“I went to law school, passed the bar in seven states… I’ve become a damned vaudeville act.  I need ignorant juries.  I need them worried.  And I need them to trust me.  And that comes down to whether this shirt brings out my eyes.”  FANTASTIC opening.

Many moments through Canterbury’s Law match the bar set by that writing, and even the weak moments are quality.  For a pilot, there is a lot more focus on the case du jour than on introducing Elizabeth Canterbury, let alone the minor characters.  Our primary window into her personality comes in the courtroom, as we watch her manipulate jury and witnesses.  She is devious and delightful.

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“In the city that never sleeps, he’s the cop  who never dies.”  The tag line sums the show right up.  It’s all you really need to know, and if you want to know much more, you’re really out of luck.  There is very little explanation of WHY a shaman cursed/blessed John Amsterdam to live immortal until he finds his soulmate (although it’s probably important that the shaman is female) but we mostly don’t care anyway.

Right off the bat, New Amsterdam observes magnificent economy of screen time in building character.  We meet Detective Amsterdam, hundreds of years old, all angsty about his immortality.  Rapid-fire character development shows us he’s a homicide detective, a ladies’ man, an irascible partner, a recovered alcoholic, an enabler for an old friend who knows his secret, a nude swimmer, an amateur photographer.  It’s a complicated mix that doesn’t quite add up into a compelling protagonist yet, but full credit to the pilot script for trying, in a genre that more often yields the opposite problem.

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I’ve heard many an industry professional–and not the unwise kind, mind you–declare the death of the sitcom. With poor ratings and countless failures to make it out of pilot over the last half decade, one must concede a severe low point for the art form. Still, one has to believe we’ll always want comic relief from television, and even the most embittered network exec knows it.

Need evidence? Consider the recent rumored skirmish between ABC and NBC over Scrubs. While clearly on its last legs, it still has a potential buyer in ABC, who, given that they are considering yet another season of According to Jim, are clearly desperate for comedy. (Of course, how much sympathy can we feel for the network that greenlit Caveman?)

I expect, though, that the sitcom is simply reinventing itself. In 30 Rock, The Office, and others, we see dramatically different style than the comedy that has come before. And we’re not just talking 3-camera versus 1-camera shows. The tone is just different. There’s much less set-up, set-up, punchline humor (and I can’t say that I miss it…)  The various plot lines are a bit more surreal, and most importantly they are unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Enter Unhitched, the teaser to which involves a man being violated by an orangutan. Yeah… that qualifies as unlike anything we’ve seen before.

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So… will a struggling writer and blogger living in Culver City enjoy a show about a struggling writer and blogger living in Culver City? If that show is by the creative team behind My So-Called Life and The Last Samurai? If it features a lot of pretty-but-realistic smart girls?

Are these rhetorical questions?

quarterlife (sic) follows a group of cohabitating artists, one of whom starts video blogging her observations on the personal lives of her friends. Naturally, each comes tearing home to demand to know how she could do such a thing. (This is why ScreenwriterGuy blogs anonymously, people!) We watch subplots in which characters deal with the frustrations of making art into career, and we witness the unfolding of a messy love rectangle (pentagon?) There is promise of character depth and serious interpersonal chemistry, but it is nascent. Still, if the other ingredients are not yet mature, quarterlife does seem to smell of that undefinable, angst-driven component that made shows like Wonderfalls, Freaks & Geeks, and My So-Called Life stand out, in my book.

Of course, I just named three series that lasted less than a season…

When I remember My So-Called Life, I think of a show with a chaotic, angst-driven storyline, the imperfection of which was part of what made it perfect. quarterlife (sic) magnificently offers the same feelings, from a decade further down the road of life. And while we’ve seen a million different combinations of the group of twentysomething bohemians making their way, and while some quarterlife scenes revolving around that premise are as tired as they were a million times before, overall this show gets the tone right.

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I spent the weekend on a whole heck of a lot of production, and I’m writing this at 2 A.M. With that, and given that the Knight Rider movie is a backdoor pilot instead of a “new show,” I’m going to give myself permission to replace my normal, proper review with this bullet-point response.

• How does one make the new Michael Knight even more shallow than the first one? Ah… have him wake up with two bimbos and then run from loan sharks. That’ll do it.
• I want the Glen A. Larson retirement plan. Just wait for culture to repeat itself every 30 years or so, and then collect new checks for your old work.
• Val Kilmer’s voice completely lacks the character and edge that Will Arnett’s would have had. His voice was actually among my least favorite things about the show.

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So it took maybe one second to realize I was far from the target audience for Lipstick Jungle.  We start with shots of women’s calves as their expensive high heels clack down New York sidewalks.  A newscaster tells us that the sets of legs belong to a trio of the most powerful women in the country.  Then, boom, fashion show.  If not self-mandated to review every new show for this site, I might well have hit the remote right there.

However, I liked the show.  Well… at least I liked the structure on which it was built.  With an ensemble of three, LJ had time to explore each character well.  There was strong conflict in each storyline, and the pacing and development for each woman was compelling.  Less appealing was the fact that this sorority of female power elite featured less power and more sorority.  Good storytelling might get me to overlook the lack of subtlety in visiting feminist themes (Career vs. family, marital doldrums, arrogant suitors, boys’ club co-workers, all in the pilot?  Leave yourself some girl-power territory for later!) but I will never love the conversation if it has to happen while shopping for scarves and coconut body oil.  Perhaps the target audience will find this juxtaposition intriguing, but I thought the tone undermined the premise.  Maybe I’m giving the producers too much credit for wanting to create high-status female characters of depth, but the opportunity is undeniable.  Make-up tips in every commercial break don’t help.

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