Mid-season

So, it’s the lull in the entertainment year, when Hollywood finishes up off-loading its most awful movies that it doesn’t want to send direct to video and television shows are in re-runs and cancelled shows are replaced.

The replacement shows are a mixed bag this time around, but there are two surprisingly good ones:

• The New Adventures of Old Christine is really, really funny, which is remarkable, considering how Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ first post-Seinfeld show, Watching Ellie, was unbelievably awful. (It even had a character quite clearly intended to be almost identical to Kramer.) It’s not changing the face of comedy or anything, but that’s OK: Just being a really solid sitcom is plenty.
• Conviction, which is set in the Law & Order universe, but without the theme song and stilted structure, is also pretty good, although maybe not quite as good. It’s odd seeing a kid who looks like Fred Savage — but isn’t — as a lawyer, but the rest of the show is pretty darn interesting, although only on TV would they refer to someone who makes more than $50,000/year as “underpaid.”
• Heist, though, ouch. It should be noted that I like stories about criminals. One of my favorite comic books of all time is Secret Society of Super-Villains #1, where Mirror Master and Captain Cold rob a fast food restaurant in lieu of paying for lunch. I dig villian-centered novels (my father introducing me to Slippery Jim DiGriz was probably a bad role model to set up for me) and caper movies. This, though, this is just bad. Leaving aside that it’s trying to cash in on the buzz generated by Andre Braugher’s Thief on another network: It’s got characters named Lola and Pops. It has scenes painfully clearly written while the screenwriters were rewinding and watching key scenes from Pulp Fiction. It has people amusingly punching each other in the face. It has the actress who plays the really, really bitchy wife of Shane on The Shield as an impossibly young chief of detectives. I actually felt brain cells of mine dying as I watched this, and wouldn’t be at all shocked to learn they’d left a note.
• According to Tom Shales at the Washington Post, I’m probably being too easy on Heist, if anything: “‘Heist’ seems derivative of an imitation of a copy of a clone — so plastic-coated and phony that it’s hard to tell what it’s ripping off.”.

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