Jessica Jones: A Marvel hero for grown ups

You've heard the hype: Marvel's Jessica Jones, streaming now on Netflix, is the best Marvel adaptation ever to come to television.   The bar hasn't been set all that high, of course, and I've only watched half the series, but I have to agree. 

Krysten Ritter as Jessica perfectly embodies the mood of the series, which unspools as an old-fashioned film noir detective flick.  It just so happens that this private eye has super strength, her on-again, off-again boyfriend is invulnerable, and she's up against a villain who can control minds.  The cast features mostly unknown actors who all make strong first impressions: Mike Colter makes for a dark, deeply wounded Luke Cage, Rachel Taylor perks up the show as Jessica's mentor and best friend, radio host Trish Walker, and Eka Darville brings vulnerability and hidden resolve to the role of Jessica's sidekick Malcom.

If there's a weak spot here, it's the former Doctor, David Tennant, as Jessica's arch-enemy Kilgrave. He's been written not so much as a supervillain but as an obsessed stalker, serial killer, and psychopath.  Kilgrave is very clever, and seemingly always one step ahead of Jessica, but what's his agenda?  He seems content with using his mind-control powers to make Jessica's life miserable, when he could easily just kill her and move on with conquering the world.

Jessica Jones the character debuted in 2001 in Alias Comics, long after I had stopped reading comic books, so I'm going into this series with only a bare bones idea of her (considerable) backstory.  And that's fine; Jessica Jones has been written so you don't have to know anything about the comics. Instead of ham-handedly giving us an origin episode (like seemingly every other comic book franchise to date,) Jessica's story unspools slowly in flashbacks and dialogue.  There are "cookies" embedded in the stories that will give comic book nerds goosebumps, but you don't have to get all the in-jokes to enjoy the series.

What we do learn is that a freak accident gave Jessica powers, including super strength and a limited ability to fly (although Jessica says it's more like "controlled falling.")   She set out to use those powers as a superhero, only to fall under Kilgrave's control and forced to commit horrible acts.  So Jessica decided to hide her powers and took up a new career as a private eye, albeit one with an edge who can snap open the strongest locks  and perch atop rooftops like Spiderman.

Like Netflix's Daredevil and ABC's  Agents Of SHIELD,  this series takes place in the familiar Marvel universe, a world with costumed super heroes and alien invasions.  We don't see them, though, they're just casually mentioned in throwaway dialogue, often jokes. The Avengers and the attack on New York depicted in the first Avengers film get mentioned and even figure in a sub-plot, although it would be more believable if Jessica's New York City showed some of that devastation.    (Apparently all those skyscrapers destroyed in the film have been rebuilt overnight; compare that to how long it took NYC to just clean up the WTC site at Ground Zero.)

If Jessica Jones reminds me of anything, its Watchmen, the film that convinced critics that  super hero movies could be "art."  With its gritty New York streets, jazzy score, and film noir voiceover narration, Jessica Jones deserves to be taken seriously; but don't worry.  It's also engrossing entertainment.

Into The Badlands: Steampunk Kung Fu With A Side of X-Men (Hold The Zombies)

AMC's  Into The Badlands (following Walking Dead on Sunday nights at 10 pm) was created by the same team  (Alfred Gough and Michael Millar) that gave us Smallville. But this time,k instead of reimagining a classic superhero story, Gough and Millar borrow from a half a dozen different genres, mixing kung fu with King Arthur,  Mad Max, and Heroes (or, if you prefer, X-Men.)

In a post-apocalyptic future, we're told, guns have been banned and seven rival baronies keep an uneasy peace through the use of Clippers, highly trained martial arts assassins.  We know this because in the first scene, an unarmed Clipper named Sunny (Daniel Wu) kills about a dozen "nomads" who scavenge the Badlands for sustenance.

If you're lucky in this world, you live on an estate protected by one of the Barons.  Serfs - or Cogs, as they're called here - till the fields (each Barony is responsible for one vital resource, like oil or food; Sunny's Baron Quinn grows poppies for opium.)  A select few get to live inside feudal castles, lit by candles and filled with young cadets hoping to be trained as Clippers.  Despite this being an apparently agrarian society, somehow someone somewhere still manufactures automobiles and motorcycles, as well as refining gasoline and producing rubber tires.  (It's a fantasy, people; you're not supposed to think about those things.)

After quickly disposing of those aforementioned nomads, Sunny pops open the trunk they were transporting and discovers a kidnapped teenager named M.K. (Aramis Knight.)  It seems a rival Baron (well, Baroness) named The Widow had hired the nomads to bring the boy to her.  Sunny brings M.K.  back to the Baron and lets him compete with the others in the training arena, but soon learns the kid has a secret:  Any time he bleeds, his eyes glow bright white and he develops the strength, speed, and martial arts skills of a super-ninja.

Back at the castle, it turns out the Baron's latest wife is shagging his grown son, and the Baron is having some serious migraine issues.  (Poison, maybe?) M.K., for his part, is on a quest to find his mother and return to his birthplace, a city called Azra that supposedly lies outside the badlands and is depicted on a medallion he wears around his neck. 

But the Baron's son ends up with the medallion, and M.K. is captured trying to get it back.  Rather than let the boy be executed, Sunny helps him escape, perhaps thinking Azra may be where he's from too (even though the Baron assures him there's nothing beyond the Badlands.)

So that's where we are.  Who is M.K. and where do his powers come from?  Why is The Widow plotting against Baron Quinn, and will it erupt into warfare?  And will Sunny be satisfied with his life as an assassin, or will he rebel and try to live a normal life with the woman he secretly loves?

As an accompaniment to The Walking Dead,  Into The Badlands should easily tap into the same audience - it's got plenty of thrills, violence, gore, and fantasy - without actually dragging zombies into the conversation (like the awful Fear The Walking Dead.) There hasn't been a good kung fu show on television in ages, so expect the body count to stay high, the fight scenes to be epic, and the plots to remain just clever enough to keep fans tuning in from week to week.  No, it's not Game Of Thrones, but it looks like it'll be a fun hour of escapist TV.

Miss Fisher's Muder Mysteries: Roll over, Hercule, and tell Miss Marple the news

PBS has just started airing Season 3 of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, providing the perfect excuse for me to bring this perfectly delightful period series to your attention.  (All of Season 3 is  available on Netflix, if you feel like binging. And you should.)
 
Based on a series of novels by Kerry Greenwood, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries  whisks us back to Melbourne, Australia in the late 1920's, where the terribly modern Miss Phryne Fisher has taken up the occupation of female private detective, much to the chagrin of unflappable Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page) and his industrious constable, Hugh Collins (Hugo Johnstone-Burt.)

But the gem here is Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher, a woman raised in poverty but risen to great wealth and title. She looks like a Betty Boop cartoon come to life in her chic Twenties couture, stylish hats, and racy autombobile. But those who underestimate her will soon learn that there's a razor sharp mind under those bangs, (as well as a gold-plated pistol under those sheer nylons.). 

In fact, everything and everyone on this show captures the Twenties as convincingly as the BBC's great Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries bring back the Thirties and Forties.  The show is filmed in blushed pastels, looking for all the world like an old black-and-white film that's been colorized for modern audiences.

The mysteries are consistently well written and will keep you guessing, but the real fun is watching Miss Fisher slowly win over Detective Jack Robinson, just as Miss Fisher's companion Dot (the winning Ashleigh Cummings) wins the heart of Constable Hugh. Other standouts in the cast include the ineffable Richard Bligh as Miss Fisher's butler, Mr. Butler, and Miriam Margoyles as Phryne's empirious Aunt Prudence, who's always looking down her nose at her flapper niece's latest goings-on.

Although it's mostly light entertainment,  Miss Fisher doesn't shy away from some of the serious issues of the day - especially the very British concerns of class and religion - as well as introducing us to the birth of innovations like racing cars and aviation.  The shadow of World War I (in which Miss Fisher served on the front lines as a nurse) hangs heavy over many episodes as well.

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries airs several times a week on different PBS channels; check local listings, or just dive headfirst into the show on Netflix.

AGENT X: 007 Should Be Licensed To Kill This Turkey

[SPOILER ALERT]
What were they smoking at TNT when someone decided to greenlight this laughably implausible yet creakily old-fashioned secret agent series?   Created by The Bourne Identity director W. Blake Herron, Agent X posits that a secret codicil in the Constitution empowers the Vice-President (played by Sharon Stone!!) to employ a covert agent to protect the nation, removed from  oversight by Congress or any other federal agency.  If you can believe that, then get ready to swallow a Batcave-like headquarters buried beneath the vice-presidential residence, Gerald McRaney as the Veep's Alfred The Butler-like major domo, and 40-year old journeyman actor Jeff Hephner as the dashing, two-fisted superspy John Case.

Let's not even think about what Spiro Agnew would have done with this kind of power, let's just look at  the series; can it rise above its patchwork mishmash of Batman and Bond with good storytelling, compelling characters, and well-directed action scenes?  Not based on the two-part pilot, which starts with Case rescuing the FBI chief's daughter from terrorists and then defusing stolen atomic missiles stolen by Chechen rebels.

Sharon Stone plays the widowed vice-president (a storyline about her husband's death can't be too far off) like a combination of Hilary Clinton and sexy Cinnamon Carter from the original Mission: Impossible, who jumps at the idea of carrying on deep espionage behind the back of fictional President Eckhart (the usually reliable John Shea,) the CIA, and the FBI.  McRaney comes across as stiff and phony as her butler and accomplice-in-espionage, while Hephner as Case lacks James Bond's gadgets, elan, and  sense of humor.  Hephner looks like a waiter in a tuxedo,  and is barely more believable as an action hero.  

The action scenes include the usual nonsense, with heavily armed terrorists spraying machine gun fire and hitting nothing while our heroes take out bad guys with a single shot. The big plot twist in the episode about the stolen missiles - it turns out the kidnapped scientist who can unlock the nuclear codes has doublecrossed the Chechen warlord and wants to auction the missiles to the highest bidder - is delivered so clumsily that it delivers no real surprise.  Case and the beautiful Russian mercenary he's recruited infiltrate the auction and kick major terrorist butt so effortlessly, it makes The Man From UNCLE seem sophisticated in comparison.  And when the evil warlord nobly sacrifices himself to save Case and help blow up the missiles, whatever small credibility the story might have had goes out the window.

Send Agent X to the shredder and look for thrills almost anywhere else.

American Horror Story: Hotel - Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave

"Checking In," the 90-minute season debut of American Horror Story: Hotel, marks the fifth season of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's anthology spookathon. It delivers exactly the kind of shock horror that viewers have come to expect:  Half a dozen grisly murders, kidnapped children, vampirism, ghosts, blood and gore, gratuitous male nudity, unexpected superstar casting, and just for good measure, a graphic  homosexual rape scene.  With series matriarch Jessica Lange gone, the series compensates by casting Lady Gaga as chic lady vampire Countess Elizabeth and Matt Bomer (White Collar, Magic Mike) as her boy-toy.  Several members of the series' repertory company return, including Sarah Paulson as Hypodermic Sally, a wraith trapped in Courtney Love's old grunge wardrobe, Denis O'Hare as an aging drag queen named Liz Taylor, Kathy Bates as the hotel's concierge, and (the as yet unseen) Evan Peters and Angela Bassett.

New cast members include Wes Bentley as damaged L.A. detective John Lowe, who's investigation of a series of gruesome serial murders leads him to the Cortez Hotel as  Lowe and his wife (Chloe Sevigny) try to get over the loss of their young son, who vanished mysteriously at a carnival several years earlier.  Cheyenne Jackson plays Will Drake, a millionaire New York businessman who's bought the hotel sight unseen and plans moving in along with his pre-pubescent son.  Not surprisingly, Lowe's missing son (along with several other very spooky children)  live in the hotel, in a secret room filled with vintage video games. 

The Cortez is a gauche art-deco hotel located somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and like the L.A. haunted house in the  first season of AHS, it's peopled by ghosts seemingly fated to haunt the premises forever. We learn quickly that his is no ordinary hotel:  When two Swedish girls check into the hote, they're  first terrorized by a creepy apparition that crawls out of their bed, and then wind up chained up in a neon torture chamber, being force fed offal to "cleanse their bodies." When one escapes, Countess Elizabeth slashes her throat.

When a seedy rock star type (Max Greenfield) checks into the hotel to shoot up, his heroin stupor is interrupted by a creature who rips off his pants and graphically rapes him.  We later learn that Bomer's character Donovan first came to the hotel 20 years ago to score heroin with Sally; when his mother (Kathy Bates) discovered his OD'd body, she pushed Sally out a window.  And now they're all still at the hotel, unaged after two decades.  When the soundtrack hamhandedly plays the Eagles' "Hotel California," it's pretty clear that you can check out but  never leave.

In another particularly graphic scene, the Countess and Donovan (Gaga and Bomer) pick up an attractive young couple at an outdoor screening of the silent Nosferatu (credited as the first vampire movie) and bring them home for an orgy. That leads to shots of entwined naked bodies until Bomer and Gaga slit the twentysomethings' throats and start drinking their blood.  "And you didn't want to go out," says Countess Elizabeth coyly.  "It's not the party, it's the clean up," deadpans Donovan.

Meanwhile, the serial killer that Det. Lowe is chasing lures him to a murder scene by texting from his wife's phone number, resulting in the Lowes' young daughter seeing two disemboweled corpses.  Fearing for his family's safety, Lowe moves out - and  into the Hotel Cortez.

Ryan Murphy directed the debut episode and leans heavily on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining for his photography, shooting the hotel through fish-eye lenses to make the corridors seem like an endless maze and giving everything a disorienting, skewed look.   At times the homage verges on plagiarism, but Murphy's never been shy about "borrowing"  ideas from idols like Hitchcock or DePalma.

In other seasons, American Horror Story has managed to imbue both its villains and its victims with enough humanity that their stories held your attention; with AHS: Hotel, viewers will have to identify with Det. Lowe and his family, because every other character comes across as so loathsome, vapid, or evil that we don't  care about their fate.  "Checking In" definitely has potential but I'm not convinced yet that Murphy and Falchuk have it in them to top earlier seasons, especially season two's crazy but engrossing Asylum.  There's a big difference between depicting horrible things (like the Hostel movie franchise) and creating true horror.  You can always count on American Horror Story to gross you out, but it remains to be seen if it can still scare us.  

Heroes Reborn: Will The Second Time Be The Charm?

You have to give NBC credit for even considering that a reboot of Heroes - the 2006 series that helped launch the superhero craze sweeping through television today - might be a good idea.   Heroes debuted to rave reviews and excellent ratings but crashed and burned in its second season, with confusing and often irrelevent sub-plots, boring scripts, and a storyline so twisted that it made the final seasons of Lost seem like Oliver Twist in comparison.

Heroes ended with Claire (Hayden Panettiere) revealing her super powers to the world; Heroes Reborn (Thursdays, 8 pm Eastern on NBC) begins with the super-powered now public knowledge and called "evos" (presumably because "mutants" was already taken.)  And much like the X-Men, the "evos" are welcomed by some and feared and discriminated against by others.  When the  PrimaTech Corporation holds an international fair to welcome evos into society, we see a large shadow hover the festivities and then watch in horror as  the entire town of Odessa, Texas is blown to smithereens.  Among the survivors: Claire's father Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman,) one of the holdovers from the original series.  Apparently Claire, despite her invulnerability, died in the blast.  We see Noah call her hopefully, only to hear her voicemail.  (Of course if he really wanted to find her, he'd only have to go to Nashville.)

An evo named Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) is blamed for the disaster, which is dubbed "June 13," a date as historically catastrophic as  "9/11."   Noah, perhaps due to the blast trauma, returns to a very ordinary life as a car salesman named Ted, until things start to happen...

And that brings us to Heroes Reborn's tangled and twisted  multiple storylines. Like the first series, you almost need a program to follow along:  There's the callow high school kid (Robby Clarke) who can teleport people, the Japanese girl who can enter a video game and fight with ninja powers to save her kidnapped father and the video gamer who's sucked into her alternative universe, the war hero with a dark secret who picks up his dead brother's mantle as a costumed vigilante, and the "June 13 truther" (Henry Zebrowski) who's enlisted to help Noah find out what's happening.   And there are two psychopathic vigilantes (Rya Kihlstedt and Zachary Levi) who are murdering evos to avenge their dead child.  There's also the mysterious stranger (there's always a mysterious stranger) whose agenda we don't know yet, who pops up from  city to city to save the evos.

I won't give more away, except to say that the pilot suffers from the same problems that doomed Heroes:  Too many characters, too many storylines, and uneven plotting.  The action scenes when Miko and Ren discover the video game world provide thrills and excitement, but there are just as many moments when nothing happens except some force exposition to connect all of the show's disparate parts.   What we learn in the first two-hour episode is that there's an apocalypse coming, and the evos (or heroes) have been sent to stop it.

Give it a try and maybe you'll get sucked into the narrative.  But it's not a show you can just watch once in a while for some action or humor.   You'll just wind up shouting at your screen wondering what the fuck is going on.

The only scary thing about SCREAM QUEENS is how awful it is

Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan created Glee together; Murphy and Falchuk followed  up with American Horror Story.  That's two significant and successful series, one an uplifting story of underdog high schoolers and the other one of television's most grotesque, original, and truly terrifying series.   So what happened with Scream Queens? The "horror/comedy" (airing Tuesdays at 9 pm Eastern on Fox) falls flat on all fronts; it isn't funny, and it isn't scary.  

Set in a fictional sorority called Kappa House, the series hews closely to the formulas established by horror franchises like Scream and Friday The 13th  (as well as their numerous parodies.)   Back in 1995, a co-ed dies after giving birth in the Kappa House bathtub; her callow, vapid sorority sisters were too busy dancing to "Waterfalls" to call an ambulance for her.

Twenty years later, Kappa House remains the most prestigious and snobby sorority on campus, ruled by a cabal of snooty, privileged girls named  not Heather but Chanel:  Chanel No. 1 (AHS regular Emma Roberts,) Chanel No. 2 (Ariana Grande,)  Chanel No. 3 (Billie Lourd,), and Chanel No. 5 (Abigail Breslin.)  (Chanel No. 4 had the poor taste to catch meningitis and die.)

Chanel No. 1 rules the house with an iron fist, invoking all those "mean girls" comedies of the Nineties, down to forcing the obese housemother to scrub floors with a toothbrush and repeat racist cliches from Gone With The Wind. These girls' idea of fun is to throw a "White Party" where everyone wears white - and is white.

But that all comes to an end when the new dean (Jamie Lee Curtis, playing a role that could easily have gone to Jane Lynch,) decrees that after several scandals, Kappa House will be forced to admit any student who wants to join.  Without the  allure of exclusivity, all the cool pledges leave, saddling Kappa House with a collection of geeks and losers, including  a totally wasted Michele Lea in a neck brace; a tattooed mannish girl the Chanels dub "Predatory Lez;" a deaf girl who endlessly hums Taylor Swift tunes totally out of key;  a vapid vlogger who reviews candles on her YouTube channel;  and the sorority's first black pledge (former Disney star Keke Palmer.)  The pledges also include Grace (Skyler Samuels,)  whose dead mom belonged to Kappa; she wants to join the sorority to establish a connection with the mother she never knew.

Glee made its underdogs lovable, talented, plucky and brave; in the case of Chris Colfer's Kurt Hummel, the show probably saved the lives of gay teens with its "It Gets Better" message.  But Scream Queens has a mean streak a mile long, as if all of Murphy and Balchuk's pent-up contempt for the Glee kids  has finally  found an outlet.  Instead of brave Artie in his wheelchair, there's Michele Lea in a neck brace; instead of proudly gay Kurt, there's "Predatory Lez."  And if that's not enough, there's "Deaf Taylor Swift" too.

It's not long before a serial killer dressed in a red devil costume starts killing the girls of Kappa House, starting with Ariana Grande's Chanel No. 2.  Grace soon discovers the secret about the girl who died giving birth at the sorority and realizes the baby would now be college age and could be anyone on campus. In fact, it could be her.  Or the serial killer.

The Devil killer strikes four or five times in the pilot, including a scene in which the maid has her face shoved into hot fryer oil and another in which "Deaf Taylor Swift" gets decapitated by a lawn mower during a hazing ritual. But Scream Queens can't decide whether to play the murders for laughs (ala Scary Movie) or for shock value (as on the truly terrifying American Horror Story.)  It feels like Murphy, Falchuk and Brennan have no idea what they want this series to be, except offensive.  In that regard, they've succeeded admirably.

Beyond failing to capture the strengths of their earlier work, Murphy and Falchuk don't shy away from indulging their worst impulses, like hiring 28 year olds to play teenagers or wallowing in gratuitous homoeroticism.  (All three male leads, including Nick Jonas as a gay frat bro, wind up stripped down to their underwear at least once in the pilot.  Shades of those embarrassing Glee shower scenes!)

Best case scenario,  Murphy and Falchuk needed something for Fox to replace Glee and threw this mess together without much thought, reserving their best efforts for American Horror Story: Hotel, which debuts later this season.  Or maybe they've just run out of ideas, and this is the best they can do.

That would be very scary indeed.

Monica The Medium: What good is talking to dead people if you're vapid and have nothing to say?

Becoming Us, ABC Family's reality show about several families dealing with transgendered relatives, broke new ground in cable television. So does Monica The Medium, but in quite another way. Starring Monica Ten-Kate, a Penn State student who shares an off-campus house with several roommates and  purports to talk to the dead, which is like presenting a "reality" show about a Martian or a talking horse.  If you want your mind blown, watch Penn & Teller: Fool Us.  If you prefer the manipulative, deceptive, and painfully insincere, here's the show for you.

Monica's roommates are the sort of vapid, privileged white girls we've met a million times on MTV, which often makes Monica The Medium feel like The Real World: Supernatural.  The girls look for boyfriends, go to parties, dish about makeup and dresses, and leave their apartment a mess.  About the only thing you don't see them worry about is getting an education and eventually, a job, since they all clearly have rich parents to go home to.  Monica, meanwhile, is trying to run her psychic business out of their campus "housing," which is quite a bit nicer and much bigger than the middle-class brownstone I grew up in.

We all know how so-called psychics work and Monica's no different:   Start with vague questions, like "do you have a relative whose name starts with a J or a G?  Oh, your dad's middle name was John?  Is he dead?"   Monica's first "reading," done over a game of beer pong, is heavily edited, so we only see the questions that get positive answers, not the vague, open-ended questions that "psychics" use in a cold reading. 

In another scene, Monica does a reading for a young couple who turn out to be a girl whose father was killed in a car accident by the sister of the young man with her.   There's only one problem: The young man lets it slip that he was informed "we'd have this opportunity to get a reading," which means the couple was approached by the show's producers and interviewed at length before the reading. Quel surprise!

Monica, for her part, seems quite sure she's actually hearing the voices of the dead, almost always instantly and with no trouble connecting with the spirit world. If anything, she has so much psychic information flooding her brain that she needs to take notes to make sense of it.   Most mediums at least try to make their seances look "real" (and therefore somewhat difficult;) Monica chats with ghosts as easily as her ditzy roommates text back and forth.  She's either a consummate fraud or an exploited nut case, but either possibility makes Monica The Medium one of the most despicable programs on cable.  (Don't worry, there are worse on network television, like those shows that offer cash rewards for contestants to treat their loved ones abominably.)  For ABC Family to air this show, after its sterling record of family dramas that sympathetically portray the plight of the mentally handicapped, the deaf, the transgendered, gay teens, and foster children, seems horribly jaded and crass.

Public Morals: A Sixties Soap Opera With Crooked Cops

Sandwiched between the summer and winter season's of TNT dramas like Major Crimes and Rizzoli & Isles,  Public Morals tells the story of NYC vice cops in the Sixties who tow a shadowy line between keeping the peace and stuffing their pockets with bribes and swag. The series was created by and stars Edward Burns, who brings the same gritty neighborhood realism to the show as his celebrated indie film The  Brothers McMullen. 

Burns plays vice cop Terry Muldoon, and Michael Rappaport (looking a bit like The Honeymooners' sad sack second banana Ed Norton) plays his partner Charlie Bullman.  Together they've got a good thing going; as Muldoon tells Irish crime boss Joe Patton (played with a sinister old country brogue by the esteemed Brian Dennehy,) "Nobody's getting hurt and we're all making money. Let's keep it that way."

Silly me, I thought the Italians ran organized crime in Sixties Manhattan, but here it's an Irish gang and one of its major players gets offed by Patton's hot-headed son in the first episode.  That sets off  various power plays among both the cops and the gangsters, presaging a gang war that will derail Muldoon's tenuous peace.  Among the players, Kevin Corrigan stands out as the weasly underling Smitty, and Brian Wiles brings a bit of mystery as a fresh-faced rookie detective who got promoted because his dad's a 1PP bigwig.  Is he there to learn the rules and play the game, or is he a plant looking to uncover the systemic corruption in the Vice Squad? 

There are a number of younger actors playing various relatives, hoods, and cops who manage to get their shirts off gratuitously at least once an episode, making Public Morals feel a bit like a daytime soap (where beefcake is a way of life.) There are also a few back stories to add interest: Muldoon has a wife who's clueless about her hubby's corruption and wants to move to the suburbs, as well as a teenage son who admires the mobsters down the block perhaps a bit too much. Bullman, rather unbelievably, has taken a prostitute under his wing and is trying to keep her off the streets, sneaking money out of the family cookie jar to help her.  It's a good bet that somewhere during Public Moral's 10-episode first season, those secrets will start to unravel.

Ed Burns, who wrote the first four episodes as well as starring in the series, certainly has the kernel of a good idea here, but the soap opera tropes, confusing extended family relationships (this guy's the nephew of that guy who's the uncle of this kid who's dad is this guy), and dull plotting just aren't clicking yet.  Rappaport comes across as way too dopey to be a police detective, which might work if played for comic relief but just grates against the series' supposed realism. And while the show does a decent job of recreating the Sixties with vintage cars and suits, the haircuts and beards are often all wrong, and Dennehy's stereotypical Irish mob boss often feels like he's been transplanted from  another series, one set in the Thirties or Forties. 

Verdict:  Wait for Major Crimes to return in January if you want a good drama on TNT.

Stephen Colbert Gets Off To A Rocky Start on The Late Show

David Letterman and Jon Stewart had 20 years to get it right, so it's probably not fair to judge Stephen Colbert based on his first night as a late-night variety show host.  But of course we'll do it anyway.

Letterman, of course, came to the Late Show as an Emmy-winning star after a decade of entertaining college students and insomniacs at 12:30 am.  Stewart had a decade on Comedy Central to hone his craft before anyone started to notice he was on the air.  Stephen Colbert is really only known for his The Colbert Report persona as a "narcissistic Conservative pundit" (a phrase he used several times on his debut;)  America hasn't met the real Stephen Colbert yet.  So he has his work cut out for him.

The new Late Show with Stephen Colbert began by introducing the refurbished Ed Sullivan Theater, which has been made over into an art deco movie palace complete with stained glass images of Colbert himself encircling the ceiling.  Jimmy Fallon hired The Roots as his house band, and Late Late Show host James Corden has the multi-talented Reggie Watts; Colbert's house band is the unknown Jon Batiste & Stay Human, fronted by an effusive musical prodigy from Louisiana.  Rather than the slick show-biz shtick of Paul Schafer & The CBS Orchestra, Stay Human uses a variety of rustic instruments, from tubas to a toy melodica, to create a musical gumbo that, at least on the debut, veered a bit too close to the  twee retro cornball veneer of the Lumineers and Mumford& Sons.

One thing that's new about the current late-night landscape is that today's hosts do a lot more than chat; Fallon frequently sings and plays guitar, and James Corden is a Broadway-trained singer and dancer.  Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, and David Letterman told jokes and talked, period. Colbert can sing too and started his show with a musical montage that had him traveling around the country - from corn fields and bowling alleys to a machine shop and a sandlot softball game - harmonizing with locals to "The Star Spangled Banner."

That was followed by a running gag in which CBS President Les Moonves sat poised with a switch that could change the feed from Colbert's show to a rerun of The Mentalist anytime Colbert got off track.  That  sounds a lot funnier than it turned out to be.  But a bit in which Colbert used Oreos as a metaphor for the media's insatiable appetite for Donald Trump news clips worked much better.  Other gags in the opening montage - including a supernatural amulet that forced Colbert to shamelessly shill for a sponsor - fell flat.

Colbert introduced George Clooney as his first guest, but since Clooney didn't have a new movie to promote, the pair did a scripted bit in which they invented a silly action thriller for the star to plug. It really wasn't very funny, but worse, it didn't give us any idea of Colbert's ability to engage with celebrities, something Letterman excelled at. The opening patter, in which Colbert congratulated Clooney on his marriage to human rights activist  Amal Alamuddin., seemed stale and uninspired, given that Clooney's been married for a year.

The interview with Jeb Bush went a bit better, since Colbert did at least engage the GOP candidate in a real conversation and asked him one pointed question.  Pointing to his own brother in the audience, Colbert said that while he loved his brother, he disagreed with him on many issues, so where do Jeb and his brother George W. Bush disagree?   Bush answered that he wished his brother had done more to rein in Congressional spending.  Bush didn't address - and Colbert didn't ask - if that included the trillions spent on invading Iraq, or whether that fiscal conservatism would have included cutting back the enormous Bush tax cuts for the 1% - questions that a Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, or possibly even Letterman might well have posed.

The expanded debut episode ended with a jam that included Batiste & Stay Human, Mavis Staples, Ben Folds, Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, and a slew of guest musicians (most of whom I didn't recognize and who weren't properly introduced) playing  Sly Stone's "Everyday People." But the performance deserved more time and seemed rushed and poorly shot.

So Colbert gets a C+ for his first show and has us wondering whether he'll warm up to the art of the celebrity interview, if he'll continue to throw softball questions at his political guests, and if the show will figure out how to best present the talents of Jon Batiste and Stay Human.  The answers, of course,  are all almost certainly yes, and his guests for the rest of his opening week include Scarlett Johansson, the CEO of Tesla Motors, Vice President Joe Biden, and Kendrick Lamar, which will give Colbert plenty of opportunities to work out the kinks.

But man, I'm going to miss Dave Letterman.

Don't Be Afraid Of Fear The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead began with Sheriff Rick Grimes waking up from a coma and finding civilization as he knew it gone, victim of a zombie apocalypse.  Every fan of the show has wondered at one time or another  how the world could have turned to shit so fast.  Fear The Walking Dead promises to tell that story.

Shot mostly on location in L.A., with palm trees substituting for the iconic Atlanta woods of Walking Dead, the pilot aired Sunday, August 23 at 9 p.m. on AMC. The series will continue for the next five weeks, to be followed by the season premier of The Walking Dead in October.

It wouldn't be part of the Walking Dead franchise without a couple of foreigners feigning American accents, so Fear stars Kiwi actor Cliff Curtis and Brit Frank Dillane as schoolteacher Travis Manawa and his hunky, heroin-addicted stepson Nick.  Kim Dickens plays Madison, a caring assistant principal and the mom of this typically dysfunctional blended family. Alycia Debnam-Carey (big surprise, she's Australian) plays Nick's jaded teen sister, Alicia, and Lorenzo James Henrie portrays Travis' disaffected son from his first wife, still resentful of his parents' divorce.  Lots of angst, lots of drama, and we haven't even gotten to the zombies yet.

The story starts when Nick wakes up in a post-drug stupor in a Venice Beach crash pad and discovers his girlfriend viciously munching on a corpse.  Of course no one believes him in the hospital, assuming his nightmarish vision was just the drugs.  But when an elderly patient in the adjoining bed  dies of a heart attack, he's quickly whisked away by the attending physician.  "This man has got to be taken downstairs NOW," he commands. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, a video of a highway stop between police and a rogue driver goes viral, and seems to show the driver being repeatedly shot by police and still coming back to life and attacking them.  So yeah, people are dying and turning into zombies, but the police, the military, the hospitals and everyone else in control is covering it up, blaming the sudden disappearance of dozens of people on a  flu epidemic. 

Nick, desperate to find out if he really saw his dead girlfriend eating human flesh or was just hallucinating, escapes from the hospital and contacts his heroin dealer, Calvin, who masquerades as a clean cut boy-next-door type.  Calvin has Nick's parents fooled when they come looking for their son,  but when Nick meets with him at a diner and asks if his last dose was spiked with PCP, it's clear that this guy is a sociopath.  Calvin takes Nick for a drive and tries to kill him, but Nick manages to wrestle the gun away and Matt gets shot in the chest instead.

When Nick brings his disbelieving parents to the scene to show them what he did, they find zombie Calvin lurching around trying to take a bite out of them.  Nick runs him over with his parents' car but Calvin gets up again and keeps coming. Running over him a second time finally crushes his skull, but Travis, Madison, and Nick now know the truth.

With Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman involved with the writing, and directed by Adam Davidson (a veteran of TV's Community and several small indie films,) Fear The Walking Dead definitely gets off to a good start.  The necessary exposition - who are these people and why should we care about them? - never bogs down the action, which moves along quite quickly.  (Given that this is only a six episode season,  the pace should remain brisk throughout.) 

Press blurbs from AMC suggest that in the next few weeks, we'll see Madison and Travis pull their blended family together and struggle to survive one step ahead of the zombie apocalypse.  With Kirkman at the helm, it's a good bet almost no one here is safe and the show will  lose a featured actor or two every week.

The zombies here look a bit different, since they're all "fresh" kills and none of them has rotting flesh and filthy clothing. There also aren't that many of them (yet,) although zombies do tend to multiply faster than Tribbles, so I'm sure the makeup department will get busier week by week.  But at least in these first two episodes, there's far less gore and violent death in Fear than a typical episode of Walking Dead.

But what really separates this prequel from Walking Dead is that here,  we know more than the characters.  The viewer knows civilization will fall, that no matter what the government, military or health officials try, all their plans will fail.  We know the future, and it's unimaginably bleak.

The characters on Fear The Walking Dead are going to have figure that out themselves. Will fans care about their fate as much as Walking Dead fans have become invested in the survival of Rick and Carl and their dysfunctional blended family?  Right now, Madison and Travis seem smart but bland, and Nick and Alicia comes across as downright unlikable (like, let's face it, most teenagers.)   As the zombies multiply and society falls, it will be up to those actors as to whether we keep tuning in, or just wait for The Walking Dead to return in October.

True Detective, Season 2 Post-Mortem: To Know True Detective

Guest review by Sam Michael Braverman

[SPOILER ALERT:  DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE SEEN THE SEASON FINALE]

I want you to know True Detective like I used to. About 18 months ago, in January of 2014, I met two tortured souls named Rust and Marty. Every Sunday for eight weeks,  I followed their trials and tribulations over a 25+ year stretch, meeting them first as grizzled husks before rewinding to show the events which had led us to the beautiful media-res in which they had first been introduced. It was a triumph, True Detective premiered and seemed to affirm that we are living in a golden age of television. Do you remember Season One?  It was glorious and we will never meet its like again.

Now we have this thing to discuss, to sift through, to try to find solace in good performances which can’t overcome slipshod dialogue, no, I say. The only possible explanation for the disparity in quality and content from seasons one to two can be that Nic Pizzaloto is fucking with us all. He is playing an expensive, and in my opinion in poor taste, practical joke. This is what I told myself every Sunday for the past seven weeks, telling myself “he’s subverting expectations so much that when this gets good it’s going to blow all our minds, right!?” I’m going to go watch the finale and get back to you, at the end of this piece, but lets reminisce a bit first…

Season One's timing was perfect; Our society arrived at peak Mconnessiance, the upward tick of Matthew McConaughey’s career which had begun in early aughts as he moved past milquetoast Rom-Coms and searched for more challenging fare like his sardonic, demented, contract killer in Killer Joe or his confused speck of humanity haunting the frames of Joe. McConaughey breathed life into the cypher of Rust’s paradigm and made dialogue like “It’s all a ghetto, man. A giant gutter in outer space” seem not only logical and legitimate but downright prophetic. He was a castaway from society, just enough knowledge of his past unfurled over the first six weeks to show us how a man whose only marketable skill is going undercover with drug runners and white supremacists could lose any hope in humanity. Brief glimpses of his “home” of an empty apartment, a mattress, and a cross, aided the show in successfully showing without telling us who Rust was offscreen and in doing so gave us not just a character and an actors’ astute performance but rather a flawed and tangible person.

Doing just as much heavy lifting were co-star Woody Harrelson and director for all eight episodes Cary Joji Fukunga, as the perfect foil and and focuser respectively. The paring of Hart and Cohle was electric from the first episode and we only grew more invested as, week by week, questions about our leads were answered just as more about the main investigation or the Yellow King were raised. Yes, the murder of Dora Lange was objectively a more linear investigation than the one comprising the bulk of Season Two, but that shouldn’t have mattered when it came time to unravel this seasons mystery.

           
This is why Season Two has infuriated me; This show was never about the investigations or who actually killed a young girl/old man, this show is about stellar acting supporting intriguing dialogue, anchored by cinematography that engages each location as a feature also in service of the story. This show worked because it was greater than the sum of its parts, it aspired to do nothing more than give us two people we could care about and place them in situations and locations which would inspire wonder. And it fucking worked.

           
In “The Long Bright Dark,” the first episode of the first season, the viewer learns that there is a two decade plus timeline in play, we are introduced to both our leads and they quickly assert their main character traits in a non-showy, organic, way. The posed corpse, the inquisitive detectives prompting the storyline set in the present, features the first “Rust and Marty drive in a car and Rust talks some crazy bullshit about the universe and smelling psychospheres” ALL HAPPEN IN THE FIRST TWENTY MINUTES. And it worked.

The reason I’ve taken seven hundred words to sing the praise of Season One is the same reason I’ve written this piece: I still don’t know where we went so, so, wrong. Was it the departure of Fukunga, leaving Pizzolato to steer the ship alone? Were McConaughey and Harrelson the key? Whichever DP executed that incredible tracking shot in the fourth episode of season one? WHAT WENT WRONG?!

Season Two should’ve been subtitled “Cliches” because every character, every action, every line of overwrought dialogue drips of a desperation to join the zeitgeist. This whole show has reverted from an inspired and unconventional take on a cop drama to an hour every Sunday devoted to sapping any joy or permanence from the proceedings. I don’t care about anybody this season; when they shot Paul (that was Taylor Kitsch’s character if you cared, which you probably didn’t,) I yelled at my TV because he was the closest in performance and writing to an actual character we’ve seen this time. The other leads could best be described as serviceable. In a mid-budget February release Vince Vaughn might actually be a convincing gangster, here he reads as somebody who takes a handful of painkillers before shooting every scene, words tumble out of his mouth but he hasn’t said a damn thing all season. I’m not even going to talk about the other two because since they had sex at the end of the penultimate episode they’re both irredeemable in their own personal arcs. It doesn’t make sense. It makes me sad.

Last week I was watching True Detective with my brother and four firetrucks pulled up outside. We paused the show and watched the fire trucks idle for a half hour. That is how bad this season is. I’m going to go watch the finale now and hope my hardest that it proves me wrong. I want this season to Mobius strip and prove that time is a flat circle, but I’m not holding my breath.

(Break to watch Season Finale)

Joke’s on me, everybody dies and fuck character arcs. Colin Farrell is still a shitty dad, Vince Vaughn a shitty mobster, and Rachel McAdams sad and without highlights. The script was littered with gems like “I thought we had more…time.” Can we talk about Vince Vaughn’s dad lecturing him as he walked to death? That happened. I’m referring to the actors and not the characters because eight episodes gone, I couldn’t tell you what made any of these pastiches tick or care in the slightest what happens to them. What happened to subtlety? I’m going to mail Nic Pizzolato a dictionary with the same word on every page; on every damn page it will define subtlety and nothing else. James Frain killed Colin Farrell; has James Frain been in this show the whole time? He killed Taylor Kitsch last week, does he only exist in the final two episodes of this show to shoot the main characters dramatically and show them bleeding out the mouth? HOW ABOUT THE WAY THIS SHOW FUCKING TREATS WOMEN? The men heroically dying, insisting the women get away to freedom, to a life on the run in South America?

So you win, Nicky. I watched this whole season. I’m pretty sure you’ll get at least one more shot to do this so if that happens, maybe a few less eight balls in the writers room. Lets try going back to at least a semi-coherent plot, a locale more interesting than “L.A. but with sepia tones and industrial things”, and maybe even a female character with three dimensions. I’d lament how stupid the ending to this show was but it pissed me off from the first week. This is not my beautiful house. I’m going to try and forget this season happened and in a few months probably rematch the first to be reminded of what it was like to know True Detective.

Food Network Star: Handicapping The Final Five

It's that time of year when Food Network is close to anointing someone (maybe) to be the next Food Network Star.  

The "maybe" has become an important proviso since two of the last three winners never got their promised series;  season 8 winner, Brooklyn restauranteur Justin Warner, turned up on a one-hour special and has appeared sporadically as a guest judge on Food Network series, but season 10's "chuckwagon chef"  Lenny McNab disappeared down a black hole after his win.  (Several news sources reported McNab had made homophobic, racist, and misogynistic comments on a private blog,  which probably led to his banishment, but Food Network has never confirmed why McNab was not given a series.)

Interestingly, for the first time,  the final five competitors  on this season of Food Network Star are all men.  (There is still one female contestant competing on the web series Star Salvation who might get a second chance to enter the competition.) Before we handicap this season's finalists though, let's take a look at what Food Network has been up to lately.

Just has MTV turned to reality programming when viewers tired of 24-hour videos, Food Network has had to adapt, and most of its primetime schedule is now devoted to either cooking competitions (like Chopped) or cooking competitions turned into silly game shows (Cutthroat Kitchen, which wastes the talents of  the great Alton Brown, or Guy's Grocery Games, which features the ubiquitous Guy Fieri.)

There's also Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, which is broadcast on what seems like a continuous loop (over 100 times a week!,)  and several new shows that ape its formula (one with Paula Deen's sons and another with Iron Chef Michael Symon traveling around the country sampling classic recipes, burgers, and BBQ.)  There are also a handful of reality series in which a so-called expert helps a struggling restaurant or  barby hiding cameras and spying on the employees. And then there are the Bobby Flay shows, too numerous to mention, in which he either recreates his Iron Chef heroics or barbecues or makes brunch.

Weekend mornings remain the last stronghold of Food Network's traditional "chop-and-drop" cooking programs.  (These programs are repeated endlessly weekdays but new programming is relegated to Saturday and Sunday mornings.) This is the kind of show that Food Network Star promises its winners, but let's be honest, the network has shown little interest in hiring anyone but white female home-cooks lately.  From "Pioneer Woman" Ree Drummond to farm cook Nancy Fuller to country/western star Trisha Yearwood to FNS Season Nine winner Damaris Phillips, all of Food Network's cooking shows that remain in production look very much alike.  They've joined legacy stars Ina Garten,  Giada deLaurentis, Sandra Lee, and Rachael Ray as Food Network's "ladies of the afternoon."

But when it comes to hiring new stars, Food Network clearly knows what it  wants. If you include Food Network's sister network The Cooking Channel, you'll find mom, blogger, and standup comic Daphne Brogdon,  Minnesotan farm-to-table cook Amy Thielen, "Hungry Girl" Lisa Lillien, and a gaggle of Hollywood has-beens (Tiffani Amber-Thiessen, Debi Mazar,  Hayley Duff) inviting us into their living rooms for dinner or desert. All women, all white, predominantly rural, and  all home cooks.

There was a time when Food Network hired professional chefs to host its cooking shows,  but Ann Burrell and Alex Guarnaschelli's shows failed to find an audience, and clearly Food Network's target demographic has decreed it wants to watch relatable moms in the kitchen and nothing else.

How does that bode then for the all-male finalists of Food Network Star?  Will any of the dudes still in the competition have a chance to break through the Velvet Apron of Food Network female hegemony?  That remains to be seen, but in the meantime, here are your finalists:

Alex McCoy -- At age 31, he looks 25 and brings a boyish, youthful enthusiasm to the show.  Pros: Alex is a real-life professional restauranteur but comes off as the lovable boy next door.  Cons:  His "point of view" is sandwiches, and Food Network already has a "Sandwich King,"  FNS season 7 winner Jeff Mauro.  Odds:  5-1 

Arnold Myint - It should probably be noted that aside from Iron Chef Cat Cora,  Food Network's only gay presence in the past 20 years has  been FNS Season One winners "The Hardy Boys," whose show only lasted one season. Arnold is not only openly gay but a professional drag queen, although his cooking point of view simply stresses throwing fabulous parties.  He could be the queer Sandra Lee if he weren't so sweaty and stiff on camera.  Pros:  Inclusivity is in this year, and Food Network could use some positive press after the Paula Deen scandal.  Cons:  Gay or not, he's still a dude, and while he's had flashes of fabulousness, his camera presence and cooking have been less than stellar.  Odds: 7-1

Eddie Jackson -  A good-looking former professional athlete, Eddie sailed through the opening rounds of the competition but has faltered lately with both his camera presence and his cooking.  FNS season 4 winner Eddie McCargo Jr. was one of Food Network's very few black on-air personalities (BBQ cooks Pat and Gina Neely and Sunny Anderson are the only other ones I can think of,) but of course race isn't supposed to enter into a competition like this.   If you take that out of the equation, Eddie's probably still a front runner but fading fast.  Odds:  3-1

Jay Ducote - This big bearded friendly guy wants to teach the world Louisiana cooking.  I like his personality,  I like his point of view, and he's been as consistent as anyone else on this season of FNS.  Then again, season 9's Rodney Henry (the "Pie Man") seemed like a shoe-in but Food Network decided it didn't want a fat white guy on its schedule and went with the much blander (but prettier and more accessible)  Damaris Phillips. Odds:  3-1

Dominic Tesoriero - Yes, Dom was eliminated in last Sunday's episode but he's still alive on Star Salvation.  This Staten Island native has a decidedly New York personality (Food Network likes that,) runs a mac-and-cheese food truck (how's that for relatable?) and the Italian dishes he's made  have shown him to be the season's best cook, hands down.   He's been a trainwreck on camera but his next-to-last challenge showed promise.  If he can figure it out in time, watch for Dom to win Star Salvation and come back to win the whole thing.

Then he just needs Food Network to put him on the air.

Becoming Us: The New Normal?

I'll be honest: I watched the first two episodes of Becoming Us thinking it was another of ABCFamily's teen-oriented scripted dramas with a timely twist, like The Fosters (about a lesbian couple who adopts a multi-racial group of kids.)   It was only when the cast turned up on a talk show that I realized that Becoming Us is a reality series about an extended family in Evanston, Illinois that - as we now know well into the first season- includes three transgendered individuals.  It's almost as if Caitlyn Jenner were anticipating this series when she proclaimed, "I am the new normal."

The series revolves around 17-year old Ben, his mom Suzy, and his transgendered dad, who now goes by Carly.  "Who could have guessed that just as I was becoming a man, my dad would decide to become a woman?" Ben asks us in one of many direct-to-camera asides.    Becoming Us loves to break through the fourth wall, letting Ben narrate his own story with remarkably adult perception.  It's one of several factors that makes becoming Becoming Us feel like it's scripted.  Reality shows like the Real Housewives franchise or  Jersey Shore show us stupid people doing stupid stuff; here, a remarkably empathetic family goes through an incredibly stressful situation with grownup understanding, compassion, and  humility.  They're almost too good to be real.

Ben has two allies in dealing with his dad's transition, his understanding older half-sister Brook  (who's busy planning her wedding) and his platonic girlfriend Danielle, who also has a transgendered dad.  (What are the odds of that?)  In addition, Ben has two older friends, Ayton and his live-in girlfriend Brook, who are dealing with Brook's couch-surfing kid brother Lathan.  Lathan's "going through some stuff" but just when we're ready for the skinny goth boy to come out and announce he's gay, he instead reveals that he's transgendered too and was actually born a girl.

Ben's obviously got a lot to deal with:  Poor grades, his weird but co--dependent relationship with Danielle, and his evolving relationship with his father (whom he refuses to call "mom.")  Lathan's cloying presence stresses out Ayton and Brook's relationship, while Brook has to deal with introducing her straight-laced in-laws to her transgendered step-dad (and deciding what role, if any, she'll play in the wedding.)

I don't watch much reality TV - I've never seen an entire episode of any show  featuring real housewives, Kardashians, Chrisleys, or duck-call salesmen - but I assume one problem they all share has to be vignettes that feel, if not completely scripted, at least set up for the cameras.   In one episode, Danielle's dad and Carly go bra-shopping together with their two kids in a tow, which has to set a new watermark for teenage humiliation on TV.  When Ayton and Ben's relationships with their girlfriends sour, it happens on the same episode at supposedly the same time, which didn't feel natural either.  And when Carly takes Ben, Ayton, and Lathan camping for some she/male bonding in the woods, their campfire confessions don't ring true at all.

Still, Becoming Us couldn't have arrived at a better moment,  coinciding with Caitlyn Jenner's front-page transition and  raising  positive awareness of this unique segment of the LGBT community.  You might not believe every minute of Becoming Us, but it's nearly impossible not to like these people or root for them to stay together.  That, after all, is what Robert Frost told us family is all about:  When you have to go there, they're the people who have to take you in.

 

AMC's Humans revisits the singularity conundrum: What happens when machines can replace people?

AMC's Humans takes place in a world very much like our own, except for lifelike robots called Synths that have taken over most of mankind's menial jobs.  The show debuted on AMC with very little fanfare, suggesting that the channel is saving its promotional firepower for the debut of its Walking Dead prequel in August. But on the basis of the first episode, Humans has plenty to recommend it.

The first episode introduces three concurrent plotlines:  A dysfunctional family with two working parents and several obnoxious kids buys a Synth to help run the household; instead of helping though, the Synth, named Anita, exacerbates existing family friction. Meanwhile an elderly physician (the great William Hurt) tries to hang on to his obsolete Synth, whom he has come to think of as a surrogate son.  And finally, a young man named Leo runs around trying to rescue a small group of rogue Synths who have acquired true sentience and have self-awareness and emotions.

It's a sci-fi trope as old as Isaac Asimov's 1942 "Three Laws of Robotics,"  which have formed the foundation of almost all robot/android fiction since.  In case you're not familiar with Asimov, here they are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.  

From Star Trek's Replicators to The Terminator's Skynet to Battlestar: Galactica's Cylons, the idea of sentient robots has amazed, terrified, and beguiled us in a thousand different forms, but inevitably the story always returns to the question of what scientist John Von Neumann called "The Singularity:"  The point at which technology exceeds humanity and the machines no longer need humans.

Humans raises some interesting questions about the idea of robot slaves replacing people, but never really wraps itself around the bigger issues. Everyone in this universe seems to have a job, although obviously the displacement of human labor by machines would be devastating to world economies.  The teenage daughter of the family who brings home a Synth wonders why she should study medicine if a Synth will soon be able to do surgery better than a human doctor; just imagine how Synths would impact manufacturing, the service industry, government bureaucracy, or even the military.  If everything from flipping your Big Mac to directing traffic on the corner can be done better by robots, what will people do for a living?  We can't all be scientists, although Humans seems to suggest otherwise.

William Hurt's role as Dr. George Millican, a pensioner who's grown overly fond of his Synth, despite the fact that he's long overdue for an upgrade, and National Health has just purchased millions of the latest model.  George's Synth has become the repository of a lifetime of memories with his late wife, memories that George himself is starting to lose because of dementia.  If the Synth "dies," those memories die with him.  And bringing that human element to the story makes all the difference.

Colin Morgan's role as the leader of some sort of Synth underground, trying to save a handful of sentient Synths from capture by the authorities, will need some fleshing out.  The first episode doles out  details in bits and pieces and it will take a while for the whole story to make sense.  But we do learn in the first episode that a secret government agency (apparently we'll never run out of those) is on the trail of the sentient robots, whom some scientists fear could bring on a Terminator-like Armageddon.

There isn't a single idea in Humans that you can't trace back to Pinocchio (or Frankenstein.)  But the idea of man making life in his own image, and then being destroyed by his creation, is such a powerful myth that there's certainly room for one more television series about it. 

Humans airs on AMC on Sundays at 9 p.m.