CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

Bravo has started showing The Larry Sanders Show in rerun. I used to watch it sporadically during its inital run on HBO, and really liked it, but was not a regular viewer.

Bravo shows it twice a night, and with TiVo I am now a regular viewer, and I have to say that this show is one of the best pieces of entertainment it has been my pleasure to experience. Just for kicks I checked it out at IMDB and found that The Larry Sanders Show was nominated for over 50 Emmy’s during its six year run! And most people I talk to have never even heard of it, much less seen it.

For those unfamiliar, the star of the show is Garry Shandling, and he plays a character named Larry Sanders. In the show, Larry Sanders has a talk show that competes with Leno and Letterman, complete with real guests playing themselves as if they were on a talk show. For example, on the final show of the series, the following people appeared as themselves: Ellen DeGeneres, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Clint Black, Tim Allen, Warren Beatty, Carol Burnett, David Duchovny, Greg Kinnear, Jon Stewart, Bruno Kirby, Sean Penn, and Tom Petty.

I’ve also seen episodes that included segments taped by Jay Leno, as if doing the Tonight Show, where he refers to ‘The Larry Sanders Show’. Also, the guest stars are not treated with kid gloves, and are not always portrayed sympathetically. Some of them even gamely play into the most unappealing aspects of their own public personas.

All of this has the effect of blurring the lines of reality. I mean, at some points in the show, you’re watching Larry doing his show (the show within the show), and then other times you are watching the backstage/offstage stuff. And sometimes you’re seeing a view from offstage of the show as it’s being taped. They even shoot the show-within-a-show on tape, and the backstage/offstage stuff on film, so the distinction is always very clear, further enhancing the effect.

But all of the guest stars and filming techniques are simply the gravy…the meat and potatoes are the excellent writing and acting by the ensemble cast. Both the show and the show-within-a-show are well-written, funny, and engaging.

One note about content…since this was originally a cable series, the characters (when offstage) use profanity and make sexual innuendos, and Bravo only bleeps (not cuts) the very worst parts (they bleep the eff word, but not the ess word, for example). If you’re offended by profanity, even in context, you may want to skip this show altogether.

That being said, I highly recommend ‘The Larry Sanders Show’. Tune in for a couple of episodes to get a feel for the characters and the situation, and I think you’ll be hooked. Seeing this show also makes me wonder why nobody is syndicating Garry Shandling’s first series, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”, which had similar reality-blurring situations (and also had one of the catchiest theme songs in television history…my wife and daughter

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What an idiotic show. These are supposed to be the crime scene investigators, but they end up questioning witnesses, pursuing suspects, making arrests, etc, none of which is their job. There was an episode with a private plane crash in the Everglades, and the CSI team handled the entire case. No local police. No feds. No FAA. Nothing. Ridiculous.

Some of the forensic stuff is interesting, but they dumb it wayyy down for the audience, and the characters spend a lot of time saying things like, “I think I’ll use the mike-row-scope now, which is a device that will let me be able to see tiny things as if they were slightly larger.”

And (my apologies to Marie) *what* is the appeal of David Caruso? He looks as translucent and fragile as a newborn baby bird (see http://us.imdb.com/Name?Caruso,+David), he arrogantly left his first-and-only hit TV show (NYPD Blue) for a film career that flopped, while boldly predicting that NYPD Blue would fail without him (it’s still going strong), has made a string of deplorable movies, and just doesn’t seem to have any charisma at all, to me. I guess he falls into the category of Things Scott Doesn’t Understand About Women. He’ll be entry number 165,145,798,643,654,134. Approximately.

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If you took 24, La Femme Nikita, Dawson’s Creek, and the Matrix, mixed them all up, kept in all the mediocre parts, and took out all the really good and really bad stuff, you’d end up with something a lot like Alias. This series is okay, bordering on good, with the potential to be really good, meaning that the ingredients are there, but they just need to be tweaked, in my opinion.

The basic storyline is that there is a father/daughter team who are good guys working for the CIA, but they also work as double agents infiltrating an organization called SD-6. SD-6 is part of a global conspiracy to…take over the world, I guess…but they tell all of their staffers that they’re working for the CIA. So, our main characters work for the *actual* CIA while also working undercover as double agents at an agency that *isn’t* the CIA but tells their people that they are. It’s actually not as confusing as it sounds.

Throw into that mix the fact that the lady who is the wife of the father and the mother of the daughter is also a KGB agent who has surrendered to the CIA and may actually be helping them against SD-6, but might also be playing Machiavillian games with them.

The premise actually works for me, and the actors do a good job. Unfortunately, though, for me the writing is already starting to get a little repetitive, and the plot is not moving along very quickly, and the scenes where they dip into personal-life-angst are a little heavy-handed, and the action sequences are well-staged, but unexciting.

I’m sticking with it, however, because it’s just good and interesting enough to keep me involved, and I want to see where they go with it. My hope is that they pick up the pace and drop some of the syrup.

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The last TV drama I watched with any regularity was probably…L.A. Law, maybe? That was a long time ago. Since then I’ve never been able to ‘get into’ any of the drama series. Part of the reason is that I found it increasingly difficult to commit to an hour a week at a fixed time. But the major reason was that they just didn’t do it for me. I tried to watch ER, but didn’t care for it. I tried to watch Law and Order, didn’t care for it. I tried to watch some of the family dramas, but I not only didn’t care for them, their treacly contrivances actually offended me, artistically (even though I was allowing for the fact that it was television in the first place).

Then last year I saw the first couple episodes of the first season of 24, at Marie’s request. It was very interesting, well-acted, gripping stuff, and I really liked it, but I still drifted in my viewership habits, and once you miss an episode of 24, you’re really stuck, because each season is one day (24 hours) in real time.

But now I have TiVo (why did I wait!!???), so I don’t have to worry about being home at a certain time, or missing an episode, and I have seen every episode so far this season (2nd season). I look forward to each episode with great anticipation, but also some dread, because the series builds up incredible amounts of tension and suspense, and I find that watching it is a draining experience. For reference, I’m no lightweight entertainment consumer, and regularly watch such tense/suspenseful fare as Apocalypse Now, Clockwork Orange, Eraserhead, etc, all of which are life-changingly intense, so I have a tolerance for that type of thing.

But 24 still manages to get under my skin and make me squirm. It’s not gross or ultra-violent, but it uses the story and the characters to build incredible amounts of tension and anticipation, all while telling a tight, believable story. I’m not going to give any of the plot away, because this series is *very* plot-driven, but suffice it to say that it involves things of global importance as well as things that are of paramount importance to the individual characters as people.

I highly recommend this series. If you’ve missed part of this season, I suggest you wait until it comes out on DVD and/or in reruns. I’m also thinking about getting all of last season on DVD, even though I know how it turned out. That’s how much I like this show.

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That’s right, that’s one half of one star. We watched about 90 minutes of this 2 hour mini-series debut episode, and that was all I could stand. I have enormous respect for Steven Spielberg, although that does not translate into liking everything he does. And the first 90 minutes of the debut episode of “Taken” combined the worst Spielbergian traits, in my opinion. The beginning of the show contains a voice-over by what sounds like an 8 year old boy, talking in an inexplicably erudite manner, but with a child’s voice. Think of Harrison Ford’s voice-over in “Blade Runner”, without the cursing, done by an adolescent boy, and you’ll get the idea. Now, picture that what he’s narrating is set in a treacly, plasticized, idealized vision of the 1940’s. Here’s a list of hackneyed clichés from just the first 90 minutes:

Blond, square-jawed, blue-eyed Marine who appears to be a good guy, but also seems to have a darker side.
The plain-Jane daughter of the colonel, with whom BEM (blue-eyed Marine) flirts, apparently to curry favor with the colonel
The bad-girl in the convertible, with whom the BEM flirts a bit more aggressively, and whom the BEM snubs in order to culture favor with plain-Jane, even though he’s *really* attracted to bad-convertible-girl
Nazi’s in a dream/flashback/nightmare
Gruff-but-lovable dad hiking with his two Boy Scout sons, coming across something otherworldly, then taking BEM there to look at it
Brave, efficient American WWII pilots being shot down in a vroomy dogfight
Strange lights (like the small ones in Close Encounters) swooping in to “save” the shot down plane
Typical 1940’s diner waitress at the end of her shift, being told by the gruff-but-lovable cook/owner to go home, and that her husband isn’t good enough for her
Waitress’ good-for-nothing husband leaving on a sudden three week business trip saying, “If you need me, call the home office. They know where I’ll be.”
Bad-convertible-girl almost getting decapitated by the crashing saucer in Roswell, NM, then wandering through the crash site and picking up a strange piece of metal
Bad-convertible-girl showing up at BEM’s office with metal in a paper sack, telling him she needs to talk to him, *not* telling him what it’s about, he assumes it’s relationship-related, so has an underling send her packing
Brave, efficient, shot-down, alien-probed pilot returning home to a world where everything he knows is wrong (and his life is not his own)
Lights in the sky making car engines die out
UFOs being explained as weather balloons
Dead alien bodies laid out in the desert, looking just like the aliens from Close Encounters
Crashed alien ship, four dead alien bodies, but the ship had…dramatic music…*five* seats…duh duh duhhhhhhhh (it couldn’t possibly be that there was one empty seat)
Mysterious, ailing visitor showing up in the barn (replete with door flapping and banging in the wind), and being taken in by 1940’s waitress (who’s husband happens to have just left on a “business trip”)
And on, and on, and on, and on…

I am not even doing justice to the awful triteness of this episode. I understand that

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