Thursday, June 16, 2011

Pilot Screener Reviewlets - FOX Dramas

- Alcatraz: it's Fringe, with Jorge Garcia instead of Joshua Jackson (also: the old guy on the team that forms by the end isn't nearly as entertaining as Walter Bishop, and the cases available in series seem, at least on first blush, to be way too "the same old thing")! I kinda wish it had opened in the present day and just started with the weird mystery popping in the middle of nowhere, instead of the blandly atmospheric mystery-tinged horror film stuff that leads to the "all the prisoners and guards at Alcatraz have disappeared, where did they go?" question. It puts us way ahead of the characters... but, hey, it's the hook, so I understand frontloading it. Loved the first act, focusing on the first Alcatraz prisoner who reappears in the present day. Then act two starts on Sarah Jones and the show, depressingly, becomes a straight procedural until she's sucked into the mystery, and all I wanted to was go back to the criminal.

- Exit Strategy: action movie adrenaline junkie procedural? Something goes wrong on a CIA mission and the team is sent in to fix it and help assets escape a bad situation. Stock characters. It's being retooled, so we'll see what they do with it. If it stays mostly the same... why not have just picked up Human Target for another 13 episodes for an action hour (regardless of the ratings not justifying it)?

- Locke & Key: love, want more, I fear it's more of a miniseries than a 22-episode season, multiple season show and probably really expensive, so that's why it didn't go? Definitely has a "something weird is happening and I, as a human being, would be asking questions and demanding everyone pay attention to it, but it's a television show so meh!" to it. Fingers crossed someone swoops in to pick it up as, perhaps, a 6-hour SyFy mini?

Not yet watched: Touch (it hasn't been filmed... quite liked the feeling I got from the script, though I haven't done a review... but also very concerned with the Tim Kring of it all, having been burned on a worldwide-scope, massive ensemble with intersecting lives, heavily serialized show from him in Heroes)

2 comments:

Another Whiner said...

Yeah, Alcatraz just felt too Abrams. And the end was just so eye rollingly predictable. But I have a feeling that it will attract an audience. The people who liked Fringe when it was more procedural will enjoy it.

Jacke said...

Well, The X Files was also a procedural show with a mythology. What did it do right to make those mysteries more involving than JJ Abrams procedurals?