Since many TV shows hit their stride after a few episodes, I never feel it’s good to review a show after the first episode. Well it’s been a few weeks now, some shows, surprisingly, have been cancelled and now I can give some comments on what I’ve seen of the season so far.


Hawaii 5-0: OK, this show pretty much broke my rule of giving a show a chance past the first episode because it was SO unbelievable. When I was reminded the FIFTH time that Steve McGarrett was trying to solve the murder of his father I lost it. His father’s dead, we saw it happen, I get it, let’s move on. By the second episode I was done (yes I did give the show another chance) because I was tired of hearing about how Chin Ho was a ‘bad’ cop but everyone on the force misunderstood him and his cousin was going to pay for his sins. I don’t need to have everything explained to me. I thought I might have a problem with the show because of the old series, but this is so different that wasn’t the issue of my less than glowing opinion of it. There wasn’t any logical growth to the formation of the team. Basically, McGarrett father was killed and the governor gives his Navy SEAL hot shot son a badge, a gun and free reign to pursue and capture anyone he wants on the island. You think I’m kidding but she says so in the pilot. In what universe does a governor have the power to give one guy blanket powers to do anything he wants?


The Event: Talk about dropping someone in the middle of something. The Event is supposed to be the big mystery/conspiracy show this year and the frustrating part of this show is you kind of want to like it, in a guilty pleasure way, but the internal logic and reminder of better and worse shows gets in the way of fully hating or loving it. It reminds me, in more ways than one, of HEROES in the first season, where I wanted to embrace and like it, and I did to a degree, but there were little things that bugged me that became huge logic errors by the second and third season. One big problem in casting this show; if you have a character that is a CIA operative (in this case director) who is supposed to know a lot of secrets about The Event and has lots of yelling, wondering and otherwise standard by the book government lackey stuff, don’t use the same actor who played the same role in a show (HEROES) you want to convince people this show isn’t. The Event wants to be LOST so bad it even has a plane crash and a narrative that goes from the present to the past. The big failing of The Event is they are trying to play coy about The Event and people involved in The Event you have to swallow a lot of hokum to accept the premise, then the show takes this logic and changes it to its whim. An example would be the boyfriend of the kidnapped girl who has been stupid lucky for the past two episodes then in the third, when it is needed, we find out he’s this computer hacker who went to MIT. If that’s the case why has it taken him so long (we have established it has been a few days since his girlfriend has been kidnapped) for him to realize his identity was erased? I mean that’s stuff right out of 2600 handbook which even a casual hacker, let alone one who supposedly broke into some super lab at 16 and was on the CIA’s radar, would know. I’ll watch for a little more but it isn’t making me happy.


No Ordinary Family: Another show trying to pretend it’s something else and failing miserably. No, critics of America, this is not The Incredibles. ABC wants you to think that because it was a successful movie by the parent company Disney. No this is HEROES, and like HEROES it’s not built with a solid foundation but only with an interesting premise with nowhere to go. This to me will probably be a beautiful train wreck of a show because the actors are trying to make it work but the writers are like subpar on the idea scale. The first failing was in revealing in the first episode that there are others with the super abilities, which would mean this family having them isn’t unique and probably means there is some devious purpose for it happening. Now cue the evil music tying the scientist/wife’s boss to the evil music and to the super power guy that was killed. Oh, and let’s have the dumbest female next to Lois Lane as a police detective. If the police sketch artist is in a parking garage fighting a guy who is kind of moving fast and you happen to shoot said fast guy, the first thing you do is NOT to tell the sketch artist to leave the scene, then discount him the rest of that episode and the next when he gives you leads about bank robbers. When he reveals he has super powers, and this is after the ‘mysterious guy (more on him later)’ you tell him stop being a vigilante and walk away from it. That’s the best you’ve got. Oh, and the jump the shark moment was when the mysterious guy turns out to be Sylar from HEROES. OH, not the real Sylar but when he has finger telekinesis, strangles the female detective with his mind/finger, then causes her gun to float in the air and fire at her (I refuse to believe they killed her off as implied) you have done the same thing Sylar did four years ago.

 

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Some TV Reviews - October 11, 2010
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