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Justice: Pilot

post from TV Squad on 30 August 2006 09:16:00 PM. © TV Squad

Filed under: Drama, FOX, OpEd, Justice

(S01E01) This show seems like a regular Jerry Bruckheimer, over-the-top procedural right up until the end, doesn't it? Just like on every version of CSI, the attorneys on Justice have all the coolest bells and whistles to help them do their jobs. Only this time, there's a twist at the end. We spend an hour watching a team of attorneys spin a case in their favor... and then we get to see what really happened. I want to know what evil genius conceived of this show and I want to simultaneously shake his/her hand and slap his/her face for suckering me into an hour of television every Wednesday night. 'Cuz I'm hooked.

This pilot was gripping, wasn't it? Sure, sure... there was a little overacting on the part of, um, everybody. But hopefully they'll sink deeper into their characters as the series charges on. Speaking of the characters, let's critique, shall we?

Ron Trott-T(Victor Garber). I love the idea of a ruthless attorney who can't try cases because juries hate him. I can see something happening in the future where one of his teammates gets caught in traffic or something and he ends up having to address the jury. He's like House, but in a law firm instead of a hospital. And he uses his powers for evil by exploiting the American judicial system. I also like how he assumes the worst about people, for instance, he automatically questions whether his client is on crack.

Tom Nicholson-N (Kerr Smith). It's going to take me a little time to get past Kerr Smith as a high-powered attorney who gets to try major cases. He doesn't look a day older than he did when he played Jack on Dawson's Creek. The man does not age... how does this kid have his name as part of a law firm? Anyway, I like that he's actually a good guy and he has to believe in his client in order to do a good job defending them. And that it's seen as a weakness. Is there a sexual past with him and Alden Tuller? She nodded at him when she mentioned ex-boyfriends.

Alden Tuller-T (Rebecca Mader). I recognize her from somewhere and her IMDB resume isn't helping. I swear I saw her play a vampire in some movie (Bram Stoker's Dracula?). Anyway, she's the accident recreation specialist and she works with kid gloves. She is an expert at making science nerds speak English. She's nice and patient, while Trott is pushy and without tact.

Luther Graves-&G (Eamonn Walker). I get the feeling he likes the challenge of getting a guilty man off. He's pushy just like Trott, but in a much more respectful way. We don't get to know him very well in this episode, but I get the feeling that each of these supporting characters will get their storylines as the series plays on.

The Story. Super smart story to open a series: a wealthy man's wife dies and the media tries and convicts him. Unless you live under a rock, you've seen this happen in many, many forms (sometimes the media is right, sometimes it's wrong). It's so great to be on the other side of the story, isn't it? Coming from someone who has watched a lot of Law & Order, it's nice to see a show where a defense attorney isn't villified and people aren't acting for the good of man. Not sure if that's going to fly with a larger audience since Americans tend to root for the good guys, but we'll see.

I think the extreme tactics employed by the defense attorneys before and during the trial are entertaining. They have all sorts of technology that helps them recreate the accident and scan thousands of pages of paper for key words... but my favorite tactic of theirs was the dummie jury. How can a prosecutor even compete with that? The attorneys change their approach and tidy up their defendant based on comments from a 'jury' of people watching the trial in the law firm. Damn. No wonder these high-powered lawyers are so expensive!

As the attorneys made their way through their own defense case, I started to question whether their defendant was truly innocent. This is some good writing-- there are so many things happening at once here, yet it's all easy to follow. As I mentioned at the beginning, the best part of this show is the end where we get to see what really happened. In this case, the attorneys correctly recreated the accident scene. They were right! I can't wait to see them be way wrong and get a guilty person off or, worse yet, send an innocent person to jail. The last few seconds of the show is worth the hour on the couch.

Other thoughts. I think what's most interesting about this show is that it's not so much an attack on the justice system, as it is an attack on the American media. It seems to take aim at Nancy Grace in particular, by having a younger, less annoying and much more attractive woman anchor a Court show... but with the same guilty-as-charged attitude as Grace. Garber has a great line that (I think) explains this series, "When I started, it was about knowing the law. Now it's about knowing the law and the press. The jury that's going to decide your case is out there and they're watching." Loved the scene where Ron Trott goes on television simply to test their defense with a focus group.

The only complaint I have with this pilot is the opening credits sequence. God, that sucked. It looked like something the editors from CSI threw together at the last minute. I think all the scenes used in the open were from the pilot.

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GM drops Survivor sponsorship, but not because of
race twist

post from reality blurred on 30 August 2006 07:50:55 PM. © reality blurred

After sponsoring Survivor for its first 12 seasons, GM has dropped its sponsorship of the show.

That their sponsorship was dropped before the most controversial season yet is "just a coincidence" and "not cause and effect," GM spokeswoman Ryndee S. Carney told the AP.

Instead, it apparently took them 12 seasons to figure out that it's not exactly organic to have a GM vehicle drive across the sand on an island only accessible by boat. They wanted more integration, but "[t]here's a limited number of possibilities as to how you can integrate a car or truck in a show that people spend their whole time on an island," she said.

In fact, the AP reports that "the company made the decision in the normal course of making its media buys months ago, before the show made its recent announcement."

GM Withdraws CBS' 'Survivor' Sponsorship [AP]

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DVD News

post from TVs Best on 30 August 2006 07:08:00 PM. © TVs Best

Fox's short lived "Stacked" the complete series DVD is coming out on December the 12th. This is a three disc set which includes 5 unaired episodes of the show. The E's "The Simple Life" season 4 DVD will be out December the 26th. Its a one disc DVD with 2 sides to watch.

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Grey's Anatomy :: It's a hard-knock life.

post from Homepage RSS Feed on 30 August 2006 07:04:59 PM. © Homepage RSS Feed

Classic - The central theme of this baby is how life is hard, yet we make it harder on ourselves by making choices that may not be the smartest to make. Or something. There's a guy who gets himself shot on purpose just to make pretty scars, a cute little girl who gets half her brain removed, and a girl with a horrid mother who gets a botched gastric bypass surgery just so she doesn't have to concentrate on a lifelong diet and exercise regime. I'm not really sure what any of that has to do with life being hard, but my life was certainly hard while WATCHING it.

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Access Cattywood!

post from TVgasm on 30 August 2006 07:00:00 PM. © TVgasm

Get ready, folks! The world of info-tainment is about to be rocked! Not since the glory days of Mary Hart and Leeza Gibbons have we seen so much alleged fur fly on the set of a flashy, vapid, and generally...

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Watch Katie prep for her first CBS News
assignment

post from TV Squad on 30 August 2006 06:57:00 PM. © TV Squad

Filed under: CBS, News, TV Royalty, Web

Would you like to see Katie Couric without her makeup? Well, courtesy of AOL Television, here is your chance.

AOL TV has exclusive video of CBS's fast-rising news personality, sans makeup, as she prepares for her first 60 Minutes segment on the first responders of September 11th. The brief video shows Katie walking into work, not being recognized without her makeup, and performing some of the voice-over for her piece on the long-running news magazine. Also featured on AOL TV's All Eyes on Katie page is a slide show presentation on how Couric's decision to leave NBC's Today show for the CBS caused a domino effect on all three major networks.

I, for one, cannot wait for Katie to anchor her first news broadcast on September 5th. Not because I want to see how she does, but to stop the barrage of Couric news that we see and hear every day.

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Bones: The Titan on the Tracks (season premiere)

post from TV Squad on 30 August 2006 06:33:00 PM. © TV Squad

Filed under: Drama, FOX, OpEd, Bones

(S02E01) You're looking for a review of the second season premiere of Bones, aren't you? Perhaps you're interested in knowing if Emily Deschanel's acting skills have improved over the summer, or if David Boreanaz has gotten even hunkier. Well, don't worry, we'll be here next week at this time (or somewhere near this time) with ongoing reviews of the series.

In the meantime, you can read our early take on the official FOX preview screener of the season premiere as well as a review of the Bones press kit, which I wasn't too impressed with. By the way, on the subject of Deschanel's performance . . . from someone who didn't see an episode of the show last season she seems okay. However, you seasoned viewers may have another opinion.

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Fall of the Taj Mahal

Welcome to my first attempt at recapping Prison Break. Umnata did an awesome job last week, and I just hope I can get from A to B without dropping the ball. I have never recapped a show this dense,...

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Supernatural :: Tonight! An Expose! Overly-Moral
Sorority Girls Killing for Christ!

Classic - A Reverend's daughter starts taking her Sunday school lessons a little too seriously when she conjures the Hook Man to kill her friend (among others) when she suggests they watch Reality Bites. I mean, I cringe at Ethan Hawke's whole "ontological necessity" answering machine thing, too, but I'm not sure it's worth killing over.

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Seinfeld: The Letter

Filed under: Comedy, TV on DVD, OpEd, Retro Squad, Seinfeld

(S03E20) I know this episode was produced over fourteen years ago, but it was still hard for me to recognize Catherine Keener in this episode. I'm usually pretty good at recognizing younger versions of now well-known actors, but even when I watched this episode the other day, I was surprised when the "Notes on Nothing" mentioned that Nina, Jerry's jealous artist girlfriend, was played by Keener. Maybe it was because she was younger, or it could have been her hair or something. Either way, she did a great job in this episode, foreshadowing how she'd do in movies like Being John Malkovich and The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Anyway, if you're a fan of Neil Simon, you probably loved that episode. If not, then it was still pretty damned good.

Unlike the Entertainment Tonight folks, who refused to give the producers permission to use their music in the previous episode, "The Good Samaritan," Neil Simon's people had no problem giving Jerry and Larry permission to use lines and an audio clip from Chapter Two. It was integral to the plot, as Nina tries to get back on Jerry's good side by writing him a letter with one or Marsha Mason's speeches from that movie. Jerry also used a line from Plaza Suite to dump Nina, but that part got cut.

Also funny was Elaine's fumphering as Mr. Lippman talks to her about the woman who wouldn't take off her Orioles cap at the Yankee game. The reason why she was fumphering? Because Lanie was that woman... and she skipped Lippman's son's bris to go to the game, saying she was visiting her sick dad. The throat clearing and pained looks on Elaine's face were pure Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one of the aspects she brought to the part that could never be written into the script.

Oh, and I also liked what she said her father had: "Neuritis... neuralgia..."

On to the "awards":

Best line: Not a lot of stand-outs in this episode, so I'll just go with Jerry's definition of a posse: "The posse has tremendous appeal. Get away from the job, camp out, you're with your friends... Come on, it's a week-long game of hide-and-seek on horseback."
Best facial expression: The eyeroll George gives Jerry's back when he false-scincerely says to him, "You know, it's a miracle you're not married."
Best Kramerism: The painting, of course! "He is a loathsome, offensive brute. Yet I can't look away."

Observations and DVD tidbits:

The Orioles cap incident actually happened to Larry David; his friend, who was the accountant for the then-California Angels invited him to sit in then-owner Gene Autry's box for a game. Larry came to the game wearing a Yankee hat (he's a big fan, of course) and someone from Autry's office asked him to take the hat off.
Among the actresses who auditioned for the part of Nina were Amy Yasbeck of Wings, and Heidi Swedberg, who we all know came back to play George's fiancée, Susan Ross.
Richard Fancy is back as Mr. Lippman. I love how chummy he is with Elaine, as if she's more than an employee: "So Lenny gave me the tickets for tomorrow night. I'm inviting Frank and Marsha. I want ya to come." Who are Frank and Marsha? Anyway, when Elaine tells her she has plans -- doesn't want to get caught there by Nina's dad, who gave her the seats the last time -- Lippman insists: "Well, break 'em! You missed the bris, I want you at the game." How friendly of him.
This is one of those episodes where the writers thow in a couple of instances where a speaker mispronounces a word and isn't aware that they did it. Elaine says "stupid stuperstition" and pronounces "bouyed" like it's "boyed". Those incidents are usually sprinkled in every few episodes. But its that small stuff that made Seinfeld so different at the time.
The two snobby art collectors who are so enthralled by the "Kramer" are Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong in the script. They buy the painting for $5,000.
For some reason, the Notes on Nothing identify Phil Rizzuto, who we hear at the end of the episode describe the meele as Elaine gets in another scuffle over her hat, as a Mets broadcaster. For shame, Notes on Nothing! Everyone in New York knows that the Scooter played and announced for the Yankees for fifty-five years. He refers to "Seaver" in the clip; that's Tom Seaver, a Met legend who was actually working as a broadcaster on Yankee games in 1992. Yes, I know far too much about this stuff.

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