John Walker's Electronic House

It’s great to be wrong.

I can’t even be bothered to watch Reaper any more, but I’m totally into Chuck.

The two shows have so much in common – both feature a reluctant regular guy who works in the nerd section of a large store, thrown into a fantastical situation where they have to fight evil/crime. Each has nerd buddies, nerd gags, and a wise-cracking geek best friend. Except one ran out of steam by the second episode, while the other, despite seemingly having nowhere to go with its concept, is really, really fun.

Episode two of Reaper was such a terrible mess. It was an almost scene-for-scene reprisal of the first, with a different monster-of-the-week, and apparently completely different parents. Sock, the comedy buddy was still funny, but the second he went off screen, it was like watching roadkill. Episode three I couldn’t even survive halfway through. It was the exact same episode again, ringing more hollow than before. And this time the jokes felt deeply contrived.

But there’s better news. Chuck. The potential didn’t seem to be there – a guy gets all of the government secrets from every American agency downloaded into his head, and rival CIA and NSA agents are assigned to keep an eye on him. So where can that go? Surely secrets are update constantly, and how exactly are they going to apply it? Rather well, it seems.

Each week the team of three – Chuck (Zachary Levi), Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) and John Casey (Firefly’s Adam Baldwin) – are either given a mission, or stumble upon one, where the two super-agents are forced to rely on Chuck, and his constantly entertaining bemusement and fear, to complete their tasks.

So there’s constant fight scenes, kung fu, daft gadgets (“How was I supposed to know Karina had a remote controlled jetski – it’s not usually an option in real life,”) and Chuck’s “flashes” where visual stimuli trigger information from the information in his brain. And that’s all fun. But it manages to get the in-between stuff right too. Chuck lives with his sister, and he has to keep his new life a secret from her, which leads to domestic issues. But not tiresome Clark Kent rubbish. It keeps it short, but realistic. Then there’s Chuck’s “cover” – he and the astonishingly pretty Sarah are pretending to be a couple, which of course leads to potential romantic friction. And again, rather than being a pain in the arse, this is done really nicely, and even manages to be touching occasionally.

It’s all-round great, and it would be lovely to see it survive a first season. Where Reaper’s pilot appeared to have great, sharp writing, the following episodes revealed that they used it all up in one go. Chuck’s pilot was over-serious and convoluted, and did not portray the strength of writing that was to come. It’s been consistent, and really smart. It’s second best to this year’s best, which is perhaps not too fair, since this year’s best – Pushing Daisies – is possibly the best in a decade. And maybe I’ll find the words to say why, soon.

Sometimes a new TV show starts, and everyone resorts to a lazy comparison with something from the past. And sometimes it’s completely valid. Journeyman is desperately waterskiing behind the Quantum Leap boat. Except, oddly, it’s nothing like it.

Quantum Leap plot: Man leaps through time into other people’s bodies, to put right what once when wrong, then leaping to the next person, in the next time period.

Journeyman plot: Man leaps through time in his own body, through various periods of a person’s life, putting right what maybe went wrong, or something, they don’t seem sure.

The problem is his helplessness. Dan Vassar’s Kevin is our portal for the programme, and he’s pretty much a bystander in all that happens. Which means so are we, staring at what seems like unwinding inevitability. For example, in episode two he first finds himself no longer on an aeroplane with his wife, but instead on one in the early 80s, filled with people smoking, kids with toy guns, and flirtatious flight attendants – look, it’s the past! He helps a woman who goes into labour, and then finds himself back in the present. Next he’s in the thick of the 80s, and meets the mother again. She’s debating whether to tell her daughter about her father. Then we’re in the 90s, and we’re with the teenage daughter confronting the father. And then it’s ’97 and he’s back on a plane, meeting the estranged and mean father, who has leukemia and needs a transplant. So we’re soon with the daughter again, and bringing her to meet her father again. And done.

Kevin certainly helps – he says the right thing in the few moments he has. But he doesn’t pick the moment, and he certainly doesn’t have time to think about what he might do. In the end he makes spur-of-the-moment binary decisions – be helpful or unhelpful – and the bounces home.

There’s all sorts else going on. There’s his missing-presumed-dead fiance, who appears to be following him on his “leaps”, there’s his current wife and son and their issues, and there’s the rather big problem of his constantly disappearing. And it’s in this that Journeyman has some success. So often in mysterious fantasy programmes, the protagonists’ oddities are madly ignored. Here his wife can’t deny what’s going on – especially when he vanishes from a flight. And gracefully, she accepts the impossibility of her husband’s newfound ability to time travel. Plus there’s the logistics of it, like the troubling nature of heightened airport security for a man who gets on a plane, but doesn’t get off. Or disappearing from the driver seat of your car as you’re going 30mph.

It’s a nice show, with a decent cast. But it’s forgotten something rather crucial – to have a point. So yes, he helps people out. But why? We never knew who leapt Sam Beckett, but we at least knew he stepped into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanished. And what’s the dramatic tension of the episode? What if he doesn’t do the right thing in those few minutes he’s with someone? Does he get stuck? Die? We can’t ever find out, because if he did so, the show would be over, him trapped in the past. So instead we have to assume his guesses are correct, as he helplessly stumbles through someone’s life. There’s never any mention of the paradoxes of time travel, never any concern over his changing the past (with him merrily crashing his own life whenever he gets the chance). There’s far more emphasis on the problems his time travel causes his personal life than there is of the journeys themselves. And that’s presumably because it’s impossible to write a proper story when he’s aimlessly flipping back and forth against his own will. So in episode one he – wait, I can’t even remember a week later. And in episode two he inadvertantly gets someone to donate some bone marrow, so some guy who was nothing to do with the episode will go on to do some humanitarian work.

It’s as if the show got picked up on a format that sounded like it had a good hook, but in practise has nothing it can do with it. It’s certainly watchable, but more for the soap of his life, than for the show’s apparent premise.

I mentioned this before when the pilot was generously made available to the viewing public by the kind folks of piracy. Now it’s real and proper and on television, and there’s been two of it.

Everything is wrong with this sitcom. The premise is so flimsy (two super-geeks live across the hall from a ditzy big-boobed blonde, and want to win her affections), the 1970s dynamic is dallying around sexism (super-intelligent guys compete to win dumb girl’s affections, girl has giant breasts, guys are nerdy and unattractive), and the gags involve missing trousers, walking into doors, and having difficulty moving heavy objects up stairs.

Which makes it hard to justify why I laughed all the way through both episodes. Well, it’s not hard. I just have to admit that either I’m an idiot for not seeing the levels it’s working on, or I’m an idiot for laughing at the bad TV show. In conclusion, I’m an idiot.

It’s written by sitcom writing vetern Chuck Lorre and former Henson cohort Bill Prady (who when he stood for governer of California, stated he’d “solve all the state’s problems in twenty-two minutes and forty-four seconds with two commercial breaks and a hug at the end.”). Two men who know sitcoms, even if they’ve spent most their writing in the middle-of-the-road, with shows like the occasionally sufferable Dharma & Greg, the horribly underrated Grace Under Fire, and one of the best sitcoms ever, Roseanne. So it’s all safely familiar.

The cast is more interesting, with sitcom regular Darlene’s “Johnny Galecki” BoyfriendfromRoseanne and the pretty much unknown Jim Parsons. Both are excellent, with fantastic deliveries, Galecki even getting away with a walking into a door gag thanks to pristine timing. The breasts are played by Kaley Cuoco, who is better known for voice acting in cartoons. Hopefully the hints in the first two episodes that she’s not completely stupid will blossom, and she’ll be given a slightly more rounded character than a Cheesecake Factory waitress who just broke up with her boyfriend. It’s telling from the all-male writing team that the only ways they’re able to create her character is defining her through relationships with men. She’s great in her part, and thankfully is bullish and strong despite the weakness in her lines.

If they can evolve their writing staff to a slightly more advanced state, and write Cuoco a distinct and interesting character, as rubbish as everything about the programme should be, this could creep into 3rd Rock From The Sun territory.

I adore French & Saunders. And I have no measure of whether that’s incredibly uncool, or enormously out of date, or something. But I adore them.

I love them because when working together, they’re incredibly funny. And because they’re astonishingly cruel. And cleverer than me. And I’m a bit in love with Jennifer Saunders.

Everything is meta. Layer on layer on layer. No sketch sits still, or stays in its place. They stay in character while stepping out of character. There is no defined position between sketch and sketch show, everything blurred, everything a television programme eating itself.

To understand their majesty, all you need to see is the Silence of the Lambs sketch.

Whether being Madonna and Britney, the stars of Alien, or a making-of documentary of the Harry Potter movies, they remain Dawn and Jennifer. Their accents may have changed, and indeed will likely change throughout the sketch, but it’s never about that which they’re spoofing. The Lambs sketch is purely about their being back for a new series, dressed in the lavishly complex clothing of a movie spoof.

These blurs nicely include Dawn’s size, somehow never impinging on her playing someone as thin as Britney Spears (well – back before Britney went saggy), but yet always being relevant. Not, “Ha ha! There’s a fat lady!”, but something smarter than that. Or as idiotic as French declaring, “That’s my big fat wobbly belly.”

Anyway, so they’ve got a full series of clip shows to celebrate 20 years on the BBC, with new material scattered throughout that’s just as great as they’ve always been. Seeing their awesome Silent Witness spoof, Witless Silence, again is such a joy. And best of all, it reminds you quite how silly they are. Astonishingly silly. Silly enough that a sketch can just be the two of them dancing stupidly, or shouting like children. But still smart.

And no, I didn’t think Ab Fab was very good, and the Vicar Of Dibley is like a tramp vomiting his liver in your face.

And Jennifer’s mother is a biology teacher in Cheshire.

What television needs is another show about vampires. Goodness knows there haven’t been enough yet, and goodness knows it’s important that they all be made with a budget of 10p and a cast of people you recognise from films you once saw on TV late at night.

Moonlight – the latest attempt to wring another drop of blood from the poor undead bastards – embraces everything at its very worst. Episode one is a cavalcade of awkward exposition. The episode begins with the central character, vampire private detective Mick St. John (played by Alex O’Loughlin, who peculiarly looks like a young Jon Stewart), explaining to an unseen television interviewer all about himself. Here he’s asked about all the various vampire details, and blithely dismisses various vampire rules so we know the score here. Crosses, holy water, garlic, and stakes through the heart can’t hurt him, and sunlight makes him feel ill. Turns out you can kill a vampire by setting him on fire, or chopping his head off. And then, oh the surprise, the interview is his own fantasy, and he tells us about his average day.

But the laboured exposition doesn’t end there. We have to see him injecting blood with a syringe, because he’s a good vampire, and therefore doesn’t drink the stuff like every other vampire in the universe. And we get to hear about how his life is about to change, because he saw a reporter on an internet site reporting on a murder.

Sophia Miles (cursed with small parts in vampire nonsense, from the BBC’s recent dreadful Dracula, to the abysmal Underworld sequel) plays Beth, said reporter, who decides the attacker of the murder victim must be a vampire due to the puncture marks on her neck. But she’s not a reporter for a TV channel! Oh no! This is the Noughties. She’s a reporter for an online news site called Buzz Wire, that looks like it was designed by MTV in 1987. In fact, it looks like that pizza commercial Winona Ryder’s film gets made into at the end of Reality Bytes. Her boss exclaims to her,

“200,000 unique visitors on your vampire story, and we posted less than 24 hours ago! The vampire angle was genius.”

Vampires, you say?

Buzz Wire has its own open-plan office filled with nu-media lovelies who get scoops over the television channels, because it’s all about the internet nowadays, someone once told the writers.

And so we are forced to accept that St. John and Beth will become teamed up and fight mysterious crime together. And that friendly vampires are everywhere. And people are interested in vampires but don’t know about them. And goths, called “emos” by the moronic writers, want to murder each other and become like vampires. And vampires. Vampires I tell you. Vampires.

Everything you’d assume a minimal-budget, yet primetime show would do wrong is here. Green-screened driving sequences, tacky beyond belief. Filmed like a soap opera. Incredibly claustrophobic small-set shots. And lots of sweeping, sped-up helicopter shots of cities, because Angel did that so then we’ll look like Angel.

Worst is the miserable attempt to include Whedon-esque banter. It’s just horrible. Everyone comes off sounding deeply smug, rather than witty, ensuring you hate everybody involved. And naturally it’s vital that we see Beth stripped down to her bra twice in the episode, and then drugged by evil men, and rescued by the good man.

Somehow it manages to be worse than cable attrocity Blood Ties, by failing to at least have the decent fight scenes. So naturally it will run for fifteen seasons, despite including narrative dialogue such as,

“Relationships are complicated. Vampire or mortal, that’s one thing we have in common.”

And it finishes with fucking Evanescence.

Anti-Americanism in the UK is as rife now as it has ever been. People here talk about “Americans” in a way they would find abhorrent if supplanted by any other nation. It’s vulgar. And it’s not exactly helped by Fox.

Kitchen Nightmares – the Channel 4 series in which Gordon Ramsey visits failing restaurants, shouts at them for being idiots, changes their menu, hugs everyone when they make some money the next week, and then gets sued – has followed Hell’s Kitchen across the Atlantic and onto Fox’s main network channel. But, as is often the case, it’s gone under something of a transformation.

The UK’s Kitchen Nightmares is an oddly quaint programme. The restaurants he visits tend to be small, village projects, and supporting them seems almost philanthropic. (Obviously it isn’t – it’s to sell advertising – but the impression is nice). Also, you get to see morons shouted at by a frightening man, which is fun. At first this appears to have been kept intact. The first restaurant is a small Italian family business in a small town, the second a peculiar Indian-cum-American-cum-deathtrap in New York. The temptation to tackle big businesses was avoided, and mercifully.

But as you watch the first episode, the differences become quickly apparent. First of all, the US Hell’s Kitchen melodramatic narrator is back to talk us through what we can see in front of us, rather than the more congenial babbling of Ramsey explaining what he’s up to. (Of course, the narrator is a massive boon to Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen, replacing the vile snarking of Angus Deayton). Then there’s the score. Like so many US shows, each 45 minutes is given a unique score to reflect the action – something that can be absolutely fantastic. However, here it’s trying so hard it ends up sounding like a horror movie. Shrieking violins accompany the revealing of cockroaches in the kitchen, and Hell’s Kitchen’s dun-dun-duhhh strings invade every busy scene. It all ends up becoming rather ridiculous, with the fear that at any moment there’s going to be a wacky trombone as someone falls over.

And then it all goes insane. Halfway through the first episode the staff come back to their own restaurant to find their rotting kitchen completely refitted with state of the art equipment. Huh? They were appalling at their jobs, and had let their business fall apart. And the response was to reward them. It made no sense, and it doesn’t fit in with Ramsey’s approach to breaking people down before they can be built up. It made the whole programme feel false, and the results unlikely to survive. Traditionally Ramsey would have made them sell property to afford new equipment, make sacrifices in order to improve. Receiving a gameshow prize left these people where they were, and even endorsed their failure.

Episode two repeats the moment, this time completely refitting the restaurant itself, as well as paying for professional cleaners to clean the kitchens (although thank goodness, because they were infested), and then paying for a double-decker bus to be driven around New York promoting the business. However, thankfully episode two brings back two vital ingredients that make the show worthwhile. Firstly, we get to see Gordon topless – a feature of the UK version that appeared in every episode for unknowable reasons, but was always hilarious. And secondly, he harrasses one dreadful idiot to the point where he quits, and gives the restaurant a chance. It was interesting to see the comparison with episode one, where he pushed the large Italian American brute to his very limit, looking likely to get flattened at any moment, but instead having him back down and admit that he was the problem, and changing his ways. In episode two, it’s a slimey Brit who can’t take someone standing up to him, and he eventually slithers away. It gives the results more authenticity, rather than seeing the stupid get rewarded.

But everything that Fox adds, adds nothing. The narration, the score, the ridiculous gameshow prizes, and then on top the treacly eulogies from staff declaring how Saviour Gordon has saved their lives, all create the impression that the programme was too difficult without them. It implies that the audience must be too stupid to manage without someone holding both their hands and pointing everything out for them. And when the British version managed fine without any of this, and the US version implies its audience needs it, it empowers those who believe “Americans” are whichever sweeping generalisation they wish to impose. It would have been so great to have seen Fox try and keep the import in its original format, and see if it succeeds. I believe it is the assumption of a moronic audience that makes the programming so lowbrow, rather than the reality of one. It just seems incredibly unlikely that anyone on a free-to-air network is ever going to take the chance to find out.

Damages – FX

Glenn Close did a stunning turn in a previous season of The Shield, and presumably this gave FX cause to beg her to do her own series. And the results are excellent. Taking the traditional FX model of a single story running for a season, Close plays a litigation lawyer who is famous for her ruthless practice, and indeed practise, taking on a seemingly impossible case to prove a businessman unfairly fired hundreds of employees. It’s a big money case, and a lot is at stake. The story is shown from the perspective of a freshly qualified lawyer who finds herself in at the deep end of the case, under Close’s wing. Which turns out to be the worst place to be. Each episode flashes forward to some event in the future where our heroine is in a police interrogation cell, her boyfriend dead, his blood all over her. It seems it can only be Close’s doing, and the journey of how we get from here to then is intriguing. Strongly boosted by Close’s excellent menace, and a decent supporting cast, it shows a lot more promise than other FX shows that have been stuck in the gaps between series of The Shield.

Bionic Woman – NBC

Hooray – the sexy assistant lady from Jekyll has her own show! From the makes of Battlestar Galactica, and indeed apparently the cast of Battlestar Galactica, it’s yet another old show brought back from the past for a more cynical audience. There’s a decent amount of promise in this pilot, getting things dark enough to be interesting, and witty enough to survive the ludicrous story. It very much follows the BSG formula of implying a deep background story as more important than the episodic tale. Most importantly, it features super-fast running in the woods, and jumping from rooftop to rooftop, which is all the show really needs to do. Plus it’s got Starbuck in it, so double hooray!

Many more after the click.

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I would like to begin by saying that I’m in no way suggesting that Paula Abdul has a painkiller addiction. To do so would be a terrible accusation, and one I couldn’t even consider making.

Interestingly, she exhibits so many of the behaviours of someone with a painkiller addiction, despite definitely not having one at all. She has permanent pain in her spine, which is totally real and from dance injuries, and not the classic psychosomatic pain exhibited by those with a painkiller addiction. And all that strange behaviour we’ve seen, and the loss of sleep, and the crashing, and the freaking out, and the sudden moments of super-crazy hyper behaviour – you could totally put them down to being addicted to opiates. But that would be wrong, because the cause of the problem is that her adrenal gland has stopped working.

Fortunately there are doctors on hand to take vast amounts of her money (surely, “help her in all situations”? – Ed) for the fourteen operations that have been performed on her neck, despite the problem only getting worse. They’re not worried about her having a painkiller addiction, because they know it’s the glands, and then a quick MRI will confirm the neck’s still being naughty.

It’s a really good job that Paula Abdul doesn’t have a painkiller addiction, because if she did it would mean that her vast staff, and all the doctors and therapists she sees (“let’s work with the muscle energies”), were despicably irresponsible human beings who were ignoring the real problem in favour of continuing to receive money from her. Thank goodness that definitely isn’t the case.

Oh deary me – it’s not a good time for the hagged old sitcom. With Scrubs entering what must be its final season, soon there will only be How I Met Your Mother representing a genre that was once ruling the world. It turns out that churning out derivative copycat crapola year after year isn’t the perfect recipe for success, and this September’s batch of new shows will be doing nothing to help.

Cavemen – ABC

Gathering itself a great deal of attention for being based on a series of commercials for US insurers, Geiko, this is the face of corporate arrogance. “These 30 second adverts are popular with the viewers – this means a 21 minute sitcom can only work.” Yup Mr Executive, turns out what’s funny for half a minute can somewhat lose its charm when made 42 times longer. Per episode. In fact, it can become downright offensive.

The schtick is such: cavemen still exist today, and are treated as second class citizens by a prejudiced public. The commercials were based on the stereotypes others had for cavemen, and the presumptions they would make about them. This new TV show is apparently based on the stereotypes others have for black people, and the presumptions they would make about them.

It’s quite foul from the very start. We’re first treated to a laugh free opener seeing the three starring cavemen (all white) complaining about their representation on television. Well, two of them are, the other one enjoying seeing the stereotyped wacky weatherman. He’s the stupid one, see. It’s established immediately that there’s literally nothing differentiating cavemen from the rest of white middle-class society, but for their buldged foreheads and hirsute bodies. Why? Because they’re white guys with some make-up on, in a show written by white guys, in what they appear to think is a cutting commentary on our still-segregated society. This episode, due to be shown about five episodes in when they’re broadcast (please, don’t let it last that long) tells of how one of the cavemen, engaged to a pretty white girl, is trying to seek the approval of her father. This involves the three of them attending an upper-class barbeque held by the girl’s family, with hilarious consequences.

They are not welcome, refused entry by the guard on the gate, ignored by most, talked to like scum, and seen as the object of a sexual thrill by a girl who has heard rumours about their sexual abilities. The bbq is at a golf club. DO YOU SEE? DO YOU? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Except, this heavy-handed attempt at a racial analogy is somehow too much for its caucasian writing team. One of the cavemen can dance really well, and credits this to his appearing on Soul Train. Another drinks too much and demonstrates his prowess at sports. The third, through a series of farcial accidents, finds himself stood in a fire, holding a burning stick, shirt torn, and roaring at the crowd. They all, unwittingly, live up to their stereotypes, as if it’s just impossible for them to avoid them. It is, in fact, about the most disgustingly racist concept imaginable. And impressively, at two extremes. It begins so desperately trying to show that ‘cavemen’ are so regular and just like, um, white middle-class people, that they live exactly as white middle-class people live. See – no prejudice here! And then it swoops wildly to the other end, announcing that despite everything, in the end they just can’t help but be the savages they truly are.

Oh, and the only black person who appears in the episode is working behind the bar at the golf club. Smooth.

That, and it’s miserably unfunny.

Aliens In America – the CW

Thank goodness the CW have Reaper, because this isn’t going to pull them out their scripted mire. I should probably say I only got about halfway into this, and couldn’t carry on. It begins explaining how the show’s central star sometimes feels a bit like an alien in school, outcast and getting in trouble, blah blah blah. If only all the outcast kids from American TV shows got together, they’d have a gang that could take on the jocks.

But, twist time! The family decide to take on a foreign exchange student, recommended it by a school counsellor as a means for straightening out their son. The mother fantasises of having a young, tall blonde Swede (presumably this is her desire to perform statuatory rapes), while the father likes the amount of money they’ll receive for this. And then they went to the airport to pick up their new family member, but SHOCK! He’s Pakistani! GASP! The family splutter in horror, and the Pakistani guy smiles and tips his head and then fixes some wires in Johnny 5.

And that was enough. Because this was going to go in two directions. Either it was going to be about the wacky differences between the two cultures, or it was going to be teaching us all valuable life lessons that not everyone from the Middle East is a terrorist. Or most likely, a sickening, patronising combination of the two. Not being someone predisposed to hate Pakistanis, the programme’s faux shock at such a human didn’t really click with me. I’ll finish it at some point. And I’ll be right.

The Bill Engvall Show – TBS

Another pilot I couldn’t complete (along with the Sarah Connor Chronicles, for a future post), I couldn’t work out what this was meant to be. Starting last week on TBS, I didn’t know what to expect. They are the channel that offers the completely adorable My Boys (due to start season 2 on Monday!), but also the hateful 10 Items Or Less (FEWER, YOU DIPSHITS, FEWER). This falls into neither category, but instead manages to be the distillation of every mediocre sitcom, refined into purest mediocrity. It was apparently about nothing. A family, with two parents, three kids, a sitcom house with a breakfast bar dividing the kitchen from the living room (what ever happened to two-way hinged swinging doors, sitcom designers?) and a story about the kids Just Being Kids! The older daughter wants her belly button pierced – uh-oh! This prompts Engvall to go off into some half-arsed stand up material about Kids These Days, awkwardly delivered sat at the dining table. And there I gave up. Maybe in the second half something interesting happened, like he slaughtered all his family with a lathe and then painted the stairs with their blood. Somehow, instead I think some life lessons we’re probably learned, and father and daughter got that little bit closer.

The Big Bang Theory – CBS

James Burrows’ latest work is a difficult one to pin down. In some ways it’s very traditional, open sets, attrocious canned laughter (although this is hopefully because it’s the pilot), and lit by floodlights. In other ways it’s going to some new places, putting two uber-geeks in the lead roles, and opening with masturbation jokes. Not subtle ones like How I Met Your Mother would do now, or Seinfeld once did, but the two guys in a sperm clinic, discussing the cups they ejaculated into.

They come home to find a pretty girl has moved into the apartment across the hall, and wouldn’t you know it, they just don’t know how to talk to girls. So yes – geeks and girls. Not original. The material – more so. I laughed a few times, surprising myself. This is mostly thanks to the stregnths of the two main stars, sitcom stalwart Johnny Galecki (David from Roseanne) and some guy who’s not done much called Jim Parsons. They play off each other well (this is the second attempt filming this pilot, so presumably they’ve had some practise), and that chemistry works. It’s not helped by the peculiar decision to throw in two more scientist geeks halfway through for seemingly no reason, especially when one of them’s Simon Helberg – Studio 60’s weakest link, sporting the same infuriating haircut. I think what makes it work is the lack of fanfare over visual gags – something sitcom genius Burrows had forgotten how to do for the last few years, not least with last year’s awful The Class. Here, when the pair come back from visiting their new neighbour’s bully ex-boyfriend with no trousers on, rather than everyone shrieking in horror (please try not to remember Friends’ worst episode, when Ross can’t get his leather trousers back on in his date’s bathroom – one of the all-time least funny scenes in anything ever, including The Sorrow And The Pity) everyone immediately understands what happened – because it’s obvious – and carries on.

It’s the most hopeful, but that’s not the highest accolade from this collection. “Funnier than Cavemen!” – there’s a quote for the DVD release.

Shorter posts to stop scaring the timid of mind.

Pilot season is upon us. I’m able to see them because either I’m a professional TV critic who gets sent the preair discs, a psychic with extraordinary premonition, or a time traveller from the future coming back to tell you what I saw next September. Whichever convinces you most.

Chuck – ABC

It seems the flavour of the new season is the heroic geek. Could this possibly be a reaction to Hiro and Heroes? Well yes, clearly. Chuck is the improbable tale of Zachary Levi’s geek-if-you-squint Chuck, who is, by reasons too stupid to explain, filled with all the secrets of the US government. Every part of it. Such that he’s pursued by the CIA and the NSA, who are chasing each other, while Chuck tries to maintain his regular life working at Buy More – a fictional Walmart – specifically in the Nerd Herd computer tech support area. The two after him are relative unknown Yvonne Strzechowski as a pleasantly traditional gorgeous-chick-cum-ninja, and Adam “Jayne off-of Firefly” Baldwin as Mr Shoot First Agent Type.

It’s a daft premise, and it’s unclear exactly where it will go. He’s got all these secrets in his head, which will presumably be out of date within a few minutes. It’s also entirely unexplained how he knows where a bomb is going to be, but nice that he saves the day through some dubious geekery, beating the super-high-class governmental knowledge. But what next? They agents are now in his life, but how does knowing lots of stuff lead into a weekly series of adventures? A good cast and some fun writing gives it a chance, but I tip this one to suffer from the Adam Baldwin Curse of Cancellation, by episode six.

Reaper – CW

It’s impossible to discuss this pilot without spoiling an early reveal. Indeed, read anything about this show and it will tell you this, but it was still fun to watch it not knowing the full premise. So read ahead if you don’t mind reading what you’ll hear everywhere about this.

Sam (Bret Harrison, Grounded For Life) is a 21 year old who works at… guess where? A geeky fictional store, this time called The Work Bench. His life is in a rut, having dropped out of college because “it made [him] sleepy”. Things change slightly once he meets the Devil (super-smooth Ray Wise), and eventually finds out from his parents that before he was born they, well, sold his soul to Satan. Come his 21st birthday, he belongs to the Devil.

It is, again, a premise beyond reason. But joyfully, Reaper knows this. It revels in it. Sam’s new job is to act as a bounty hunter for Mr Beelzebub, rounding up Hell’s escapees with his newfound abilities. The pilot has him, and his workplace buddies (mostly Tyler Labine’s ‘Sock’) trying to capture an arsonist, burning buildings all over town.

It is just brilliant. “Sam, I’m not a carjacker,” says Wise from the back seat of Sam’s car. He pats him reassuringly on the shoulder. “I’m the Devil.” All the way through the dialogue is spot on, and everyone plays it perfectly. There’s a very Whedon-esque feel to the banter, and in a show about sending back various creatures to Hell, this could obviously be problematic. But it steers clear of too much comparison, clearly aiming for the laugh-out-loud gags over the emotional sensitivity and relationship drama that made up so much of Buffy. And it hits those gags. I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud so many times in a 42 minute drama. ‘Sock’ could have been a hateful character, overplayed and “wacky”. But Labine nails it. He could so easily have been pegged as the sci-fi nerd, or the computer geek, or the overweight anti-jock, but instead it’s hard to categorise him, sitting in the position of that one guy who’s funny, over-loud, rude and liked. Alongside Harrison’s bemused straight man, seeing him come charging down the aisles of The Work Bench, chasing after a pack of dogs, armed with a leaf blower that he’s revving menacingly, is very, very funny.

There’s no fear of where this will go – only that it won’t get a chance to go there in the random mid-season cullings. Each week Sam will get a new hellspawn to round up, and a new device with which to do it (the pilot sees him armed with a Dirt Devil handheld vacuum cleaner). There’s a love interest, a goofy gang, and the fun of hiding it all from his parents. Plus, none of them are in school, none of them should be living with their parents, and best of all, when Sam hurts Sock’s feelings, this is solved with a quick apology and immediate fun, rather than the ten minutes of teenage whining that early Buffy would have offered. It’s not as clever or precise as Whedon’s work, but it’s a damned fine lite version.