘oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing!’

Ghost Whisperer doesn’t disappoint when it comes to hokey dialogue. When the dead soldier starts wandering around trying to find his son, it’s all quickly explained away by JenLove because the son is expecting a child: “Whenever a child is about to be born it sends a ripple through the spirit world and wakes up dead relatives.” You know, that old thing. All those ghosts you see wandering about are because of spirit world ripples caused by expectant mothers.

Of course the series dances on the fine line between creepy and corny, but it does manage to deliver an effective TV level of spookiness. Don’t get me wrong Jennifer Love Hewitt is still as devoid of a personality as ever but Ghost Whisperer makes for fairly watchable television. I don’t know what happens from here whether it all goes downhill once Randy from Scream joins the cast or if it has a boom in quality right around its fifth season but all I know is that for a pilot it was way more enjoyable than I was expecting.

Ghost Whisperer is sappy, goofy, way too serious and stars Jennifer Love Hewitt but, BUT, you can see why it works as one of those ‘if there’s nothing else on, catch an episode here and there, sort of shows.’ I’m not going to run out and buy the box set, but if the remote was broken and stuck on a Ghost Whisperer rerun that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright

Thoughts – Shortland Street

Shortland Street – TV2 – 7:00pm Weeknights – NZ / 7TWO – 2:00pm Weekdays – AUS

As an Australian who spent some time in New Zealand you tended to attach yourself to the little things that make NZ different from OZ. Whether it be a desire to always be eating Squiggles, or to buy a sausage when you get fish and chips or whether you find yourself strangely hooked on shows you might otherwise overlook if they were screening in your homeland. Fair Go may very well be the best show of all time and we never missed an episode, but nothing can compare with our love of all things Shortland Street.

Shortland Street is a soap opera. A New Zealand Home & Away, an Aotearoa Neighbours, a Land Of The Long White Cloud EastEnders, a Kiwi… you get the idea. Shortland Street behaves like most soap operas, there’s a cast of twenty or more characters whose lives all interconnect through some arbitrary location; whether that be a cul-de-sac, or a pub, or in Shortland Street’s case a hospital where suspiciously very little medicine is actually practiced.

Shortland Street or SS for short or Schutzstaffel… wait, no, that’s something else… has been on the air since 1992 and is the quintessential New Zealand soap opera. There have been over four thousand episodes, which makes the phrase “oh I’ve always wanted to watch that, I think I’ll start from the beginning” sound like a death sentence.

7TWO in Australia has finally picked up Shortland Street and is now screening it weekdays at 2:00pm. We were a little excited to be able to see the gang down at the Street again; we’d get to catch up on all the goss, see who was sleeping with whom, and who was spending more time in the break room than actually out being a nurse. We left New Zealand around June this year and a lot has changed since then. For one the entire cast has travelled back in time and it’s now 2007.

Okay, so 7TWO is a couple of years behind and if we want to see whether that ex-con ever learnt how to read, or if that annoying nurse had finally found some flatmates to move in with, or if that gay guy had had the triplets with that nurse who agreed to be a surrogate parent but then went back on the offer we are going to have to wait until about 2011. For now though we’ll just have to settle for the events of the past. It turns out in 2007 Shanti & Scotty hadn’t even got together yet. What’s going on!? They were living together when we last saw them… and according to a Wikipedia article that totally didn’t have the words ‘SPOILER ALERT’ printed anywhere Shanti died back in October. What the hell?!

Sorry. I got a little worked up there. Two years old and the cast is still pretty much the same. The twatty bar owner is a still a twat. TK and Sarah are still together, but TK has goofy long hair. It’s really disappointing because Sarah’s son Daniel hasn’t even rocked up yet so we don’t get to use his nickname ‘Samoa’ whenever he appears on screen. In 2007 though the Ferndale Stranger is still on the loose… so we have that revelation to look forward to I guess.

How can you really judge a four thousand episode soap based on a dozen or so episodes? EASY. With magic and guess work. Shortland Street isn’t exactly good, but it’s a soap opera, they’re not supposed to be “good”; other than the early 90’s seasons of Home & Away, of course. They were awesome with all the fire, earthquakes, floods, kidnappings, Chloe trapped in a house with the floor covered in bear traps… those old Summer Bay happenings.

The acting is less than great, but a couple of decent actors turn up from time to time including Robbie Magasiva who starred in Stickmen and Sione’s Wedding. I’m not saying that Shortland Street is appointment viewing just because a couple of Kiwi actors needed some work. I’m just saying that if you’re home at 2pm every day flicking the channels let’s be honest, you could do a lot worse than a silly drama with funny accents. Speaking of which Coronation Street is on right after it!

Follow Up – Mad Men

Mad Men – AMC – 3 Seasons – USA

Season three is over and if you caught the fantastic season finale I think you can join me in answering the following question: Is Mad Men the best drama on TV? What do the contenders look like? Damages? Nah, that fell down in season two. Dexter? Nah, his antics got old. Sons Of Anarchy? It’s not as consistent or original as Mad Men. Friday Night Lights? Sure, it makes me cry every damn week but is it the best?

I’m sure you have your own picks for best drama on TV right now but I have to agree with the Emmys (for once) on this one. Mad Men is a damn fine series. While that other awards darling 30 Rock has tumbled in quality Mad Men has gone from strength to strength and continues to deserve all of those awards and all of that praise.

The last time I took a look at Mad Men it was just as the third season had kicked off. I threw around words like ‘captivating’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘toast’. I could spend the next five hundred words repeating those sentiments and normally I would but I thought instead we could talk about that finale and all of the questions it raised.

I don’t need to tell you that a discussion of the third season finale of Mad Men is going to contain spoilers to anybody who hasn’t seen it, but here I am saying that anyway. Was the season three finale the best episode ever? Who knows, but it was a damn fine one that more than excites for the fourth season. As if we weren’t going to be excited anyway; now we kind of feel like we have to develop a device that instantly wipes away all the days between now and the season four premiere. I suggest a yearlong hibernation… it will mean we miss out on all the other shows will like and will probably result in death, but signup sheets are in the lobby for those still interested.

So many things happened in the finale it’s hard to choose what was the most important. Obviously the Drapers divorce will hang pretty heavily over the fourth season. Will Betty really be done with Don? Will Don let another man come in and steal his wife? How is Sally going to cope with the divorce seeing as though she was already hostile and violent even before it happened?

Bleak times are ahead for the Drapers, but on the work front Don and Co. are branching out on their own. Word gets around that Sterling Cooper is going to be sold (again) so Lane fires Don, Roger and Bert so they’re free of their contracts and able to join Layne in starting up a brand new company. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is the name, and I think we felt the same kind of giddy energy watching this plan be put into action as the ad boys did making it happen.

Best of all Joan is back. Was it just me or did anybody else let out a little squeak when Roger said “Let me make a phone call.” Ever since Joan left her position at Sterling Cooper to become a housewife I think we’ve all been itching to figure out how they were going to work her back into the show, and all that time away just reminded us we may miss Joan nearly as much as Roger does. The only thing left to do now is find a position for Sal at this new company and everything will be okay in the world.

Okay, so not everything. We’re still left wondering what’s going to happen to Ken Cosgrove, Beardy, the secretaries, and all the others left behind at Sterling Cooper. By this point though I think we can have faith that Matthew Weiner will find a place for all of them in season four.

Mad Men is a funny, heartbreaking and brilliant series. John Hamm and January Jones are fantastic. Heck, so are John Slattery and Christina Hendricks… and Vincent Kartheiser… and Elisabeth Moss… HELL this is one of the best ensembles on television. Each and every one of them deserves some kind of award. Even the extras need an award for participation or something.

If you haven’t seen Mad Men yet… then what are you doing reading a recap of the third season… shouldn’t you be out hunting down the first season so you can get in on what is the best drama on television. That’s right, no pussy footing about, I’m just going to come out and say it. Best drama on television… but then again Friday Night Lights does have Tim Riggins…

Follow Up – The Inbetweeners

The Inbetweeners – E4 / Channel 4 – 2 Seasons – UK

Writing about Dead Set yesterday I mentioned E4 stable mate The Inbetweeners and it reminded me that I really need to tell people how awesome The Inbetweeners is. A few months ago I got word that this little British series about awkward teenagers might be worth a bit of a looksee and after devouring the first two series I can safely report that it most definitely is worth ‘a bit of a looksee’.

For those not in the know The Inbetweeners follows the lives of four less than popular high school students. There’s Will McKenzie who after two seasons is still kind of appalled he has to attend a public school. Simon Cooper who lusts after a girl he’s known since he was eight. Jay Cartwright who talks up his sexual prowess despite the fact it’s highly unlikeable he’s ever met a pair of hot twins let alone had a threesome with them. And rounding out the gang is Neil Sutherland who, for all intents and purposes, is a moron.

Will, Simon, Jay and Neil kind of sound like your stereotypical high school characters that pop up and mull about in every TV series about school life but the combination of honest writing and hilarious performances turn these kids into living breathing social outcasts. Despite the fact I grew up in the suburbs of Sydney and not the outer suburbs of London I swear I went to school with most of these guys, hell, I’m pretty sure that I was Simon Cooper only with worse hair and more than one friend like Jay.

Brutal honesty alone wouldn’t be enough to make The Inbetweeners must see television so thankfully it provides plenty of laughs. The Inbetweeners is written by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris. Iain previously wrote for Peep Show, and The Inbetweeners could easily be described as the awkward comedy of Peep Show for the high school set.

If you don’t like the mention of urination, masturbation and ‘shitting oneself’ in your comedy than stay well clear of Will and the lads. Of course don’t assume that means the show is just one long series of dick and shit jokes… okay so it sort of is, but the characters are so rich and well thought out that you kind forget you’re watching a guy in socks wade across a urine soaked public toilet. There’s a sweet and honest heart to The Inbetweeners that sets its ‘I’d do your mum’ jokes above everybody else’s ‘I’d do your mum’ jokes.

The second season of ‘tweeners was just as good as the first, but if I had one complaint it was that the boys seemed to spend an awful lot of time away from school. Not that their school camp, work experience, time with the French exchange student, trip to the club and work at the nursing home weren’t drowning in hilarious situations and awkward shenanigans. It’s just that you kind of missed the boys just hanging around the corridors of the high school getting made fun of for being a ‘briefcase wanker’.

It’s strange how I can hate a show like Pulling but love The Inbetweeners despite them both being vulgar comedies filled with cringe inducing moments. A case could be made that I can’t really relate to the sad pathetic lives of thirty something women, but I can empathise completely with sad pathetic high school boys. Not since Freaks & Geeks have I seen a group of friends on television that reminded me so much of me and my friends (“aww friend” *double thumbs up*)

Word on the Wikipedia is that ABC have commissioned a pilot for an American Inbetweeners and normally this would fill me with a sense of dread and the need to talk at length about how “that will never work” but lately ABC has given us the great Better Off Ted and Modern Family, and the surprisingly funny Cougar Town and The Middle so I’m actually rather… okay no, I’m still filled with a sense of dread. It’s a bad idea. The Inbetweeners is a very British show and to even make it to air on network TV in America it would have to be tamed down so much that like most British adaptations it would be relatable in name only.

The Inbetweeners is one of the best British comedies out there. A title I’m more than willing to throw onto a list that includes Gavin & Stacey, Outnumbered, Peep Show, Spaced and even The Office & Extras before Ricky Gervais turned into a massive twat. The beauty of the British sitcom is that it never outstays its welcome. Each of those shows has a season that runs for about six episodes so they can be as near to perfect as possible. Each of those shows has also had an attempted US adaptation and while The Office may have surpassed the original I often can’t sleep at night worried about how the American Gavin & Stacey and Outnumbered will turn out. Thank god the US Peep Show and Spaced died before they ever got to air.

Whether they do eventually make an American version or not The Inbetweeners will still be a fantastic little series. Season three is headed our way in 2010 and odds are it will be just as honest, well written, gross, embarrassing and laugh out loud hilarious as the first two.

Review – Dead Set

Dead Set – E4 / Channel 4 – 1 Season – UK / SBS – 10:00pm Monday – AUS

Starting tonight on SBS is Dead Set. There’s a simple test to see if Dead Set is your type of show or not. I’m just going to state the premise and you’re going to tell me how awesome you think that is. Okay? Here goes:

What if England was overrun with zombies and the only people left alive were in the Big Brother house?

I know. That’s pretty awesome huh? It’s the classic George A. Romero technique of throwing the survivors together in a one last stand situation. Whether it be the shopping mall from Dawn Of The Dead or even the pub from the equally fantastic Shaun Of The Dead. Dead Set runs with the idea that the Big Brother house is supposedly ‘cut off from the rest of the world’ and imagining how that would play out in a zombie movie.

Dead Set is written by Charlie Brooker who I’ve heaped praise upon previously in my review of Gameswipe. Through his dissection of television series Screenwipe we already know Brooker is a man who understands the ins and out of reality television, but here he shows us that he understands the ins and outs of the zombie world just as well. The premise may seem like the perfect recipe for over the top wackiness but Dead Set plays things relatively straight.

It’s a pitch perfect recreation of a zombie movie coupled with a spot on parody of Big Brother. Where a lesser series might have called their reality show ‘House Mates’ or ‘Stuck In A House’ or something like that Dead Set has the luxury of using the actual Big Brother name, house and host. Don’t think for a second that this means Brooker will be pulling any punches as former housemates, the actual host and thousands of screaming fans get ripped to pieces by the zombie hordes.

The show opens on Day 64 of the latest series of Big Brother. Housemates with names like Pippa, Grayson and Angel are doing their thing of being their attention seeking selves by getting into arguments over eggs and whether or not they’ve got their mic pack on. There’s even the grumpy older housemate Joplin (played by Kevin Eldon from Big Train). Meanwhile on the outside of the house the production staff are preparing for eviction night. We meet sleazy producer Patrick and production assistant Kelly who’s got relationship troubles that are going to look pretty meaningless in about an hour.

As the pressure mounts on the team to produce a good show they start getting reports from London that there have been riots that have left many citizens dead. If you’ve even seen one zombie movie you know that can only mean one thing: the dead are walking the earth. It doesn’t take long before the zombies show up for eviction night and tear through the crowd dressed as their favourite housemates. The zombies rip apart the studio and the Big Brother housemates mistake the screams of pain as screams of annoyance that Pippa got voted out.

Of course leaving the housemates wondering why the cameras aren’t following them isn’t enough to establish the fear that there are zombies on the outside waiting to get in. Surviving the terror from the night before Kelly wakes up and manages to escape the zombie clutches and get inside the house. As she holds a bloody knife in terror the other contestants cheer because they think Big Brother’s given them a new housemate.

That’s how the first episode ends: with the housemates becoming quickly aware of the outside danger. Needless to say ‘watching episode two’ rockets straight to the top of your things to do list.

Dead Set has been brought into this world by the British digital channel E4 which also gave us the hilarious The Inbetweeners. Just like that show’s accurate representation of high school embarrassment Dead Set is so note perfect in its delivery. Brooker not only loves horror movies and reality television but he also GETS horror movies and reality television.

The satirical point that the only people left watching Big Brother are all ‘mindless zombies’ isn’t any less stupid than Romero’s take on the ‘mindless zombies in a shopping mall’. Dead Set isn’t as laugh out loud funny as Shaun Of The Dead but it’s still a great show that is well worth the watch. Not only if you enjoy yourself a good horror movie in the 28 Days Later vein but even if you’ve ever just fantasized about the Big Brother housemates getting their throats ripped out by flesh eating zombies.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Good

Fall TV Friday – 2005 – The Apprentice: Martha Stewart

The Apprentice: Martha Stewart – NBC – 1 Season (13 Episodes) – USA

NBC are going through some rough times at the moment. They constantly run fourth in the ratings, their number one show is a reality series about fat people losing weight and their big plan to save themselves involves wasting five hours of primetime on Jay Leno. If NBC wanted to take the time to figure out where it all went wrong 2005 is as good a place as any to start and The Apprentice: Martha Stewart is the perfect example of how NBC dropped the proverbial ball, ended up the proverbial creek and screwed the proverbial pooch.

Let’s put aside for a moment whether or not The Apprentice: Martha Stewart is a “good” program and let’s ask a couple of obvious questions: Why would you spin off a reality series in the first place? Even if you were to spin off a reality series why would you do it with an only somewhat successful one? Let’s say that you have asked these questions and still decided to go ahead with the show WHY would you air it on the same schedule as the original? Each Law & Order is a different show, even The Bachelorette is different enough from The Bachelor to warrant appearing on two nights during the same week but The Apprentice is still The Apprentice and all you’re doing is saturating your audience with a product they don’t like that much to begin with.

There’s another obvious question: is Martha Stewart’s audience the same audience that enjoy The Apprentice? Heck, after watching the first episode you’d have to wonder whether Martha Stewart herself even enjoys The Apprentice.

So because NBC chose not to ask those simple questions during the 2005-2006 TV season US audiences were treated to two regular Apprentices and an extra Apprentice: Martha style!

The Apprentice: Martha Stewart opens with Martha telling us all about herself, her empire, and how she was America’s first female self made billionaire. Straight off the bat you notice that Martha Stewart isas wooden as a wood collection found in the woods in a wooden box made of wood. She describes her organisation as being “full of life”, unlike, say for example, Martha Stewart. Before things have even begun you’re wondering what kind of cutthroat decisions have to be made in the world of fabric choices and cupcake frosting.

If it wasn’t already abundantly clear this is not Donald Trumps’ Apprentice. The first five seconds of the opening credits feature some weird shots that make it look like Martha is falling in love with a horse and then there’s a collection of people that remind you this is a four year old reality show and you don’t care who the contestants are.

Harking back to the question of whether Martha Stewart fits with The Apprentice the simple answer is: she doesn’t. The Apprentice is all backstabbing, office politics, and douchebags in suits. Martha on the other hand tries to make everything as nice and as friendly as possible. The first time the contestants are brought into the boardroom there’s no intimidation, in fact they all share a laugh. Donald Trump wouldn’t have allowed laughter.

For crying out loud the first challenge involves creating a children’s book for Random House. Seriously. They have to take a fairytale and make it modern to impress a group of first graders. It almost makes The Apprentice Australia’s lawn mowing challenge seem worthwhile. The teams are quickly divided into ‘creative’ and ‘corporate’. Creative are named ‘Matchstick’ and corporate are named ‘Primarius’. I know, I didn’t need to tell you the creative team came up with ‘Matchstick’ and that a bunch of guys schooled in the corporate world could only think of ‘Primarius’. It sounds like a freaking Transformer for crying out loud.

The challenge plays out like these things tend to do, there are some arguments over who contributes enough, there’s somebody who takes control, there are focus groups, there are white boards and discussions about whether or not ‘Primarius’ is a dicky name for a team or not… okay not that last one. In the end one of the books gets rave reviews, while the other gets less than stellar reviews. Ten guesses as to which team wins. Also ten guesses as to whether the person who will leave is going to be the whiny useless girl or the team leader who took control and led his team to failure. Four Year Old Spoiler Alert: It’s the team leader.

The best part of The Apprentice: Martha Stewart is the ridiculous conference room elimination. First of all she apologizes for bringing them into the conference room, as though if it wasn’t for this darn reality show they could all just hang out and eat scones. Then when it’s time for somebody to go she doesn’t use Trump’s ‘you’re fired’ she brings out her own ‘you just don’t fit in. Goodbye.’ Apparently ‘Goodbye’ was supposed to be the next ‘Voted Off The Island’ but it didn’t catch on because it turns out people say ‘Goodbye’ a lot in real life anyway.

The kicker though is as the poor sap that was eliminated has to hop in the car and leave the show Martha sits down and WRITES THEM A LETTER. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so bizarre. Here’s her letter she narrates over the final credits in full: ‘Dear Jeffrey, I’m sorry you are the first to go. Not to fail, but rather not to fully succeed. You entered this endeavour knowing that someone would have to leave after the first task, unfortunately it is you. Personally it is hard to make such a judgement call but it is part of this interview process. Good luck. Travel safely. It was great to meet you. Cordially, Martha Stewart.’

Does that sound like The Apprentice to you? The Apprentice: Martha Stewart fails because it’s all over the shop. You suffer whiplash as the tone shifts wildly from Martha trying to be everybody’s best friend to contestants wanting to stab each other in the back. The A:MS is the biggest most glorious kind of flop. It’s ridiculous and makes everybody involved look completely stupid in the process.

So far Surface and Martha Stewart have completely encapsulated the sheer laziness that was present at NBC in 2005. NBC were sitting on a slate full to the brim with aging series. Las Vegas, Will & Grace, ER, Law & Order, L&O: SVU, The West Wing, L&O: Criminal Intent, Crossing Jordan. Some of them are fine shows but they were all getting on in years.

The only pickups NBC made from the previous TV season were Medium (which they gave up to CBS), Joey (and we all know how that turned out), The Biggest Loser and The Office (which coincidentally are now NBC’s two biggest hits). NBC needed to launch a big flagship series in 2005 to replace some of their older brands. The Apprentice: Martha Stewart was NEVER going to be that show. NBC deserve to fail when all they can offer the world is lazy programming like this.

Martha, you just don’t fit in. Goodbye.

See, it’s catching on already!

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad

Review – V

V – ABC – 8:00/7:00pm Tuesday – USA

V opens with a series a series of questions: ‘Where were you when JFK was assassinated?’ ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ‘Where were you this morning?’ I was half expecting them to ask ‘Where were you during the Blackout, and what did you see in your FlashForward?’ but this is a different global event sci-fi drama on the ABC. V is an alien invasion tale based on the 80’s miniseries of the same name.

There’s a rumbling in New York. The walls start to shake. Bookcases start to rattle. Cups of water do that ‘Jurassic Park’ ripple thing. People start to walk outside as large Independence Day shadows start to cover the city. Alien spacecraft hover overhead and everybody looks up stunned; stunned that they’ve seen all this before in a Will Smith blockbuster. Don’t worry though the producers have already thought of that so they throw a couple of teenagers on a news report commenting about how this is “exactly like in Independence Day” before one of them complains that “Independence Day was just a rip off of older sci-fi” I didn’t really hear what he was saying though I was too busy noticing how much this was a rip off of ID4.

Rather than blowing up the White House these spaceships turn into giant TV screens and the enormous head of Anna (played by Morena Baccarin from Firefly) appears to tell us everything is going to be okay. Anna’s floating head appears all over the world in every major city, from L.A. to London to Moscow to… Cairo… really? Cairo? What is this 1300BC? Is Cairo really still a major city? Why couldn’t they have been hovering over Paris or Tokyo or Dubbo?

The aliens call themselves The Visitors and the rest of the world starts calling them ‘Vs’ quicker than people started calling the visions ‘FlashForwards’. The Visitors visit the U.N. and they even hold tours of their spaceships. The Visitors are just like humans only much more advanced and at peace with the world… or are they? Dun dun dunn.

Running around these alien visitors are a loosely connected batch of humans played by actors that we may or may not recognize. Elizabeth Mitchell from Lost plays FBI agent Erica Evans. She’s partnered with Wash from Firefly (or Alpha from Dollhouse depending on your Joss Whedon series of choice) and they’re busy investigating a “sleeper cell”. Is somebody planning a terrorist attack using the alien visitors as a distraction or is something much more sinister going on?

Meanwhile Erica’s son Tyler and his fat friend score a visit to the spaceship with its surprisingly quite good CGI interiors. Whilst on the ship Tyler falls in love with a hot alien and decides that being an ambassador for the V’s is a good idea.

Elsewhere in the city we meet Father Jack who’s worried that the aliens are more than they seem. Speaking of more than they seem the black guy from Anacondas: The Hunt For The Blood Orchid turns up as Ryan Nichols a man with a fiancée and a past that haunts him. Rounding out the cast is Scott Wolf (from Party Of Five!) playing news anchor Chad Decker. Chad scores an interview with the leader of the aliens and the scene right before they go to air and she says he can’t ask him a question that will put the Visitors in a bad light is one of the best of the pilot.

During the interview we learn that the V’s are setting up stations around the world to help humans and they even offer ‘universal health care’. Stupid communist aliens, I bet they’d also like to raise our taxes and abort our unborn babies.

There are a couple of twists towards the end of the episode that actually made me say ‘woah’. Either I was channelling Keanu Reeves or V got kind of good. Twists are at their best when they appear where you weren’t looking for them. The only problem with V is that it tries to cram so much into the pilot that you kind of wonder where else these stories can go. The twists, while good, may have had more emotional resonance after a couple of episodes of getting to know these characters better.

There’s a lot to like about V, especially Morena Baccarin performance as our alien saviour. Some of the show doesn’t quite gel properly but I’m going to give V the benefit of the doubt. V has the potential to be a great series, and at the very least it’s going to better than the plodding FlashForward. Bring on our alien masters.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Good

Follow Up – Survivor Tocantins

Survivor: Tocantins – CBS – Season 18 – USA / GO! – 8:30pm Tuesday – AUS

America may be a season ahead of us and already well into Survivor: Samoa, but for us Australians let me just say a big “welcome to Tocantins.” I swear Jeff has said the name like six times now and I still don’t quite get it. Token-cheese? Anyway, Survivor: Token-cheese takes us to the highlands of Brazil where sixteen strangers set about finding out who’s going to outwit, outplay and outlast, or as the final three from the last few seasons have demonstrated ‘outwit, coast by, and make everybody hate you’.

Survivor: Gabon was one of the best seasons of Survivor ever; I’d even clock it up into top three status. Don’t freak out, I’m just saying top three seasons of Survivor, not top three of anything really important. If by the end of our time at Gabon you didn’t love Bob and his fake idols, or Sugar smashing every so-called ‘strategist’ with her plan of ‘getting all the nice people to the end’ then you have no heart. Or are Corinne, who also has no heart, and may have lost a bet to the devil at some point during which she gave up her soul and also did not get her hands on a fiddle made of gold.

While the horrid Fans vs. Favorites sent me running Gabon has dragged me right back into the Survivor mix, so bring on Toca…Tokk-tokk…tucan…bring on Token-cheese! Like I said before we meet sixteen survivors. Yes, sixteen. Not eighteen, or twenty, or seventy-two, but sixteen. Not only that but the game starts much like some of the earlier seasons. There’s no schoolyard pick, there’s no voting off two players straight away, there’s no dividing the tribes up by race. There’s just a truck, two teams and they have to grab as many provisions as they can in a minute. Old school.

Then of course Jeff reveals a twist where the tribes have to vote for a single member who won’t be joining them on their trek to camp. Damn, I knew it couldn’t be EXACTLY like the early seasons. Jeff didn’t say ‘eliminated’ so either the two ladies ‘voted out’ were going to be team captains or… they’re going to get flown by helicopter to the camps early so they can either set up or hunt for a hidden immunity idol. Oh good, we’re getting to the hidden immunity idol early, here I was thinking we wouldn’t get a season’s worth of people not understanding how far a ‘pace’ is.

There’s a red tribe named Jalapao, and a black tribe named Timbira. On the red tribe we get to meet crazy old Sandy who does not let up with the crazy eyes. When you see that her occupation is ‘bus driver’ all you can say is ‘ooooh that makes so much sense.’ There’s also Carolina who’s squeaky and bossy (never a good combination). J.T. a country boy who’s kind of like a Southern version of Boston Rob in that you kind of like him but he’s a bit of a douche. They’ve also got Joe who looks like Johnny Drama and Stephen who sort of looks like a pointy nosed, lazy eyed version of Jim from The Office. My favourite in red though would have to be Taj, who’s married to Heisman trophy winner Eddie George… which apparently may or may not be a big deal.

Dressed in black we meet Carl Weathers look-a-like Jerry who’s also a Sergeant in the U.S. Army. There’s Coach a Steven Segal wannabe who’s a real life soccer coach but says in a confessional “I find faults in people because that’s my job.” Wow, who knew that coaching consisted of just telling people why they suck. Joining Coach in the ‘why don’t you just shut up’ category is Candace, one of those women who use ‘well educated’ in place of ‘snobby bitch’ to describe themselves. Along with Jerry my favourite would have to be Tyson the smart ass Mormon who likes to get naked.

There’s also a girl named Erinn who’s a hairstylist (there’s always one) and a guy named Brendan who I totally forgot about whenever he wasn’t on screen. Brendan got sent to Exile Island at one point and every time they showed him I thought the twist was that they’d introduced a new cast member, and then another one, and then another one, and each of them was a boring pretty boy.

GO! treated us to a double episode to open Tocantins and they went much the same as the start any other Survivor series. There’s the building of camp, the forming off alliances and even challenges involving ‘rafts with puzzle pieces’. Pfft. Puzzle pieces. It’s no ‘fill a tank with water’, but it’ll do. Both tribes lost a member, and the two women who were signalled out early as being ‘weak’ got spared because as we all know in Survivor world the only thing worse than a weak woman is a bossy one. So Cassandra, Carolina and their hard to control boobs were sent packing.

You can never tell this early on whether it’s going to be a good season of Survivor or, you know, Thailand. Once you get down to about ten or so that’s when seasons start to kick into gear. Either that or assholes take over the game, you know, like in Thailand.

Survivor works best when you’ve got an underdog like Sugar or Bob from Gabon, or Yul, Ozzie and Co in Cook Island to root for. But it works just as well when you have a crazy ego-maniac calling all the shots like Boston Rob on All-Stars or Richard Hatch in the first season. Then of course there’s the rare highlight where you get to watch a guy who’s awesome at everything, on a team that wins everything, and is just a great guy like Tom who won Palau.

Heck, there are good survivors and bad survivors in every series. At the end of the day we’ve just got to hope that Survivor: Tocantins contains a Lex, a James or a Yao-Man and pray that the boring ass Ethan’s, Parvati’s and Jenna’s of this world get eaten by some of those wild animals that pop up in between every scene. At the end of my review for Gabon I said ‘all we want are some laugh out loud moments where the guys we’re rooting for one up the guys we’re not’. Gabon delivered those moments in spades. Oh Randy, how you so totally deserved that ‘pretend immunity idol’ and Corinne how you totally deserved to look like freaking moron in every episode. Here’s hoping that Tocantins delivers more of the same… I’m counting on you Tyson!

Review – The Contender Australia

The Contender Australia – FOX8 – 8:30pm Monday – AUS

Mark Burnett is a man with a mission, that mission of late seems to be to create an Australian version of each of his franchises. Joining the god awful Australian Survivor and the painful Are You Smarter Than A 5^th Grader? are the recent local version of The Apprentice, and now The Contender Australia. I think it’s safe to say that we may never see a Pirate Master Down Under, but I for one think that’s a shame.

The Contender Australia is Top Model with boxers, it’s MasterChef with guys in a ring, it’s On The Lot if instead of really bad short filmmakers you instead have guys who beat on other guys. In short The Contender is a reality series and like most reality series (especially ones from Mark Burnett) it combines silly challenges with over serious confessionals and that overshadowing sense of dread that if one of these contestants were to not win they will probably suffer a horrible death or at the very least be shunned by their family.

The series is hosted by the incredibly grating Charlotte Dawson and yet another unemployed Underbelly actor Daniel Amalm. There are fourteen super middleweight contenders all vying for the chance to fight Anthony “The Man” Mundine. When The Man stepped out on a ledge to talk about how they all want to be the man, to fight the man, and to man the man, or whatever he said, I suddenly got hooked on a series that promised me that in the end somebody would get to beat the crap out of Anthony Mundine.

We meet various contenders as they talk to camera and spurt lines like “He’s like a teacher on holidays… no class” that feel like they’ve been hand delivered to them by the producers. Early favourites for me would have to be the levelled headed Garth, the trash talking Junior and Sonni the guy who seems to think everyone and everything is stupid except for boxing and his yellow suit. The contenders are divided up into two teams, the yellow team and the blue team, so they kind of look like extremely fit Biggest Losers.

Once divided into teams they then have to complete a silly challenge to fill out the middle of the episode. This is Mark Burnett after all and what reality show wouldn’t be complete with a nonsense challenge. The teams have to race up a mountain and run an obstacle course. Sonni walks the length of the way and gives his very own Mohammad Ali inspired speech: “I didn’t come here to jump around like a kangaroo. I didn’t come here to act like a bird.” … it’s no ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ but still…

The challenge continues with the teams then having to grab buckets and fill a tank full of water. Seriously. Then four guys race up the mountain again with the challenge of remembering numbers to unlock a combination that unleashes a weather balloon. Seriously. This is why I’m going for Sonni, because of his complete contempt for stupid challenges like this.

The first blue and yellow members up the mountain win ‘golden gloves’ that take them straight into the second round. Because nothing says ‘I’m good at boxing’ like launching a balloon. Garth makes it through, and so does Ben who has way too much time to talk during this episode. Unfortunately he’s here until at least the final 8, which is a shame, because he’s an idiot and less of him talking crap the better.

The yellow team won so they get to pick which two boxers are going to fight. They pick one of their guys to face off against one of the others. Or as Pradeep puts it “We can now choose who’s going to fight and who will fight.” Yes, those are the exact same things.

The loser of the fight has to go home. The build up to the fight and the fight itself are easily the best bits of the show. Yellow Josh from Mt. Druitt faces off against Blue Israel from Noosa. Go figure that the guy from Mt. Druitt would be kind of intense and come from a broken home while the guy from Noosa would be really laid back. It’s a shame Israel lost (oh wait, spoiler alert? Sorry.) because his baby who punched her tiny fists together whenever somebody said ‘boxing’ was adorable.

The fight itself is a weird mash up job by the editors. Instead of playing out the highlights from a match as if it were a real boxing match we’re treated to zooming cameras, pan shots, slow motion, a heavy handed soundtrack, way too many reaction shots from the crowd and lots of nauseating quick cuts. The whole sequence would work better if we got to see it as a real fight. On Idol they don’t chop up the songs and show them in slow motion, or fill the screen with thousands of reaction shots, so why do it here? We want to see boxing, show us boxing.

In the end a fight that everybody, including Josh, agreed was won by Israel was given to Josh because one of judges was wrong. What a great start to season. Tune in next week when for more bad judges calls. They can pass it off as ‘that’s just how it goes sometimes’ but we seriously just watched the guy who won the fight get eliminated for no apparent reason.

Still, bad calls by judges, dodgy challenges, and heavy handed hosts can’t hide the fact that The Contender Australia is a fairly good reality series. We’ve been inundated with Australian versions of everything from Ladette To Lady to Farmer Wants A Wife to Beauty & The Geek and The Contender Australia is easily one of the better ones. I’ll definitely been tuning in again and not just because there’s the promise of Anthony Mudine getting beat up eventually, but because I really want to see what stupid challenge Sonni is not going to compete in next week.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright