Posts Tagged ‘TNT’

  
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

TV on DVD: “Leverage”

by Scott Malchus

leverage-aLeverage: The 1st Season (2009, Paramount)
Purchase from Amazon

Not since the late ’60s Robert Wagner series, It Takes a Thief, has a television show about thieves been so much fun. Combining elements from that great show and the very successful Ocean’s Eleven films, TNT’s Leverage has all of the makings of a long running show. The first season has just been released on DVD, and I highly recommend it as a good way to sit back and be thoroughly entertained.

After years of sub-par movies and tiny supporting roles, Timothy Hutton landed a role that does his talent proud. He stars as Nate Ford, a former insurance fraud investigator whose son died while he stood helpless as doctors tried to save the boy. Denied the right to a lifesaving procedure by the insurance company he works for, Nate is bitter, divorced, and has turned to the bottle to help him get through his pain. Nate gets lured into overseeing an operation to recover stolen plans for a devious corporate executive (guest star Saul Rubinek). He agrees to manage a three-person team of thieves: Eliot Spence (Christian Kane) a highly skilled fighter and weapons expert; Parker (Beth Riesgarf) an expert thief; and Alec Hardison (Aldis Hodge) a computer whiz and expert hacker. After successfully completing their mission, the team is double crossed and nearly killed. Nate puts together a plan for their subsequent retaliation. He brings into the fold a fourth member, lovely grifter Sophie (Gina Bellman) with whom he has a complicated relationship dating back to his days in te insurance business. After completing this revenge mission and making enough money to retire, Nate convinces his group of con artists that they could actually go on doing what they did, but helping people who have been ripped off by greedy corporations or all around nasty people.

Leverage has a winning formula for success. Each episode has its own standalone story: The Leverage team finds some unlucky soul and helps them out of a jam. At the same time, each episode continues the arc of Nate’s story. Will he get revenge on his old bosses? Will the team get caught by his old rival, James Sterling (Mark A. Sheppard)? Plus there are romantic overtures between Nate and Sophie and Hardison and Parker that add sparks. (more…)

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Friday, June 26th, 2009

TV on DVD: “Saving Grace: Season Two”

by Scott Malchus

Saving GraceSaving 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.

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Monday, June 8th, 2009

The Three Strike Rule: “Royal Pains,” “Nurse Jackie” and “Hawthorne”

by Scott Malchus

Probably because my mother was a nurse, I will always have an interest in medical shows, good or bad. An early TV addiction to St Elsewhere helped fuel that interest. With the summer upon us and cable networks bringing out their slate of shows, there are three new medical related series to make you laugh, cry and possibly inspire.

pains_500First 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.

Hank happens to be in the right place at the right time when a girl collapses, vomiting. When the resident “concierge” doctor misdiagnoses her as an overdose, Hank halts him before she’s injected with medicine that could kill her. Of course, Hank saves the girl’s life. Scott’s German happen to witnesses the whole incident and is so impressed that he immediately offers him a job as the Hampton’s concierge doctor for the summer. (more…)

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Monday, May 11th, 2009

21st Century Digital Boy: Rescue Me, Grey’s Marriages, Bargains, “Can We Talk?” and the NBA

by Peter Chakerian

rescuemeRescue Me

OK, I’m finally ready to proclaim what a lot of you already have: the FX network’s Tuesday night show Rescue Me is stunningly brilliant. It’s a good thing, too, because the setting for the show—a New York firehouse post-9/11 attacks—deserves the kind of great writing it has.

Blame my late public announcement on coming late to the Denis Leary/Peter Tolan-anchored firefighter drama, but thanks to the miracle of Hulu.com—a friend second only to a DVR box for any tragically over-scheduled house like mine—I’m finally caught up.

I honestly don’t think there’s a better drama on television right now, but that in itself is a miracle of sorts: the last couple of years of this five-season show were less than stellar. But after the writers’ strike and a reduced number of episodes in a season, Rescue Me is streamlined and sharp enough to reapply for that “Best Drama on TV” status.

Viewers need look no further than the last episode, where 9/11 firefighter widow Sheila Keefe (played by Callie Thorne) nailed a mouthful of inspired monologue in one freaking take. Yeah, five minutes in one take. It was, in a word, incredible.

The personal trials and tribulations within the show’s plot continue to thicken: Tommy Gavin (Leary) returns to Ground Zero and the back pain that Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale) is experiencing turns out to be more than he bargained for/expected and Genevieve’s perspectives on the terrorist attacks push Gavin over the edge. Rescue Me airs tomorrow night and if you’re not watching it, you’re due to miss a five-alarm fire. (more…)

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Monday, September 1st, 2008

The Three Strike Rule: “Raising the Bar”

by Scott Malchus

Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue) returns to the television landscape tonight at 10 PM EST with another lawyer series on TNT.

Raising the Bar focuses on the justice system through the eyes of the DA’s office and the public defenders office. Although wonderful actresses Jane Kaczmarek (Malcolm in the Middle) and Gloria Reuben (ER) are on hand to add stature to the series, the real stars of the show are the young, good-looking actors playing young, good-looking lawyers. They’re led by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, the former teen star (do I even need to tell you?) who has a real “in” with Bochco, having appeared in Bochco’s NYPD Blue and Commander in Chief.

Gosselaar portrays Jerry Kellerman, a brash, idealistic public defender who is constantly butting heads with the justice system, primarily Kaczmarek’s off-kilter Judge Kessler (it is a bit strange that each case he has is assigned to Kessler). Reuben is Kellerman’s boss, although she only seems to appear when he needs advice. So far she has been wasted in her role.

As with most of Bochco’s series in the past, the draw of this show isn’t the issues, but the characters. Like I said, the cast members are good-looking thirtysomethings with enough charm and sex appeal to entice viewers back each week. In both tone and execution, Raising the Bar feels like a legal version of Grey’s Anatomy, especially in the manner in which all of these same lawyers seem to be good friends and hang out at the same watering hole after a long day at the job. Am I the only person who, when the work day is done, actually goes home to the wife and kids? I don’t know.

Despite the show’s familiarity, it isn’t bad; the acting is excellent, and the production values are top-notch. TNT has really become a destination place for producers to take shows that may not have caught on with the other 4 “big” networks. Additionally, TNT and its cable cousins seem to be more patient with a series, allowing it time to work out the kinks. Case in point: the pilot episode of Raising the Bar was pretty clunky, and almost made me not want to watch any more episodes. However, by the second episode, Kaczmarek’s antics were toned down and Gosselaar’s histrionics were kind of shoved out the window. This was a positive move for the show. (more…)

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