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.