Like watching a second-year veteran going through a hitting slump, three episodes into the Burn Notice sophomore season, the show still hasn’t found the same spark it displayed last summer when it became a breakout hit for the USA Network. For those of you who haven’t seen it, Burn Notice is an action-adventure series centering around ex-spy Michael Westen, played by Jeffrey Donovan. He has been “burned,” stripped of resources, and dumped in his hometown of Miami. With nothing to his name, Westen had to lean on his overbearing mother, Madeline (played by Sharon Glass) and reconnect with an old spy buddy who used to give information about Westen to the Feds. That guy’s name is Sam, and he’s played with womanizing sleazy charm by B-movie god Bruce Campbell. Also in tow is Westen’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), a hot ex-IRA operative who loves firearms. Season One followed Westen as he tried to track down the people who screwed him out of his life as a spy. At the same time, he took on side jobs helping down-on-their-luck friends of friends who needed muscle, but couldn’t go to the police. You know, like trouble with loan sharks, drug dealers or the mob. Whereas Season One had a Bourne Identity-meets-MacGyver-meets-The Equalizer sense of fun, so far Season Two feels a tad routine, and has me feeling obligated to tune in and see what happens.

The Season One cliffhanger saw Westen driving his car into the back of a semi-truck trailer to await a meeting with a mysterious woman who may or may not have burned him. As the screen went black, fans waited in anticipation to find out who was behind the overall story arc that drove his character throughout the season. One year later, the back of the trailer opened, and nothing really changed. Westen found himself helping some stranger at the bequest of the mysterious woman, Carla, (played by Battlestar Galactica’s Tricia Helfer). Carla refuses to disclose whether she is the one who actually burned Westen, and has nefarious plans to use Michael for her own needs, or his friends will pay the consequences. It all sounds intriguing, but so far, it feels like we’re treading water waiting for the big wave to come in. I suppose we, as viewers, should find the storyline of Westen and Fiona’s doomed love affair heartbreaking, or the storyline of his tortured relationship with his chain-smoking mother funny. But Gabrielle Anwar is better when she’s being sexy and dangerous instead of depressed and bitter. And frankly, as much as I admire Sharon Glass, Madeline is just plain grating. The less we see of her, the better. If the show really wants to delve into Michael’s family history, they should bring back his brother, Nate (Seth Petersen).

Will I keep watching Burn Notice? Sure. It’s on a season pass on my TiVo. However, I don’t rush to watch it when I know there may be other, more interesting things waiting for me. Here’s hoping the show rediscovers its swing before too long and breaks out of its slump.

Elvis Mitchell is one of the preeminent film critics and interviewers of our generation. Since 1996 his NPR radio show, The Treatment, has been a stomping ground for popular culture’s most talented and important individuals, where they can speak freely about their craft without the pressure of feeling like they’re “promoting” their work. Mitchell’s cool and laid-back style seems to place all of his guests at ease, including his listeners. It’s not just his ability to conduct an interview but his vast knowledge of information that makes him such a pleasure to listen to. In addition to The Treatment, Mitchell is also the entertainment critic for NPR’s Weekend Edition With Scott Simon, a job he’s held since the show’s debut in 1985. His extensive list of credits includes hosting Independent Focus for the Independent Film Channel, guest-hosting for Charlie Rose on several occasions, and a four-year stint as film critic for the New York Times, beginning in 2000.

Tonight at 8 PM ET (with a repeat at 10:30), Turner Classic Movies premieres Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence, the network’s first interview program. In the first installment, taped last year, Mitchell talks with the late Sydney Pollack, and in coming weeks he sits down with Bill Murray, Laurence Fishburne, and Quentin Tarantino, among others, to discuss the art of filmmaking and just to listen to these craftsmen share their stories. More than your typical interview show, Under the Influence has the feel of overhearing a wonderful conversation in a restaurant or at a party, and therefore is a natural extension of Mitchell’s radio show. Whether you’re familiar with Elvis Mitchell or just being introduced to him, Under the Influence is a treat for fans of movies and those of us who simply enjoy an intelligent discussion between two knowledgeable people. I had the opportunity to speak to Mitchell via telephone in early June; throughout our conversation I found myself intently listening to him but at times forgetting that I was the one doing the interview. He has that way with people. Although he professed to being as nervous as the interviewee, it never came across that way.

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I was supposed to write a column about several reality shows airing this summer, and I had good intentions of doing just that. But the only reality I know right now is that I’m an addict … to Lost. I must find out what happens to the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, which departed Sydney, Australia, for Los Angeles, California, on September 24, 2004, and crashed on an uncharted island.

It began as a curiosity. See, I was over at ABC.com, doing research for my Three Strikes column on Brothers & Sisters. All I wanted was a jpeg, you know? Honest, this was the only reason I was even near the site. Then I saw an option: “Full Episodes.” I mean, what could it hurt to check and see what they were streaming, right? Maybe… maybe they had unaired episodes of Cavemen, I liked that show. I did; really, I’m not making this up! Clicking that link was like finding a private room at some teenage suburban party where all of the “good” kids are drinking smuggled beers in the living room and the “cool” kids are doing something else away from the crowd.

I’d decided long ago that I wasn’t going to get caught up in the Lost hysteria. After I missed most of the first season, I thought there was no way to catch up. Sure, the DVD’s are available to rent, but I wasn’t going to waste one of the entries of my Netflix queue with Lost, not when I had 300 movies to get through. And after two seasons, I stopped caring. I thought, “Come on, can it really be as good as Deadwood, Veronica Mars or Friday Night Lights. Was Lost even close to the caliber of The Sopranos?” I scoffed at the notion. But Abc.com… damn you ABC! It taunted me… “Lost Season 1 in streaming HD.” HD? C’mon, it can’t be that good. I reasoned with myself, “Look, just this one episode. I’ll watch the pilot and be able to claim I’ve seen Lost. Then, back to my life.”

My life. Ha! I have no life! Two hours after watching the pilot, I was hooked. (more…)

TBS begins their summer of comedy this Thursday night (6/12/08) with the second season premieres of The Bill Engvall Show (9:00 PM) and My Boys(9:30 PM).

The Bill Engvall Show is the more traditional of the two sitcoms, and by traditional, I mean there’s nothing new here. In the show, Engvall, the popular stand up famous for his “blue collar,” plays Bill Pearson, a family counselor who can’t always figure out his own family. His typical sitcom nuclear family includes a smart, beautiful wife, played by the underrated Nancy Travis, and three very different children: An older, headstrong teenage girl played by Jennifer Lawrence, a space cadet teenage son played by Graham Patrick Martin, and a brainy, mature tween son played by Skyler Gisondo. In addition, Tim Meadows is on hand as Engvall’s best friend, Paul. Paul is a renowned hair-replacement specialist who is treated like part of the Pearson family. He likes to look good, but he’s unlucky in love.

As an added treat, Brian Doyle Murray shows up on occasion as the Pearson’s cranky neighbor. The plots of the The Bill Engvall Show are something you’ve seen thousands of times. So why watch it? For one, Travis is wonderful, and her scenes opposite Engvall ring true of a real marriage. Engvall may not be the best actor in the world, but he has good comic timing, and his interplay with Travis is fun to watch. Moreover, he and Meadows seem to have a real bond, and play off each other quite well. In general, the best-played scenes take place between the adult characters, whereas the scenes with the children are overly predictable. Still, despite the predictability of The Bill Engvall Show, the creators’ intent from the beginning was to create a “traditional family sitcom,” and they have succeeded in doing just that. In truth, this is the perfect type of show for summer viewing: not much required from you as a viewer and just enough laughs to go down with your beer.

I must admit that I turned off My Boys during its inaugural season. There was a bevy of hype surrounding the show, and it was praised by many critics as one of the best comedies on television; unfortunately, for me, it was originally paired with 10 Items or Less, a series that put me on the floor with laughter. Whenever My Boys came on, I found it nice, but not the greatest comedy since Arrested Development. Thus, when asked to review the upcoming second season, I tried to approach the show with an open mind, even though I feared hating it. (more…)

USA Network’s latest in a successful slate of summertime programs is In Plain Sight (premiering 6/1/08 and airing Sundays, 10 PM). The series stars Mary McCormack as Mary Shannon, a federal marshal for the Federal Witness Protection Program. The show takes place primarily in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area, where Shannon is based. McCormack is a fine actress whose most visible role is still that of Alison Stern, the wife to Howard Stern in the 1997 film, Private Parts. Since then, she has appeared in a number of indie movies, as well as excellent supporting roles in such television series like Murder One, The West Wing, ER, K-Street and the exceptional 2004 USA Network mini-series, Traffic. It’s great to see McCormack the lead in a series that blends comedy, drama and mystery; she makes the show worth checking out.

In Plain Sight joins the ranks of TNT’s The Closer and Saving Grace as another series about a strong female lead who must juggle the strenuous requirements of her law enforcement job with the daily struggles of her daily life. McCormack’s Shannon character is much closer to Kyra Sedgwick’s quirky Deputy Chief Johnson than the human train wreck Holly Hunter portrays in Saving Grace. In Plain Sight does a good job of mixing the serious with the light comedy, much in the way Burn Notice, USA’s hit series from last summer, does very well. That said, this new series isn’t reinventing the procedural drama, nor do I think they’re trying to. The unique setup of the Witness Protection Program allows for secondary characters (i.e. each weeks guest stars) to represent each episode’s main storyline. These characters come in, tell their story, and are gone by hour’s end. Meanwhile, the supporting cast of people in Shannon’s life serves as the background stories that connect each episode together. Like I said, this is a tried and true formula. So it’s up to the writers to come up with compelling stories and interesting characters to keep us coming back on a weekly basis. For the most part, they succeed. By the third episode, the series began to show the actors gelling and everything coming together. In truth, it will be the likeability of the characters that will bring you back each week, and the producers rounded up a fine group of actors to do just that.

The supporting characters include Shannon’s partner, Marshall (Frederick Weller), a young, cocky pretty boy who, despite a caseload of his own, is always quick to help our Shannon. Weller does a lot of posturing throughout the early episodes; however, the banter between his Marshall and McCormack’s Shannon is fun to watch. Stan McQueen (Paul Ben-Victor) plays their chief inspector. I didn’t get a real sense of his character, although he spent the first few episodes exasperated by Shannon and her methods. On the home front, there is Shannon’s live in mother, Jinx, played by the wonderfully loopy Lesley Ann-Warren (who doesn’t get enough juicy roles, these days); Shannon’s on-again/off-again boyfriend, Raphael, portrayed by recent Dancing with the Stars contestant Cristián de la Fuente, and her floozy sister, Brandi, (Nicole Hiltz) who has dropped into town unexpectedly for an extended visit. Brandi has a no-good boyfriend who is destined to bring big trouble into the life of Shannon and her family. (more…)

So here we are at the end of another cycle of Fox’s juggernaut, American Idol. For seven seasons, the televised talent show has been the thorn in the side of every network and the scorn of “real” music fans. I’ll admit it, I watch the show. I enjoy hearing these contestants trying to make it big, and it is one of the few programs my family can watch together. Even “family” shows, these days deal with issues that are a little to mature for a six- and nine-year-old. This year, the show that gave us the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Chris Daughtry (and cursed us with Taylor Hicks and Clay Aiken) has seen its ratings suffer a blow. Was it fallout from the recent writers’ strike that also ate away at the ratings for so many other primetime series? Or was it something else? Although American Idol will finish the year the number one-rated show, giving Fox another season win in the ratings war, I believe viewers got a stale taste in their mouths.

The show suffered from several setbacks early on, starting with the weeks of audition episodes that seemed to drag on like they would never end. We get it, hundreds of thousands of people auditioned and the poor, overpaid judges had to suffer through innumerable bad auditions. Boo hoo. Here’s something I don’t get. If only the most talented singers are supposed to get through the door to meet Randy, Paula and Simon, how come we end up seeing so many shitty vocalists? Sure, one or two might be good for a laugh, but it gets old really fast. A smart thing to do would be to pare down these audition episodes to a two-hour special and then get on with it. Another problem the show had was its bloated Wednesday night episodes that are supposed to serve notice to the person going home that week. Instead of announcing the loser in one half hour segment, we were subjected to live question-and-answer portions via the Internet. People don’t care whether Simon and Paula really hate each other, or if one of the contestants is single. We just want to hear them sing. (more…)

Hey, all. This week I learned what they mean by “chasing down an interview.” I had been planning to post a conversation with one of the actors from October Road, and the two of us have been playing phone tag for days. My backup plan for this week, a write up of the Gene Wilder special on Turner Classic Movies that premieres Tuesday, fell through when the network failed to get me a screener. Bummer. I love Wilder. Anyway, at the last minute (i.e. Sunday morning) I was hanging with my son on the living room couch when I was inspired to write the following. I hope you enjoy it. Aloha.

One of the drawbacks of my son Jacob’s breathing treatments for cystic fibrosis is the amount of television he and his sister, Sophie, end up watching. While we try to curb the level of crap they end up seeing, some things slip thought the cracks. Unfortunately, once an adventure show like Power Rangers kicks down your front door with its level of “fantasy” violence, as a parent you wind up sitting with he kids making sure what’s on the screen is not too inappropriate (this also goes for those teen shows on Nick and Disney which deal with complex emotional issues that I find a little much for my nine-year-old). When Jacob was younger, watching television with him was a mixed bag. The Wiggles were tolerable, Sesame Street educational, but Barney made me want to rip my hair out. My son’s interests have now shifted to comic books and action figures (”guys,” as he calls them, even the female superheroes) and for a thirtysomething fanboy like myself, it’s an opportunity to relive a bit of my childhood.

The most memorable television shows from my youth were Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers (the latter’s theme song is still embedded in my memory). Both series were originally Japanese animated shows produced in the early ’70s (Gatchaman and Space Battleship Yamato, respectively) and imported into U.S. syndication during the latter half of the decade with English-dubbed voices and some of the adult content sliced out for the target audience of prepubescent boys. What made them so enjoyable to tune into was the continuing drama that unfolded in each episode. Battle of the Planets may have been about the struggle between a group of teen warriors taking on an evil alien nemesis, but there was always the mystery surrounding the identity of the villain Zoltar and the question of hero Mark’s family lineage that carried on from episode to episode. Likewise, Star Blazers was the ongoing saga of a space battleship (modeled after a WWII battleship) on a a yearlong mission to save Earth. Each episode concluded with a countdown to the number of days remaining for the Star Force (as the crew was called) to complete their mission and save humanity. Good stuff.

Looking back, these animated TV shows, along with the chapter-like structure of classic X-Men and Teen Titans comics I was reading at age 11, influenced the type of writer I would become one day. I was not alone, as most of the animated series that are popular today use continuing storyline structures, like nighttime dramas and the comic books from which they are drawing stories and inspiration. Although superheroes have broad appeal (e.g. The Incredibles, the Spider-Man films, 300, and Batman Begins), television animation is treated like the bastard child of entertainment, as if its sole purpose is to sell toys and cereal. Fortunately, the writers and artists that work on most of these series don’t think that way. Here are four of the best action/adventure animated shows currently running on television. Now, if you’re not into this type of thing, I ask you to still read on. Being familiar with them may some day make you a very cool uncle or aunt. (more…)

Yeah, I may catch a lot of crap for this review, but I have my reasons for writing about October Road: actor Geoff Stults is a friend of mine. When he was an unknown, he embarked on a ridiculous adventure with me, starring in a still-unseen movie I directed entitled King’s Highway. Geoff was 100% committed to the project and never wavered over the course of the two years it took us to complete the project. In addition, Geoff has shown generosity whenever I have come calling for donations to the CF Foundation. Bottom line: good guy all around.

Because I think he’s a fine actor, I was thrilled when he was cast in the ABC series October Road, which debuted last spring and began its second season last Thanksgiving. While the show may not be a classic like Friday Night Lights, it is definitely not as horrid as critics would have you believe. Although the show got off to a painful start, I forewent my three strike rule because I wanted my friend to have success. And you know what? I’m glad I stuck with it. By the end of Season One, October Road had become a heartwarming, sometimes funny show. Syrupy and contrived, but still a guilty pleasure. (more…)