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Elementary S01E13: "The Red Team"

Spies and counterintelligence must be tracking well on the giant algorithm machine that tells studio executives what to make shows about, because for the second time Elementary set a story in the little-known, high-stakes world of international espionage with an episode centered on "The Red Team," a phrase which brought me back to my college days where lots of fellow students wore the T-shirt "BE THE REDS!" which I think is grammatically incorrect yet totally charming. Needless to say, the episode was not about a beloved Korean sports team that the secondary characters were members of, but an elite National Secret Service squad that zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Here's the thing: The pitch of "Sherlock, but in New York City!" CUTS GLASS because of how unique NYC is. And New York has the weirdest crimes IRL. Like, just last year alone a sushi restaurant burned down because one of the chefs hoarded gasoline in soy sauce buckets, a father walked into a public school swinging a chain around his head and demanding to fight some 14-year-olds because someone was bullying his daughter, and a building superintendent broke into a tenant's apartment to sex up their dog. (Well, the dog thing happened in New Rochelle, but you see what I mean.) NYC has literal layers of people from every culture in the world who have grown set in their New York City-specific ways and are thrust together in this pressurized atmosphere, and that means the crimes that happen there are like, you know, interesting but instead we're getting mixed up in these big international spy dramas. I mean the climax of last night's episode happened in a seedy motel that looked like it was in Burbank. I know it's roughly $500 million a second to film in New York but Elementary doesn't even TRY to get anything about the city across except for like, hailing taxis. You know they have at least the same money Louie did in Season 1, but that rarely comes through in the cases. Sherlock living in NYC mostly translates to his house looking vaguely like a set from the film version of Rent. And more and more the crimes seem to happen in isolated, non-New York bubble locales, or in largely theoretical worlds like that of secret national service groups, Russian spies, international assassins, etc.

But far be it from me to argue with the computer that runs Hollywood. It's the size of a refrigerator and voice activated and draws on both science AND magic for its computations, and I don't. Maybe I am not smart enough for last night's storyline? I honestly had a lot of trouble following the bouncing ball all the way through. A conspiracy theorist was killed, he had been bugged by Yossarian who said he was a marketing exec and not a spy with a Catch-22 reference code name but this hot team of super spies was being killed off BY OUR GOVERNMENT but they didn't want to talk about it to a Brit/the NYPD because they were proud to die for their country and also the last one alive would have this super valuable information to sell to Page Six and then one of the guys who had a wife in a wheelchair (and was either carrying a boombox or a big purse) decided to everybody else off to save her life and… I'm sorry I suffered this breakdown of understanding where my brain got just straight-up too bored to function and I just started mentally fixating on the shiny parts of the show that caught my magpie's eye. Like Lucy Liu's wet look!

And her boots! This episode was a foot fetishists' fant-ta-ta-saaaay. She was wearing some HOT BOOTS. Sherlock, also, I realized a lot of this show functions as a primer for the freshest in men's sweaters. He had so many holier-than-thou sweaters this week. And he kept doing like little muppet expressions. NOT A COMPLAINT!

It was exasperating how awful the NYPD were. We've seen Sherlock solve the last 11 cases singlehandedly and vindicate Gregson from framing a terrible murderer, and yet they were still icing him out at the station and getting angry at him for helping them out.

Then they horribly accepted his help and let him solve the case after rightfully admitting they were too stupid to sort out a box of Legos let alone a spy ring and then Gregson PUNCHED SHERLOCK IN THE GUT at the end for his troubles. How awful. What a bunch of just terrible stupid thugs. Hopefully the real police department is not as horrible but ever since that one cop tried to meet women online for the express purpose of cooking them I've given up hope on the 5-0. And also one time the LAPD pulled me over under suspicion of being a hooker!

Yes, it's true. I had a 5am shift at a hostel in Hollywood where I worked the front desk and made the hooker mistake of putting on chapstick before hopping out of my vehicle. A car pulled up and did that little "YOPYOP" sound and they pulled me over and wanted to know, "Where are you going, what are you doing, oh you have a job around here? Or really, at this hour? What kind of job? Well go over there and walk in the front door then, if that's the case. Who does that car belong to? Where's your daddy?" and all that kind of commentary. Let me tell you right now, I was NOT dressed the part of a streetwalker I had a giant navy blue crewneck sweatshirt on top of huge baggy jeans and sneakers and wet hair in a pony tail and chapstick. They wrote down my license number and everything! I slumped around feeling like Fantine for the rest of the day. So no, I'm not going to sit here and sing you a lullaby about how IRL as a whole the police are looking after us all day every day because each police department is but a tapestry of individuals and some of those threads are BROKEN.

Loved the bit with the turtle.

ALSO BEES. BEES. Okay, so from last episode, technically the first commenter to call out how I was wrong about the Sherlock's pet hive from the pilot never coming back again was THEOPRATT. I owe you a coke! DM me via this site with an address to send you your prize!

QUESTIONS:

1. What's your personal experience with police?

2. Does Elementary need some more of that "real authentic New York pizza" sort of tone or should it just keep doing its thing?

3. Is Gregson being totally ungrateful for that time Sherlock did his job for free and also that time he let it slide that he had framed a criminal with false evidence?

4. Are you getting tired of all these high-falutin' spy game type plots or are they exciting?

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666 Park Avenue S01E01: "Pilot"

We live in a post-The Vampire Diaries, post-Battlestar Galactica, post-Revenge, post-Teen Wolf, post-True Blood, post-Breaking Bad world. Sure, some of these series are still airing, but the toothpaste is already out of the tube: GOOD TV MOVES QUICKLY. There is no going back! It is 2012. The only way a network serial can possibly survive is to learn the best lessons from its higher-quality cable competitors: Keep the characters fascinating and the plot points flowing—particularly in the pilot, when the storytelling should be nothing less than habit-forming. Unfortunately the pilot for ABC's new supernatural thriller 666 Park Avenue eschewed both of those elements and settled for being more like the middle section of a particularly uninspired horror film; you know, the part that comes after the terrifying cold open, but before the heroine actually figures out what's going on, where she's just entering dark hallways going, "Hello? Anybody there?" It was THAT for an hour.

Based on a book most of us had never heard of, 666 Park Avenue is from the evil geniuses at Alloy Entertainment. They're the ones who've made an industry out of publishing ghostwritten YA thrillers and adapting them into TV shows (The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, The Lying Game). But this older-skewing premise exercises an astonishing lack of imagination and almost no scares that could reasonably surprise or hook anybody's interest. The premise itself proved to be a bit of a disaster: A young, impossibly attractive couple answered an ad for a new building manager at The Drake, an insanely posh apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Jane (Charlie's Angels' Rachael Taylor) has a background in architecture, while Henry (Brothers & Sisters' Dave Annable) works for the mayor—two qualifications that seemed to impress the building's devilish owner, Gavin Doran (Lost's Terry O'Quinn), and his wife, Olivia (Ugly Betty's Vanessa Williams). So the young couple moved in and that's when weird (and weirdly unoriginal) things started to happen to them and a half-dozen of their unmemorable neighbors. Anyway, the premise's disastrousness is this: Every tenant of the building has somehow sold his or her soul to the devil in order to be there, so what we're dealing with is essentially a haunted-house story in which the characters can't or won't leave. Is there anything less compelling than that? Who cares about the devil's lease agreements? How can we possibly root for characters who stay in a bad situation for more than two episodes, let alone SIX SEASONS? The first season of American Horror Story essentially admitted that the premise can only last for about 12 episodes, and even that felt like a stretch.

To get around this obvious fatal flaw in its premise, 666 Park Avenue will undoubtedly be stretching out the amount of time it takes for Jane and Henry to even realize that Gavin Doran is the devil (basically—it's already clear this show will be backtracking/secularizing the whole satanism thing). But that's the premise's second fatal flaw: It relies on the heroine's ignorance to maintain plausibility, and that's just not how good TV works. Like most main characters, Jane is our audience surrogate, so by definition she should not be as in the dark as we are. Jane spent most of the premiere episode having only tangential encounters with supernatural phenomena, but none of them were serious enough to give her pause or write them off as anything other than stress-related nightmares. In keeping her discoveries restrained and her curiosity minimal, 666 Park Avenue has promised us a feast and served only an appetizer. That's just not acceptable anymore.

This lack of storytelling momentum might be acceptable if 666 Park Avenue had anything original to say or an even remotely scary idea in its head. Truly addictive TV shows all have killer "gotcha" moments just before commercial breaks, but 666 Park Avenue's were straight-up boring. One pre-commercial stinger featured a character we'd just met washing his hands. Boom! Commercial. Another was that same, barely featured character hugging someone we'd never seen before. Boom! Commercial. Even the episode-ending cliffhanger was boring. A teenager in the building had stolen a necklace and suddenly had a VISION of Jane running somewhere. Boom! Credits. Sorry writers, you need to Netflix up some TVD and see how this sort of thing is done, because so far you are failing.

Speaking of TVD: To be fair, its pilot was not its best episode. We know this now. The primary reason for lackluster quality of TVD's first few episodes was that Elena (the audience surrogate) didn't know that vampires existed until about Episode 5. Frustrating! That unforgivable ignorance is happening here, too. But at least the TVD pilot managed to bust out some thrills and twists during its 42-minute runtime, like a truly scary cold open, a brutal "murder" of a character we'd gotten to know (Vicki), and the sudden appearance of a surprise villain/heartthrob (Damon) followed by a brutal vampire fist fight. In 666 Park Avenue a lady got her head stuck in an elevator and later a man got sucked into some wallpaper. Not the most compelling stuff. Probably the biggest shock was when Jane woke up from a nightmare (in which a character she'd never met fell off the roof), only to reveal that her feet were FILTHY. But that didn't so much scare me as remind me I need to Swiffer my floors.

I'm tempted to admit that 666 Park Avenue has potential to improve, but the characters are all so boring and the premise so maddening that I really doubt it. You're telling me the subplot where the writer spies on his neighbor is going anywhere interesting? Or the backstory of Olivia's deceased daughter? Or the psychic teen? No, I do not care about these people and I am not curious about the mosaic in the basement, either. I just don't see this happening. Good scares (and even dream sequences) are only effective when there's real tension, real stakes, and we genuinely care about the characters involved. None of these three elements were present in the pilot. Right now the only interesting thing about 666 Park Avenue is that it had the audacity to have the sign of the beast in its title. It's a great title! Unfortunately it makes a promise that the show just doesn't keep.

666 Park Avenue Series Premiere Photos

What did YOU think of 666 Park Avenue's series premiere?

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Note: I'll be taking over News Briefs for the rest of the week to give Tim some time off. I promise not to Britta this.

BUSINESS TIME

... The empire business is apparently doing well. Sunday's penultimate episode of Breaking Bad was the most-watched episode in the show's history, with right around 3 million viewers tuning in to see that one bald guy do that bad thing to that other bald guy. [Vulture]

... ESPN and MLB have agreed to an eight-year contract extension worth $5.6 billion that will keep baseball on the World Wide Leader through at least 2012. The deal, which requires ESPN to pay double what it's been paying each year, gives the network playoff game coverage, something it lost the last time it negotiated. No word as to how ESPN will integrate Tim Tebow into this coverage. [THR]

... Apparently they weren't kidding about living forever in that song: MGM TV and Nigel Lythgoe, uber-producer of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance are bringing Fame back to television with a contemporary re-imagining—not to be confused with the now less-contemporary re-imagining that happened with the 2009 feature film remake of the same property. So if you're keeping track, Fame has now been: a 1980 film by MGM, a TV show that aired from 1982–1987, a 2009 film, and now another TV show. I eagerly await the 2028 film and the 2033 TV show. [Deadline Hollywood]

... The musical chairs (not to be confused with those of The CW's immortal Oh Sit!, of course) of scheduling honchos continues, as ABC has recruited Andrew Kubitz, a CBS programming executive, to join its team. Kubitz replaces Jeff Bader, who left to go do a similar job over at NBC presumably for more money because really, who would want to do scheduling for NBC? [Variety]

... Steve Burton, a longtime fan-favorite on ABC's General Hospital is leaving the show after more than 21 years playing Jason Morgan. I'd love to tell you I had a good quip here, but soaps have taken enough hits over the last few years and I'm more of a The Young and the Restless guy. [TV Guide]

... The comedy-script buying spree continues, as NBC has grabbed hold of pitch from Cathy Yuspa and Josh Goldsmith called Gates. The script is based on a British show of the same name that just debuted a few weeks ago and follows parents dealing with the awkward situations that arise when dropping off and picking up their kids outside of school. [Deadline Hollywood]

CASTING NEWS

... Bunhead Bailey Buntain will guest on an upcoming episode of The Middle as a new student who Sue tries to mentor through the social hierarchies of high school. Shockingly, Buntain's character ends up faring better with the cafeteria's one percent than Sue typically does. [EW]

... It's that time of year when new series begin moving deeper into their initial episode orders and therefore need to fill a bunch of new roles. A slew of people joined new series over the last day or so. Michael Gaston (Damages, Fringe, Unforgettable) is coming to Last Resort for a multi-episode arc as the father of Autumn Reeser's character. He will probably wear a suit and glare at people. Pretty Little Liars' Sterling Sulieman has joined The New Normal as the "Republican EMT brother" of NeNe Leakes' character. Based on the subtle way Ryan Murphy handles things, I can't wait to see his measured approach to Republican ideology. Michael Wiseman (The Closer) and Vinessa Shaw have been cast in recurring roles on CBS's period drama Vegas. Shaw will play the wife of Michael Chiklis's Vincent Savino and Wiseman will play the right-hand man to Jonathan Banks' Chicago gangster character. I'm just happy that Banks is on another show where he gets to argue with more bald guys. [Deadline Hollywood]

... Though not casting per se, Katie Couric has announced the first guests for her aptly named daytime talk show, Katie, and if you had post-baby Jessica Simpson in your office pool then you should probably let me know where you work because it sounds like an awesome place. Simpson will be joined by Sheryl Crow, who apparently wrote and will perform the show's theme song. If you miss the opening show on September 10, it's okay, you can go back to 2003 and it will be just as relevant. Katie's other early guests include: Jennifer Lopez, Hedi Klum, Demi Lovato, 50 Shades of Grey author E.L. James, and a bunch of other women. Literally, there are no men announced to appear on the show thus far. It's like a gender reverse of most everything else on television. [Deadline Hollywood]

MAKING FUN OF JAY LENO IS AS PASSE AS JAY LENO NEWS

... Howard Stern is claiming that NBC reprimanded him for taking a shot at Jay Leno by calling Leno a "spineless maggot" during a rant about Leno's supposed pay cut that could help save jobs over at The Tonight Show. I can't wait until Leno responds to Stern by delivering a nine-minute monologue about Snooki's pregnancy. [The Wrap]

Cory Barker is a co-founder of This Was Television and the founder of TVSurveillance.com. Follow him on Twitter: @corybarker.

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