The All-Pilot Project: Valentine & Easy Money (Nov 11)
The Poop: Ah, this is frustrating. On the face of it, this should be a show that I really like. Sure, forgotten pantheons trapped in mortal shells has been done before (Douglas Adams’ Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and Grant Morrison’s Mr. Miracle spring to mind), but it’s an interesting idea that’s very much different from anything currently being done on TV. Even a trashy soap opera where the characters are fallen gods would be a legitimately interesting series. But this matchmaking thing… oy.
Do you know how interesting matchmaking is? Not at all. You know how you have that friend who is always trying to fix people up, and you sort of hate them because enough already? Yeah. That friend is this show. The format requires them to introduce us to two new characters every week, find a reason why they can’t be together, then get them together in spite of it, and then we never see them again. Rinse, repeat. That doesn’t leave us with time to care about either of the star-crossed lovers and even less time to care about the regular cast. And besides that, matchmaking isn’t really fun to watch. You know what would be fun to watch? Suddenly mortal gods adjusting to their new lives!
It doesn’t help that the regular cast isn’t interesting either. They should be, but the various gods are all so poorly defined that they don’t have any room to play around. Only Reaser’s amusingly high-strung Oracle makes any impression whatsoever. When your main characters include Hercules and Ares, there is absolutely no reason for boring scripts. Sadly, bland Hephaestus putters around in the background while two people we have never seen before and will never see again, and who hit every note from every romantic comedy you’ve ever seen. You know who this show is aimed at? Kelly from The Office. She would love this show and talk about it every Monday, and seeing that would be a hundred times more entertaining than actually watching the show.
I actually liked the turn at the end, when the Oracle takes a look into the future of their human friend and sees images of blood, betrayal, and slaughtered gods. That’s a show I could get interested in, but I don’t think they’ll ever quite get there. They have 22 “meet-cutes” to plan in a season (I am being very optimistic here), so there’s no room for a meta-plot that might actually get exciting.
The Prognosis: Damn. They got very close to having something that I wanted to watch, but somehow Mad Libbing the matchmaking conceit into the series pretty much kills any interest or momentum. If they were to get past that and actually embrace the godly premise, this might be worth a second look. But they can’t because they’re already CANCELLED!
Easy Money
Sunday 9 PM, The CW
The Premise: You know what? I’m not sure. Granted, it’s the second episode instead of the pilot, but you’d think they’d catch people up. I know somebody turned out to be maybe not related to somebody else, but I don’t know if the parties involved viewed that as a good or bad thing, because they just kept restating it. They also talked at length about the importance of shredding loan application. According to IMDB, it’s a “Dramedy about a family that runs a high-interest loan business.” Nice if they would have mentioned. I actually thought they were recent lottery winners. Also, “Dramedy”? What is this, Hooperman?
The Personnel: A whole lot of people who are now out of work. (Foreshadowing!) Created by Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, both of whom wrote for The Sopranos, The Incredible Hulk, and Magnum PI. Who knew that one person had all three of those shows on their resume, let alone two different people? Judge Reinhold and Laurie Metcalf are the most notable names in the cast.
The Poop: This show might actually have been good, but it’s impossible to tell. The second episode doesn’t introduce anybody, let on as to how they know each other, or tell us why we’re watching them.
I’m not opposed to complicated television. In fact, I love complicated television. I’ll go to great lengths to make a series more complicated than it needs to be. But they have to give me something to work with. The Wire is probably the most complex series ever, but if you were to pick a random episode and watch the series for the first time, you could still glean certain facts about the series. You’d be able to tell that it was about cops and drug dealers in Baltimore. You’d spot the major characters and how they relate to one another. And at the end of an hour, you’d be able to identify things that happened and how important characters were involved. Maybe you wouldn’t get all the minor characters and the bureaucratic intricacies, but you’d at least know what you watched.
This is the second episode – even people who watched the pilot haven’t fully internalized the show yet. It wasn’t even that it was bad – I liked the dialogue, there was a weird sense of humor at work (Alias’ Kevin Weisman appears as a ventriloquist), and the character dynamics were interesting, if poorly defined. The problem was, they didn’t give me anything to hold on to other than confusion. Heck, take two minutes to do a Previously on… that actually names the characters and tells us about things that happened, rather than the sloppily edited mess.
Not much point in going on further, since Easy Money has also been cancelled. I’ve never seen a series that was so new-viewer unfriendly in its second episode.
The Prognosis: CANCELLED! A possibly good show that overshot itself too soon.
