Tag Archives: chase

Why Television is Failing So Much These Days

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Networks really don’t want to admit this, but they’re losing big time in the ratings wars. Oh, they’ll acknowledge it by saying really stupid things like, “we have to compete with so many other sources, like computer games, Xboxes and cable” but what they’re really not admitting is that they’ve so lost the pulse of America that they may never gain it back. The reason they don’t want to admit that they’re failing big time is that everyone who works for the networks realizes that his or her job is on the line if someone higher up realizes how incompetent they really are. So, instead of admitting it and fixing it, they’ll go on pretending that the emperor has no clothes and hope no one notices either.

Well, I’m going to put forth a couple of problems and solutions, and then we can kind of figure out if the networks are ever going to get any better.

1. The Hiatus. One of the biggest mistakes the networks could ever make is to start up a new show that starts to gain the attention of the public and then SUDDENLY yank it off the air for three or four months, and then let it reappear again. If there was a number one stupid thing to do so you could derail any chance at succeeding in ratings THIS  it is.

The origins of this stupid idea quite possibly came as a result of the infamous writer’s strike that halted all production for a period of time right in the middle of a brand new season. As a result, some really promising shows got canceled prematurely because they didn’t even get a first half of a season to gain popularity. They were pulled off the air during the strike and then never brought back.

Now, I could see this as one of those once in a lifetime situations, but somehow the networks thought this was a really good idea to subject viewers to a gap in time right in the middle of a show, as if this would cause them to come rushing back to that show, because they’ve been waiting and anticipating its return. This is supposedly what happened with LOST. But because it worked for LOST, they tried it with every other stupid show they aired. They did it with Heroes, and then Heroes went completely downhill. Then they did it with every other shows as well. SyFy became famous for doing this (even though it’s not a major network), and it is quite possibly the reason for the destruction of Caprica. Caprica was a somewhat decent show, but they cut it right in the middle of its first season so that people just stopped caring about the show. Then the second half came, and well, no one cared. So it got canceled.

That’s the problem right there. If you give us a new show and then halt it in the middle of the very first season, don’t expect us to come back. Sorry, but you lose.

2. Remake Hell. There’s a reason some shows were canceled the first time around. They failed. Remaking a failed show from yesterday may sound like a daring idea, but all it does is show that your network has no creativity whatsoever. Hawaii 5-0 might sound like a great idea, and I’m kind of liking the idea of seeing Grace Park in a bikini once a week, but to be honest, Hawaii 5-00 wasn’t all that great a show back then. I’m not all that excited about it now. So, I don’t watch it. And when others get over the fresh car smell, they probably won’t either. And that’s the most popular of the remake shows to have been done. Imagine what happens to the ones that aren’t as popular. The show V sounds like a neat idea, but it’s been done before. Even though some of the actors on the show are all from a Best of Sci Fi of all time (watching the cast is like watching a recap of who was once great in sci fi), it’s very hard to get past the fact that almost nothing in this show is original. And then they put it into half season hiatus (see complaint Number 1), which means they’re going to be seriously struggling to maintain an audience. And when they cancel it on us, they’ll blame us for not wanting to watch it.

3. No Faith in a Network. This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the networks. I generally don’t watch a new television show any more until it reaches the third season because I’m so tired of a show being canceled in the first or second season, right after I’ve gotten drawn into it. They did it to me with Harsh Realms (remember that one?), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Jericho, Jeremiah, Firefly, and Dollhouse. Why would I trust a network to actually continue a television show that I started to watch? It’s really not worth the effort until they’ve decided to reward us by actually continuing the show. But they won’t continue a show because none of us are watching it (maybe because we don’t believe you’ll continue it).

4. Rehashes of Overdone Formulas. How many Law & Order or CSI franchises can we create? As a matter of fact, do we really need another cop show of any sorts? At one point, I was getting paranoid while living in San Francisco because there were more cops on television from San Francisco than there were actual cops on the streets. I was scared to walk to the corner because on TV there was a crime happening every fifteen seconds in San Francisco. And I knew not to call a cop because they were all basket cases who were having problems dealing with their sanity (or ex-cops who were scared of their own shadows…thanks, Monk). Recently, there was a show with a guy who played a drugged out mafioso in New Jersey who was now a cop in Detroit. I was starting to wonder who I could trust anymore. I mean, I’m kind of scared just now writing about it. But stop giving us more stupid cop shows. There’s not as much crime in the world as there is on television. Stop scaring the crap out of us.

5. Bad writing. This is probably my biggest complaint these days. The Event stopped being an event for me because the writing was straight out atrocious. And then they backed it up with some of the worst acting since Pauly Shore decided to make serious movies. Or maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a recurring fear I have. But either way, the writing is awful on some of these shows. I remember watching an episode of The Chase (or is it just Chase?), and three times in a row I was able to blurt out the next line of dialogue word for word before the actor could say it. And these were the “gotcha” moments that cop shows have where the hero gets to say the cool thing to the guy who is setting him or her up for a big dramatic moment. The writing was so bad that it was badly predictable.

That, in short, is why I find network television these days to be suffering. If they want to really compete with the competition that’s up against them, they have to raise their game. But they can’t raise their game if they’re going to keep doing the stupid things they keep on doing.

“The Event” and “Chase” Leave a Lot to Be Desired

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I gave them both a try. I even continued watching both shows long after I thought they had seriously jumped sharks, shark tanks and the Atlantic Ocean. But nothing about these shows has caused me to think that they’re worth any further watching on my part. Last night’s airing of both is a good example.

The Event

The series started off with a bit of an overhyped dud and has managed to dog paddle its way through the rest of the season. In the very first episode, they presented us with “the event”, or at least what I think was supposed to be the event. A plane was hurtling towards the president, and then out of nowhere it vanished. The next week, the plane reappeared in the desert. Then secret police/military helicopters showed up and may have slaughtered everyone. And then the bodies woke up. And then the bodies were now all prisoners wondering what happened. My writing of this makes it sound a lot more exciting than it really was. To be honest, it’s been extremely boring, accented with huge moments that generally don’t make any sense. And I don’t mean “doesn’t make any sense in a LOST sort of way”. It’s more a “doesn’t make sense in a Cop Rock (remember that show?) sort of way”. Nothing the show has done has caused me to really think: “I can’t wait to see how they pull this off” or “I wonder what’s going to happen next.” Instead, it’s been more like “I really can’t wait until they go to a commercial so I can do something constructive like check email for a spam message I’m hoping to receive.”

Last night’s episode was par for the course. Let me explain. The main actor, who is Jason Ritter, the son of John Ritter, attempted to act his way out of a paper bag in which he showed his range of “I’m in a panic mode cause I’m looking for my girlfriend” and “I’m in anger mode because I’m looking for my girlfriend.” Unfortunately, in the previous episode, he found his girlfriend, so his acting range has no purpose right now, as “I found my girlfriend, so I’m now going to act all frantic for no reason is hopefully not going to be noticed by the audience.”

And that’s a huge part of the problem with the show right there. The acting is atrocious. And I mean ALL of the acting. At first, I thought it was because they had really bad actors, but there are some pretty decent actors here who are doing some seriously horrendous acting, which to me means their director sucks because even bad actors can’t act this badly. An example: One of the main recurring actors is D.B. Sweeney who has done some great things in the past. He was in a show with Terry O’Quinn, the bald guy who plays Locke in LOST, called Harsh Realms, where he played the buddy of the main character, and he was really good in this part. When I saw he was now in The Event, I was actually thinking, wow, they got a good actor, mainly because I was seeing a lot of bad acting. They’ve done nothing great with him, and as a matter of fact, his acting is pretty crappy in this show as well, which immediately tells me that the director seriously sucks.

Another example was the appearance of Paula Malcomson, who plays, well, to be honest, I haven’t a clue who she was playing because I was having a seriously hard time paying attention when she finally appeared. Malcomson is the actress who plays Amanda Graystone in Caprica, who probably has one of the most nuanced parts in television these days on that show. In The Event, they decided that because she was a “serious” actress, they were going to let her show her talents at being completely nuts and off the wall. She puts on a 40 or so second rant that was basically best described as “bad actress overacting”. I half expected the two other actors in the scene to respond with “Really?” because it was so over the top bad acting that I couldn’t imagine anyone else remaining in character for the rest of that scene. But fortunately, we was joined by Jason Ritter and the woman who plays the FBI agent, so the bad acting continued ensue and a good time was had by all.

Let’s move on with the story. In the last episode, they released the mysterious woman who won’t tell the president her secrets because of some strange terrorist demand that the government do so. So, she goes on the subway, drives around for a while and then ends up in a wannabe Starbucks, orders coffee, and then her fellow accomplice throws off a tracking device placed in her food (and now in her) by mixing a similar tracking device in the creamer of the coffee so that soon 50 something people are walking around with the tracking device. And then the good/bad guy working with her ends up beating up one of his fellow FBI agents, burying him in the trunk of his car and then radioing the bad guy holding everyone hostage that he needs to come in.

So, they all move in on a huge warehouse where the bad guy is holding out. Fortunately, the government just so happens to see the mysterious woman walk in through the front door of the warehouse with a CC camera at the last second before she disappears behind the door. So an FBI crack team of guys in military uniforms with FBI blazened on the back of their jackets rush into the building to catch the big bad, mean terrorist. I say this because this leads to a typical police raid drama that should have required the writers and director to have actually watched a typical police raid drama some time  in the past because it has to be the biggest joke of a raid I’ve ever seen. First off, it had to be the slowest raid physically possible. After the crack team breaks through the front door, they waddle forward in as slow a manner as physically possible so that we end up with at least two commercial breaks before they get about fifteen feet past the front door. Before they even get that fifteen feet in, the executives of the FBI then come crashing in behind them. You can tell the executives because they’re the ones that don’t wear any protective gear other than a flack vest, but all have three piece suits, minus the jacket, because somewhere in Hollywood land some informed them that cops look much cooler with the dress shirt, flack vest and hand gun attire than with full body armor and machine guns like the rest of the guys were wearing.

So, in all of this time they’re raiding, the bad guys get away by crawling into a hole in a drain that’s located in the room next to the one where the ten thousand crack soldiers are breaking into their warehouse. And then, and this was my favorite part of the episode, he activates some mysterious glowing bomb and the double agent guy from before decides to sacrifice his life (even though he can get away just by stepping into the drain opening about two feet away from him) because somewhere down the line he had to give up a girl he fell in love with because being an alien (did I mention he was one of the aliens?) he would never age, and well, we learned from watching years of Highlander that you just can’t do that to a woman. But back to the great moment of television history: The President of the United States is watching the invasion over the CC camera, which for some reason is relaying the image in full HD television, and focused directly on the door where the FBI agents busted in. And then, for no apparent reason, the CC camera switches to a full view of the warehouse, and we watch it implode on itself. And all I’m left wondering is: Who the hell switched the camera angle, how did he know to do it at that time, and where did that new image come from? Unfortunately, those questions won’t be answered by The Event because they were stupid mistakes in creating the show, not mysteries within the show itself.

When the episode ended, I was almost comatose and thankful it ended. And then I watched the lead-in for The Chase.

The Chase

One of the stupidest shows I’ve seen in years. It involves a female US Marshal who apprehends fugitives. For some reason, they’ve made her out to be a chance-taking, thrill-seeking agent who risks her life constantly. In the beginning of this episode, she gets angry at one of her agents who doesn’t risk his life jumping onto a boat that might have three armed fugitives on it. Her second in command plays the Will Riker character of her conscience, who tends to try to keep her grounded.

What bothers me about the show is that it takes every cliche of Hollywood and uses it as if it’s brand new. Last night, there were three separate dialogue moments where a character said something, and I responded out loud with exactly what was going to be the zinger of a response. And word for word, I was right each time. I’m not kidding either.

The villains are cartoonish and way over the top. I kind of wondered where they would even imagine such people really existed. Even the bar in Mos Eisley didn’t have a cesspool of villainy like the ones that occur in Chase. Sometimes, I find myself rooting for the bad guys, just in hopes that the death of the US Marshals on the show might cause the show to never appear again on network television.

Both shows have been picked up for finishing out their season, but I imagine that is only because NBC has nothing better planned. It has done everything possible to hype the crap out of The Event, but it’s really not worth the effort. The only thing going for it is that it comes on right after Chuck, which is a great television show, even when it’s not at its best. Unfortunately, everything following Chuck makes me realize how nice it is that I own books that I can read instead.