Saving Grace: Season Two (2009, Fox)
Purchase from Amazon.
TNT’s Saving Grace stars Academy Award winner Holly Hunter as Grace (betcha didn’t see that one coming!), an Oklahoma City homicide detective who’s regularly visited by a real-life angel named Earl (Leon Rippy, formerly of Deadwood). He tells her that God has a plan for her, and despite her skepticism, she does have faith.
Grace is no saint, mind you. She lives hard. She drinks to excess, has questionable work ethics (like throwing suspects down a flight of stairs to get the statement she wants), and she once had an affair with her partner, a married man. Grace has a nephew who likes to hang out with her and emulate her, and her best friend, Rhetta (Just Shoot Me’s Laura San Giacomo), is the medical examiner. Saving Grace is well acted and the stories are thought-provoking, at least in the episodes I saw (more on that in a second). Needless to say, there’s some heavy-duty spirituality on this show that may not be every viewer’s cup of tea.
I’d love to say I got caught up in the show’s second season and couldn’t put the DVDs away. I’d love to say that Saving Grace is so well done and so addictive that you should watch it on TNT and rush out and buy the first two seasons. For those of you who read my reviews, you know I’m passionate about the movies and TV shows I love, critical yet generally snark free about the things I think are crap. But I can’t tell you whether or not Saving Grace is great or crap because I only saw two episodes — Fox sent me a single promo disc. I can understand if Fox is trying to save money by only sending out the fourth of four discs from this box set, but not making every episode available to a critic is like asking a music reviewer to give his opinion on a new album based on one song. It just doesn’t work.
I can tell you that the two episodes I watched were well done and kept my attention. I was more interested in what was happening with Grace and Earl and her coming to terms with her life than the routine police cases. Frankly, the squad-room scenes felt like something I’d seen hundreds of times. In addition to the police work, there’s a continuing storyline involving a very effective Bokeem Woodbine as a death-row inmate awaiting his execution, but who he is and why he’s on death row remains a mystery to me.
Watching Holly Hunter, one of the finest actresses alive, so convincingly illustrate Grace’s struggles with her demons and her destiny is a joy, and it sparked my interest enough for me to catch the show on TNT, where it’s currently in its third season (Tuesdays, 10 PM EST). As for the season-two box set, the best I can recommend is to check out one disc, like I did, and if you like what you see, keep on watching.
With Farrah, we knew it was coming. She made her living less as an actress than a professional provocateur, first with her sole season on Charlie’s Angels, then with the poster, then with her bid for serious acting acclaim once she’d been relegated to pure cheesecake status. In the ’90s she posed nude in Playboy to show that sexiness was more than an accessory for girls under 25.
HawthoRNe in My Pride: TNT’s new “sensitive” medical drama kicked off June 16 and appeared, at least at first glance, to be heavily courting — and perhaps even banking on — the erstwhile ER audience. HawthoRNe is centered on the director of nursing at a Richmond, Virginia, hospital and features Jada Pinkett Smith as single mother/chief registered nurse Christina Hawthorne, whose calling card is putting others’ needs before her own.
Everwood: The Complete Second Season (2009, Warner)
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, The Complete Series (2009, E1)
First up is USA Network’s Royal Pains, which premiered last Thursday and runs after Burn Notice. Mark Feuerstein stars in this improbably set up series about Hank Lawson, a New York surgeon who loses his job after he decides to save a sicker patient than one of the medical facilities chief benefactors. Because the dead patient has so much money and pull, Hank is blackballed and can’t find another job. Apparently the need for excellent physicians does not extend outside of New York and Hank sits around, drinking beer and watching television while the bills stack up and his supermodel-hot fiancée breaks off the engagement when it appears that he has no future. Enter his horndog brother, Evan (Paulo Costanzo), who drags him away for a weekend in the Hamptons. Evan talks them into a huge summer party hosted by a German blue blood played by Campbell Scott.
Spin City: The Complete Second Season (2009, Shout Factory)
Gigantor: The Collection Volume 1 (2009, Koch Vision)
Gavin & Stacey, Season One (2009, BBC Video)
