My Generation
My Generation is a mock-umentary show about nine high school graduates from the class of 2000. Ten years later, the documentary film crew catches up with them to find out where they are now.
There's some cool things about this show. It's inventing it's own format. It's honestly portraying people in their mid-twenties in a way that TV seldom does. The thing is, I didn't like it.
I think the problem may be that it was trying too hard for that realistic documentary feel. The result is that nothing much happened. Entirely too much time was spent on one-on-one interviews with the characters and narration about the characters. I want to see scenes, please! These people's lives were a little too far on the side of realistic. Real people's lives are not very interesting. That's why my facebook mini-feed is not a hit TV show.
The first episode had the burden of establishing not only who these nine people are, but also who they were ten years ago and what happened in the past ten years to make them who they are now. (Hint: Most of the time it was 9/11.) Instead of doling the exposition out interspersed with some kind of STORY, this glut of information was just dumped on the viewer for most of the episode.
There's another thing, but I'm hesitant to say it. I hate to give opinions that limit the kind of stories we can tell, because execution is always more important than premise. But there's a reason television has seldom tackled a realistic show about people in their mid-twenties - it's depressing. I don't think it's impossible for it to work, but it would have to be handled really well to not be a total buzz-kill. My Generation has the added... what's the opposite of a bonus?... the added opposite-of-a-bonus of showing us these characters as they are graduating high school with high hopes and great expectations. And then we see how far they've really gone - not very. Which is completely realistic, but not very uplifting.
Anyway, I applaud this show for stepping out of the box and trying something other than doctors/lawyers/cops. I'm actually kind of interested to see where it goes because the format is so unique.
$#*! My Dad Says
$#*! My Dad Says is about a young man (Jonathon Sadowski) who loses his job and has to move in with his crotchety father (William Shatner), who says shit. It's loosely based on the popular Twitter feed, Shit My Dad Says.
I didn't actually think it was that bad. Rephrase: I didn't think it was as bad as I thought I was going to think it was. It wasn't funny, but then neither was anything else this fall. It's a standard Odd Couple format (How will this mismatched pair live together?), which has been done again and again, but I don't think it's necessarily dead yet.
What this show does have going for it is an awesome cast, including Madtv alumni Nicole Sullivan and Will Sasso. The four stars do a great job of delivering jokes that aren't so good. If the quality of the writing picks up, I could see this being a decent comedy.
Outsourced
In Outsourced, a manager from a novelty catalog company (Ben Rappaport) is sent to run their call center in India.
What is with all the non-funny comedy pilots this season? Is it me? I watched the premiere of The Office and laughed, so I don't think my funny bone is broken. And I wanted to like this show. I really really did. But there is just so much bad going on here.
I was really pleased when I first heard about this show. There is a dearth of Arab and Indian characters on television and then here's NBC making a show where most of the main cast is Indian. A show that takes place in India, no less. But from what I saw in the pilot, it looks like that was supposed to be the joke. All the humor seems to come from a place of "India! What a silly place! They worship cows and eat gross food! They have humorous misconceptions about normal American people!" I wouldn't say the jokes were offensive, but I wish the tone of the show was more inclusive of this other culture, rather than taking every opportunity to point them out as the Other.
I know you were all missing the cops and lawyers. Well, worry not. Tonight there's Blue Bloods on CBS and Outlaw on NBC.
No comments:
Post a Comment