DanielSonenberg.com

Now that autumn is upon us, and school’s in session and I’m planning a big research trip to Pittsburgh this weekend, I thought – what I need now is a new television show. Mom reminded me that the new Bionic Woman series, which has received its share of hype, started tonight, and so I decided to check it out. I’m that generation that remembers lying in my parents' bed, or even Omi’s, eating sliced yellow apples and watching Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner in their respective bionic person series. I even had one of those Steve Austin dolls, complete with the removable arm patch that showed all the bionic circuitry underneath. I also spent afternoons running about and making ch ch ch ch sounds. But who didn’t?

So I tuned into the Bionic Woman, and it was okay, in a sort of glad-to-know-it’s-out-there-don’t-need-to-tune-back-in kind of way. They have a couple of actors from (the far superior) Battlestar Galactica, and I guess some good special effects (but nothing really out-does ch ch ch ch), but not a compelling story or innovative style.

But dagnabit, I got sucked into the NEXT show, the 10:00 one, and A) watched my night go down the toilet and B) fell in love. My word, NBC’s Life is a terrific show – and it had a great pilot. It’s about a cop, Charlie Crews, who was framed for murder and then spent 12 years in prison getting the tar beat out of him regularly before getting exonerated. So he gets out of prison with this big settlement, part of which includes getting his old job as a cop back. And get this: while he was in prison, the way he coped? He got all zen and stuff. Like all accepting, and even at one point he says something about “the universe making fun of us.” Oh, and he’s developed these uncanny crime-fighting abilities. Not exactly super powers, but an almost preternatural intuition, and an ability to really talk to people (and sort of turn them to jelly). There’s also a sub-plot, unveiled in the pilot’s final shot, of him trying to figure out just exactly who framed him (he has this big wall of photos of likely suspects, and we get to make an important connection as the shot pans from face to face).

I guess it wouldn’t be so good if not for the performance of Damian Lewis as the screwball-zen uber detective Charlie Crews. As brought to life by Lewis, Crews is one of the most interesting television characters I’ve seen in years. He’s kind of twitchy, at peace with the world but still with some simmering inner demons, and he’s also quite funny. As he speeds around in his unmarked cop car, trying to be all zen, he tells himself “I am not becoming attached to this car.” It’s so cute. He also happily takes a bite of an apple after he watches his friend completely crush the car with a tractor late in the show. He’s so cool!

So that’s tonight’s message. Good tv to be had. Oh, and I’m betting it will probably get canceled after 4-5 episodes. Just like Daybreak, which was just as smart.

Yeah, exactly, what AM I doing up at 1:38am, especially since I woke up at 5:30, and will do it again tomorrow (oh, today, as in in a few hours). But I have an answer for you in three short words: I. Am. An. Idiot. Oh sorry, four. My composition teacher Daron Hagen once told me that sometimes, even when you're dead in the middle of the most pressing, horrendous deadline and you're working round the clock at it, sometimes, all the same, you just need to watch television. So after a long, long day of finalizing the score for Act II Scene I of the Summer King and dispatching the product of my labors to singers and copyists, and then after a band practice and a return home, I settled in front of the old Inty-net and zoomed over to ABC.com. Because they've undisappeared Day Break (remember the show whose cancellation I was so upset about?) Yes. It's back - streaming only, at ABC.com. And ABC really and truly hates this show - they waste no opportunity to treat it like poo. They announced all big and glorious that starting Monday, January 29, they're going to premiere one episode a week, each Monday, until the series runs its course (it was originally supposed to fill the gap between the first and second half of Lost - a vastly inferior but much more popular effort). So here we are, on the 29th, and what does ABC do? Just dump the whole series on line, no pomp, no circumstance. No dragging it out week by week, just here - have em all, we really don't think they're worth anything. And I really wouldn't waste this cyberspace with my rant if the show weren't deeply, deeply good. It's a scandal that this show was canceled, and an even bigger scandal (or wait, something really cool!) that you can now watch the whole season for free on the web, with only limited commercials. To do so, go here and navigate to Day Break. Hopper is a cop played by former Rent star Taye Diggs. He's living the same day over and over again, just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, only in this instance each day he wakes up he's framed for the murder of an assistant district attorney. Sure the show's overwrought, melodramatic, and what have you, but it's also thoughtful, complex, moving, and seriously imaginative television. The acting is top notch, and everyone in it's a hottie, so I really don't see how the American public missed the boat on this one. But at least morons like me can now deprive themselves of intensely needed shut-eye, staring into the same computer screen that's held my gaze since the sun was on its way up this very...I mean yester...day.

Once upon a time, 24 was actually a really good show - great concept (the show proceeds in real time, each ep is an hour in the life of hero Jack Bauer and his colleagues (and occasional adversaries at the Counter Terrorism Unit), excellent, suspenseful writing, and even pretty good music. I remember when the first season ended everybody thought, how could they do it again? In other words, how could they expect us to believe another 24-hour story line? What plot devices were left? Well, now the show is on season six! And the answer is: none. There are no plot devices left. The show repeats itself ad nauseam, every episode is full-on, no real development, just explosions and mini-climax after mini-climax. 24's answer to character development is death. That is to say, rather than having characters emerge with real feelings or personality traits or back story, 24 - as seems the vogue in TV dramas - kills them. That's how they generate drama and emotion. And to begin with, every character is pretty much a two-dimensional cartoon, taking on various personality traits willy nilly as the plot demands. Chloe, the socially awkward computer whiz with no inner sensor was a fresh, delightful character three seasons ago. But now her little quips are tired and we've heard them all before, nothing at all has happened with her (except for a couple of barely believable love interests, and a turn behind an assault weapon that appears to have left no mark on her psyche). The worst thing is, the show really can't top itself anymore, but it tries. In typical Fox-like fashion, the creators feel that each new threat has to be bigger and badder than the previous one, but there comes a time when you just can't up the ante anymore and you need resort to something else (like, say, real drama). How many suitcases containing nuclear devices are opened to creepy music and hushed silences over the course of the series? Answer: too many. It packs no punch anymore. How many evil terrorist dudes turn out to be just the underboss of the even-eviler uber terrordude? Answer: just about all of them. How many devious terror plans are actually just a distraction from the even more devious terror plan? Answer: all of them. How many creepy, annoying, how-the-hell-did-they-get-this-job in-fighting CTU bureaucrats are there? Answer: at least one per season. Oh I don't like the show at all, it leaves me with an icky feeling. And that's to say nothing of the unending violence, the glorification of torture, the often right-leaning political viewpoint. Unlike Battlestar Galactica, which leaves me in awe of its creators after every episode (how can they be so smart? the characters so rich? the plot so detailed and well-conceived? the moral issues so thought-provoking?), 24 has me rolling my eyes and cursing the TV. It is low, low, low entertainment.

And yet I haven't missed a single episode. Why? There's really only one answer: Kiefer. Kiefer Sutherland is that good. The rare convincing male action lead. His character is paper thin, goes through the same emotional near-issues each season, is ridiculously super human and unkillable (in the latest episode he stood mere meters away from a nuclear blast and watched the mushroom cloud rise, and yet you know he'll survive - probably even grow stronger from it). But he has that velveteen intensity that just melts all resistance. This is beyond gender, beyond sexuality. All I, or any of us 24 junkies need to hear is that fierce whisper: "I don't have a lot of time right now" (a line he says just about every episode) and we're putty, staring dumbly for another hour at what has clearly become the dumbest show on TV.

I posted a few weeks back about a show on ABC called Day Break, starring Taye Diggs (that's him in the pic). If I were truly a savvy blogger I'd hyperlink to the post, but instead, I'll let you dig for it with the brand new danielsonenberg.com search bar. Isn't it exciting? While you're searching, you can also look up that other post, from further back, when I said I was giving up television for good. Yeah, well, we see how that turned out. I am nothing if not human (and occasionally deeply in need of mind Novocain). Anyway, I watched a couple of more episodes of the show and got hooked - it's like 24 meets Groundhog's Day - high concept, very intense, great acting and writing, overall just a solid show. Well, I knew something was up a couple of weeks ago when I went to abc.com and saw that the next episode "had not been scheduled yet." I mean, this show was slated to run consecutively until Lost, which is more popular but not as good, made its triumphant return in February. Anyway, I went back to abc.com yesterday and discovered that all mention of Day Break has been scrubbed clean from their website. It's as if it never existed. Of course through google and wikipedia and all that I was able to ascertain that the show had been canceled due to consistently declining ratings. Apparently the last episode they aired only drew 3.9 million viewers (yeah, I'd be really bummed if one of my compositions "only" reached that many folks). So they just pulled the plug and flipped the bird to viewers like me, who had gotten hooked into a serialized drama, every episode of which had already been shot and paid for. In the can, so to speak. Apparently there were initially whispers about airing the eps on-line, but there were some sort of "music clearance" issues, so now Day Break has simply been disappeared. Is it just me, or is this deeply callous, insensitive and even immoral behavior on the part of the network? I mean, why would I ever, ever invest in another new show on ABC, now that I know that they don't give two squats about my happiness? I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. And the thing that kills me is, there's this other show called Big Day, another 24 knockoff, but this one idiotically about a single wedding day, stretched out over a whole TV season (stop reading for a moment and contemplate the inanity of that). Alex and I tuned in briefly because it stars Wendie Mallick, who was absolutely brilliant on the very funny show Just Shoot Me. But Big Day is truly awful, a clear misfire. I mean, I understand there is something called taste when it comes to humor (as every friend upon whom I’ve forced a viewing of “A Charlie Brown Kwanzaa” has reminded me), but this is not about taste. This is just an ill-conceived program with terrible writing, no comic timing, and no real interest whatsoever. It feels like watching a comedian out and out bomb at a comedy club. And yet this show, this STINKER that no sane person could possibly enjoy (unless they liked Gods and Monsters, I suppose), doesn’t get canceled by the American Bonehead Company? Grrr….

What can I tell you tonight, lovelies? I'm finding it difficult, at the end of long working days, to do anything but stare blankly into the television. Have seen some interesting things there. Daybreak, a rather violent show about a cop who keeps living the same day over and over again groundhog day style - but he uses it to try to solve the murder of which he's accused and save his family and friends. I only see it every so often, but tonight it made me think. The same scenario, involving a drug-using ex-cop (not our hero), ended three dramatically different ways. My momentary eureka was that actions, sometimes rash and terrible, and sometimes life-defining, or life-ruining, are the product of chance impulses, reactions to tones of voice or perceived slights or failure to empathize. Perhaps a little gentleness really can change the world. I also watched a bizarre show called Show Me The Money, hosted by William Shatner (whose renaissance I enjoyed in its more fully realized version - the lawyer Denny Crane - last night). This show has many dancing girls, and hires contestants not based on their intellect (a la Jeopardy) but based on their ability to be entertaining and/or charismatic – by which I think the producers mean outright buffoonery, apparently. Some poor shmo from Texas couldn’t say that Holly Golightly was the protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (“I wasn’t even born in 1959&rdquo and then the next contestant guessed that Elton John was the singer of the 70s classic (and hopelessly boring song) “Show Me The Way.” (I know I don’t need to tell you that was from Frampton Comes Alive). The whole show seems to be a kind of 50s throwback, except that intellectual prowess is largely frowned upon…give me Herbert Stempel any day, you know? Now for the last while I’ve been watching 20 20 about why are Americans so cheap. It’s mostly been a parade of interviews with billionaires who, even though they give away billions of dollars, are actually cheap because they could give away so much more. The point of the show, I think, seems to be for us all to learn how generous, righteous and charitable our host is (he’s on the board of the Central Park Conservancy , after all). I think his name is John Stossel. But speaking of self-righteousness, now they’re playing a clip of Oprah telling her audience that each member gets to leave with a thousand bucks, but has to spend it on someone other than his or her own famiy. Good for you Oprah, pat yourself on your back for your endless generosity – I mean who else graces us with her own face on her own magazine every single month? Gosh darn it, how did I wind up talking about Oprah?? Absolutely must be bed time.

When I was a kid, a remember vigorously flipping through Cue magazine - the tv guide - starting in late November, scanning the listings for the holiday specials. The one I loved best, A Charlie Brown Christmas, always played on a Monday night on CBS (channel 2). I can still remember the thrill that ran through me as the CBS Special intro began, with swirling text graphics and pounding drums. So imagine my delight – mine and Alex’s actually – tonight, when I per chance flipped on the tv at 8 o’clock to hear the opening strains of “Christmas time is here.” It must be safe to say there has never been a better half hour animated special in history. Every moment of it is a classic, the music (of course), the voices, the lines (“of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you’re the Charlie Browniest&rdquo, and perhaps above all, the dancing (in my day I perfected a few of those steps). As if to illustrate just how bygone is the era of this sixties memento, ABC (not CBS) followed it up with some more new-fangled Charlie Brown Christmas special that was, in a word, unwatchable. The voices all wrong, the graphics too posh, the imitation Vince Guaraldi score entirely unsatisfying. But if they couldn’t leave well enough alone, at least it’s good to see that the original 40+ year-old Christmas special is now treated as the clear cultural treasure that it is (NPR specials, books on the making of, yearly broadcasts still). Merry Christmas Charlie Brown indeed.