I was recently catching up with the last few episodes of Mad Men. (It’s one of the coolest new shows on the air, by the way… Of all places, it’s on AMC.)  Anyway, they had a line that I thought was fantastic, so I had to write it down.  The philandering creative director at the ad agency was giving advice to his secretary, whom he had recently made a junior copywriter.  He said to her:

“Think about it, deeply, then forget it.  An idea will jump up and hit you in the face.”

So true.  Usually.

OK, I’m not fanatical about checking the stats of who visits my blog. (Well, not as much as I once was…) This morning, however, in a fit of procrastination, I did take a look. Normally, you can’t tell much about the people who come to your site, beyond an IP address and what part of the country or world they’re visiting from. But today, one of the referrals to my site was from someone’s e-mail account. And, for whatever reason, I was able to see a person’s name. Seeing the opportunity to procrastinate further, I googled the person. He is the assistant to the executive producer of one of the shows I recently reviewed!

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So bad. So very, very bad. So very, very, unbelievably, very, very bad.

I applaud attempting a musical television show, even if the last example, Cop Rock, pretty much earned itself eternal punchline status. Viva Lauglin, however, features not musical numbers, but characters singing along to the original version of pop songs. Why? Can’t tell. If you’re going to interrupt story with songs, at least feature the voice of the performer. And you probably need more than a few songs to qualify as a musical.

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Writing a new sitcom is really, really, really hard. You have to build an entire world, introduce us to all the main characters, tell a whole lot of jokes, take us through the plot of that episode, and make us want to see more. In today’s world, you get only twenty minutes to do it, and instead of competing with two other networks, you now compete with a hundred options, not counting the internet and video games. Oh yeah… also, if you don’t get great ratings by episode two, you’ll be yanked.

Samantha Who? does a pretty deft job of showing us Samantha’s world, as she herself attempts to get her bearings. See, Samantha hit her head and now has amnesia. Once we accept the soap opera-y premise and sit back for the ride, we watch a script that does most of what a sitcom pilot must. We meet and enjoy the people in Samantha’s life. We understand her world, and get some hints of who she used to be. Though the jokes start out a little like an 80s sitcom, making us expect a laugh track to convince us they’re funny, soon enough the show finds a wit that is more sly, befitting its single-camera format.

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You remember when Dangerous Liaisons came out as a movie, in English, and then it became an obnoxious high school flick called Cruel Intentions? Well, if you found all the spoiled rich kids cavorting in an adultless world believable and interesting in that, you might swallow what Gossip Girl offers. If, on the other hand, you like your entertainment to be about humans, you might look elsewhere.

The premise seems to be that there’s a web page devoted to the doings of a circle of posh New York school children. Gossip Girl is the name of the site, and also the name of our omnipresent faceless narrator who somehow knows what’s happening to all the characters in the story all the time.  Somebody’s back, and someone cheated one someone, and some other girl wants to seduce this one boy, and there’s these girls that are best friends but not really…  You get the picture.

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We definitely live in a world where natural disasters turn into fiction faster and faster. While that normally feels ghoulish to me, K-Ville is respectful in its use of the hurricane Katrina aftermath as a setting. Instead, the show manages to explore the issues a bit, its protagonist arguing with his wife over whether to leave the city.

Still, at the end of the day it’s just another cop show. Against today’s television landscape, only reality is less interesting than yet another iteration of a sergeant screaming, “Oh yeah? Show me some evidence!” Add the fact that the detectives wrapped things up in the pilot without much actual detecting, and this show’s not my cup of tea.

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