Comments on: UPDATED: Premiere Week 2010 – FOX & The CW

By: Television’s Two Leagues « Just TV

Television’s Two Leagues « Just TV — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 13:50:36 +0000

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By: Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 23:53:45 +0000

I got a chance to watch Raising Hope last night, and was shocked by how much I hated it. I’d always liked My Name is Earl, so was hopeful about it, but I found Hope taking the worst of Earl (laugh at the dumb hicks!) without the best (the clever characters & storytelling, the random oddball humor of Randy & Crabman). Few shows I’ve seen seem to have this much contempt for its characters & their lives, without allowing a real connection to any of them. The ending seemed completely artificial & unearned, and I fear that the show will spend 20 minutes mocking these people before allowing them to seem human for 2 minutes for “balance.” And I simply never laughed…

By: Kyra Glass

Kyra Glass — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 00:15:00 +0000

Lone Star is the first network show I have seen in a long time that has made me really think about the major networks as liabilities for good shows. Let me be clear, I loved the show. It was beautifully shot, each frame well balanced and interesting. The writing was engaging and felt authentic. It was well acted in subtle and interesting ways. There were moments that were truly unexpected, something that is becoming very rare in television, and the shows focus on a likable but ethically complex character made me hungry for more. However, as others have posted the shows ratings may have put it in danger. Perhaps what is more realistic is to say that the shows venue put it in danger. On AMC, on Showtime, maybe even on TNT this show would have had a real chance. Acceptable ratings numbers are far lower, witness Mad Men, there is greater patience to allow a show to grow, and critical acclaim holds a lot more weight. Lone Star strikes me as an attempt at a Mad Men, a network wanting a high quality, writerly, beautifully filmed drama to compete in the realm of Emmy’s and critical acclaim. Yet they don’t seem ready to support a show in the way that this kind of a show would need to be supported.
Sharon Ross makes a wonderful point when she mentions the built on disadvantage of putting a new, and in many ways boutique show, on a night in which ABC and CBS both have strangleholds on a large swathe of the audience. Certainly we can hope that they at least give it a chance to thrive on a better night, or that NBC viewers flock to it in droves when they discover how truly bad The Event is, indeed it deserves to be a hue network success. But perhaps our best hope for Lone Star is that instead of getting cancelled it gets moved to F/X, where perhaps it should have been in the first place.