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Can One Really Double-cross Themselves? #Counterpart #Starz #3weekroundup #recap #review

Can One Really Double-cross Themselves? #Counterpart #Starz #3weekroundup #recap #review


All pictures courtesy of Starz

A beloved character-actor’s journey back to TV has been a somewhat bumpy one that has landed us here. Yes, it’s time for yet another recap/review of a new show of the 2017-18 season. So, is Counterpart worthy of becoming a part of your well-balanced TV diet or is it part of nothing special? (Oy! That was a terrible setup!) Let’s find out together!

Starz’s Counterpart stars Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons as Howard Silk, the coggiest cog in the corporate machine that you can find. Every day, he goes to work at a plain gray building, walks down a plain gray hall, receives a briefcase with a manila folder inside with pedantic phrases on it that seemingly have no meaning, exchanges said phrases with someone on the other side of a thin prison-like glass, then goes back home from what the first episode shows. It’s very Orwellian in nature. No, the person on the other side of the pane is not an inmate but is a simple man just like him. There is no exchange of greetings as that is not permitted. The other man is the one who starts the “interface” by saying the phrase that was either given to him that day, or that he finds in his own briefcase. The case is filled with other folders each with other phrases on them, but Howard must choose the one labeled with what the other man says to him. They then go down the page exchanging the phrases written on their papers and writing numbers in what seems like a random pattern.

The day ends and Howard leaves to go about his business. A man of patterns, every day Howard picks up some freshly cut flowers and goes to the hospital where one of the on-duty nurses always lifts the old flower from the previous day and allows for him to replace that flower with a new one while she gives him a brief overview of any progress. He then takes the remaining bouquet down the hall to his wife’s room where she has been in a coma for some months now after a car hit her in the street. He reads to her.

This is his routine. On this night his brother-in-law comes to visit and hound him about how Howard’s wife’s mother wants her moved “home” so that she can be with “family” if and when the time comes for them to give up on her ever waking. Of course Howard objects because this city is her home and he is her family. His B-I-L is trying to force him to sign some papers that would surrender his spousal rights so they can move her. Howard then goes home, sits for a while, makes himself something to eat and goes to bed.

Every morning he gets up, goes down to a local cafe terrace and plays backgammon with a younger friend and always lets the guy win, then it’s back in to work. Except today is different. See, some guy in another department just got promoted which means that Howard can get promoted to that guy’s vacant position. He’s been doing the same job for near 30 years but finds it problematic. He doesn’t know what the hell they do there. He has no idea why he has to say the phrases, has never properly met any of the people with whom he interacts with through the glass, and never has a proper conversation with them. But the previous day he messed up. He got up from the desk and, as he turned to leave, pointed out that the man on the other side had a little smudge of jelly on his tie. That’s against the rules, and now things are going to change.

But the jelly is not the reason why. No, his life is going to change because they suddenly need him. His boss Peter (played by Harry Lloyd of Game of Thrones fame) and his second superior Aldrich (played by Ulrich Thomsen) have a source that will only talk to him. And we are, to this point, still just as confused as Howard is. And they bring the source in, and take the bag off the source’s head and it’s revealed to be... Howard Silk. But different. Cooler.

Apparently, about 30 years ago the universe and/or time split in two. Somehow this earth made a direct copy of itself but left a doorway open between the two earths. And ever since then the worlds have been secretly exchanging intel. On it’s face, you should already see a huge problem with this conceit, but I’ll withhold judgment until the end of the review. Again, up until about 30 years ago, there was one world and then there were two, but they still both had the same history, same memories, same advances, and then they started to diverge from each other which has led them to become two drastically different worlds. If you're following this, you will know that Howard Silk is still Howard Silk in the other universe, dig? He doesn’t have a different name or looks different, because he was born before the split, so his timeline could only diverge so much. From this point on we will call the original Howard “Howard” and the otherHoward “How2.” How2 is a spy of some sort in his world which we’ll call earth2. From what I could understand from the first episode, he works for the same corporation/government-funded business that Howard works for but in an entirely different department. I wasn’t too clear on it, but what was clear is that he knows all about the corporation and their various levels/departments as he is rather shocked and disappointed that Howard is still in Interface, which is the base department you can be in. Somehow Howard, who is told not to freak out, doesn’t freak out at seeing his double for the first time—he must secretly lead a super-exciting life. Still, he can’t get any real answers until How2 tells his two bosses to bring him up to speed because they’ll need him for the mission.

Left to right: Howard, Peter, How2
Howard learns what I already told you: the world split into two different universes 30 years ago and everything is slightly different on the other side of this doorway that they call The Crossing. There are so many sci-fi questions that beg to be asked here but aren’t because Howard is more concerned with how he’s being treated as a pawn in a much bigger game of which he knows nothing about. He’s told to go home and just chill out until How2 returns the next day.

Meanwhile, as Howard is back at home, one of his coworkers and semi-friend is murdered by this woman at a gay club. This action is a warning shot to How2.

Back to Howard who comes into work the next day with an entirely different notion of what he does for a living. He meets with his bosses again along with How2. They tell him that a very bad assassin has come from the other world into Howard’s and is seeking to hurt How2 emotionally to send a message. How2 tells him that his/their wife is dead on earth2 but this female killer knows that earth1 wife is still alive. So she figures that if she kills the comatose wife too, it will be a double whammy for How2 to have to know that his wife no longer exists anywhere in the two known universes. Basically, it’s the “you can never save her” trope similar to Inception.

So now Howard is all-in on whatever he has to do to keep his wife from being killed. He thinks he’s going to become some super-spy or something but all How2 wants is to stand in as him for a while so that the killer doesn’t know who she’s dealing with. How2 knows that the killer is already watching Howard’s routines, and believes that the best way to thwart the murder is for him to pose as this world’s Howard and go visit his wife in the hospital as usual. Then the killer will come, and he’ll kill her before she hurts the wife. All Howard has to do is take him through every step of his routine so that nothing feels out of place to the killer when she comes.

They prepare for the night by talking about how much they love their wife and how she died on earth2 and the kind of life they lived and how people are right when they say that one little decision can change the entire world. Here, I’ll just say that I thought there’d be a deeper conversation and there really wasn’t. They spent about ten minutes screen time together just sitting and talking; three days later I could hardly remember anything they actually said to each other.

Moving on, the Howards and the two bosses all go to the hospital at the usual evening time. How2 goes in posed as Howard while the other one stays safely tucked down into the seats of the car, hoping not to be seen. How2 does the routine, save for one crucial detail. As the nurse sees him coming with the flowers, she plucks out the old one from yesterday, but he doesn’t stop to put in a new one or talk to her. He bypasses the nurse’s station completely and goes directly to her room. He is able to sit with her for a while and remember how it was to be with his wife.

And then the brother-in-law comes and starts spitting that foolish nonsense again about signing papers to move her and How2 doesn’t have time for this. I don’t know how he knows but he does know that the killer is coming and she’s already in the building. So he shuts up the brother with some boss moves, then sneaks into the hall with his gun raised. He hides in the cove of another doorway when the killer stops near the nurses’ desk and sees the missing flower. She knows, slips out of her shoes to quiet her steps and runs for cover before firing off a few shots. They engage in some gunplay which sees How2 chase her through the building and lose her on one of the floors. She gets out and winds up exiting right near the car where the bosses and Howard are, and she fires at him. Now she knows what’s up and the game has changed. Howard’s wife is safe for the night but everything will be different going forward.

So How2 goes back through the portal only to reveal that his wife, apparently, is still alive. They meet in a bar, and we end on that shot.

Episode 2 picks up right where we left off in the second world. How2 meets his version of Emily Burton Silk played by actress Olivia Williams. But unlike in the first world, here she seems to be his ex-wife as she shirks his touch (she is with someone else at the moment, leaving him out in the cold). Emily2, apparently, seems to work for the same company as him but in the “housekeeping” department, meaning that she basically has a team that does dirty work on various agents and brings them in to make sure things don’t get out of hand in the agency. She has come to meet her ex because he just had a rendition order put out on him. She asks what he’s been doing on the other side, and he gives her no details as to his business, the business of saving the other her. Her team—three men with surly faces and holstered guns—are already stationed at the bar and How2 says that he’ll go willingly, but smells something fishy about the whole thing. Oddly, he walks out and the men follow him out but his ex-wife does not, which I thought strange seeing as how these are supposedly her men working on her team. Anyway, they escort him over to their car where he gets into the back seat with one of them and they start looking through paperwork and talking to each other in another language when he takes one of their guns and kills all three of them, then quietly gets out of the car and walks away, all with his ex-wife none-the-wiser.

From here we start to dive farther into the traditional espionage intrigue that one would expect from a show like this. How2 goes to a priest buddy who is also somehow connected to the organization they work for as he can get “visas” into the other world that last for a few hours to a full day. The priest tells him that he didn’t hear anything about a rendition order and that he doesn’t need to go on the run, just go back in to the organization tomorrow and see if they arrest you for killing three men or if they let you through. If the former, then there really was a rendition order. If the latter, then someone is trying to kill you and cover it up. Guess which one happens.

We don’t see much more of Emily that is really important, save for a meeting with her superiors where she is questioned about the rendition order that never was. And clearly the organization on that side is just as secretive as it is on earth1 because she sheds not a single tear for the three dead guys. I’m guessing that even though she was technically their boss, she didn’t know them. She also has a meeting with the priest to ask about How2 and see if he knows what the guy is doing on earth1. He knows nothing.

Meanwhile, back in this world, Howard receives that promotion to Analysis like he wanted. Now, his job is to take those enveloped, strange dialogues that he used to say everyday in Interface and interpret/decode them. How are they supposed to decode them and what are the messages they are expecting to find? He has no idea, but he knows that they are supposed to move quickly because they have more and more of them coming in throughout the day. But before he can even get to decode one, his boss and the other guy show up again needing his help because How2 is back on their side and has a plan.

Since How2 has been a spy for years—he helped establish the entire clandestine network for the organization that spans between the two worlds—he knows how this female assassin would think because it is how he would think. In the process, he also lets Howard in on more of what’s really going on. So, as stated before this is another world, but it is not, I repeat not, just a doorway into another realm or universe. In other words, this world wasn’t just a parallel universe that always existed but it was definitively created by some kind of experiment gone wrong which made this world duplicate and from there they became alternates to each other. Essentially, it is like a cell that has split. There’s one cell to begin with, but that cell, in order to reproduce, splits in two, creating two unique cells both of which have the same things in them but differ ever so slightly from each other.

Also, there’s some serious political upheaval on How2’s side which still felt a little unclear, but know that there are now two factions that are battling for control and that know about The Crossing. One faction sent the assassin. The assassin’s name in earth2 is Baldwin—her nickname—which, up until now was believed to be a man’s name. The problem: she was born before the split. Yes, that means that she exists in both worlds and has a doppelganger. How2’s plan is to exploit her earth1 self to find out how Baldwin might operate.
In this world, the woman’s name is Nadia. Now, putting aside the fact that this woman still looks like she’s in her 20s yet her character is supposed to be near, if not over, 40, she fits both roles they have her in. Played by Italian actress Sara Serraiocco, Baldwin seems like a reluctant assassin who shared a childhood with her doppelganger Nadia. Nadia, after the split, continued in the same vein as her early years, continuing to study violin until she became a professional classical violinist for an orchestra. The two girls grew up under the watchful eye of a stern, drunken, abusive father who demanded violin perfection from his talented daughter. They even share the memory of his death. He died by falling on the train tracks of a subway station and being run over when his daughter dared not extend a hand to help. After that they both went into the foster system and their paths diverged with different families choosing them.

Baldwin still uses the raggedy shack that her father left her in his will to clean herself up from the gunshot wound she sustained in the gunfight at the hospital. She knows that Nadia knows about the place too and that How2 will figure that out. Somehow, Baldwin also has an earth1 handler on that side that tells her the only logical next step is to kill her counterpart before Howard, How2 and the organization can exploit her. So the race is on to find Nadia and keep her safe.

Well, How2 beats Baldwin to the punch and finds Nadia and pries some info from her. Howard and his bosses are then able to go to the woman’s apartment and to that cabin only to find that Baldwin has been there but is now back in the city. In a genius move, Baldwin calls in an emergency about two guys being dead (she then kills them) and a man holding a woman hostage in a local bar (How2 with a drunk Nadia). The police raid the place and “rescue” Nadia only to take her out into the open where Baldwin already awaits the woman’s arrival. But looking into her eyes, remembering that traumatic moment in which they both witnessed their father’s death keeps her from killing her otherworldly self. She kidnaps her and yanks her over to the theater where Nadia and the orchestra practiced earlier. How2 and the dudes from the organization are still tracking after her while Howard wanders around.

At this point Baldwin doesn’t know what to do. She knows she has to kill herself but can’t and can feel the cornering guards closing in. She reveals herself to herself only for Nadia to think that she is so drunk she has become delusional and is having some sort of Scrooge-like vision of her past demons (Baldwin has a nasty cut on her face from a gunshot wound). Baldwin wants to know how Nadia got over their father’s death and how they were partially responsible, but Nadia can give her no real answer. Nadia eventually escapes Baldwin’s clutches only for her to run onto the orchestral stage and be gunned down by one of the organization’s men even though Howard tried to shout him down. Baldwin is then so stunned by this that she can hardly move as she and Howard watch Nadia slowly die. Even worse, instead of the organization being quick to grab her, the local police scoop Baldwin right over Nadia’s dead body. What was once a slight problem has now become a huge mess.

Emily
Episode three starts six weeks prior with a look at this world's Emily Silk. Emily was out on a plaza at night and appeared to be looking/waiting for someone. As she looked back over her shoulder in anticipation, she stepped off the sidewalk and into the street right in front of the path of an oncoming van. That accident landed her in the hospital where Howard has been coming to visit her every night since the accident. Here I should say that I could have sworn that on the first episode they said they were going to move his wife to another hospital, as opposed to another wing of the floor but the way it was filmed definitely said “same hospital.” But again it doesn't matter, it's just one of those little details that kind of irritate you, and I was half-trying to write the review while watching, so I probably misheard.

We zoom ahead to the current problem which presents as a helluva doozy for both sides. Somehow news of Baldwin's arrest made it back to the other side already. Because of this, they have already begun the process of getting her back which will entail a negotiation between the two sides. For those fans of political shows this part is for you as we begin to see more interaction between the two sides on a diplomatic level, and we see the potential for what the show could be.

So, first we have the plan. How2, in conjunction with Howard's two bosses comes up with a plan to disrupt the negotiation for as long as possible. Remember, How2 knows or at least thinks he knows that there is corruption on his side somewhere in upper-management, so if Baldwin gets to go back to their side she could very well be let off free and contracted to do more jobs in the future. He wants to know what she knows before sending her anywhere and thinks that any intel she gives them would be far more valuable while in this world rather than in his. So they feel they must distract from this proposed trade by any means necessary. The trade is two fold: an ambassador from earth2 that lives full-time on this earth will meet with some higher-up management on this world that work for the company or “embassy” of this world to make a deal. We learn that the two worlds each have their own problems that they deal with and for. For instance, earth2 has undergone a worldwide pandemic that decimated the population. In fact, the destruction was so catastrophic that they have WWII-era-like movie theater propaganda commercials that tell of the dangers of not getting vaccinated and becoming sick. You are to report your friends, neighbors, coworkers, even family members who do get sick. This epidemic was implied as the cause of someone from this earth getting through The Crossing to earth2 and spreading a common sickness that this earth has already cured. One world has a crop problem and can't feed everyone, the other does not. Different diseases have been cured in different worlds, different wars fought. But some things that do remain the same: the makeup of the land not disturbed by war. And that is what this side wants.

This earth's head ambassador is the father-in-law of Howard's main boss (nepotism at its finest). He wants the geological surveying of the land around the San Andreas fault line to see if there's gold there which I guess is something that the other side would know. Anyway, they dicker about it for a while and finally come to an agreement.


The other side of the negotiations are with what earth2's embassy calls an Inquiry Team. How2 has to convince this inquiry team that this earth should hold on to Baldwin longer for the reason I said above. The problem? The other side sent over his ex-wife Emily2 and her new lover. They weren't supposed to be talking with How2 but with the ambassador, and also, this is Emily2's first time to the other side. In what feels wholly strange but also lacks a certain suspense, we finally see someone passing through The Crossing. And I gotta tell ya it's... bland. I don't know what I expected but whatever I did expect was in no way met by this transfer. When they say it's a doorway, it really was a doorway. Followed by a short hall, punctuated by another door. It seriously looked like it was filmed in the basement of some zoo or something. There was some junk down there and a dark, dank path and before she knew, she was to the other side. No frills. No amazing music. No magic of the moment whatsoever. The strangest part to me, however, was that she walked through the hallway first, before her lover (everyone, apparently has to go through alone), then, when she got to the other side, I swear that her lover was already there. So maybe the crossing has some kind of time element to it or maybe I'm just trying to make a boring show-aspect more interesting.

Anyway, they talk to How2 and she tells him to give up this fight for Baldwin to stay because the deal is already done. She then tells him that the phony rendition (kill) order that came in for him was sent by none other than that priest guy he talked to in that church and that he should be super careful about who he trusts. He then gives her a coded message about lighting a candle for his mother in that same church when she gets back.

As the inquiry team heads back, Howard and his second boss are sent to talk with Baldwin to see if she knows more about the other world's corruption. She will only talk to Howard because of the death scene of Nadia from episode two. She, again, says literally nothing of substance as they talk not about the corruption but about how different he is from How2 now, but how a person is that personregardless of circumstances, and that he will eventually turn into How2. Eh! Whatevs! They get word that the negotiation has gone through and somehow lawfully walk out of the police station with her in their custody, even though she killed a police officer. That means this place must have a ton of power and probably went to someone so high up in the government to make a call that the very sound of that person's voice and designation caused the receiver of the call to go limp. In any case, they load her into a bulletproof van and are making the short trek back to the crossing at “the embassy” when a group of mercenaries run by Baldwin's handler in this world shoot up the van and threaten to blow it up if they don't get her. Under Howard's pleas for life, they free Baldwin and live another day.

Meanwhile, Emily2 goes back home, goes into the church and lights the candle in the exact place that How2 asked her to. Beneath where she lights the candle she finds a neatly folded letter. She walks to the same cafe terrace where Howard is seen playing backgammon on earth1. Here, on earth2 it looks like an abandoned warehouse/factory district. She starts reading the letter and we hear a voice-over of Emily from our world. That's right, Emily1 knew How2; in fact, she was his informant in her world and I guess shared info on possible corruption on our side. Not only does the episode make the implication that she was waiting for How2 the night she was struck by the van, but that she may also have been somewhat of “the other woman” in How2 and Emily2's relationship back when they were still married. Now that becomes a bizarre and intriguing question of: Can you really cheat on your wife with your wife? And you finally start to understand that this series is supposed to be more philosophical than action/thriller/suspense-oriented.

After reading the letter and realizing that How2, after their divorce, was so in love with her that he was still getting his Emily fix with Emily1, Emily2 goes back to her apartment. She enters, flicks on the light, cuts her finger and sucks on the cut a few times. And then she starts to feel woozy and drops to the floor. From the shadows someone emerges wearing paper booties so as not to leave a footprint. We never see this person's face but do see them peel some sort of sticky goo off the light dial, and empty out all her prescription pill bottles, staging the scene to make it look like she overdosed. It is unclear if she is fully dead but her eyes are left open as the unseen perpetrator exits her apartment. Oh, and back on earth1 How2 has decided not to go back to earth2, but send Howard instead.


What's my grade? I give it a solid B for now, though that could change with the development of the season. This show is one of those short-season shows, so it will only have ten episodes, and we're already near a third of the way through the season. I had started doing this review/recap thinking that it would be longer and failed to check how many episodes it had (oversight on my behalf because I've been so busy and distracted). For these kinds of series I would usually just do an entire-season review/recap, but here we are. So, what are some good and bad things about this show? Let's dive in.

First, we can just get this out of the way, J.K. Simmons is terrific. He's been really good in just about everything he's been in back since his 90s stints on Law and Order, so it's to be expected. He convincingly plays the two Howards with enough complexity to make you understand how they are similar (sharing in every detail of their childhood and young adult life), while still being almost completely different. In one scene on episode one it is mentioned that they even have different taste buds somehow because one prefers American food while the other prefers Chinese and as the viewer you don't make a quick leap to doubt this bizarre and ridiculous trait because he makes it believable. And yes it is rather ridiculous, but we will talk about that further down in this review. The point is Simmons plays both characters in an intriguing way that makes Howard a sympathetic everyman and How2 an interesting and complex spy. I've never seen the show Orphan Black but I can only surmise that this is the type of performance that the lead on that show gives too as I have seen people rave about her many roles played.
The atmosphere (cinematography, set design, saturation, overall tone of the show) is muted and rather bland, almost Wachowskian in nature, yet not as eye-popping as The Matrix's color palette. Our world, or the world of Howard is dipped in an olive-green hue similar to the inside of the Matrix, while How2's world is bathed in blueish tones similar to the real world outside of the Matrix. I don't know if that was supposed to be a deliberate callback to that particular work or if that is just how the show creator and exec producers wanted it without influence from earlier works, but you can certainly get that vibe from the entire show so far. Howard was an “office” cog just like Neo and is only now awakened to the truth while everyone around him is still, for the most part, asleep in their innocent dreamworld. Granted, this is/was the plot for many a-movie both before and after The Matrix, but this feels closer to it. I digress.

My problem with this show is, essentially, why I'm having such a hard time trying to review it. It plays almost just like any other espionage show out there (the ones that take themselves super-serious) and uses its major conceit both as a driving force, yet also as a second thought. What do I mean? I mean that even though you know that you will have characters from two “different” worlds interacting with their other-world doppelganger, it doesn't feel like that. After the initial shock of the first episode wears off, everything seems rather ho-hum concerning the trick of two worlds. It never pushes the bounds into that truly bizarre and crazy sci-fi like what it maybe could've been; instead, it takes that one sci-fi element, sets up a great “what if” and then doesn't feel like it does much with that. Both with Howard and Baldwin/Nadia they each adjusted to the idea of another them too quickly, which made the whole show feel more like it was about long-lost twins rather than a sleek sci-fi exploration.

Then there's the writing—ah, yes, that most foreboding term in any of my reviews. What to say? What to say? OK, I'm going to have to mingle in a little bit of the directing here as I talk about this because I don't know which to blame more. The writing, while intriguing, is sometimes flat. I watched the first episode twice, OK? Twice. I still can't tell you details about that conversation between the two Howards when they were preparing for the hospital visit. And is it because I have a bad memory? No, I actually have a very good memory, although lately my brain is slowing and I really need to see a doctor about it. Yes, I can mention a few details like the taste buds thing and how they each got married differently, but it wasn't memorable or even all that intriguing. The idea of, “if you were to interview you, what would you ask yourself,” has been a philosophical musing for decades now, yet here it feels so blah that you could remove the entire conversation and miss nothing.

And about that taste buds thing... I'm confused as to how old people are supposed to be. Follow me here, everyone who existed pre-split 30 years ago all had the same exact life (remember the cell). If we're going by Howard's age and by what he said about marrying Emily, that means they were adults when the split happened. Yet, Howard and How2 have completely different taste buds? One would think that as an adult your taste buds when drastically change so much as for one to hate the type of food that the other likes, yet they do. How? There's never a reason given for this other than the split, which, in that case I'm more inclined to believe that they shouldn't look as similar then. If they're eating completely different diets that should even change how they appear. Yes, it's a small detail but it really distracted me from the plot.


Even worse, the writing never quite feels like it builds to something which is probably why it feels like it goes by so fast. OK, so let me put on my writer cap for a minute. In writing for film and television there is the thing called the three-act build. First act you establish a hero, second put that hero into trouble, third make the trouble bigger and force the hero to rise to the challenge. What most people don't seem to get is that the second and third act are supposed to have action. Yes, you want a good climax in the third, but the second is where the hero was supposed to have already met and/or been challenged by the villain in some way, making the villain only more evil in the eyes of the viewer. Now, I know that a lot of shows are being written as 10+episodic movies, similar to last summer's Twin Peaks revival, where multiple episodes can count as a first or second act, but there needs to be some more breakdown of that within the show. With Howard's and How2's conversation zipping by so quickly and being of little consequence, and the explanation for why How2 is on that side of The Crossing coming so late, the first episode felt like a rush to the end. Then when we do get to the action-filled end it leaves you with a feeling of, “wait, that's it?” And not in a good way. Then the second episode only halfway remedies this but it starts to jump around too much by trying to incorporate How2's ex-wife into the story. Episode three does well but there is something so cursory about Howard's existence that he feels like the least fleshed-out character on an earth1 devoid of any good fleshed-out characters. At this point they could almost kill Howard and just follow How2 and I don't know if I'd care.

The writing is not aggressively smart or funny and it doesn't try to be. It's simply serviceable. That, combined with the workman-like directing that both has style and lacks style is so milquetoast that it doesn't draw you in, but rather leaves you with a feeling of “hm. That was interesting.” Would I be willing to commit 50 hours of my life to this show for the next five years based on these three episodes? Probably not, but it's intriguing for now.

Should you be watching? If you enjoy espionage, government/corporate corruption, and/or “accidentally important people” stories, then yes I would say that you should be watching. And because it airs on Sunday nights in the winter, it doesn't have much competition from what I can think of (ABC and NBC are pretty dead, CBS is also a graveyard, and FOX is younger-skewing with most of their comedies now and I can't even think of what most cable networks have on). Still, this won't be for everyone--most people, actually. But it's got really good acting and, even if the writing has yet to truly pop with something memorable, it does seem to know exactly where it wants to go, so you can expect the intrigue to become more entangled and dangerous as the season continues. Counterpart airs on Starz Sundays at 9pm EST. Catch up with the series on StarzonDemand or Starz.com.

What do you think? Have you heard of Counterpart? If you haven't, do you think you'll tune in now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? What's your favorite part of the series? Do you think Howard will ever become a spy like his Counterpart? Do you think his wife will ever awake from her coma? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “I'mma step into this machine as Steve Urkel... And I'll step out as Stefan Urquelle.”
P.S. I started to look up an actual quote from the show but didn't feel like it. I have to go edit my book The Knowledge of Fear again, so... Yeah. Anyway, I'll try to come up with a better more original sign-off next timeAmazon
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You Heard The Thunder Now Here’s The #BlackLightning #3weekroundup #recap #review #CW #DC

You Heard The Thunder Now Here’s The #BlackLightning #3weekroundup #recap #review #CW #DC
All pictures courtesy of the CW

The wait is over! Well, I guess it’s sorta been over for a long time now. In any case, black superheroes have returned to your screens both big and small... and handheld. Though Black Panther still has a few weeks to go, Black Lightning is here to bless you with that Mandingo power you've been lookin’ for. Don’t act like you ain’t been lookin’ for it, you know you have. But is Black Lightning electrifyingly good or is it shockingly bad? Let’s find out together!

Black Lightning is the CW’s newest addition to their superhero lineup. Though it currently doesn’t feature into the same universe as Arrow, Supergirl, The Flash, and Legends of Tomorrow, never say never as Supergirl was previously not part of the group also, and it does have a producer in common with Greg Berlanti behind it along with black producers Mara Brock and Salim Akil (a married couple; Mara was behind the show Girlfriends). Here, we are introduced to a new (to the audience) hero with a storied past. Black Lightning or Jefferson Pierce is unlike any of the other superheroes we have seen on the CW so far. Played by veteran actor (you’ve seen him before but probably never knew his name) Cress Williams, Jefferson Pierce is a middle-aged high school principal with two near-grown daughters (one is a student at the school and the other seems to be a teacher there but maybe also a college student) that lives in the fictional city of Freeland. A city similar in tone to Chicago or some other Midwest city, it has its pockets of good and bad neighborhoods with decent houses and decent people while also having gangbangers and thugs lurking around many corners.

Right now the city is in the throes of another bad run which has given rise to a gang known as The 100 (RIP CW’s teen drama The 100). A predominantly black gang, it has many members stretched like tentacles throughout the city but seems to be run by one Tobias Whale; however, the front man for Jefferson’s section of the city happens to be a man by the name of Lala, a past student of our do-gooder principal. I don’t want to age neither the character nor the actor, but I must point out here that it does give me some pause to think about just how old Black Lightning is supposed to be. I get that he could’ve been a young teacher that has only recently taken on the principal role, but on the second episode we meet a woman who was a past student of his and who also now has a daughter that goes to the same high school and I’m like what? I thought he was supposed to be closer to 40 but maybe he is closer to 50 than I thought. I digress.

Lala being one of the heads of The 100 has to operate the business as he sees fit and tries to play the big baddie of the hood. But because he was once a student of Jefferson the kind-hearted principal thinks he can reason with the man. See, Jefferson has actually had a deal with the surrounding gangs for a number of years: his high school remains off limits to and for any illegal gang activity. In return, he doesn’t get the police involved in stuff that could be gang-related in his area. But this deal gets broken when his daughters get into some trouble.

His youngest daughter Jennifer, played by China Anne McClain of Disney fame, is still a teenager exploring who she wants to be as she comes of age. She does normal teen stuff like lying to her parents to sneak out to parties. She does exactly that when she skips a stuffy adult-laden school fundraiser in favor of a party down at Club 100 with a friend (yes, Club 100 is the favorite hang spot for The 100 gang). Well, she gets into a little trouble when a guy starts flirting with her in the club. Young, the boy looks near her age and is trying to get down to business, but she is not that fast. But when members of The 100 gang come and grab the boy, they take Jennifer too. In some crazy prostitution plan, they say that the boy has a debt and that “his girl” can work it off down at this seedy motel the gang runs. But Jennifer doesn’t really know this fool, and he’s certainly not her boyfriend. Still, that doesn’t quite matter to Lala and his brood.

At Center Focus: Jennifer played by China Anne McClainMeanwhile, as Jennifer is getting into trouble, her father is at the charity dinner schmoozing donors, talking to one of his old friends and current cop Inspector Henderson. Henderson is taking heat for all of the gang violence that seems to have swept through the streets in the last ten years. He’s trying his best, but the cops can only do so much. Jefferson is committed to trying to choke the power of the gang’s by choking off their membership. He feels that if he truly invests in the youth in a meaningful and uplifting way, then they will never be tempted to join a gang. As a partner in his vision for the school, he has Ms. Fowdy. Let me get this outta the way right now and say that all the women (including the daughters) on this show are fine as hell and that you probably won’t find a better smoke show this season. #BlackExcellence. Ms. Fowdy, from what I can surmise, may be the assistant principal or the administrative assistant, but I don’t think she is part of the ordinary faculty. In any case, she seems to have a crush on Jefferson.

Though Ms. Fowdy may have eyes for Jefferson, he only has eyes for his ex-wife and mother of his children Lynn. The character list on IMDb says she never reverted to her maiden name which means—in conjunction with the heat they make on the show—that there’s a strong possibility of them getting back together. Neither is over the other and the only reason she left him was because she felt it was too dangerous for her and her mental health to be married to him as he continued in what she sees as his “addiction.” Funny enough, the girls still lived with him. Frankly, they need to explain this discrepancy better to me. 

Left to Right: Anissa, Jefferson  Back Center: Ms. FowdyFinally, there is Jefferson and Lynn’s eldest daughter Anissa. She is the Black Lives Matter, power to the people protestor that is supposed to be the troublemaker. As said before, she seems to be a young student teacher still in college or maybe just subbing on the side. Anyway, she covers for Jennifer when the latter goes to Club 100. Well, Jefferson finds out what’s going on with his daughter and goes to the club to rescue her from whatever dubiousness she might’ve gotten into. When he does, things get a little hectic. They won’t let him through to see his daughter in the boss’s back room, so he shuts the lights off and shocks a few people. Oh yeah, he’s Black Lightning.

See, about 20 or so years ago Jefferson was this amazing superhero called Black Lightning. He has electricity surging through his veins, and he can wield it at will. The problem, though, is that Lynn who saw her man coming home half-broken and beaten every night and wanted a normal, safer life. So while the streets were safe, she didn’t feel she was loved, and she left. Ever since, they’ve been co-parenting successfully while he managed to give up his crime-fighting in favor of time spent with his children. Still, he and Lynn didn’t quite make it back to what they once were. He’s retired from the hero biz.

Until that night. The electricity going out frees up Jennifer enough for her to escape into the crowd of the rest of the panicked patrons. The police come to make the crowd disperse and Jefferson hits them with some electricity too just for being idiots. The rest of the episode plays out like your standard kidnap and rescue. Jennifer is confronted at school by the same boy from the club who agreed to sell her into sex slavery to pay off his debt. As it turns out, he is the cousin of Lala and is part of The 100, and doesn’t even go to that school. Anissa embarrasses him by flipping him to the ground and showing that Woke Bae got some serious key-raw-tay skills. He comes back with a few of his fellow goons and kidnaps the both of them right out of class, whisking them away to the seedy prostitution motel. They’re gonna repay his debt to Lala.


So, while that is unfolding, Jefferson goes to see an old friend, a Mr. Peter Gambi played by veteran actor James Remar (you’ve seen him in a helluva lotta stuff, I’m sure). Gambi is like a mix between Batman’s Alfred and The Flash’s Harrison. A suit tailor by day, he’s been waiting for Jefferson to come back so that he can aid him in fighting crime again. In anticipation of this day, he helps Jefferson get cleaned up from his most recent soiree in the club and also makes him a cool new suit as he knows the old one probably doesn’t fit anymore. Now, dressed in a cool black and electric blue suit with hints of yellow on it and an eye mask similar to Batman’s Robin, he’s ready to get down to crime-fighting, if only for one night. He goes to the motel and beats through a gaggle of goofy goons before reaching the boy who kidnapped his girls. Having just missed Lala, he throws the boy off of a two-story balcony onto a car and rescues his daughters. The cops show after the fact to start arresting people and the day is saved for the moment. But not all is good. Lynn, while thankful and relieved that their babies are safe, sees his one-night-only foray back into the superhero biz as a harbinger of more to come. She’s starting to get scared again, and just when she was this close to caving and going back to him full force. Even crazier, the episode ends with the eldest daughter Anissa getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and having some kind of super-charged red energy surge through her body until she unwittingly breaks the porcelain sink in half like it’s nothing.

Episode two focuses on the aftermath of Black Lightning’s sudden reappearance and re-retirement. Naturally, we get the “people are intrinsically stupid” trope here which sees parents asking why Black Lightning came back and only saved Jefferson’s daughters but not anyone else’s. Like, really? For real? For realsies? The dude doesn't even wear that good of a mask. Two and two have never been more eager to be put together but I digress. When he learns from one of the mothers (the former student I was talking about) that the whoring motel the cops raided after he took out all the baddies is now back open and that she thinks her daughter was kidnapped and taken there, he gets super angry and re-commits to his life as Black Lightning. Lynn steadily talks about his addiction to using his superpowers which he simply one day discovered he had, but he says that he was doing good with them before, and he feels compelled to start doing good with them again. Yet, he still insists that he only has to suit up one more time. In his mind, Lala is the one who is running things (he doesn’t seem to know about Tobias Whale yet), so he figures that if he takes out the homicidal thug, then he’ll have put a serious damper or end to The 100’s infestation. All he has to do is bring Lala in with the proper evidence to convict him.

Lala
As it so happens, Lala makes it easy on Black. First he kills his own cousin after springing him from the ambulance just after Lightning dropped him onto the windshield of that car. Yes, they say some BS story about how the kid hopped out of the ambulance himself but really? Really? Dude’s back should’ve been fractured in three places not to mention shards of glass embedded deep in it. In any case, Lala dumps his cousin’s body in a dumpster. He then kills the anguished mother who came to the motel looking for her daughter. Not wanting to be bothered, he shot her a few times in the parking lot, not knowing that she had a cameraphone set up in her car window recording the whole mess.

The cops find the recording, now all they need is to go and get Lala. As it happens, Lala is currently holdup in some downtown high-rise stacked with tons of bodyguards throughout the entire building to prevent any do-gooders from raiding. The police probably would’ve made a valiant effort to get through and lost. But Black Lightning is on the case because a brotha needs all the exercise he can get. He double-handedly takes out all the bad guys up the stairs leading to Lala’s place, electrocuting them and just outright beating them silly as he climbs to the top. And once he finally gets close enough to give Lala a thunder-slap beatdown, the cops burst in like they actually did somethin’ and look at him. And for a second we get this glimmer of recognition from Inspector Henderson but are unsure if he knows it’s his buddy or not. Black Lightning makes a clean escape, leaving Lala to be arrested and taken in on murder charges of that mother.

Obviously, Tobias Whale can’t have this. While Black Lightning might not know, the police do know that Lala is just a small cog in the gang’s overall dominance. It’s just a matter of time before they pressure him into a deal where he is going to talk about ways to bring Whale down. Who is Whale? Whale is the big boss similar to The Kingpin in Daredevil (at least I thought he was). He is, from what I can tell, a large albino black man who thinks he’s the coolest brotha alive and dresses like the pimp-gangster that he is. He runs all the crime in the city and has too many connections to count. And he wants Lala dead. Does he get one of the many cops on his payroll to kill him? No. In a supreme boss-level move, Whale and his right-hand woman go down to the police station where they are escorted into the building by a few cops and walk straight into Lala’s holding cell. Whale then proceeds to do some short but sweet pontificating about the idiocy of Lala for getting caught before one-hand choking the dude clean out, killing him with an effortless palm squeeze. At that point it is not known whether or not Whale has superpowers.


We end the episode with another glimpse of Anissa’s budding superpowers of her own. While we don’t get the same red flashes of lightning that we got from the first episode, we do get her being able to throw a robber clean across a convenient store, then shrugging it off. And it seems that using her powers makes her headache go away. Up until this point, they’ve been super sparse with the details on these powers for both her and her father, but this may tell us two things: these powers are hereditary, and maybe they actually do need to be used as some kind of stress reliever. I’m unsure.

Episode three starts with the funeral of the slain mother from episode two—or maybe it's just a wake or something because it's at night and far too late for a funeral. Jefferson, Lynn and Jennifer all show up to sit in the pews and listen to this pastor preach on how the mother was standing up to the gangs and how she didn't deserve what she got. In a feeble but exasperated attempt to do something, he calls on his congregation to take a stand against this violence from The 100 and march with him, something which Jefferson is hardly a fan of. Jennifer wants to go which ropes in her mother to go as well (chaperoning). Jefferson and Inspector Henderson try to talk the reverend out of doing this because they know that it will simply put good people in harm's way and escalate the violence even further. As a viewer, you understand both sides. The cops can't seem to do their job fast enough because they have so much corruption in the force, but are trying. Meanwhile, though the pastor is criticized for rocking his thousand dollar watch, he also wants to help, wants this to stop but truly has grown so frustrated that he's run out of ideas. In Old School Days, you wanted change you marched. Now...? But he sees the return of Black Lightning as a harbinger of hope again. He feels that he and the marchers will be protected by Black and that his return was a sign from God.

Meanwhile, as the rest of her family sits in the church, Anissa is out in some dark junkyard trying to train herself to use her powers. In what has got to be one of the fastest “let's see what I can do as a superhero” scenes I've ever seen, she beats on an older washer for a few minutes before getting super frustrated, nearly hurting herself and then coming to the epiphany that it all has to do with her breathing. Funny enough, the way this is filmed, I don't actually know if she was speeding up her breathing or what she was doing, but it works. When she was hardly able to make a dent on the washer, she can now kick it clear across the yard.

Anissa seems pretty jazzed about her powers for a while until she comes to a library and finds herself lost amid the stacks, searching for research books on mutations and powers and whatnot. There she runs into this cute Asian chick who is into comics and shows her one of her books. They flirt a little and I was like, “Hold up, doesn't she have a girlfriend?” The Asian girl tells her about this costume party they are having at what appears to be a lesbian bar (or maybe it was just ladies' night??) where she works and invites her to come dressed as a superhero or villain herself. Here, we also get our first reference to one of the other DC superheroes/shows on the CW in Supergirl. I'll withhold my judgment of that until the critique.

Anissa goes to the club and predictably grinds all over the Asian girl until her girlfriend suddenly pops up out of nowhere, and I was like, “Huh? What? Like... huh?” Was she tracking/stalking her? I digress, but just know that I thought it was kinda weird for her to just show up and find her. This leads to their break-up and Anissa having to give back her girlfriend's key. She doesn't hook-up with the Asian chick but she does sit at the bar and have a drink, so it seems that we might see this girl again.

With the march set for the end of the week, Jefferson and his apparent tech guru Peter Gambi (yeah, the tailor) have to figure out how to change the protest route to keep the marchers safe. Can I just say here that they kept saying “parade route” instead of protest route and it bugged me and the people I watched this with. Parades are for celebrating; protests are for when there is little tocelebrate. Anyway, Gambi also makes some improvements to the suit which allow Jefferson to shoot a single concentrated beam of electricity toward a person and not hit bystanders, so he can safely take out gang members in the crowd. But while that is going on he and Lynn have bigger fish.

Lynn, Jefferson's Ex-WifeThat bigger fish happens to be Jennifer's deflowering. In a super-modern parent-child relationship, Jennifer tells her parents (and at family dinner no less, sans Anissa) that she is ready to have sex. Yeah. Black Rob circa 2000—Like, Whoa! She is very diplomatic and straightforward with it, too. She and her boyfriend plan on losing their virginity to each other (yes, he confessed that he was also a virgin in a rather cute little scene of acceptance) on Saturday, during the day, at a hotel room they'll be renting. They said she could always come to them to talk about it when she was ready, and she actually did that shit. Oh my god! Listen, I always thought I was a fairly good kid, but even I don't think I would've done this if it came up at that age. Naturally, Lynn and Jefferson are stunned by her decision and honesty and just want to make sure that her young self is having sex with the right person, and from what we've seen of Khalil (her bf) in the previous episode when he chastised Jennifer for drinking and being a bad role model for the other girls, he can't get any more righter at this point in life. This dude first lied about being experienced in sex, and then went back and told the truth on his minty-fresh dingaling. Hell, I still know at least five dudes in my life that swear up and down they made it with Beyonce and ain't never even been in the same building, let alone the same room with her. He is literally a younger, lighter version of her father—the epitome of what young black boys should be.

Still, being a father, Jefferson must interrogate the boy in as awkward of a way as possible. While he doesn't threaten him like most dad's might, he does ask the boy about his personal hygiene to check to make sure the boy isn't going to infect his daughter with some kind of fungus or something. It was a very funny but completely ridiculous scene and will be mentioned in my critique.

In an episode that feels like it moves super fast, the march is upon us in no time. Peter has put up construction signs all through the city to direct the people into safe areas that Black Lightning keeps watch over from the rooftop. When a thug hired by Tobias Whale jumps out with a machine gun to try killing all of the marchers, Black jumps down and puts up an energy force field to absorb the bullets. He then shoots the dude down with one of his bolts, along with another gang member that hid in the crowd. Saved, the group starts to sing Amazing Grace as the pastor stares at Black as if he was Jesus. From down the street, Whale and his henchwoman sit in the car talking about how much he hates churchgoers. Henchwoman takes a shot at Black but misses, instead hitting the pastor just above his heart. But the bullet flies through the pastor and ends up in the spine of Khalil—no loss virginity for Jennifer this weekend. Luckily, both the boy and the pastor survive, but this has only stoked the lightning more. Little does he know that he is not only battling against Tobias Whale but also against another, even bigger boss in Jill Scott's Lady E. Yes, the singer Jill Scott. What will the future hold? This family can only stay together to make it through.

What's my grade? I give it a solid B. Being black I definitely want to see more minorities succeed, so I try to judge things as fairly as possible. With that being said, there are a few flaws in this show and pet peeves of mine, but let's start with the good. The casting is phenomenal here. I can believe that the two girls are the daughters of Lynn and Jefferson. Everyone has good chemistry and there's no level on which I feel that any of the people don't know or are uncomfortable with their character. Out of all the late-40s actors that they could've chosen, I think that Cress Williams was actually a perfect choice for the role, considering the budget that they have and what they would ask him to do. He fits the role well both physically and presence-wise and seems like a high school principal. I also like Tobias Whale, even though he is thinner than I would expect for someone with the name Whale. I will say that at some times his acting is a little suspect, however, knowing that this is a comic book show and that he is supposed to be this over-the-top gangster allows him some wiggle room.

I also like the overall positivity of the show and how it displays a black family (any family, really) where the parents are both successful, and successful at co-parenting while not together. They broke up and don't hate each other; in fact, they still love each other but things are complicated. If you want good images of black people, this is it. Hell, the youngest girl is the picture of what a perfect daughter looks like. Yes, she's trying to be a little rebellious but you even get the strong sense that it is a phase and that she really just wants to be a good girl.

I also like how the show confronts the inner-city's issues head-on. It's not just about crime, it's about being socially conscious of the community, and what you can do to help it. And finally, I also like the costumes and the special effects are on par with every other CW show.

Now, for some of the bad and ugly, we have to discuss this writing, y'all. That third episode could be indicative of the people they have in the writer's room and if it is, God help us. The third episode was a mess. Everything from the strange conversation between Jefferson and Khalil, to Anissa's girlfriend randomly catching her in that bar grinding on that Asian chick, to Anissa magically learning how to use her powers in a snap, to Whale being able to stop and monologue about how he hates the protesters while sitting right down the street within their view. Almost all of it rang false and played false on the actor's lips. There's a problem with the writing when you have too many conveniences. They can make the writing overly melodramatic (some melodrama is fine, but too much and it becomes kitschy) and can make the audience put aside their disbelief in favor of asking too many obvious questions with no answer other than “because.” Why did Anissa's girlfriend know where she was at? Because it's convenient to the plot. Why did the mother get out of her car and start waving a camera in Lala's face? Because it's convenient to the plot. Why is it that the suit tailor happens to also be the tech guy? Because it's convenient to the plot. Too many of these will frustrate an audience.

Also, it feels like there's no backstory here. Other superhero shows on CW started with some kind of “creation moment” as I call it. It's that time when the person goes from regular guy/girl to superhero. Yes, we get a little of that with Jefferson, however the fact that he was a superhero before and is now returning to that somewhat cheats the audience. Look, you can do this with other, more popular characters like Batman or Superman or Marvel's main characters, but I had no idea who Black Lightning was before this show and three episodes into the series, I still have little idea of how he became the superhero in the first place. Yes, they have a full season to show his story, but they could've fit in a little flash back to his very first day on the job or what turned him or how he got his superpowers to let us know that he wasn't always this stand-up superhero man. Viewers need a good backstory in order to identify with the hero on a more human level before they exalt them to their pedestal.

And finally about the writing, how many bosses are there on this damn show? Because in episode one we see Lala, and I'm like, OK, cool. Then at the end of that episode we learn that he's working for the higher-up Tobias Whale. And I'm looking at this spooky, surly-looking, mean-mugging dude and I'm like, “I like this!” But then in episode three we see Lady E and I'm like, “Hold on. I like Jill Scott but what the new hell is this?” Because the way she spoke (and didn't offer him a seat) made me think she was the big boss. For starters, do any of them have superpowers or are they similar to Daredevil's many powerless rogues? And which one is the biggest one, the crown jewel of the underground? And am I always gonna meet one boss at a time, and that person is then taken out and replaced with another bigger boss? I mean, does Lady E have someone over her? Am I someday gonna see Jill Scott actually fighting in an action scene against Black? It's both intriguing and exhausting to think about. I never saw the first seasons of Arrow and because of that I don't watch it regularly now, but on all the other superhero shows on the CW there was always one main overarching villain for that season, and they were helped by other smaller weekly villains. And usually those villains were smart and/or had some kind of good twist to them.

Here, it's very different. There is no clearly defined main villain. He's just battling street punks, which is fine but can get repetitive if the stakes don't feel like they are steadily increasing on a weekly basis. I've already seen Black take out dudes with guns three times now. When will I see him take out dudes with something else, or truly see him actually be challenged on a physical level? With him already knowing his powers as opposed to bumbling through a learning process, and with every villain he beats being some dude with an illegal gun, there's almost no tension in his fights. He's Superman against non-Luthor humans. Basically, all of his villains so far have been red-shirt Trekkers (Trekkies are the fans, Trekkers are the actual characters) that are easily thrown away. And we keep hearing about how Whale thinks he killed Black himself a long time ago, but how? We haven't even seen a cool weapon that would match Black's powers and truly put him dire straits. He just wins all the time. And that can get boring, even if we are supposed to consider him an aged superhero who knows what he's doing.
Then there's the soundtrack. OK, so this is a pet peeve that will sound rather off-putting, especially to some younger black people but I have to be real when I say that I actually don't like all the Hip-Hop in the show. I know, that sounds super crazy because I do like Hip-Hop and can be found listening to some Drake or Kendrick Lamar when driving. And I know that supporting rap or R&B, which is predominantly black-created music, is exactly what we should want from a show like this, however I don't like it for a few reasons. First, I kinda hate when black movies and/or shows do this: assume that all black people like or want to hear rap, R&B or Jazz all the time. This is partially why you look at a lot of black films either from the past or current ones and will see soundtracks filled with the latest hot rappers that are often rapping about nothing. Or you will get the occasional theme song filled with weak lyrics from a black rapper that you don't know and couldn't recognize in a sea of white people. For some reason blacks always seem to do this, save for the times when there is extreme oversight. We did this on an almost continual basis in the 90s with everything from superhero movies to just about any black-made movie that came out. Unless it had high studio hopes, it got a soundtrack filled mostly with Hip-Hop, which, at the time, was often superior than what we hear today.

As I've said multiple times on this blog (usually in posts about movies) a soundtrack and overall sound of a movie or TV show can play huge into how well it is received and can even affect it's quality, either enhancing it or degrading it. The subtle tones followed by thumping beat of The Dark Knight soundtrack blended so perfectly with every scene that it helped to raise the tension throughout the entire film. Go and re-watch that police station interrogation scene starting with Gordon and then having Batman come in to beat on Joker. The music adds to the conversation, ratcheting up the insanity of Joker AND the intensity of Batman. Even in the movie Get Out which, thankfully, doesn't suffer from this trend, we hear one really good R&B song at the beginning (Redbone by Childish Gambino) which fits with the overall tone of the film both philosophically and music-wise. The song is slow-building just as is that song, both possessing a haunting quality to them. They pair well and each one feeds well off the other. Hip-hop often does not pair well.

With Rap or any form of Hip-hop, what we usually get is some form of a dance when the music is played. Often used in fight scenes, the repetitive nature of the beat (or just about any radio-commerical song) doesn't lend itself well to any climax in the fight. All cinematic fights need to steadily crescendo up but here? Eh! They don't crescendo, making them cool but far less effective to the arc of the hero. If it doesn't seem like the hero is ever really overcoming something while defeating his enemies, the music is partially to blame. The non-orchestral music makes it feel like every fight he gets into is just a warm-up/workout and that we haven't seen him actually challenged or tested in any capacity, which lowers the stakes. Often, the only good times to use Hip-Hop in a fight (or any radio-commercial songs) are to make a comical point. 

The second reason why I could do with less Hip-Hop is because I want the identifiable orchestral music. We all grew up knowing the themes to the original Superman, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond and a gamut of other films and TV shows. One of my gripes with the new Dynasty was that for the first two episodes they ditched the original music in favor of that pre-loaded synth-drum beat. Now they have a rushed, party-like version of the original music that strips away the grandeur of the original orchestration, which exuded wealth—the main thrust of the show.

Here, what do we get? There's a bevy of songs both old and new, both secular and religious coming at you every week, but none of them stick around for a second episode. And the theme song is barely understandable save for the last few words, “... Black Lightning's back!” Unlike the rest of the superhero shows on TV, it doesn't feel heroic. When you think theme song for a superhero, you want something that will either cause you to want to, or where you can think of the superhero themselves, stand “Supermanning” in a posed position of triumph. (For those unaware, the term Supermanning means standing in a position with your fists on your hips and your chest poked out and proud like you've just accomplished something, like Superman was always seen doing in the early comics). This music elicits none of that imagery. It feels like they went with what they thought would be the coolest thing to do, but sometimes, especially concerning superheroes, it's better to do what you think will be legendary than it is to do what will be “cool for the moment.” This theme song is not legendary and, in fact, feels almost like a placeholder for something better to come in the future. I would just like to see more orchestral music than this, but I know that there are going to be plenty of people who like the music as is, especially the younger crowd. But it's not like black people don't create orchestral music, too. Still, I like the show.

Should you be watching? Yes. If you are looking for a family show and/or are looking to add to the many comic-based shows you inhale, then I think that Black Lightning is different enough for you to like it and enjoy it as a family. I haven't seen the Luke Cage show so I can't compare the two, though I read some reviewer say that Cage's show was darker. Black Lightning fits perfectly with the rest of the CW shows. The one big question is: Will this show somehow fit into the wider DC TV universe and unite with the other superheroes on the CW? As yet, I don't think a decision has been made about it, but that Supergirl reference was enough to wet the appetites of CW viewers I'm sure, and it is from the same producers. If they do decide to cross in the future (remember, Supergirl wasn't originally part of The Flash and Arrow's universe) then it would be interesting to see in which world this would be set. With the other shows having established that there is a multiverse of 52 worlds, this show could very well take place either on Supergirl's world, Flash/Arrow/Legends world, or some other world we have yet to explore. Ooo, what if it took place on Earth-2 (or maybe it's three now) which Cisco and Barry visited in season two I think where their current HG is from (not Supergirl's world)? I think the possibilities are grand. Anyway, diverse superheroes are back in a big way. Support and we could see more. Black Lightning airs on CW Tuesdays at 9pm EST. Catch up on the first three episodes at CWTV.com.

What do you think? Have you heard of Black Lightning (not to be confused with Black Panther the movie)? If you haven't, do you think you'll tune in now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? Was I being too harsh on it or too soft? If you haven't read the comic, how do you think Jefferson got his powers? Who is Peter really? When will Jefferson learn of Anissa's powers? And do you think Jennifer has powers too? Let me know in the comments below.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us!”
P.S. To the people of power, stand strong. Happy Black History Month! I'll think of a better sign-off next time.Amazon
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Is It The World Or Just Medicine That’s Apparently Filled With Assholes? #TheResident #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

Is It The World Or Just Medicine That’s Apparently Filled With Assholes? #TheResident #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX
All pictures courtesy of FOX

FOX is batting three for 1000 this mid-season with the bad shows. First you have 9-1-1, which, while good, is far from the award-winning material that you would expect when reading some of the names in the cast (Connie Britton and Angela Bassett deserve better). Then you have the dreadful The Four: Battle for Stardom, which, thankfully, will be put out to pasture in a few short weeks—how can you make a show about stardom-hungry performers going head-to-head in singing battles so boring? Now you have this crap? Really? Oh crap! I’m burying the lede. I’m sorry, uh... So, is The Resident good enough to stay around and become a chief of some kinda... medical... department, or is this the wrong diagnose for FOX’s viewing schedule? God, that was terrible! I’m so pissed right now!!

FOX’s new mid-season show The Resident (#TheResident) follows the lives and sufferings of the staff at Chastain Medical Center. We open with a scene that sets the tone for the entire show and made me question why I (or anyone) even watches a medical show in the first place. Our opening takes place in a surgical room with a guy laying on the table to have a simple appendectomy before it completely ruptures. Here, we meet our first main player, Dr. Randolph Bell (note: I assume he’s one of the main players because he’s been on every episode so far and has had a lot of speaking and character development time, however IMDb lists him as only appearing in 4 out of 10 episodes). Dr. Bell, played by veteran actor Bruce Greenwood, is the aging chief of surgery that every patient loves and the hospital dotes on. People come from near and far to be operated on by him. Later in the episode they literally make a Grey’s Anatomy reference about how he’s the real-life Dr. McDreamy. As another aside, here I was reminded of what some song critic said about an old Omarion song IceBox when he remixed it and had Usher feature on the track. He said something to the effect of never let someone who’s clearly far better than you appear on your song. Dear The Resident, never reference a superior show in your same genre unless you really think you can compete with them. The viewers will just get pissed off and end up wondering why they aren’t just watching re-runs of that show rather than yours.

Hella-long aside but someone had to say it.

Anyway, Dr. Bell is really good, or at least he was at one point. Now, he’s secretly suffering through what looks like an early form of Parkinson’s. In what has got to be one of the worst, cheapest “I totally understand Millennials and even the most well-trained doctor-Millennials would do this” piece of garbage writing, during surgery the rest of the young surgical team (excluding an older nurse) stops to take a selfie because it is one surgeon's first surgery. Yes. That actually happened. It was a real scene. In this show. Not only was it a real scene but it was the opening scene. Of the series. Keep this scene in mind for later because when I tell you about all the other things that happen in these three episodes, you can refer back to this scene and see why I make the conclusion I do.

While everyone else is stopped to do the selfie and hold up the peace sign as they pose in front of a splayed stomach of a HUMAN BEING, Dr. Bell gets the shakes and accidentally slices through an artery. The team rushes to save him as one of the nurses yells something about pinching the artery, and the patient dies. They all gang-up on the doctor for killing the guy in a routine procedure, but he turns the tables on one of the other doctors and says that he “covered” for him on another accidental death during surgery and that if he goes down, the whole team does. The dude blackmails the team into covering up a medical malpractice. I was floored, and not in a good way.

That was the prelude surgery. We open in earnest with our two main characters. First we have Dr. Devon Pravesh, a young, newly Harvard Med-graduated doctor of Indian descent. Think of him as our Noah Wyle from ER (another show that was better than this). Fresh to his internship, he is ready to learn as much as he can and try to apply whatever he learned at Harvard to the real world. He is paired with who I’m assuming is our titular character in Dr. Conrad Hawkins.

Dr. Conrad Hawkins is a dick. I was gonna give some deep description of his look and whatnot, but eh! You know that one really annoying guy at your work who really is quite good at his job, but has few people skills and thinks he knows everything? Yeah, just picture him but white (if the guy at work isn’t). Conrad is supposed to be the semi-young Gen Xer who looks down upon everybody around him because they have an inferior intellect, yet really has a heart of gold because he actually saves patients and OH MY GOD! We’ve all seen this stupid show before, except on that one Conrad was an older, surly bloke who walked with a cane and called himself House. Anyway, ladies (and some fellas) if you aren’t convinced that he is a dick, after his intro scene where he is shown doing something stick-it-to-the-man-good, we are officially introduced to him when Pravesh meets him, and Conrad asks the very engaged Indian doctor what color he likes, referring to women.

Look, if you read this blog with any bit of frequency, you’ll know that I have said some pretty sexist, pretty politically incorrect things in my time but this bit of dialogue and character building felt pointless. Not only that but it later half-confuses the characterization of Conrad. In writing, they generally teach you to try building character through action and dialogue rather than just saying that the character is this or that. Ex: Sewn into the lining of Carl’s jacket was his most prized possession, the Terrible Towel. OK, that’s not a very good example, but do you see how I use a well-known item of memorabilia to tell you something about Carl rather than just saying it flat? Now you not only know that Carl is a football fan but that his favorite team is the Pittsburgh Steelers. So, it only seems natural for you to assume that this doctor who is gawking at a grouping of women through a thin glass like they are cuts of meat is probably a womanizer or at least a surgeon. Conrad is not a surgeon and he apparently is or was a playboy maybe? It’s uncertain.

At this point, let me stop and point out how I often only go on such long tangents and sink into this weird “I know things about writing” mode when I dislike something. Please bear with me. Back to the show, Conrad gives Pravesh the rundown about how he is his boss from now on, how Pravesh may have just graduated from med school, but he really knows nothing, about how he can end the kid’s career if Pravesh ever talks back to him or questions his judgment because he’s always right (he actually said those words. I couldn’t believe it), and how he’s pretty much like god around there. At this point I stopped to ask myself, “Self, if this hospital is supposedly so good and Conrad is such an amazing doctor, then why doesn’t he have a gaggle of other doctors following him around too? Shouldn’t he have more than just Pravesh to oversee?” Myself didn’t have the answer to that question.


Conrad and Pravesh go to what will be Pravesh’s first patient interaction, a guy with some kind of disease that could eventually lead to lower-leg paralysis. After the back and forth “intern, what do we do” exchange, and Pravesh wanting to perform some expensive test, Conrad told him to stick a finger up the guy’s butt which will tell him if his anus is tight enough. If not, then paralysis is already beginning. Conrad takes the opportunity to make another crude sex reference before leaving and finding one of the nurses.

Nurse Nicolette Nevin (played by the lovely Emily VanCamp) is Conrad’s ex who he still wants. While it’s not explicit on the first episode, it’s implied through some careful spying on her Tinder-like account that he might have cheated and/or been too afraid to fully commit, not to mention childish. He displays his childishness by yanking her into an on-call room and trying to Christian Grey her in the middle of the day. I’m quite shocked that this scene wasn’t changed considering the atmosphere currently involving sexual assaults/harassment because it’s clearly both. However, that’s not what pissed me off about this scene. What pissed me off was how it so blatantly and easily fueled the fire with ammo for feminists on men’s behavior. It felt like it was written by a woman who hates men and who sees them all as sex-hungry monsters with no tact, which is overall what’s wrong with the character. Conrad, so far, has never tried to be a decent human being. A great doctor? So-so. But just human, someone who understands the most base rules of etiquette or decency? No. And the scene rings false, too. So even after he tells her that he will do anything to get her back, and she leaves him with his pants around his ankles and inside a locked (from the outside?) room, you don’t feel that sorta, “Yeah, you go girl! Show that ass-hat what’s what!” feeling that I think the writers wanted you to feel.

Somehow Conrad gets out of the room and Pravesh finds him after having checked the guy’s butt (note: I don’t remember them talking about the dude’s butt again after that). Right in front of them an addict is brought in with some kind of injury and struggles against all the doctors because she doesn’t want to be treated and is in denial about her addiction. Conrad looks at one thing on her hand and immediately IDs her ailment and tells her that she’ll be dead by tomorrow if she doesn’t allow them to treat her. Time never being on time itself, that tomorrow thing comes immediately, and she collapses to the floor. Conrad then says that Pravesh will take lead on this girl and that it is his call on what they should do about her. Pravesh performs CPR for 26 minutes even after Conrad tells him to stop. Her heartbeat finally returns but Conrad tells him that her brain’s been starved of oxygen for too long and that she’s brain-dead now and that Pravesh broke the first rule.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to another surgeon, Dr. Mina Okafor, a black woman from Nigeria. Not only is she a pretty good surgeon she is also the hospital’s leading surgical robotics expert. She is set to perform the hospital’s first surgery using a machine to make every incision and whatnot. She is shown to lack any sort of personal skills and is solely there to perform surgeries and become the world’s top surgeon, I guess. Frankly, little is known about her for the first two episodes save for that she is black, tall, from Africa, rather rude, single and is having visa problems. That last thing about her is used by Dr. Bell to blackmail her into letting him do the surgery that she’s been training months to do. He’s never operated the robotics, still can’t hold his hands steady with the robotic interface on his fingers, and can’t even cut into an apple with the robot, let alone a person, yet he wants to do the surgery on the hospital’s biggest donor.

Now, ready for the kicker? Though newbie Pravesh idolizes Dr. Bell, almost everyone in the hospital knows that the old guy is unhealthy and that he keeps killing patients. A few other doctors know, all the nurses do and most of the other surgical crews do as well, yet he keeps doing surgeries. And nobody reports him for malpractice or violation of the Hippocratic oath or violation of hospital guidelines or something! My mind has never been more boggled. And worse, Conrad comes face-to-face with him multiple times and asks him when he’s going to give it up and stop trying to operate on people and the dude is just like, “I still got it.” And it’s half-baffling because you don’t know if these interactions were written on some kind of artistic level or if the writers were completely unaware, because from any outside viewer with a decent understanding of what’s going on in the episode, you can see that Bell is basically Conrad in 20 or 30 years. They’re both the same amount of arrogant, narcissistic and egotistic. But worst of all is that near the end of the episode you learn that they’re also the same amount of corrupt.

Left to right: Dr. Bell, Dr. ConradAfter Bell blackmails Dr. Okafor into a genius plan of operating the robot during the surgery while he sits up front (the surgery is recorded and broadcast worldwide) and mimes the movements to take credit for her work, Conrad sneaks off to the brain-dead girl’s room, closes the door and the blinds and turns off her machine on the sneak. Luckily, Nurse Nevin comes in and catches him, guilt-staring him into turning the machine back on and quietly leaving. Dude was about to Million Dollar Baby the girl without any forethought to organ donation or something like that. And I really sat there like, “What?” He seems more like an idiot than a compassionate person trying to save the family weeks, months or years of agony thinking she might wake up. You wanna take a guess at what the next episode involves?

Episode two starts with three people all going down in a medical emergency that will unite them all with the brain-dead girl. While at career day for a local high school speaking to the class of one of his patients, Conrad helps to save the life of his teacher-patient by recognizing the signs of heart failure. Across town, Dr. Bell and another lead doctor in the hospital Dr. Lane Hunter are out on a hunting excursion with a congressman and a lobbyist. The Congressman has a heart attack and errantly fires his gun, filling the lobbyist’s ass with buckshot. You know what happens next?

Yep, you guessed it: both the congressman and the young teacher need a heart transplant. At first they only have one new heart that is on the way from another donor and because the teacher is on the top of the list, it’s scheduled to go to him. However, because the congressman is a VIP, Dr. Bell does some shady stuff and un-allocates the heart for the teacher (he’s black, by the way) in order to give it to the old, white congressman. Antoine Fuqua is one of the producers of this show. I can’t believe that he or somebody didn’t see this or read the script, or stop to think about the casting and say, “Wait a minute, something’s not right about this.” But nope! Nobody saw the blatant racism in episode one; nobody saw the blatant racism in episode two. And no I’m not talking about the Dr. Okafor thing from episode one. I’m trying to save my critiques for... you know, the critique, but it’s just so stupid to set up these kinds of easily identifiable racial plot-points and not actually make a statement about race that I have to call it out a little right now. I digress.

After a ton of back and forth about whom the heart belongs to, Conrad tampers with the DNA/viability tests that determine if the heart would take in the old congressman. This forces the head of surgery to finally concede and go talk to the mom of the brain-dead girl and convince her to donate her daughter’s organs. Both men get saved.

Meanwhile, Conrad sends Pravesh out on his own on what he’s deemed “Independence Day.” He will have no other doctor to help him with anything but can turn to nurses for stuff. Now, I don’t want to compare this to Grey’s Anatomy but since this show did bring that show up, isn’t it customary for the new interns to follow their lead resident for at least a couple weeks before going out on their own even for basic chart work-ups? There is literally nothing in this episode that makes us think this is even two days after episode one. I swear it’s the next day. In any case, Pravesh has to do all the charting and sign-out work for the other doctors. He also has to visit a few patients and deal with the pesky task of learning. There’s a scene where he is in the room with Dr. Bell and a patient can't breathe so Conrad comes and dumps a bucket of ice on her to stop her from crashing, and Pravesh also fonds over the female doctor that was on the hunting excursion. He then notices that something is happening with the lobbyist who took the buckshot and runs the guy up to surgery when the nurses and another doctor told him that he should've paged Conrad and that they could’ve taken care of whatever was happening with a much more simple procedure.

In the end, Pravesh and the rest of the doctors (not Bell) end up in a bar like Grey’s Anatomy, where he stands up to Conrad and tells him that this spoiled white boy really doesn’t know everything and that he made the right call about the lobbyist and that if Conrad wants to end his career he can, but he was right. Conrad, in turn, congratulates him on passing Independence Day because he wanted him to realize that no doctor is always right, which felt kind of like a false-flag victory because the dude is Harvard trained. I think he has the sense enough to figure out that no human is ever always right about something.

Dr. OkaforOh and there’s also this completely perfunctory scene that, unfortunately, cemented my original idea that this series was written by a male-hating woman who clearly doesn’t even care to entertain notions that the male mind or social norms could both be slightly different than she expects. Case in point: The male nurse who works to remove the buckshot from the lobbyist sits at the bar and tells a woman that he is on-call and that he works at the hospital across the street, and she assumes he’s a doctor and moves closer to him. Meanwhile, Dr. Okafor, the tall, short-haired Nigerian woman sits at the same bar and is approached by a black man who sits and smiles and asks her what she does. When she says she works at the hospital, he assumes she’s a nurse. She corrects him and says that she’s a doctor actually. He then, in the most ludicrous way possible, stares at her and quietly slips off the seat and away into the crowd. A-tee-hee!

I’m sorry but this was the funniest thing. First off, I get that they are ever-so briefly touching on social attitudes about gender and what’s assumed here. It’s not that the guy is mistaken for a doctor and the girl for a nurse that is funny. What’s funny is both how this scene is acted and this recurring notion among professional women of all races (black women especially) that men are too afraid or intimidated by their success, which is why they are single. It’s not that serious. And if you are going to keep thinking this then you will remain single. The gender love gap is far more complex than that.

First off, they’re in a bar. You seriously think this dude is looking for a wife or even a relationship in a bar? No. Most men are looking to pick up some woman, so they can get laid. This is how you can tell that the scene was most likely written by a woman, just like you can often tell when female sex scenes are written by men, because they think differently about the situation. A woman is already thinking long-term about how her success will intimidate a man away when you just met. The guy is not. The guy is just thinking about how hot she is and how quickly he can get her to put out. Might be a sad commentary on things but it’s true. There’s no way he’s gonna care about your career or what you do the first time he meets you, especially if it’s not an ACTUAL date. Most men are like those four kids from Stand By Me, they only care about DAT BODY! So thinking that a man is gonna slip away just because you’re a successful doctor (actually, he doesn't even know if she's a successful doctor or not and doesn't even know she's a surgeon), and not because he maybe saw some other more attractive woman down the bar, is slightly self-fulfilling-prophecy-ish. But I digress.

Episode three starts with Conrad in a bike race with another doctor. He does some nice BMX jump to show how cool and fearless he is and wins by a hair over the other doctor. As soon as the race ends, some drunk guy (horrible acting) steps into the spokes of a bike on the ground and snaps his leg. They take him to Chastain where Conrad and Pravesh, along with all the other doctors must sit through a presentation on the billing practices. Basically, they're showing more corruption because they are trying to figure out ways to charge patients more for simple things like irrigating ear infections. Naturally, Conrad bails.

While the pay thing is going on, one of the women who subcontracts with Chastain and helps to exercise long-term patients experiences some back pain that turns into something serious when she drops to the floor. The billing specialist doesn't want to treat her because she doesn't have insurance and can't pay for the expense that the hospital will incur. It turns out she's an illegal immigrant with a huge tumor that's killing her, but the billing specialist doesn't care. Even worse, she was brought here as a child and has no more family here, so she can't be released into her own care by law. She is, essentially, a ward of the hospital, and, regardless of what they do, they aren't getting out of the situation without an expense of at least half a million. So the CEO of the hospital then engages in a bidding sale to try to pawn the girl off onto some other hospital for a fee. They're trading the girl for cash considerations.

Left to Right: Dr. Pravesh, Immigrant, Nurse Nevin
And then somebody calls immigration. Before the men in ICE jackets get to her Conrad the black doctor and their minions send her into surgery with Conrad's other doctor surgeon buddy. And the operation goes well, which means that she will be their patient for a little while longer but as soon as she can walk they will kick her out because she becomes someone else's problem then. Dr. Bell even tries to make her walk the moment she gets out of surgery and I sat there wondering how ridiculous this show could get. Nurse Nevin even has to stick it to the billing specialist when she discovers that the woman has ordered an expensive MRI for a patient who doesn't need it without checking his history. MRI's are magnetic and will rip out anything metallic. He happens to have a metal penis implant. Yet another bit of close-call malpractice in a hospital rife with it.

As far as the broken leg guy, his liver is failing, and he needs to stop drinking but can't. Oh, and Conrad was in the Marines at one point making him a poor man's TC from The Night Shift.

What’s my grade? I give it a D+. Yes, the plus is for the diverse cast. Other than that, you would be hard-pressed to find something worth a single damn in this show. It’s funny because it’s actually rare that I give not one but two super-low ratings to new shows in a single season, let alone in a single week, yet here we are. And for them to both be on the same network is astounding. It’s funny how I started this 2017-18 viewing season back in September/October thinking/writing, “Gosh, there are really not that many new shows premiering this year for the networks, at least not full-season orders.” If this show is an example of what they were offered, I can see why. And it’s also crazy how everyone calls out either ABC or NBC for constantly having new shows because they have to cancel so much stuff. At least they actually try to make good and/or innovative and creative programming. FOX decided not to do something creative this year, but instead went with watered-down carbon copies of other things that are hits. Between this show, The Orville and The Gifted (which started good but became like every other X-men film you’ve ever seen, save for Logan and Deadpool), we’ve gotten stuff that reminds us of other, much better stuff. Where do I thoroughly begin?

Before I rip into this show, I cannot stop and stress enough how much I hate critiquing other people’s work even when it’s good. As a creative myself it always makes me queasy. And distance-critiquing is the worst because you know that you are too far away to effect anything which makes it feel like you’re old-man-shouting obscenities at the kids on your neighbor’s lawn. “Like, Old Man, we’re not even on your lawn. Chill!” Just know that this is going to be very painful for all parties involved.

Like House But Without House And Kal Penn's Character AliveTo say that The Resident is a ripoff of House, MD does a disservice to all the other medical shows it rips off. Now, before you start jumping on me about how medical shows are a genre to themselves and how there will of course be overlap and similarities, let me take you through the odyssey of good/decent versus lazy shows. For those people who were there in the beginning, Grey’s Anatomy, when it first came out, was so good, so new, so different from the reigning medical show at the time (ER), that it literally (in concert with Desperate Housewives) helped to change the language and flow of all of ABC’s shows going forward. It became somewhat of a cultural phenomenon, so much so that to this day people are still referencing the McDreamy, McSteamy thing. Hell, this very show did it! Not only that but it melded music from up-and-coming artists into what often became the most heartfelt moments of the show. Would The Fray have been as big without Grey’s Anatomy pumping their single “How To Save A Life?” Maybe.

We can jump off Grey’s and over to other medical shows in recent years. To try to be different from Grey’s, they all went with some kind of hook that either drew us in on an emotional level or made us sit at the edge of our seats. Private Practice had a different feel than Grey’s while still fitting into that universe. The Night Shift was a hospital populated by soldier-doctors dealing with all sorts of PTSD, US disillusionment, etc. Code Black followed a hospital under severe stress from running out of supplies. Pure Genius tried to bring super-tech into medicine. Red Band Society tried to show what it was like to be a sick kid living in a hospital. Even The Good Doctor has a unique twist with our main character having autism. The only one that didn’t have a huge twist was Chicago Med, which survives because it is part of a much larger shared universe with the entire Chicago franchise on NBC.

The Resident does not have a draw or catch, at least not a good one. From what I can see, and this will take us back to the beginning of this post about how I had to think about why we watch medical dramas, this show is about corruption in the field of medicine. Our main character has a surgeon’s-like god complex and so does the actual surgeon. Both of them have already proven in the first three episodes that they will stop at almost nothing not to do what’s right but to do what best feeds their ego. If that means breaking the law, blackmailing someone, or just flat-out committing malpractices, so be it. What’s worse is that there is an emotional dissonance about this whole thing. Whereas House seemed like he really did care and was an overworked, beleaguered genius who was essentially always mad because he could never master the art of being human, Conrad doesn’t seem to show any of that. For House his gift was his curse. Conrad doesn't seem compelled to help people. Yes, the hot nurse he used to sleep with tells Pravesh that he totally has a heart of gold and is the guy you go to if you “want your engine fixed” but there’s something so intrinsically oily about him that it’s hard to see past his bad behavior.

Yeah, I used this pic twice, in ode to this recycled show Also, the supposed genius of him feels lost when, on Pravesh’s first case, the girl goes brain-dead and he just seems completely pissed about it. Yes, Conrad told Pravesh to stop and he wouldn’t, but he also told him that the case was his. And in the end, when the girl’s organs were needed for harvesting, I kinda felt, “Well, wait a minute so Pravesh technically did the right thing twice and both times Conrad told him he was doing wrong? What?” I know every single thing doesn’t have to be written in one episode and you need to give the characters time to build and whatnot, but it truly felt like Conrad didn’t even conceive of the possibility that the girl’s organs could be harvested. He was willing to turn off the machine and let her die and risk having some of her organs sour in a corpse. Who knows how often they would come in to check on the girl? Whatever.

And the third episode, to me, was morally washed out by the actions taken by nearly everyone on the first two episodes. They try to build this narrative that our titular character and his minions are the rebels against the corporate health machine, yet took no time to truly build the ground on which their moral superiority could stand. Between Bell willfully killing patients, Okafor being just as robotic as the tools she uses in surgery, and Conrad also being willing to kill, lie or cheat to get his way, why should I root for any of them to get their way over the wishes of the hospital? Do they really care or are they all just on a spiraling ego trip to the bottom? Right now I'd vote for the latter.

Then there is the overt racism, sexism, misogyny and misandry that has been written into the DNA of each character. Both Conrad and Dr. Bell are the literal epitome of white boy privilege. White male Trump voters, if you’re still wondering why or can’t see why so many minority groups dislike you and think that things are unfairly advantaged toward you, watch the first three episodes of this show, because this is why. The older, white male Dr. Bell who is known to be killing patients because he’s unfit to be a surgeon, gets to keep doing it for however long he’s been doing it because... well, because he’s white and has a good reputation. A reputation, mind you, which is filled with lies manufactured by him. There’s no oversight for this dude, nobody checking behind him, except for people that rank beneath him in the hospital. Meanwhile, Conrad gets to be as mean, conniving, sexist and racist as he wants and nobody says a thing. Can he sexually harass his ex-gf by pulling her into a room and forcibly kissing her? Sure. It’s just a cool joke and oh he will do anything to get her back. And seeing as how he was willing to kill a patient without consent (at least Bell attempts to save his patients every time), I’m not unsure that he’d do more devious things for Nevin if she asked. Do they have terrible personalities and could easily cause the hospital dozens of lawsuits if either of them were found out? Of course, but they’re really good at their jobs sorta (even that’s questionable) and they’re white males, so they get to stay.

This view of them and how their characters are built wouldn't be so bad if they tried to make an actual statement on social justice, or at least one that was less muddled. Right now it feels like they're saying that yes white men disproportionately have advantages in this society and that many of them can act like a-holes but it's OK so long as they do good with that. It is the Trump syndrome personified. Yes, House had some of this same shtick, however, he also had a certain bit of quirky, comical charm to both the character and the actor's performance. Here, unfortunately, Conrad looks like a d-bag. There's almost zero real charm here. Instead of a rye smile, you get a smug grin that doesn't feel like it's been earned either by age or experience. Oily. Super oily! I think what it is, is that almost all of the heroes here lack any kind of nobility. Again, I will keep going back to Conrad trying to kill the one patient, yet this military guy has Death Before Dishonor tatted on his back. Give me a break! 

Frankly, their behavior is partially indicative of a much larger problem in dramas (med dramas specifically) these days. They’re filled with assholes. We get it, hospital drama is life and death, so you need people who are at the top of their game to be the ones calling the shots, but where Grey’s Anatomy excelled at giving us more love and coaching-up of talent, most of these new dramas are corner-stoned in the chew out. There’s a sense that the teaching doctors have to be asses to you because that’s what the job requires. Uh, no. The job requires that you be on point and come ready. But you don’t have to challenge someone’s personality and try to make them in your own image in order to do that. On the flip, people are not as stupid as they are made out to be. They don’t come in thinking they know everything (and yes, that even goes for Millennials). Yes, they will come in thinking they know a lot but that doesn’t mean that they are so stupid that they have no idea what they signed up for. Again, I think this is a superficial generational thing to treat anyone under 37 as a complete moron because their brains are wired differently. I even noticed this in Grey’s Anatomy this season with the new interns. If you go back and watch the first season and compare how they were treated and reacted to things then as opposed to now, you can see that this new round of interns is, for some reason, written as intrinsically more stupid. It baffles me.

Dear Emily VanCamp, you are wasted on this show
Again, circling back to my idea that this show is about corruption in the medical field, I had to sit down in silence for a while and have a good think about why people even tune in to any kind of case-of-the-week procedural or medical drama. If we tune in to cop shows to see bad guys perform slick and ingenious crimes but ultimately getting caught, do we not tune into medical dramas to see people’s lives saved? Sure, there is always the one or two criminals that outsmart the cop or patients that die, which we ourselves learn from just as much as the characters, but we watch more for a good feeling, right? So then why the hell would I want to watch a medical show that has a malpractice seam running through its very fabric? Dr. Bell is almost every person’s worst nightmare whenever they think about going to the doctor’s even for a routine checkup. This man will kill you while removing a mole for god’s sake. He is definitely the one to leave a pair of scissors inside of you or accidentally make you blind when you had 20/20 vision. What’s worse is that Conrad doesn’t seem much better. They both operate with a mindset that rules don’t apply to them. Amidst the show’s light, sunny cinematographic composition lies a fairly dark show that both covers some of the same storylines as Grey’s and other medical dramas, yet has little to no gravitas underneath to support its weighty inquisitions. It’s a wonder to me that they chose Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” as the song to promote this show because it doesn’t fit the tone of the show in anyway. Same can be said for the title of the show because it really isn't about The Resident. In fact, I would have appreciated this show more if they just named it Malpractice and explored the dark side of medicine. For now, however, it seems to have taken on a mixed tone where it doesn't know what it wants to be and both the viewer and the characters are lost in this murky mess.

Therefore, I’ve come to what, to me, feels like the only logical conclusion I could produce: this show is a satire of other, much better medical shows. It has to be. Whereas Grey’s is a serious show and Scrubs was a parody, this lies somewhere in the middle with worse writing than both. Taking the storyline of McDreamy’s hand problems after the accident and turning it into a head-shaking killfest with Dr. Bell has to be the writers and producers critique of how terrible they thought that Grey’s Anatomy storyline was. Just like the annoyed, egotistical Conrad, who thinks he’s some kind of drill sergeant and/or father figure to the younger doctor who he sees potential in has to be a nod to Scrubs’ Dr. Cox. Because if this is supposed to be taken seriously, then yikes! What's worse is that I know at least two of the writers on the show have done far better work on shows that have gotten cancelled. One of the male writers and past doctor (currently under investigation for sexual harassment) worked on The Night Shift which most likely influenced the bits and pieces of military protocol on this show. The creator of the show also worked on Black Box which handled the business side of medicine in a much better, more interesting light and, because it was an ABC show, had far more heart and emotional weight to it than this show does. It's rather sad that both of those shows were cancelled when they explored some of the same territory that this show has but with greater writing.

Should you be watching? I would say no, but it seems like I don’t know what people like because people seem to watch the shows that I vehemently dislike. So maybe people are looking for something new or are looking for villains in a medical drama because if so, this will fulfill that need. But I’d say that there have been far better medical shows within the last three years and I named some of them here. Hell, I liked Pure Genius better than this. Sadly, I can see this getting renewed, but I doubt that it would make it past season three. The Resident airs on FOX Mondays at 9pm. Catch it on FOXonDemand or at FOX.com.

What do you think? Have you heard of FOX’s The Resident? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? What did you think of it? Was I too hard on it and it’s your new favorite show? What do you think will happen to Dr. Bell when the hospital board finds out about his sickness? And do you think Conrad will get back with his nurse ex-girlfriend? Let me know in the comments below.

Coming SoonCheck out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.


Until next time, “You got into Harvard Med?” 'What? Like it's hard?' “Uh... Yes. It's really, like super hard. Super duper hard.”
P.S. There were some things that I wanted to say in this review/recap but I just got so frustrated with even reviewing this show that I couldn't spend another couple of minutes on it. I think of a better sign-off next time.Amazon
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OK Talent But No Magic #TheFourBattleForStardom #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

OK Talent But No Magic #TheFourBattleForStardom #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

All pictures courtesy of FOX
I’m going to try to keep this three-week roundup as short as I can because it is a reality show and I’m more judging it on the concept, but by this time you should know how well I do with keeping things short, especially because this sentence is running on longer than most Oscars broadcasts. At the same time, I have a lot to say about this show and very little to say about the show. Over the course of the next few months we are going to be bombarded with singing/talent competitions all vying to be the next new [insert your favorite competition show]. The question is: Will any of them be good, and how many of them will have the opportunity to stay around for longer than one of my run-on sentences? With some of them old (The Voice), some of them returning (American Idol) and some of them revamped from what they used to be (Showtime at the Apollo), who, in this competition of competitions, will win? Does The Four: Battle for Stardom (totally thought it was fame and not stardom) start the year off shining bright or will it last for but a flicker of time like that dreadful Boy Band singing competition from summer 2017? Let’s find out together.

The Four: Battle for Stardom is FOX’s regret over losing the bid for a revamped American Idol manifested into a semi-creative idea. (Note: At the time of writing this review, I was unaware that The Four was actually a foreign show brought to the US. How foolish of me. I should've known). So, the concept goes that FOX, in their all-knowing wisdom, searched the nation for a few weeks or months looking for the hottest, most market-ready, undiscovered singing talent this country has to offer. This search produced four “finalists” that they believe could be the next big thing. Ideally these four finalists would be the top four in any other singing competition. You follow?

Now that they have their four they are challenging viewers of the show to come and see if they can beat the Four by out-singing or out-rapping them on stage on TV (not live TV which I originally thought it would be). If they can outperform any of the Four, then they get to become part of the Four and will seemingly be in contention at the end of this season when the Four is narrowed down to just one, you follow?


That's the simple part. It gets a little convoluted and starts to lose me as a viewer when they set up the way that these challenges or “battles” between performers come about and are judged. Once you’re on the show, which I can only assume happens by you submitting a video to the contest, you are called to perform on a small stage in front of a live studio audience and four judges. The judging is where the show loses me. You have DJ Khaled, Meghan Trainor, Charlie Walk (a record label exec), and Diddy. Now, I’ll withhold talking about the judges for now and continue explaining the setup, but just know that the judges are not ideal. Oh, and the show is hosted by Fergie.

So, the judges are there because they are the ones who get to decide whether the new singers can challenge the Four or not. They do this by giving a simple yes or no vote that is translated into blue or red circles. The stage lights up and the new singer stands in the middle. The stage then forms one blue circle for each yes vote and a red circle for a no. My problem here is that there are no ties or debates that can affect the vote. For instance, you know how on American Idol you always needed a majority to go to Hollywood but not necessarily every judge? Here, it’s either all or nothing. They either all think you’re good enough or you don’t get to challenge. So if even one of the judges acts like a diva and doesn’t see what three others do, then it’s over for you. Now, to me that defeats the purpose of even having four judges. Frankly, why even have more than one? Or any at all? I fail to see what use, other than star power, the judges really serve here if their individual knowledge base and experience is not wholly appreciated and the singers fates are dictated solely by the one. It bugs me.

Fergie Is The Host, Y'all
Once a person makes it to the challenge round, they then can choose which of the four performers they want to challenge that night. No, it is not a free-for-all where you can challenge all of them and the best person wins. You choose ONE and perform against them. Do you have to perform the same song or at the same time as on The Voice? No. You perform your prepared song, they do the same and then it’s in the studio audiences’ hands. They vote and decide which of you will go into the Four. Here, I see yet another wasted opportunity, especially because the show is not shown live. When the audience votes the show doesn’t give you an on-screen tabulation of who is in the lead with the vote like you would see during a political vote. There are no percentages that you can watch and turn to your family to say, “Oooo, it’s close.” No. There’s a counter that says when the full vote has come in and then the screen lights up which person won. It’s just not dramatic enough, but I digress.

Sometimes the person from The Four stays, sometimes they go and a new Four is formed. Actually, a new Four is formed literally every episode thus far. And here’s the kicker, none of the original Four are still around, which really only makes you wonder how exhaustive this original search was. But even worse, once you are in a challenge that night, if you are part of the Four or become part of it, you cannot be challenged again that night. I repeat, you CANNOT be challenged again that night! Now, I know that there are plenty of people who are currently shrugging and saying, “So what,” about that idea, but think of it this way: say that they have an absolutely fire show one night and there are about four really good people on there that get to challenge. If there’s a fifth one that comes along, what do they do? More importantly, what if two really good singers have to go against each other because there is no one else left to challenge, even though one of the people currently sitting in the Four and who can’t be challenged would get absolutely smoked by this new challenger if they had to go against them? Basically, you are forced to keep weak talent while a much stronger talent gets sent home just because. The whole time I was watching it I thought, “Hmm? Is this really a good format?” The answer is no, not really, but it is made even worse by a few more things.

First, there is the audience bias. Every time we get a new one of these singing/talent competitions the question is always: How do we make it different enough from American Idol that it feels like our own thing, yet similar enough for it to draw viewers like AI’s early days? That question is always followed up closely with the “How do we do this Live” question. Because something that American Idol did perfectly, and that changed the entire landscape of TV, is that they managed to fit in a Live-performance component that also allowed for viewer interaction. You, as the couch potato you are, got to not just watch but help to decide the fate of the talent you saw. Granted, this was partially sullied by the whole Sanjaya debacle in which a large group of extremist ne’er-do-wells decided to vote through someone who clearly didn’t deserve to get as far as he did, but the system usually worked well. And people could debate all day but winners got chosen and were, for the most part, really good.

Here, on The Four, however, the judges have first choice as usual, but there is no development process here, meaning that this isn’t the third, fourth or fifth time the judges have heard this person. They’re experiencing these performers for the first time just as we are. That’s nice and all but when you are sitting at home and see these idiots choose someone to even challenge one of The Four that clearly doesn’t deserve it, you no longer feel you can trust the judges. For me, this show lost all credibility when Diddy not only chose, but argued vehemently for a rapper named Illakriss to do a challenge, even convincing the much more level-headed Charlie Walk to change his vote in favor of this dude. He was so terrible that he would’ve been one of the many laughed-at people that made it into the American Idol montage from the early days. It was clear that he was bad.


But this bias extends to the entire in-studio audience. If American Idol taught us one thing it is that there are not only a swath of people in America who cannot actually sing but think they can, but that there are also just as many equally tone-deaf people who really do think these people can sing. I will never forget when Simon Cowell told someone they couldn’t sing and told them to go out onto the beach and find a handful of people who think he can sing and maybe Simon would change his no-vote, and the dude did. Those people really enjoyed the man's shrill singing voice. It astonished me. On The Four, yes, the audience has been good about picking people who sound impressive... so far. But if that Illakriss crap happens again, can we trust the small studio audience to pick the better singer/performer? We have no idea how homogeneous or heterogeneous these people’s choices in music are and America, so far, gets no say, save for those artists brave enough to come to challenge the performers on the show. Simply put, there’s not enough TV-audience engagement so far and there really isn’t enough of...

Drama. Yes, that is the crux of the next point. The next most important component of this show is the judges’ panel. I cannot stress this enough, American Idol was successful in its early incarnation because of four things: great singers, a jovial side that looked at terrible singers, the ability of the audience to interact with the show and the chemistry among the judges. Tons of shows have tried to duplicate these lightning-in-a-bottle ingredients and many have nearly succeeded but almost always fail on the judges’ chemistry. AI worked so well because, for one, while they were all big personalities, they fit each other. Paula was the biggest star pre-show. You could tell that they knew what they were talking about and had good experience. But here’s the kicker, you could also tell that they weren’t trying to be anything or anyone other than who they were. They felt authentic and because of that they also felt like even when they offended each other, they could apologize, forgive, and have a good laugh about it over a meal later that week. This authenticity to both themselves, the viewers and their fellow judges created real drama and empathy. But as soon as they started bringing in other judges to try playing a role of “the mean one” or “the nice one,” or tried to supplement people who knew what they were talking about from an executive perspective with big-name, current stars, the show started to flounder. And sink. And became more about the judges than the talent (let's not revisit that Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey year). And eventually ended. Granted, they’re coming back this spring, but so far all I'm hearing about this reboot is that they are trying the same things that were mistakes the last time they were on air.

The Four skipped right past the successful years in favor of The Voiceroute and went with stars. Meghan Trainor does not feel like she is on equal footing with the guys even though she is the current singer/star. Yes, DJ Khaled is a star, but he is still more in the background, behind the mixing board. And some people don’t even know that he produces music. The Walk guy is OK, but he doesn’t seem ready for TV, at least not with this group. The worst, though, is Diddy. I suspected this would be the case based on the adverts and yep, it’s the case. Diddy is too big of a personality.

Yes, Diddy. The D, the I, the D, the D, the Y, the D, the I, the D. It’s Diddy. Every time I watch this show I am reminded of two things: the fact that Diddy was a big enough personality to have his own reality show in the early 2000s which, if any of you remember, literally went into the comedy lexicon as an aughts-era-defining show. Making The Band is still talked about to this day in certain circles and it’s now-defunct groups each had their moments, however brief they may have been. But oddly enough, the show was never known for its amazing talent, but rather its over-the-top antics from its main producer, the music mogul himself, and the drama between group members. It showed a side of Diddy that, frankly, pissed a lot of people off.


Which leads me to the second thing I’m reminded of every time I see this show, an antecdote from behind the scenes of the 90s hit football movie Any Given Sunday, starring Al Pacino as a beleaguered NFL coach. At the time, Diddy (then known as Puff Daddy or Puffy) had been cast in the other lead role as the rising-star football player. It was going to be his first big foray into acting, and he was going to make one helluva splash with such a big role, and it was supposed to mint a new career for him. But, while still in pre-production, Diddy apparently felt that he knew more about how the film should go than the director, writers, and a few of the producers and was already acting like a diva who had been nominated for multiple Oscars. He was a star and wanted to be treated as such. But he was far from having the kind of star-actor clout that the film’s star-director did have. That director, Mr. Oliver Stone, after a few weeks of pre-production and going back and forth with Diddy came into the office with just a few weeks to go before principal shooting started and told the producers, “I just gave myself an early gift. I fired Puff Daddy!”

The role would eventually go to Jamie Foxx who would use that role as leverage to show that he could do dramatic roles different from his comedic roots, and we know how the rest of the story goes for him. What’s important, however, is that I, along with that particular production crew and many other fans of the film, am convinced that firing Diddy was the best thing they could've done. I don’t think that movie is even half as good with him in it. You see where I’m going with this?

Don’t get me wrong, I actually really loved the 90s-era Diddy. But as the years have gone on, it seems like Diddy turned from hopeful music exec who really just wants to make good music and inspire people, to some form of buffoonish caricature of the music industry's worst ills. You think a music executive is an abusive ass? Guess what? You think a music executive thinks they’re god? Guess what? You think a music executive is spiteful and vengeful and will destroy you if you don’t cater to their every whim? Guess what? He feels like Trump in blackface or Harvey Weinstein without all the allegations. But worst of all is that none of it seems genuine, which is actually kinda depressing seeing as how New Yorkers pride themselves on being authentic and being able to sniff out authenticity. Yet, Trump and Diddy not only existed but thrived in that environment.

Again, I say all of this because if Diddy felt more genuine, felt like he wasn’t playing a role for everyone, maybe this show would work or the overbearing nature of his personality would allow the other judges to breathe. But as it is, the other judges almost seem too timid around him to even share their real critiques of the artists. Again, going back to Illakriss, the dude’s two chosen songs were so whack that it’s amazing he even got on the show. And you can’t tell me that the other three judges, being in the industry for some years now, didn’t all want to give this young man a Sandman-at-the-Apollo/Beyonce’s-To-The-Left boot in the butt upon hearing him the first time. But they all gave him a chance under the instruction of Diddy. Yet, they didn’t give a chance to some other artists that actually could sing or rap but maybe didn’t have the stage presence that could be worked on. At least give them the chance to challenge if you’re doing it for weak talent. Granted, Diddy did apologize and say that in hindsight it was probably a bad idea to go with Illakriss, and I respect him for that, but the fact that it seems like they’ll be too afraid to actually make a firm stance and vote their conscience tells me that this show will never survive with Diddy on the panel. Worst of all, Meghan and Walk feel like his underlings, leaving DJ Khaled as the only one who is even close to Diddy’s equal. And I love Khaled, but he is far from assertive in this forum. I think he still wants to be liked too much for him to be effective as a judge in the spotlight. And that’s OK for him, but it won’t work for the show.



Honestly, I think that if the producers want this show to succeed, then the best thing for them would be to follow Oliver Stone’s example and have Diddy step down. Limit it to just the remaining three judges, get rid of the all-or-nothing judge vote, but keep the yay or nay circles so that people who do get one red circle know what the judge will be looking for going forward. Do this all live and incorporate an at-home voting component somehow. That may be having to have the contestants fly out a second time the next week to see if audiences thought they should be part of the new four or not. Something to get people more involved.

I don’t know what the ratings on this show are, maybe they’re actually really good, and they don’t need to make a single change. But from my perspective, this show will hardly last the tough competition that’s out there. I give this show a C-. I’d tell you to watch if you want to, but there are simply too many other good music competitions coming down the pike. The Four: Battle for Stardom airs on FOX Thursdays at 8/9c pm (two hour show). Catch it on FOXonDemand or Fox.com

What do you think? Have you heard of The Four? If not, do you think you’ll tune in for an episode? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Was I too hard on it? Who has been your favorite contestant so far and why? The judges and audience keep going for Zhavia but I’m just not hearing it. Her look is different but her voice just seems OK to me. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.


Until next time, “Some stars are meant to burn bright and fast. Others shoot, staying but for a eye's brief flicker.”
P.S. Ooo, that's good. I like it. But is it the right quote for all post? Hmm? Two and a half years of blogging and I've finally written a quote I might like as my sign-off. I'll have to consider this more thoroughly. Until then, I'll come up with a better sign-off next time.Amazon
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Is There Another Flight I Can Catch? No? You Sure? #LAtoVegas #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX

Is There Another Flight I Can Catch? No? You Sure? #LAtoVegas #3weekroundup #recap #review #FOX
All pictures courtesy of FOX 

Boy, I guess my brain is just taking its dear, sweet time with getting back into the groove of things after such a long layoff. There are literally only, like, four or five new mid-season shows I’ll be reviewing and this is the second, yet it feels like the 20th. I’m already tired of watching new stuff, though that may be because I haven’t found a diamond in the rough yet. Still, my sluggish start to 2018 does not bode well for my upcoming projects this year, including season two of Extraordinary and the release of my mystery novel The Man On The Roof—look for those soon on Amazon Kindle. Anyway, we’re back with another new show (almost all the new shows are on FOX. Hmm? Interesting...) on FOX. Will this new half-hour comedy make a smooth landing into your heart or will it pull a Sully and have to crash-land in the Hudson before slowly sinking into the deep fridgid waters? Let’s find out together!

FOX’s LA to Vegas is an airplane workplace comedy about the pseudo-famous weekly flight from LA to Vegas. For those not in the know, there really are groups of people that hop onto a plane every weekend in LA and fly to Vegas, returning Sunday night. A respite for some, business for others. I guess an East Coast equivalent would be those yuppies and hipsters that drive from Manhattan to the Hamptons every weekend during the summer—hey, Bravo’s Summer House, you equally trashy Guido-less version of Jersey Shore. Because it’s a constant flight that happens every weekend and it’s very cheap and easier than driving, you get a lot of the same people on the flight every single week, so we will have both crew and passengers as regulars on the show. This is a fictionalized depiction of the drama that could happen amongst them all!

First, let me start by saying that ye should be not fooled ye weary viewer. Though the always classy and talented Dylan McDermott is put front and center in most of the advertising for this show, he is not exactly the star of the show. It doesn’t center around him, but rather the lead stewardess Ronnie, played by former soap star Kim Matula. I’ll talk more about this discrepancy later, just know that I had to get used to it. We open episode one with Ronnie fumbling out of an Uber while leaving a message for a DELTA HR person about a recently vacated flight attendant position on their LA to JFK flight, all while she sprints through the airport getting dressed into her current stewardess uniform. (Note: This is a single-cam, no laugh track, no studio audience kinda comedy for those who didn’t know). She manages to get fully dressed, get on the plane and start welcoming passengers while explaining to her co-worker her dreams of grand travels around the world. LA to JFK can eventually lead to JFK to London which can eventually lead to London to somewhere Asian, and before you know it she’ll have trotted more globe than those B-ball players from Harlem. If she can just get that Delta job and ditch this rinky-dink unnamed airline she works for now.

Ronnie at left, Bernard at right 
Her coworker is Bernard, played by Nathan Lee Graham. He is the fiery, sassy black gay dude that embodies the thick card-stock 90s-version of a gay man. He’s supposed to be funny and we all know it, but somehow the shtick feels dated. Again, I’ll address this more later but just know there’s something off about him. Anyway, he both commiserates with her while also giving her a “girl, bye,” about her seriously thinking she’s going to get her grubby paws on that Delta job—not that he wants it for himself, but no way she’s on the radar.
They break from their coworker powwow so that we can meet our first main-player passengers beginning with Artem. Played by the familiar character actor Peter Stormare (Armageddon, Bad Boys 2, Minority Report), Artem is supposed to be some West European (maybe Russian) sleazy gambler who will take a bet on anything and is superstitious like all gamblers. His gripe: some grown baby-man is sitting in his lucky seat on the plane. The baby-man is sitting with his fiance as they are flying to elope in order to piss off her parents (Artem won that bet. It was either piss off parents or she’s knocked-up). Ronnie gets them to move by offering free beer to someone else who will give up their seat and at first a pregnant woman stands up and it’s supposed to be super funny but... Eh!

NicholeThrough the pregnant woman and the couple we meet another one of our main-player passengers in Nichole (with a damn H!). Nichole is a scripper. She scrips. For a living. That’s some southern accent humor for you. If you don't get it, fine! Anyway, she works at the strip club Grapefroots where she earns a helluva lot of money over the weekends making it bounce and wobble from dem dollas. The pregnant girl works with her, though she doesn’t become a series regular. Nichole (with a damn H!) tells the bride-to-be that she can also make it drop and wiggle for green stacks because a girl that looks like her is built for the pole... or the lap, whichever. Nichole also makes a commission off of each girl she brings in, kinda like a stripper-recruitment pyramid scheme.

Before Ronnie completed her quest to get the couple to move to new seats in order to satisfy Artem (the couple doesn’t care where they sit, so long as they stay together—awww! Young love is so sweet and stupid), she also ran into our third main-player passenger, the very British Colin. Colin is played by actor Ed Weeks who I guess may be new to the US market. I’m sure he’s been being British in other things but I haven’t seen him in anything I can remember, and I’ve clearly seen a lot of crap. Colin is both irritatingly proper and charmingly sarcastic, making it a very odd but mildly satisfying love interest for our long-suffering Ronnie to get internationally dirty on a domestic flight with. Ronnie and Bernard at first stand at front and wonder about who he is and why he’s traveling back and forth to Vegas every weekend because he doesn’t seem like the gambling or stripping type. His fictional, fantasized options: a failing spy, somebody in WITSEC or something else. In reality, he’s a professor at some college, but that still doesn’t explain why he’s flying back and forth which is later revealed.

Moving on, we finally round out the main cast with our cockpit heroes (Boom! Just gave you a perfect name for another comedy show and/or movie. You’re welcome, Hollywood) Alan, the co-pilot played by Amir Talai, and Captain Dave played by McDermott, finally! Alan is given little to nothing to do on the first couple of episodes and may never be given more than 10 lines on each episode. He exists almost solely to sit next to Captain Dave, look like a doofus, act like a dingus, and play beta-male to Captain Dave’s clear alpha sensibilities. He and Captain Dave have been going number one and two together for some time now, as evidenced by his lack of laughter at Dave’s overplayed joke about the flight from LA to Lost Wages! Yeah, it’s that bad. The stick belongs to Dave. The yoke belongs to Dave. Alan does not get to touch either and that is how it will always be.

Alan at left, Captain Dave at right
Captain Dave is a four-time divorced non-ladies-man ladies’ man that all the women want to be with simply so that they get experience in knowing the type of guy that they don’t want to be with. Almost every one of his ex-wives cheated on him, seemingly because he couldn’t get them to climactic heights on a frequent enough occasion, or because his ego was too big and other things not big enough. Still, does that stop him? Well, yeah, it probably stops him from doing a lot of things, but not from flying the pond-hopper that is LA to Vegas on a weekend-ly basis. Granted, he has to have a few drinks to fly or to do just about anything in his life, but he’s always good to go and always sorta-professional. A bevy of bad jokes, filled to the brim with alcohol, and a sweat of jubilant desperation always filming his body, Captain Dave is everybody’s bad uncle but in a plane captain’s uniform.

The flight filled with potential syphilis carriers finally takes off toward Vegas. It isn’t long into the flight before Ronnie learns that a fellow stewardess—some Asian chick—has already landed the Delta job behind her back. With her dreams crushed, Ronnie quits mid-flight and goes to sit down in the seat next to the professor who not only heard her and Bernard’s theorizing about who he is and what he does, but also logically explains how he thinks she made a terrible mistake because now she will have to pay for her flight back to LA and is in no better possession for a national flight than before. His logic infuriates her. So much so that they hurriedly scamper to the bathroom to make things super awkward and get a little strange and wet, which they do in a PG-13 sorta way. After there mile-high make out, they de-board never to see each other again... until the return flight on Sunday night. It’s only then revealed why he goes back and forth from LA to Vegas: he is married and has a young son. And Ronnie feels like an absolute peach about the situation.

While Ronnie is losing her shiznit on the Brit, Captain Dave is trying to find a bit of weekend glory as his life has dive-bombed in a most miserable way. He had hoped to flaunt his captain-of-the-air power by officiating an on-board wedding for that eloping couple in the same way a boat captain can marry off anyone at sea, but Ronnie informs him he has no such power. Then, on the return flight he manages to leg-lock that very same young, dumb baby-man when the guy comes back complaining about the flight and the passengers on it who convinced his girl that she wasn’t actually in love with him anymore—Nichole (with a damn H!) totally got that pyramid-scheme bonus. Captain Dave sneaks up from behind and subdues the kid who has threatened to do something really mean to the plane. Ronnie un-quits her job (never made it official) and commits to suffering in hopes of thatone day. One day! And the Brit confesses that he has been separated from his wife because they went through a quickie Vegas wedding after a few Hangover-esque nights of wild times that accidentally produced a baby. He is in no way in love with that woman. Ronnie feels a little better about their in-air slobfest.

Episode two is about Captain Dave being chosen as one of the top 10 pilots to watch out for by some flyboy magazine, which he hopes really sticks it to his rival. But as the time draws near for him to do the photo shoot for the zine, he comes down with a severe case of the yips and, assumingly like in all of his past four failed marriages, can’t quite perform. The plane is up in the air and cruising on autopilot but no way in hell is he gonna be able to land this bird.

Meanwhile, Ronnie and Bernard are suffering through their own crisis. After handing out a coupon for Grapefroots to her seatmate, Nichole discovers that the old man has died on her shoulder. Per airline and FAA rules and regulations, a person cannot be legally pronounced dead until on the ground. Ronnie and Bernard don’t want to freak-out the passengers, so they (Nichole helps) try to pretend the man is just sleeping until doofus Alan comes out from the cockpit and mistakes the old white dead guy for another old white alive guy and announces that there is a dead guy onboard. And who wants to ride around with a dead guy? So Nichole has to enlist the help of British bloke Colin to help her carry the body to the front for no apparent reason other than to set up the pratfall of Alan when he is summoned to the front to land the plan. Alan trips over the dead guy and smacks into the cockpit door, knocking himself out. So Ronnie has to go into the cockpit and convince Captain Dave that he can land the plane, and simultaneously she has to explain why she failed to show up for a date with Colin after their misunderstanding got understood. Her explanation: She just couldn’t because he scared her with all of his overbearing, polite Britishness. But carrying a dead body together changed things and once the captain does land the plane, she is totally ready for a real relationship. And now Colin agrees with her that they shouldn’t be in a relationship, and she’s lost her chance. It’s DELTA’s LA to JFK all over again!

Episode three finally introduces us to Captain Dave’s nemesis. Upon coming into work with an injured wrist that he claimed he hurt while trying to lift an armoire off of someone, Dave suffers through Bernard calling it into the airline. They quickly send a replacement in Captain Steve, a man who flies international (LA to Canada) and who is married to a model (a catalogue model an internet catalogue model). Dave hates him because he finished at the top of their flight school and beat him out for multiple routes in their time as professional pilots. So the last thing he wants to see is this man take another win by doing a better job than he ever could. At first the crew are enamored by him. Ronnie thinks he’s a hunk of a man, ditto Bernard and even Alan thinks he’s cool. In fact, they could get used to flying with him, and Steve brags about maybe taking over LA to Vegas for an easier workload. They’d at least never have to check Dave’s hair for grays anymore or baby him about his terrible jokes and drinking. But when Steve cracks the whip and insists that they are terrible at their jobs.

Bernard and Ronnie then unite with Dave in operation: Get Steve Off LA to Vegas. Riding as a passenger, Dave tells Steve to ease up on his crew but Steve ain’t hearin’ it and says that he’ll have them fired if he takes over. Dave then turns on the plan when he learns that he can take over Steve’s international flights if Steve takes his LA to Vegas. Still, Ronnie and Bernard are like family, so he sticks up for them again only for Steve to reveal that he was never serious about taking over LA to Vegas. Hell, the dude flies international. International! So, all is saved as far as flights go.

Left to Right: Captain Dave, Ronnie, ColinOn the ground, Colin struggles to throw his son a really cool Vegas birthday party but is thwarted when the place he booked was previously used by an anti-vaccine parent and now has a super-virus or something. Ronnie hooks him up with Artem who knows people in Vegas. Artem takes him to a nice indoor playhouse of sorts only for the budget to balloon to a few thousand dollars. So Colin and Artem end up at Grapefroots where Nichole (with a damn H!) welcomes them to throw the party on Sunday because it is a dead day anyway. The kids have fun sliding down the pole, have condom-balloon animals and even get to pet a man dressed as a dog who is the slave to his dominatrix mistress. It’s the best b-day party ever!

What’s my score? I give this a C. This show is dumb, OK? Like, seriously dumb. It reminds me of a defunct show from about ten or 15 years ago called The Loop where the comedy elicits more head shakes and “this is stupid” comments than actual laughs, yet I liked The Loop. This? Eh! Take it or leave it. I don’t think it’s as smart as Brooklyn-9-9 but I don’t watch that either. And it’s definitely no New Girl. The funny thing is that every situation, so far, has been pretty realistic. Can I believe that a pilot would get the yips, a guy would die in flight, an eloping couple would break up and the girl would run off to be a stripper? Yes. It’s all happened before. Yet, there is something so very inauthentic/unfunny about the show. I think that it fails to properly balance or even have some kind of emotional weight to any of the episodes. One of the reasons why most comedies in the past were successful was because they had at least one “aww” moment either per episode or per every two episodes. That moment when the audience stops, the plot slows and a real connection is made between the characters and the viewers, either exploring some kind of meaningful topic or hitting on something revealing about the characters. But with most single-cam shows of the last decade, they fail to do this unless they are strictly about families. Even then it’s difficult. With the exception of Seinfeld which never had to have an awwmoment, many of today’s comedies go strictly for the laughs without establishing any personal connection. Such is the problem with this show.

Have you ever been watching a comedy or any kind of movie and thought, “Wow! This seems like it should be good and I should be more into it but I’m just not.” The jokes could even be funny or the action pretty good but you just don’t feel a thing? That’s sorta this show. And it’s really no more epitomized than by the character of Bernard. It’s rare that after spending a few weeks/episodes with a show (or a movie) that I can’t figure out what it is that either I or some other viewers won’t/don’t like about something, yet here I am with Bernard. I can’t figure out if I don’t like the actor, don’t like the way he’s playing the character, don’t like the way the character is written or just don’t like the dialogue for the character but something is painfully off about him to me. This is not a Seth MacFarlane/Orville problem where if you get rid of him the entire show becomes exponentially better, but Bernard currently doesn’t feel like he fits with the rest of the cast. Don’t get me wrong, some of the lines they’ve written for him are quite funny if not new, but they don’t make me want to laugh. It’s almost as if every line he says he knows is funny, but he doesn’t want you to laugh because he’ll then feel laughed at. I don’t know, it just feels strange. It doesn’t fit with everyone else.

Speaking of casting, I have to say that I was a little disappointed when I realized that McDermott really wasn’t the full-on lead. Again, you can usually tell who the star of a show is by who they open up on and whose private life is explored more. Ronnie gets both the opening shot and gets all the questions about her private life explored on a continual loop for the first three episodes. You have all the answers to her major questions by the end of episode four (yes, I watched four eps instead of just three but only covered three per my usual): she’s single, she wants to travel the world, she’s socially open to dating but kinda has a crush on British guy which is really complicated, she is nosy and thinks she’s a do-gooder, she once had an affair with a married man and et cetera. McDermott you hardly know anything about except that he is a lush with ex-wives who thinks he’s better than he is. Does he have kids? Why did he move to LA? What does he do when in Vegas? Who knows. Again, not hating because the woman who plays Ronnie is quite charming and good, but for those tuning in solely for McDermott (me at first), temper your expectations. You get him, but he’s more of a co-lead. Funny enough, this is a real tricky way to get women to top-line network shows. I digress.

Should you be watching? Eh! Probably not. It’s certainly not a family comedy and chances are good that if you’re single, you’re probably too busy with work or other shows that you feel a lot more comfortable with on Tuesday nights—a night with a glut of comedy already, with NBC’s reality game shows and ABC’s two-hour laugh block. It’s ultimately a forgettable show that tries but doesn’t try hard enough to exploit its novel idea. I’ve called many a show and movie forgettable before and some have turned out to be good or stick around longer than I hypothesized they would, but I would say that this one does not supply you with any joke or comedic setup that you’ll be talking about the next day at work or tweeting about with your buddies that aren’t currently already watching the show. Sorry, but I’d expect a lot more from producers Adam McKay and Will Ferrell. Oh, did I bury the lede there? Oh well! LA to Vegas airs on FOX Tuesdays at 9:00pm, right before The Mick. You can catch up with the first four episodes on FOXonDemand or at FOX.com now.


What do you think? Have you heard of LA to Vegas? If not, do you think you’ll tune in for an episode or two now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Was I too harsh on it? Is it your new favorite show? And what crazy shenanigans do you want to see happen to the crew and passengers of the flights? And when will Colin and Ronnie hook up again? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking. If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.


Until next time, “Do you fly often?” 'No, I... don't have wings.'
P.S. That's a little Airplane humor for you. See, the sneaky part about it is that it's not an actual quote from the Airplane films. Sure, I could've used the most quoted quote from the overly quotable film, but I didn't. So... yeah. I'll think of a better sign-off next time. Amazon
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A Joke About Not Knowing The Number Is Too Easy #911 #3weekroundup #review #recap #FOX

A Joke About Not Knowing The Number Is Too Easy #911 #3weekroundup #review #recap #FOX
All pictures courtesy of FOX 

It’s unbelievable how time flies. Just a few minutes ago I was on vacation and now I’m here, writing this stupid post about one of FOX’s new shows and debating whether I’m going to do a post on their new reality competition The Four (not all that great of a show; Diddy’s too overbearing). You’ll have to excuse me as I haven’t written (read: typed) a single word since a week before Christmas, save for the occasional Twitter post. I’ve taken notes about some of my upcoming projects on pieces of scratch paper and bills that God knows I’m never even gonna open (the problem goes away if you ignore it long enough, I swear), so I have been keeping up with pseudo-writing, but nothing substantial. Frankly, I’ve got a lot of writing to do this year and hardly enough time to do it. And because I decided to take an extra week of vacation due to an illness (first time I’ve been really, truly, ultra-sick in eight years), I am trying to shake off the brain fog and yips that come from being out of practice. OK, so what the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, FOX’s new show 9-1-1. So, is this new show about first responders a heartbeat away from brilliance or is it ready for the cancellation body bag? Let’s find out together!

FOX’s 9-1-1 is the latest production from the studio’s beloved producer Ryan Murphy (and cohorts) that takes a look at all the dramatic and emotional goings-on that all first responders must go through on a daily basis. A show packed with a few heavyweight TV stars, it focuses not just on cops or firefighters but on the full gamut of individuals tasked with the job of saving our lives and keeping the peace. The first episode opens with a voice-over from TV and Murphy-productions veteran Connie Britton (Nashville, American Horror Story season 1, Friday Night Lights) who gives a rundown on what she sees as the two emergencies that people must deal with on a daily basis. The first is the emergency (read: immediacy) of everyday life. Connie’s character Abby Clark is a 40-something recently dumped single woman who has to take care of her Alzheimer's-stricken mother in her medium-sized apartment. No kids, hardly any prospects for the future and still crushing for her ex-boyfriend, she has to somehow find a way to make it through each day without losing her shiznit.

Abby; Connie Britton Is Looking Really Good These DaysThe second emergency is an actual emergency and “is the kind you call [her] about.” Things like car crashes, fires, etc. She is a 911 operator (for the remainder of this, I will only use the hyphens when referring to the show as a whole) for LA county. We take her first call—a young boy who hit his head in the pool and currently isn’t breathing—and meet our main team of firefighters.

Our firefighters/EMTs are led by Peter Krause (most recently of ABC’s The Catch; also Six Feet Under) who plays Bobby Nash, a middle-aged recovering alcoholic who had dropped so low at one point that he lost his family and his job as a firefighter, but who now goes to weekly confessions at his preferred Catholic church. The job, which he loves, drove him to drink but it also drove him to stop drinking because of said love. He’s an all-or-nothing guy with a good head and an understanding heart, and he is the captain of his squad.

Next we have Hen played by Aisha Hinds who has appeared in a ton of stuff and is usually the bald black chick. Here she plays the bald black chick firefighter. In the first three episodes little about her is really explored save for the fact that she feels comfortable enough to give men around her unsolicited advice while not playing into the stereotype of the bossy black woman.

We also have Howie “Chimney” Han played by Kenneth Choi who we later learn is playing into the exact love-archetype laid out for Asian-American men. While he is trusted by his captain, there are limitations to what he can. He is set-up as a possible joke-sponge for future episodes.

And finally we have Evan “Buck” Buckley played by Oliver Stark, king of Winterfell—the north remembers. He is literally the young buck of the team and, yes, you guessed it, is written as the overly rambunctious know-it-all millennial who just wants to use his status as an LA firefighter to get laid often! Awash in a severe hero complex, he wants to one day be the old guy with all the coolest stories that the young women and the kids love to hear. And yes, that means that Captain Bobby both sees a little of himself in Buck and sets up a father-figure dynamic between them that the show will profitably plunge for the duration of its existence.

Back to their first rescue, we see the team respond to the downed swimmer and work to save his life as the boy continues to turn blue. It is here where Abby reminds us that as soon as help arrives in-person, usually the callers hang up the phone before the 911 operator knows the outcome of the call. To her, it’s like reading a really good story and then having the last few pages ripped out. Unfortunately for her, on the calls where they do stay on the line the outcome is not so hot. Where Bobby and his team are able to save the swimmer, Bobby’s attempts to stop a suicidal young woman/junkie from jumping to her death prove meaningless as he watches the girl plummet through the sky. Abby heard that.

Hey, yo, Bobby!
Losses are a possible everyday occurrence for Bobby, but ones with such a visceral connection cause him to go to the church where he talks about the drinking history. That was his coping mechanism. Now he journals all the deaths.

Buck’s “coping” mech is getting laid. He takes the firetruck for a breezy spin around the city before sinking into something young and brunette and spinning back to the firehouse where he must hear about Chimney’s girl problems. Chimney is an embellisher who tells his girlfriend fanciful stories about his job that aren’t always true, to make himself sound more heroic. We later learn that she does seem to have some sort of hero fetish. Anyway, we see Buck get a warning about using the truck for extracurriculars.

Abby takes a call from a guy who sounds like a stoner, who tells her that he thinks someone flushed a baby down the toilet because he can hear it crying in the wall. The team goes to the apartment complex only to confirm the insane hypothesis and introduce us to our final main character Police Officer Athena Grant, played by Angela Bassett. Working the beat, Athena is there to do preliminary investigative work on how a baby could’ve gotten into a toilet pipe and prevent higher levels from flushing. While the team saws the baby out, Athena discovers an immigrant father and his young daughter trying to hide her afterbirth bleeding. It turns out that the girl gave birth to an unwanted baby and threw it down the open toilet pipe of an unfinished apartment upstairs. They rescue the preemie who comes out elongated and in need of NICU care immediately. The mother also needs care which leads to Buck getting angry that the girl could treat her child like that and refusing to let the girl ride in the same ambulance as the baby. He and Athena get into it about age and rank and cops vs. firefighters and, frankly, I thought it was a rather stupid argument, but they wrote it, so...


With our journey ended at the hospital, we follow Officer Athena home where we learn that she and her husband are going through drama on account of him finally admitting he's gay. He tells the kids, precipitating an argument about the proper time to tell them. She thought it was too soon for them to handle that, and that he lied to her. Her husband counters with something about how she knew the truth the whole time but didn’t want to admit it.

As we dig farther into the personal lives of our mains, we see Abby’s mother is so unwell that she has an at-home nurse that ain’t worth a hill of beans and who is quickly replaced. Abby goes back to work and takes a call about a huge snake being wrapped around some woman’s neck and the team goes to the girl’s place to find it filled with uncaged snakes—some illegal—that look dangerous. Unable to pry the snake from around the woman’s neck, Buck cuts the snake’s head off and receives a lecture from his older superiors. But at least he’ll get to bang snake lady. In fact, he does bang her on a rooftop after taking the firetruck on a spin once again. That three-strikes system goes out the window when Bobby finds him up there midday and fires him for being an idiot.

So, while Buck brainstorms with Hen on how to get his job back, a give-me lands in his lap when a little girl calls 911 about a break-in. The girl tells Abby that the house is new, and she doesn’t know her address yet but that she can hear two men rummaging around downstairs. They call mom but she left her cell at home. So Abby makes a dispatch call to the nearest cop (Officer Athena) and tells her to look for a house with a young girl’s bike in the driveway. But even knowing the neighborhood that could take too long, so Athena gets an idea.

She calls her girl Hen who is busy on a car crash call and asks for help. Hen shoots that call to Buck who drives the firetruck to Athena’s rescue. The plan: drive around with sirens blaring in the firetruck to see if they can sonar the girl’s specific location. Yes, I used sonar as a verb. This way, the burglars won’t suspect the cops and won’t elevate the danger.

Well, the plan works until the girl goes downstairs and tries to sneak away. The burglars get her and grab the phone from her. Abby talks them down from killing the girl and tells them that the cops are on their way, but she’ll help them escape if they leave the girl unharmed. They fall for that and end up wandering out into the arms of Athena. But the “mastermind” burglar won’t give up easily and escapes onto his motorcycle. He is about to run over and gun down Athena when Buck shoots him with the fire hose. The kid is reunited with her mother, the day is saved and Buck keeps his job... for now.

Left to Right: Bobby, Buck, Hen, Officer GrantEpisode two sees Buck realizing the weightiness of both Bobby’s words and of his job as he suffers through his first lost save-e. A roller coaster malfunction sees a black guy treated like every black guy in a horror film pre-Get Out. His overweight surviving buddy is left to dangle in the upside-down roller coaster while Buck tries to strap a harness onto him, so that he and the other passengers can be safely lowered off the stalled ride. Unfortunately the big fella freaks and says that he can’t extend his hand out to the safety harness, then plummets to his death. While Buck deals with that, we learn throughout the episode that the guy previously had suicidal tendencies and that his black friend had convinced him to get out and start living again only after the big man had been locked away in his apartment for a few months. So even though it was Buck’s job to save the dude regardless, it wasn’t fully his fault. Still, he gets told by Bobby and Chimney that he’ll never forget the look on the man’s face as he fell those few stories. Even Officer Athena comes by to give her two cents about the badges and the uniforms they wear and how taking them off at the end of the day is supposed to be symbolic for letting go of the day’s drama.

Meanwhile, Abby is still suffering through her mother’s suffering. Luckily, things start to look up when she gets a new nurse who is patient and much more caring than the previous lady. This woman’s caring reminds her of how loving people can be and causes her feelings for Buck to surface. On episode one she talked to Buck during that home invasion and he told her that the kid was safe, the burglars caught and the cop unharmed. She made an instant connection with him because she finally got the end of a good story. Seeing him on TV after the roller coaster thing makes her want to reach out to him even though he looks a little too young for her. She risks her job by calling him later in the episode on his private line and chatting with him about how tough the job is and it seems like they’re making a true connection.

Meanwhile, Officer Athena and her husband are still arguing but try not to let their frustrations play out in front of the kids. They continue to attend couples counseling where she finally admits that she did know something but ignored the signs because she wanted children so badly and was aging quickly. She says she is willing to live a celibate life if he is, and then he drops the bomb that he met someone. Interestingly enough, earlier in the day she, Hen and Chimney got a call about some dangerous devil-dogs that attacked this man in a house. She gets the dogs some food and distracts them with that while the man climbs off the counter and flirts with Athena. Hen plays like her sista and asks why she gave no response to the man’s overtures. She wasn't into it. But as it turns out the man was actually a burglar and the dogs were trying to guard against him. They just let a burglar go. She eventually finds him later in the episode and brings him down.

Back to the EMTs and we learn two things: the kid (Buck) is suffering through a bout of the yips, and they deal with a lot of suicides in LA. After some therapy where he sexes up his therapist, and a refusal to climb the ladder to save a precariously hung scaffold worker, Buck has to rappel out of an apartment window and thrust-kick a guy back into his apartment and off of the ledge from which he’s about to jump due to his cheating girlfriend. The day saved, everything is right and everyone goes home. But only upon returning home does Officer Athena realize that her sick daughter (the eldest) has actually OD’d on something.

We pick up episode three with a bounce-house emergency. An idiot dad goes to play in one of those dangerous outdoor bouncy houses at his child’s B-day party. As it so happens, the house is right above a cliff on a windy day. Yeah, that happens. And yes, the dad is thrown out of the house. Chimney complains that he never gets to do anything cool because he must stay on-ground to work the wench while the others rappel down the side of the cliff to secure the kids and dad. There’ a bunch of cut-scenes back and forth to the wench to make it seem like Chimney’s job is so dramatic but it definitely isn’t.

Meanwhile, we pick back up with Athena’s 911 call. She and her husband go to the hospital where it’s revealed that the girl took some of Athena’s leftover pain meds from her dental work last year. She survives, but two big things come from this: Athena’s husband’s boyfriend/date arrives at the hospital with her husband, letting her know just how over her sham-marriage is, and the girl admits that she was being bullied at school which is why she took the pills. BUT she did NOT want to die... supposedly. In any case, Child Protective Services comes to talk to her about what happened and why she’s in the hospital because they have to by law.

Meanwhile, remember that stereotypical Asian male thing I referenced earlier? Well, Chimney is playing that to a tee. See, he tries impressing this white or Latina(?) woman by cooking and telling her the heroic embellishments about him rappelling down the cliff. Frankly, she is as regular looking as Wonder bread, especially knowing the kind of women they have in LA. There are models and wannabe-models on every corner. But he likes this girl. So much, in fact, that he proposes to her and she turns him down flat. Yep, Asian dudes never get the girl and that’s both in movies as well as in real-life statistics, which biasly show that black women and Asian men are the least sexually-desired groups worldwide. He gets so pissed that he goes out on a late-night drive to zoom away his frustrations. Some idiot drives in front of him, and he sees something in the middle of a busy highway and bam! He crashes and has to make a 911 call.

Is It Racist That This Is The Only Good Picture I Could Find Of Chimney?
Another crew comes, but he only wants Bobby and his crew to touch him. What’s wrong? A long pipe of rebar has speared through his skull making him into a human unicorn. They manage to cut it down far enough to pry him out of the car and get him to the hospital where they slide it out in surgery, but they then put him in a coma to see if his brain has been thoroughly damaged or not. Bobby tries to get his girlfriend to at least go to the hospital to see him but that skank even refuses that because she doesn’t want to be saddled with a possible cripple for the next few months or years. The episode ends with Chimney sorta waking or at least conscious enough to react to what his visiting team is talking about. All is well.

What’s my grade? I give it a solid B. OK, so this is not as genre-defining as many of Ryan Murphy’s other works. In fact, when I’m considering everything else that he’s had a hand in developing for the last 15 or so years—Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Feud, Scream Queens—this is undeniably the most pedestrian, bland show of all of them. You’re not going to find potentially award-winning writing like on ACS, Feud or Nip/Tuck. You will not find biting or over-the-top satirical plotting and characters like in Scream Queens, AHS or Glee. And you definitely won’t find film-quality cinematography or artistic compositions like in ACS or Feud. But what you will find is an interesting look into a part of the first responder's jobs that you rarely see. With FX’s past show Rescue Me or NBC’s current Chicago Fire you mostly get firefighters being... well, firefighters. They either hung in the clubhouse or had the heavy gear on. Same with most cop shows which are about detectives and not beat cops which are two very different positions. And even medical shows tend to only show you the aftermath of a much crazier scene in the field. This, however, is like the before and in-between of all of those shows. I almost wish that they did something like what NBC has with its “Chicago” franchise and had multiple shows that rounded out the entire story of people. But I can accept this show for what it is. Even still, I see potential for a great many fissures going forward.

First off, as I was trying to say, this show is basically the legwork for those other traditional servicemen shows. So most of the stories will stop at the hospital doors if they ever get that far. Also, you’re not going to see some hard-hitting police work like you would on SWAT or Law and Order. This’ll be CIP stuff: drug-dealing on corners, people actively getting robbed, etc. So where most crime procedurals focus on the mystery of what happened and if justice will be served, this show is all adrenaline rush, baby! That can be good, but it can also get repetitive fast! Again, only three episodes have aired so far, and we’ve already seen a suicidal girl jump off a crane, a suicidal big man willingly fall to his death off of a roller coaster and a pissed-off pseudo-suicidal boyfriend threaten to jump off of a balcony. And that’s not even counting the faux-suicide overdose of Athena’s daughter. I most certainly get that it’s a huge issue from personal experience, but if the main emergency is always going to deal with someone threatening/wanting to kill themselves then it could get old and predictable.

Also, so far, the characters do not pop off the screen. They’re not wholly memorable nor offending. While I give a lot of positive points for their stories being highly relatable, they also haven’t trod any new ground like, say, Rescue Me did when it first came out so many years ago. The depiction of firefighters post-911 as not only being pissed about all the hero worship they received after the World Trade Center but almost showing them in an anti-hero light was jarring and riveting and kept the show going for a number of seasons. Here, there is no bite. It almost feels like while the adrenaline rush is good for that hour, there’s nothing to look forward to as soon as the credits roll.

It’s rather hard for me to critique this kind of work because, unlike Scream Queens or AHS or ACS or almost any of the other Ryan Murphy-produced shows that have come, this one is so inoffensive in every way. Ultimately it may suffer from its lack of forceful... je ne sais quoi. It’s a feel-good show that challenges nothing, makes a statement about nothing, wastes the talents of its considerably talented cast, has a point-and-shoot kind of film style and tastes like a lick of vanilla in a sea of nothing but vanilla ice cream.
Should you be watching? This ain’t a hard question for you to answer. If you aren’t pretentious about what you watch and want the jolt of OMG every week, then tune in. If you want a peek into the lives of first responders, then tune in. If you like easy characters that are going to give you a good chuckle now and then, or if you like seeing servicemen and women in some kind of uniform, then check it out. Again, I gave it a B, FOX has already renewed it, and I have enjoyed watching it every week and will continue doing so for the remainder of the season, so take that for what it is. But this’ll probably never get anywhere close to any awards and I doubt if it’ll be the talk-of-the-town come May. Check out 9-1-1 on FOX or FOXonDemand. New episodes air every Wednesday at 9/8c pm.

What do you think? Have you heard of FOX’s 9-1-1? If not, do you think you’ll check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? What did you think? Am I being too hard on it and it’s your new favorite show? Do you think that Abby and Buck will hook up at some point during the season? And what kind of private life do you really think Bobby has? Let me know in the comments below.

Coming SoonCheck out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.


Until next time, “Do you know the number for 9-1-1?” 'Dude, really?”

P.S. “Michael, nooooo! You promised not to use that joke in then title of this post.” I know but it was so easy and I couldn't think of a good sign-off. I'm so ashamed (weeps bitterly into his barbecue Pringles). I'll think of a better sign-off next time.AmazonGoodreads Author Page
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And Now The End Is Here. #NaNoWriMo

And Now The End Is Here. #NaNoWriMo
Picture courtesy of the NaNoEdMo website 
It’s official! Another #NaNoWriMo is over and in the books. If you participated, I hope that you enjoyed the crazy, hectic, stressful but satisfying experience and accomplished every goal you set for yourself and your novel. If you didn’t participate this year (like me), then I hope that you at least cheered for the participants. Some of these writers were doing this for the first time and giving it their all and that should always be commended.

The idea of finishing a novel in under a month is, hopefully, not as daunting now that many of you have done it. You are now part of the small group of people that have gone from saying, “One uh dees dayz, I’mma write me a novel,” to, “Holy crap! Dude, I wrote a novel.” (side note: Quotes may not be direct). So feel proud that you are no longer one of those if-I-only-had-timers and that you are officially a doer.

So what next? Well, unfortunately, now comes the hard part. I know, some of you are like, “What? The hard part comes now?” Trust me, if you weren’t having some real fun while writing, then you’re never gonna get through this next part: editing and revisions. Remember what I said in my previous #NaNoWriMo post: “Stray far away from attempting to do any editing and revising during the primary writing process during the month, even if you finished your goal early.” People will always try to argue for stopping and going back to fix things but I’m telling you that it can mess you up more than help you. With December being a month full of cheerful holiday greetings, sweet stuff, family and all-over holiday busyness, this month happens to be the month of nothing. Sit back, relax and enjoy yourself, your family or whatever other work that you do.

But even while relaxing, always be open to any little details, facts, factoids, or just cool twists that can impact the story you’ve just written, whether those things come to you on the back of mythical muse’s wings or if you overhear them at a party or wherever. Sponge them in, because January happens to be National Novel Editing Month (or something like that). That month will challenge you to edit, revise and re-edit the book that you wrote in November. You will have had a month to sit on the book and either think incessantly about it or not worry yourself with it at all. And when you come back and read what you wrote, and read all of your notes and whatnot, you might have a new perspective on what you wrote that could completely change your vision of the book or strengthen the vision you already had.

Editing a book that you’ve finished and getting it ready for people to read is the most trying, pressing, stressful work that you can do in this industry, so it is important to make sure that you give yourself every advantage you can. Indulge in your favorite activities and desserts this month, be around people that you love and care about, but also make sure that your mental acuity stays precise and razor sharp, and that your wit is not lost in the mire of sugar-sweet holiday sentiment because the real work, the not-so-fun part of writing a novel, the month where everybody who knows about National Novel Editing Month is a little on edge because half of them are realizing that maybe they need to toss a quarter of their book—that starts in January.


But again, don’t worry. If you are unable to finish the challenge, it’s OK. Many people are never quite able to finish said challenge because as long as it takes to write the book, it oftentimes takes twice as long to edit it on average (my observation). But this is the point where you can really shine, because as great as all of those cheerful, positive quotes about how “if you want to be a writer, then write. Now you’re a writer,” are, the truth is that anybody can write something, but that doesn’t mean they should be considered writers. Real writers take the time to try to polish their work to as pristine of a shine as possible. Here is where we will see if you will be one of those, “Oh, I wrote a book once,” people and that’s where the conversation ends, or if you’ll be a “I wrote a novel and edited it and sent out letters about it and tried to get it published and/or self-published and...” and the conversation gets interesting. Don’t just be a writer, don’t just be an editor, be interesting!

So, how was your #NaNoWriMo experience if you participated? Was it fun or a slog? Was this your first time or are you a veteran? Actually, I’m quite intrigued by that third question because it seems like most of the people I ran into out here on these internet streets were first-timers and I was wondering if people ever really sign up to do it a second time after either succeeding or failing at the challenge. I succeeded but didn’t do it again this November because I had other projects that needed tending to first, but I’m curious about others’ experiences. Anyway, leave a comment below about your experience. If you didn’t participate, then tell me why. Oh, and I’m still looking for people willing to review my new psychological thriller/mystery in the vein of Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and In a Dark, Dark Wood, so please leave a comment below if you are interested because I would love to have 50 reviews for this book by the time I release it. Thank you. In any case, whether you just want to comment on NaNo or if you are interested in reviewing my book, I would love to hear from you.
Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Hey, Mom, Dad, I was readin’ in a book that—” ‘Holy crap! You read a book, son?’ (dad) “Yes, I read a book and—” ‘He said it again. He admitted to reading a book. Like, a full book?” (mom) “Gah! Yes, a full book.” ‘Hmph! Probably had pictures.’ (sister) “No... OK, well, yes. It had three pictures, but it was really long. Like, 300 pages.” ‘Well, what was it about?’ (mom) “I don’t know. It was a mystery.”
P.S. Just admit it, you liked that joke. You liked the whole thing. You liked the setup and lame payoff. You snickered. Admit it. Admit it! I’ll try to come up with a much better, much shorter sign-off next time.
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Whoop! Whoop! That’s The Sound Uh Da Police! #SWAT #3weekroundup #CBS #recap #review

Whoop! Whoop! That’s The Sound Uh Da Police! #SWAT #3weekroundup #CBS #recap #review All pictures courtesy of CBS 

Here we are again with another late-season three-week roundup of a brand new (read: completely old and overdone) show. On deck this time, we have CBS’s latest remake/reboot of the police drama S.W.A.T. While I’d like to hand it to them this time for picking a decade other than the 80s to finally remake something from, I can’t help but still feel a certain turning anguish in my stomach at the fact that we are getting yet another remake. Granted, this is of a very pedestrian idea, but there are so many pedestrian ideas out there that haven’t been explored that it somehow gives me pause to see a new show and/or network (or a film and film studio for that matter) trade on an easily recognizable name over even considering something that could be wholly different. Yes, there are thousands of stories one can tell that are centered around the S.W.A.T. team, especially in this day of mass shootings galore and terrorists supposedly running to every corner of the earth, but there’s other agencies that we could explore and in very intriguing ways. But again, since this is so on-the-head obvious, I guess I can give it a pass as it is another cop show and, frankly, they’re all alike anyway. So, is this newest iteration of S.W.A.T. a battering ram in the right direction or will it just be another flash(bang) in the pan? Let’s find out together!

CBS’s new 2017 SWAT (from here on out I will not be putting periods between the letters) stars Shemar Moore (most recently of Criminal Minds fame) as Daniel “Hondo” Harrelson who is one of the leaders of the Special Weapons and Tactics force of Los Angeles. The little bit of twist this time around from what I’ve read (I don’t actually know because I never saw the original) is that this black Daniel, like every black cop character apparently, has a connection to the very streets over which he now “presides.” Side note: Why is it that every black or Latino character who plays a cop has to have the same played connection to the streets but the white guys usually just get to be cops? Seriously? I really try to keep this blog non-political and try to stay away from commenting about feminism, race, religion and the like, but what is it with that? At some point they almost always deliver a, “Hey, but I got outta that life” speech and/or a, “but people like me seeing people like me, black people for them and not against them...” speech too, signaling that they became cops because they want to put a stop to this notion that minorities don’t respect the law or that good cops do exist or that cops can have a positive influence on society or something like that. It’s never that the black or Latino guy became a cop because they just wanted to stop bad guys. Now I’ve gone on a rant at the beginning of the review which is definitely no good. Let me hop back on track. No race stuff from here out. Maybe. No promises.

Hondo and Deacon in foreground, Christina and Tan in backDaniel is put in charge of his unit over another qualified senior SWAT member after the previous leader shot and nearly killed a black kid during the opening raid. Some weapons runners were in the middle of a deal and took off running through the streets and jumping on rooftops and houses, which is, apparently, a thing in LA because they did the same thing in Straight Outta Compton. Well, Hondo uses the opportunity to prove his badassdom by beating up one of the runners and shooting one in the head within seconds, sniping a guy from 30 feet away. The leader tries to shoot one of the other runners but errantly hits a black teenager. Because of this, and LA being what it is, the police chief and mayor decide to fire the old leader and promote the black Hondo over the white guy who was next in line, one sergeant David “Deacon” Kay who looks like the next oldest guy on the team.
Through the first three episodes, not much is given on Deacon’s character per se, but you do get a sense of who he is. A family man, he is a strong, rather silent type who, while he clearly feels the burn of being passed over for a job which should’ve been his, is hardly fuming about it as much as the many petty people that populate this world would fume. But to his credit, Hondo has been a good leader so far and has even consulted Deacon on the moves they should make in a particular stakeout, but that’s not until episode three.

ChristinaAlong with Deacon and Hondo, we also have Dominique Luca who is the older lock-and-step guy who does what his commanding officer tells him to do but is a crack-up when not in the field. A SWAT lifer, he is the womanizer who refuses to commit to anyone or anything outside of the job. His father was a SWAT member and so was his grandfather, making him third generation badass. We also have Victor Tan who is, for all intents and purposes, our token Asian character through the first three episodes. With so much going on with everyone else, he hasn’t earned the character spotlight and, if I’m being honest, has nearly melted into the background like ice cream into my belly (and you thought I was gonna say pavement, didn’t ya? Nope! Went with the clumsier simile). I think he also said that he’s married but I can’t be certain. And I also don’t remember him doing anything of real note, so... Yeah. Next we have Christina “Chris” Alonso (side note: because I hate girls using boy’s names and because it might get confusing with later references, I will call her Christina) who is the Latina of the group. She is a softer version of Michelle Rodriguez’s character from the Fast and the Furious franchise. She’s Leti 2.0—the version that came back to the franchise after they killed her off earlier, then brought her back more caring and nurturing. Christina’s kickass-ness is quite evident and she seems to have better detective skills than some of the others on the team, Hondo excluded. She is also young and is one half of a “duo” that represents the millennial generation (the actor playing Tan is technically a millennial but I’m not sure if the character is or not).

The other half of the duo is newbie Jim Street, played by Alex Russell of The Chronicle fame. Hand-picked by the exiting squad leader, he is your quintessential young maverick/death-wisher who runs gung-ho into any situation. We see him first zooming through the downtown streets of LA on his motorcycle, racing to get to work and tailed by a patrol unit of cops who have no idea who he is. He shows up late to his first day and in the dressed-down tactical uniform. He changes out of that and joins the rest of the group.

After the opening salvo, the community where the black boy got shot is up in arms about yet another police shooting. They organize an outside protest rally for change for their little neighborhood and the city as a whole. SWAT goes to walk around in their plain blue uniforms, meeting people in the community and patrolling the gathering. This is the best they come up with to mitigate the disaster that was the shooting of the kid. While there, Jim flirts with Christina and I don’t know if it’s the actor who is just always happy-go-lucky in real life or if that is how the character is sorta supposed to be played, but you can tell straight away that even though she is turning down his advances because they work together, she is totally going to give him some eventually. She gave this tiny flinch of a smile that looked like she was holding back from jumping his bones that night in favor of the, “Nah, I’mma make you work for this” trope, which I am totally down for. I have no idea why, but I really liked this. I’m jumping ahead.
Jim Getting The Chew From Hondo And DeaconThe main speaker at the rally is a young man who had a family member also suffer gun violence and police malfeasance not too long ago. As he is up on the dais making his speech, someone starts shooting and guns down one of the other people right beside him. Jim takes off toward the shooter with little regard for his safety or his team. He loses the shooter after showing some pretty impressive Spider-man skills. Hondo and the team have to chew him a little and they go back to the station.
Hondo learns the chief commanding officer in charge of all the SWAT units in the city wants to handle the job with a sledgehammer rather than some finesse, and he ain’t goin’ for it. Instead of roughing people up, Hondo takes the “this is my hood” approach so often used by the black cop in these shows/movies. He goes around the city with his squad and asks some of the locals, stopping first at a salon, which leads him to a street-hustling BBQ master, which finally leads him to a towing company that was seen fleeing the rally on the day of the shootings.

Well, the towing company is run by some ex-military dudes (mostly white) who look tough but SWAT’s got nothing on them for now. So Hondo makes a stop over at the shot-kid’s hospital room. He’s alive and awake and surrounded by family and the black activist dude. Hondo says some encouraging words about how he was once in the same streets and how it’s tough but the kid will make it and about how the police are not there to be enemies to anyone. He then gets some intel from the activist dude who said that he knew some ex-military sniper who was supposedly into the movement but more from a “the government is corrupt” standpoint rather than a “Black Lives Matter” view.

Hondo and the squad go to this sniper dude’s house to find that the other towing ex-military people live there to. They figure out that not only are these guys some of the people that were involved in buying the guns at the beginning of the episode but that they also shot the black people at the rally. They are trying to cause a race war not because they believe in white power or the oppression of blacks but because they are trying to bring down the entire system of the government and hoping the city will rip itself apart in utter chaos.

Well, Hondo splits his team. He gets to the roof of a building to stop the sniper who has promised to kill a bunch of grade-schoolers only to find that the threat is a decoy and they really plan to rob a very important bank and start the domino in bankrupting the city(?). It kinda got convoluted at that point but by then it was only ten minutes left in the episode and I was ready for the wrap up.

The bad guys have a rocket launcher that they use once on a truck. Hondo and his team manage to stop the baddies and fight them in the street. Jim shows that he can definitely fight and be good at the job, but still gets saved by Hondo and the day is saved.

Jessica and Hondo; They Actually Make A Cute Couple When Dressed Down... And Naked
On a side note, one of their superiors Jessica Cortez is sleeping with Hondo. But because she is younger than him, a woman, and higher-ranking, at the start of the episode she wants to officially put in the paperwork to declare their relationship. But when Hondo gets the promotion, she then becomes his direct superior which makes her want to break it off, and you can just tell that Hondo wants part-time custody of her bed sheets (he’ll come by and hit it on the weekends). And as much as she is objecting, you can tell she’s gonna cave. A lot of this show is predictable, but it’s the first few episodes so... what can you expect?

Episode two sees them open with a training exercise on a meth lab setpiece. There, as they go through the raid and look into room after room of meth makers without firing a single shot, newbie Jim takes off once again on his own and winds up taking one of the meth lab workers down but getting shut with a sticky arrow in the back of the head by a secondary SWAT training officer/meth maker. His team lost the exercise do to his freestyling without the team, and if it was real life he would’ve gotten killed. They break from the exercise only for the chief over the SWAT units to come and privately talk to Deacon about the racial tension having died down in the city and how he can now go back and make Deacon the new squad leader and, I guess demote Hondo? It’s all very hush-hush and Deacon really isn’t having it because he, at the very least, is a man of integrity.

Meanwhile, as the squad is going through more practice drills, across town a county jail transport goes horribly wrong when the cousin of a big bad criminal breaks him out of the transport. See, the lead prisoner and three others were being transported to prison and were inside of a building with a glass elevator. The lead prisoner’s cousin came and shot up the guards, posed as a guard himself and they made off with the lead prisoner and the other criminals who had to escape too because they were all chained together. I’ll say I was actually surprised that the lead prisoner and his cousin didn’t just kill the other criminals once they escaped because he would’ve had to know that by finding the other criminals, the police could potentially interrogate them and then find him. And that’s exactly what the SWAT unit tries to do.

Not only is an escaped prisoner troubling the city, Hondo’s non-girlfriend girlfriend and boss Jessica (she has a desk job but used to be a patrolwoman; everybody is a cop) is the person who busted the lead escaped criminal. If she knows one thing, it is that this guy is all about the vengeance. Loves the vengeance. So she is concerned most about the woman whose testimony put him away. That woman is a single mom with two children, one of which was used as a carving board for the lead criminal. As it turns out the lead criminal was a rapist and pedophile who used to sleep with young teenage girls. There mighta been some murdering stuff in there too, but I can’t remember as they only mentioned it once. It’s a good probability that the single mom and her family need protection but because the police unit is already tight on fund allocation, the head honcho will never approve of it. So Hondo takes it upon himself to jump ahead and assign Christina and Jim to the woman’s house as a safety detail. Naturally, they get their flirt on without really flirting, talking about the latest dating apps and such.

As Christina and Jim are getting familiar with each other at the single mom’s house, Hondo has split the rest of the team up to go and collect the various criminals around the city, the very plan I knew they’d try. They believe they can get the other accidental escapees to rat on where the rapist dude might be or at least where he dropped them off. So they trick the black criminal’s friend into telling them that the black criminal sometimes frequents his sister’s place; then they find the exotic animal smuggler back at his home feeding the crazy exotic animals because they haven’t been fed since he was arrested I guess; and they also find some other dude doing something else.

None of that leads them to the rapist. But then Christina and Jim notice that this teenage boy has been riding back and forth in front of the single mom’s house like he’s casing the joint. They and Hondo ask if he’s reconning for the rapist but he explains that he wants to kill the escapee just as bad. He even says that he’s been bouncing between the single mom’s house and his cousin’s house because the rapist always claimed that the young teenage girl living there was his bride and belonged with him. So Hondo and the group go over there to find the rapist there, leaving Christina and Jim behind on the detail. No, they’re not done protecting the family. In fact, the rapist’s brother comes to get the single mom and her kids who go and hide in the bathroom. Jim tells the little boy some story about how he had to be a little man when he was younger and how that’s the kid’s responsibility now and how the kid can calm himself down during times of stress. Well, the kid does the thing and we get to see none of the kickass-ing that Christina and Jim do to the brother, but they do take him down.

As it turns out, the rapist is not only at the other young girl’s house but escapes out the back with her. Now they need to figure out where he might go. They hear something from one of the other re-captured escapees and/or the girl’s father about some cabin, discover that his aunt had a cabin which is still listed as existing outside the city and not belonging to anyone, and they load up and get going. We get a huge shootout between the rapist and SWAT and even have Hondo come riding in on a helicopter. Hondo, being the capeless superhero he is, magically has the best shot from up high when the rapist steps to the window using the girl as a shield. He shoots the guy’s brains out and the day is saved. We also got a little back and forth with Hondo and Jessica about their relationship and his unspoken bad boy promises that he’s still gonna come over every now and then and tap, flip and lick it, and she’s caving. She wants to be bad. Secret romance that’s forbidden at work? Like Brandy sang back in the 90s, she “wanna be dow-ow-own!”

Episode three opens wiith them doing typical SWAT stuff: a raid on a heroin smuggling ring. Nestled inside what looks like a pretty nice apartment complex, they get some good intel about some people smuggling drugs and go to raid the place. They bumrush the door and immediately people scatter. They catch a few of the people, gun others down, then return to the apartment to find a fairly clean room. There’s no coke, no ex, no nothing inside. If this was a drug den at one point then they have surely missed the—boomp! They hear a subtle sound come from somewhere in the back and open up a room to find a bunch of people crowded into a room no bigger than a janitor’s closet at a rundown elementary school. One man, the “lead mule” is the only one who can speak English. They get his name out of him and some gobblety gook about wanting to be in America or something and then he starts rubbing on his stomach, foaming at the mouth and collapses in front of them. He’s overdosing on the copious amounts of burst condoms full of heroin.

As it turns out the people in the closet were all Filipino immigrants who were being forced to be drug mules, and now the team has to figure out who is behind this ring. Also, they learn that the people in the closet (sounds like an off-Broadway gay musical about an entire gay club in some straight-laced Republican dude’s closet) are actually only halves or partial families. So they have to find the families as well.

While that investigation is going on, we get some more background for Jim. In the first episode, we learned that the SWAT leader that was fired was the same cop that busted Jim’s mom. Her crime: she killed her boyfriend who was abusing her and little Jim when he was young. Zoom forward to episode three when we actually see Jim visiting his mother in prison. She is still in there for a while (maybe for life) but she looks good. Actually, if you watch a lotta TV you will notice that his mother is Sherilyn Fenn who played Audrey on Twin Peaks. Anyway, she tells her son that one of the girls who she is close with in jail is getting out soon and that the woman is scared that her ex (a supposed abuser) is going to find her and get violent with her again. She just wants Jim to go over to the guy and warn him off of this woman, rough him up if he needs to. He promises to do so.

TanBack to the main story, the team starts to search for the strands that lead back to the people behind the smuggling ring. Remember we’re not only dealing with drug smugglers, but also human traffickers and extortionists. So this has to be a pretty big ring. They discover that all of the people in the closet were asssociated with this one particular pastor/priest. Because the lead mule is still struggling to live and is currently unconscious in a hospital bed, the priest tells the cops that they all worked for this same cleaning and hospitality agency. So they go to the place, which supplies workers for a lot of medical properties like nursing homes or places where “not a lot of Americans want to clean out bed pans.” A white guy, he tells them that he hires a lot of immigrants because they are willing to work the nasty jobs for a visa, but that he has outsourced his hiring to this one guy because this guy speaks Filipino.

Well, cut through the BS, SWAT chase around the HR guy, then a few others only to end up back in the white guy’s house. They figure that it actually was the white guy the entire time. So they go to his wife and, surprise, surprise, his wife is Filipino (I don’t think the actress is actually Filipino but some other Asian ethnicity. I’ve seen her play a few different Asian characters). And I’m like, “Well, it was her the whole time.” But apparently the one cop (who is not part of Hondo’s SWAT team) doesn’t realize this. He turns his back on her and gets shot when he turns back around.

The woman and her husband get to a private airport where they try to take off in a private jet but are stopped. The husband caves quicker than a knifed souffle and tells the team everything while she resists saying anything. She’s a gangster. With the husband’s intel, they find the rest of the families before they die from suffocation while locked away in a shipping container.

Back with Jim, he goes to rough up the dude for his mom and gets arrested for throwing paws with the guy who is totally not feeling anything he’s saying. Well, Hondo discovers the real intel about Jim’s mom and goes to visit her in prison. It turns out that prison has corrupted her. Now Jim’s mom is a seller of contraband and the guy on the outside was working with this woman on the inside who was never actually getting paroled but is Jim’s mom’s competition. Hondo warns her off of ever contacting her son again, or at least for a good long while because he doesn’t need that kind of distraction in his life right now. Oh, and there was a tiny thing about Dominique needing a place to stay and depending on his SWAT brethren and sisteren to house him for a while because his latest girl kicked him out. Take a guess of who he stays with. 
Dominique and Hondo
What’s my grade? I give it a B+. It’s strange that I enjoyed this show because it’s a typical procedural drama that literally adds nothing new to the plethora of cop shows we have on the horizon of TV. But as a procedural, it is decent. The problem with the series is that it’s just decent. It’s not flashy, nothing heavily intricate and is predictable at nearly every turn, yet it’s entertaining for what it is. I’ve said that a few times this new TV season and for those that don’t know what it means, it means that you should know what you are getting the moment you see the commercial for the show. It’s just like every other cop show. And that’s the problem, but only if you’re looking for something new and innovative.

The show is also very strange in that it takes SWAT, which is known for being the tactical team that comes in when a situation gets out of hand, and turns them (or at least the public’s general idea of them) into your basic detective unit. In the first three episodes they did more detective work than both Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling did in the two Blade Runner movies. It makes me wonder what the other cops do.


Then we have the stereotypes within the show. They get it right with all of the minority inclusion, and it was about time that Shemar Moore got to lead his own show (yes, he was a big part of Criminal Minds but not the lead), but the writing is more typical of a lot of white writers sitting around thinking about what other minorities do, rather than having ethnic writers. I’m sure they do have minority writers, but something about the black guy having come from “the hood” is such a played motif that I groaned at the very mention of it. But I digress.

Should you be watching? Sure, if you like shows where the good guys always catch the bad guys and procedurals are generally your thing. If stuff like Criminal Minds, Chicago PD and the like are what you enjoy, then go for it. This is an acceptable remake to a show that, in and of itself, was not all that great. I can’t really be mad at an average show that has produced an average show. And SWAT wins a few brownie points for having adopted and adapted the old theme song to both make it current while not sullying the catchiness of the original tune. But if you are looking for something with a little more dramatic depth, then this probably isn’t the show for you. Ultimately, SWAT is a bubblegum show that tastes good for a while but quickly goes flavorless after a few commercial breaks. Will you be talking about it the next day at the watercooler? Probably not. But the cases could get interesting and they do a good job at establishing all of their characters while leaving plenty of room for intriguing developments. SWAT airs on CBS Thursdays at 10pm.

What do you think? Have you heard of the new TV remake of SWAT? If you haven’t, do you think you would check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? What do you think they can improve? Do you think that Deacon will betray Hondo? And will Jim find out about Hondo talking to his mom? And what do you think about the relationships between Hondo and Jessica, and Jim and Christina? Let me know in the comments below.        Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking. If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Hi, 911? Yeah, there’s a giant pitcher of red liquid walking around the house across the street. I’m getting nervous and I think he has a bomb.” ‘Have you seen a bomb?’ “No, but he keeps talking about an explosion... of flavor.‘Of flavor?’ “Oh god, he’s coming this way. Ahhh! He just burst through the wall of my house. [background noise: ‘Oh yeah!’] He’s terrorizing me with Kool-Aid goodness! Help!”
P.S. But on a serious note, swatting is a very serious and very dangerous practice done by quite a few idiots out there. If ever it is done to you make sure that you don’t panic, get down low, do not resist and calmly explain what has happened. I’ll try to come up with a much better, shorter sign-off next time.
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Growing Up Ain’t Always Easy... Or Fun #YoungSheldon #3weekroundup #CBS #recap #review

Growing Up Ain’t Always Easy... Or Fun #YoungSheldon #3weekroundup #CBS #recap #review
All pictures courtesy of CBS and Young Sheldon promotional materials

It’s time for another review/recap of one of this fall’s new shows. And because these idiot networks can’t seem to premiere everything at once like they used to, and insist on shuffling, re-shuffling, and cutting the deck that is their lineup of shows, we’re here in the middle of November for a show that premiered back in October (or September. Whichever). Yay! So, is CBS’s hit show Young Sheldon really deserving of all of its blue ribbon accolades or is this one of those homemade volcanoes at the school science fair (womp, womp)? Let’s find out together.

CBS’s Young Sheldon, a spin-off of the long-running hit comedy The Big Bang Theory, stars Iain Armitage as our titular character and follows a nine-year-old sheldon as he embarks on the hormone-soaked wilds of the high school jungle in, apparently, 1989. It is at this point in the review that I must stop and give a caveat that I am not a fan of The Big Bang Theory. It is not that I actively dislike the show, but simply is a matter of timing. I didn’t see the very first episode (or season, for that matter) of the show and I hate coming into things at the middle when I can get it at the beginning. It premiered during a time in which I was watching zero CBS shows because most of them seemed to trend older with the exception of How I Met Your Mother. I didn’t even like Two and a Half Men, so nothing drew me to watch CBS. I have only seen a literal handful of episodes of The Big Bang Theory and that was in syndication, so if you are a fan of The Big Bang Theory, then take everything I have to say both during the recap and during the review with a grain of salt. OK? Good. I now return you to your recap/review already in progress.

Young Sheldon, at the start of our series, is thrust into a new world that he is hardly frightened of, but, in fact, looks forward to the adventures of learning and overachieving at the high school level. But there’s a few problems. First, he is leaving his twin sister Missy behind in, I’m assuming, elementary school. She is your average little girl but she abhors her I’m-smarter-than-you brother and has a sarcastic outlook on life. He will also be joining his eldest brother Georgie (George Jr.) who is, at 14, entering High School also as a freshman. As a football jock, Georgie wants nothing to do with his younger brother because he has to build his own reputation which is difficult enough, especially with the family’s current situation.

The current situation: the family has had to move sometime within the last few years. Why? Because their father George Sr. (played by Lance Barber) is a football coach. As we learned in the first episode where Sheldon sought to point out the flaws in everyone, including his teachers who break the school’s rule book and, according to him, aren’t smart enough, George must sit his son down and tell him about the lesson he recently learned. Recap of that last sentence: we learned that the dad learned and was about to learn his son something, you follow? George used to coach at another high school and I guess he saw some of the other coaches maybe at his own school (I was a little confused here because of the situation) who cheated in some way and was then let go and made a pariah. The reason I say I was confused (and I don’t usually confuse easily, but it was very late and I was mentally fatigued) is because it makes little sense for the school to have fired him for seeing some other school’s coaches cheating, especially if that rival school was cheating against his own school. Then again, maybe there was an acceptable culture of cheating, but that’s hard to believe because the show is set in Texas and we all know how seriously Texans take their football at all levels.

That, of course, leaves the most important character of the series, even more important than Sheldon: his mother Mary. Mary, played by Zoe Perry (fun fact: she is the Millennial-aged daughter of Laurie Metcalf of Roseanne fame and Jeff Perry of Private Practice and currently Scandal), is the best character on the series so far. I will try to withhold my critiques but just know that I like her. The typical 80s mom, she is concerned about all of her children but is most concerned about her little genius child and how he fits into his new school and the world in general. We see this more in the second episode, but let’s stick with the pilot for a little while longer.

Sheldon goes to high school where, as I said, he goes through every one of his classes and tells each one of his teachers something about how they are doing something wrong. He even says that one teacher has a mustache which goes against the school’s dress code. And that teacher was a white woman. To get him to fit in more, his parents talk to him about how everything isn’t always so rigid. While his parents argue with the school administration about how he needs to stay in that school and the teachers need to just deal with him, Sheldon ventures into a music class where he shows that he is a musical savant as he sits down to perfectly play the piano, though he’s never done it before. And while the teacher there tells him that he should pursue music, he refuses outright because he’s purely about science and musicians take drugs. We see a little bit of his brother being teased as the dumb brother as Sheldon’s reputation has already spread, and get a talk from dad about how to deal with a genius brother.

The episode bobbles along with some stuff in there to demonstrate Sheldon’s aversion to playing outside, watching cartoons and doing anything that doesn’t require the mind or science. And we also see a little thing about Sheldon going to church and how he simply doesn’t get it. But we end with a heart-warming and honest talk between Sheldon and George about his firing from his previous coaching job. “Is he sad about it,” Sheldon asks. Yeah. He’s angry and a litle sad. And that comment makes Sheldon touch his father’s bare hand without his mits on connecting on his father on a more human, personal level. Georgie Jr. and Sheldon
Episode two focuses on Mary’s concern that Sheldon doesn’t have any friends. This stems from her seeing her two sons eating in the cafeteria and Georgie Jr. eating with friends but Sheldon sitting alone having delusions about the cosmos and the big bang (get it? Get it! Ha!). I should say, just in case you didn’t get it from the first episode, that George Sr. is the new football coach at this high school so his wife popping up and hanging with him during the day isn’t that weird around lunch time. I don’t yet know what she does for work, if she does work (this is the 80s and not the 50s, so I assume she does work but who knows).

Missy and SheldonMary errantly tells Missy about her worries concerning Sheldon having no friends, and Missy then relays that message to Sheldon. So Sheldon goes on an adventure to develop some friendships. He goes to the library where he is pointed to the old book How to Win Friends and Influence People. He uses the techniques within the book to visit all the different cliques in the school to make friends. Along the way he makes a few funny jokes that align with the “greetings, earthlings” trope that fish-out-of-water stories have, but has no luck with friends. Finally, his sister, who is struggling with the idea of not being exceptional like her brother, comes up with the idea to read the names on the book’s reservation card because those people were also desperate enough to need a book to make friends. As it turns out, all of the people who recently took it out are adults, his teachers in fact. And after hearing a few terrible stories about how one teacher stole another teacher’s innocence and how that innocence-stealer was also left damaged from the breakup, he has to return the book.

In returing the book, Sheldon finds a young Asian boy who is also having trouble making a friend and huzzah! You’ve got a friend in me. Mary tells him to invite his new friend over and they have a dinner where George Sr. makes sure the boy’s mother doesn’t have a particularname (he fought in ‘Nam), and the boy tells the story of how his family escaped from Vietnam and have migrated here to become low-paid, overworked immigrants. How depressing! But the good news is that he and Sheldon can build rockets together and they both are super into math.

Sheldon's friend and Sheldon
Episode three focuses on two things: Sheldon’s grandmother (his mother’s mom) and his rejection of religion. Every Sunday, Mary goes to church and often takes the children (her husband is sometimes busy with the football team). But Sheldon, being the person he is, must call out the preacher’s claims that God created the world in six days, and challenges the existence of God and even tries to make that old stupid argument that God and science don’t align. But when he learns that some of the greatest scientists he admires also believe in God and that Pascale said that it’s smarter to believe in God than it is to not, he is flabbergast.

Meanwhile, his grandmother, played by Annie Potts, comes to babysit a few times. Like most grandparents, when she comes, the rules are a little more lax as she adores her grandchildren. But when George Sr. suffers some serious health emergency, grandmother or MeeMaw has to come and emergency-babysit while George and Mary go to the hospital. Things don’t look good when George thinks he is having a heart attack and has to stay in the hospital longer than expected. With Meemaw not being forthcoming enough with the deets about their dad’s health, Georgie Jr. decides to take it upon himself to steal his sleeping grandmother’s car and drive his siblings to the hospital. But being 14 he can’t drive and swerves all over the road hitting things at eight miles per hour. He finally lucks out when they all see an ambulance and follow it to the hospital.

Both plots come to a head when Sheldon sneaks away to pray in the hospital chapel. No, he doesn’t pray to God but to famed legendary scientist Pascale because he thinks that if Pascale was wrong and there is no God, then no harm done, and if he was right, then Pascale would surely be near God and able to pass along Sheldon’s message. He prays for his father’s good health, and just like that, his father is getting better again. The episode ends with the entire family going back to church and Sheldon’s tiny bit of belief having already dissipated back into atheistic doubt. All is well.

What’s my grade? I give it a C+. The only reason I see for this being this fall’s number one new show is that it has The Big Bang Theory as a lead-in and is associated with that show. If, however, this was not associated with that show in any way, I doubt it would really be all that. Let’s start with the way CBS rolled this thing out.

For starters, I have a few issues with how networks and streaming services premiere new shows these days. There almost seems to seldom be a happy medium and it’s getting worse, not better. With Marvel’s Inhumans premiering its first two episodes as a movie a few weeks before the TV premiere; Star Trek Discovery premiering one episode on CBS, then the second one on CBS All Access the very same night, and the third the next week; and with streaming services premiering entire seasons for binge-watching, I absolutely hate how we consume TV. One of the biggest pluses for cutting the cord, other than the cost, should be the ability to not fall prey to a network’s whimsical maneuverings of their schedule. I have yet to cut the cord. But even if I had, I would still have fallen prey to the same thing when viewing Young Sheldon. For some dumb reason, CBS decided to premiere this show not only out of its regular timeslot and date, but a full month ahead of the second episode. The first episode came on during premiere week on September 25th. The second episode finally came on on November 2nd, and the show moved from Mondays to Thursdays where it follows The Big Bang Theory. I can only guess that the network is deathly afraid of the show dying without the BBT lead-in. But in any case, having one episode of something play, then skipping weeks before showing the next one, then having it be off for at least another week during the Thanksgiving holiday, especially during an era in which people want full seasons of shows all at once, is courting cancellation. The time thing is needlessly disruptive and can leave a bad impression on viewers, especially if they didn’t love the first episode. And God the first show was awful.

Missy, MeeMaw and SheldonSpeaking of, the pilot for this show is the textbook reason for why I always give a show at least three episodes to prove itself. To me, it was an absolutely terrible premiere episode, starting with who narrates the show. It’s funny that I went to the IMDb page for this to read some reviews and a few of those reviewers said the same thing I was thinking, and that is that the show seems to suffer from Jim Parsons narration. Parsons, who plays the adult Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, voices Young Sheldon’s inner-thoughts similar to on The Wonder Years or Arrested Development. It’s not necessarily his narration that is bad, but the fact that the show comes from his viewpoint when it probably would be better if it came from his mother Mary’s viewpoint.

After having seen Zoe Perry on last season’s Scandal, I can say without doubt that she is a phenomenal actress. She shines in this series, too. The show might actually be better if she narrated the show and it focused on her perspective raising such a gifted child. She’s really quite young in real life, but somehow plays older and has the mother thing down really well. Out of all the characters on the show, she actually feels the most geniune in all of her scenes. The comedic lines are delivered with conviction, she showed true caring and motherly concern for her family, and she is the one trying to balance Sheldon’s genius eccentricities with being a regular kid. In fact, both she and the husband character are pretty good parents, even if they do play into a few stereotypical family sitcom tropes.

The biggest problem with the show, outside of the dramatic tonal shift between this show and The Big Bang Theory, is that the titular character is not likable. Let me say that I abhor the “likable” description for characters. I have watched and read enough book, film and TV reviews in my life to cringe every time I hear that word. To me, it is a cop out for whenever a reviewer doesn’t understand or agree with the choices of a character, and it only applies maybe five to ten percent of the time. Characters don’t have to be likable, they have to be interesting, and their interesting-ness should overpower any annoyance or outright disdain one might have for them. Young Sheldon does not overpower my disdain.

Of the few episodes of The Big Bang Theory I’ve seen, Sheldon is a strange genius who, while very annoying and flawed, is played in a way that can often come off as endearing. However, Sheldon’s annoying I’m-better-than-everyone attitude is evened out by the fact that he lives/works with a bunch of other geniuses that are deeply flawed and know they are flawed. They are the essential “geeks that can’t get girls” concept, who evolved over time.

Here, on Young Sheldon, I know we must give him enough time to develop into the character he is supposed to be, but that will take years/seasons to happen. On this show, he comes off as a smart-alecky, know-it-all brat who thinks that everyone around him is exhaustingly beneath him. I had a friend tell me that she didn’t want to watch the show because she felt that she would get pissed watching some smart-mouthed kid talk back to adults and would feel compelled to pop the character in the mouth once. She’s old school and from the Midwest so don’t give me the PC “you can’t hit kids” thing. And while I probably wouldn’t do that myself, I had the same inclination.

Young Sheldon is not endearing and seldom funny in his pursuits. Where adult Sheldon has this almost Grinch-like or Cat-in-the-Hat-esque mischievous grin upon his face even when putting down his fellow geniuses or the non-superior-brained normies, Young Sheldon never gives that particular type of warm invitation to come laugh with him. Instead, he looks at everyone as if he is fed up that they don’t think his way, and that they’re idiots for not. He’s got a huge superiority complex that goes beyond America’s love of precocious kids. This is only made more evident by the fact that he is surrounded only by his family. Where on Big Bang he is circled around three other geniuses in their own right, on this show he only has the laypersons of his family. On Big Bang when he makes jokes about his colleagues intelligence or eccentricities, its endearing because you know that he is speaking with people who are close to his equals. Here, we know that he has no equal. Everyone is mentally a peon to him, even the adults, and he treats them as such, which is the most annoying thing you can do in this particular political climate. Again, I’m definitely not the PC-type (read my books to find out) but saying that Texas is some stupid, backwards land where a child is the smartest person serves to make fun of the average working Joe and Jane in a way that might not be great viewing for everyone. I thought we were past the "small town life is full of simpletons"-trope about twenty years ago. If you’re going to satirize the “simple-minded” religious of Middle America, then you better be damn funny doing it, otherwise, they might tell you to take a hike. And this show really ain’t all that funny, even though I’m not one of the simple-minded.

Should you be watching? If you’re a fan of The Big Bang Theory then yes you should check it out. Some people won’t like the change in format between the shows--going from the multi-cam studio audience show that is The Big Bang Theory to a single-cam show of Young Sheldon in which there is no laugh track. This is a big departure for CBS in the comedy area, though ABC, FOX and NBC have all been doing it for years with much success. The other non-studio-audience comedy CBS has/had is the new show Me, Myself and I, which has since been shelved, but not officially canceled. This show will be a little different for most CBS viewers to watch as it doesn’t even have strong musical cues to hammer home the jokes. I personally think that was a bad idea to switch formats between the two shows, but it does give some variety. As far as it being funny: eh! The first episode wasn’t funny at all, but the next two episodes had a few good laughs in them. Personally, I probably wouldn’t watch the whole season and would only tune in now and then for Zoe Perry. I find that the callbacks to The Wonder Years and Boy Meets World aren’t strong enough for me to recommend it as the new go-to family show, but it’s serviceable, as in it can serve up one or two laughs per episode. Maybe. Young Sheldon airs on CBS Thursdays at 8:30pm.

Included this pic because Zoe Perry looks her age, a young 33.
What do you think? Have you heard of Young Sheldon? If not, do you think you’ll tune in now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? Was I too hard on the show? Where do you think the show can improve? And do you think we’ll one day get kid-cameos of the other Big Bang characters somehow? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, “Let’s see: two and two make five? That doesn’t sound right.” ‘I don’t know. Looks right to me and I’m pretty smart. I’m a whale biologist.’ “But the numbers—” ‘Whale biologist!’
P.S. OK, that’s not the actual dialogue, but points to you if you know the reference to which that paraphrasing might refer to? Hint: It was an animated comedy on FOX. That show had scientists too. And, uh.. Yeah. That’s all I have to say. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.

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To Write A Novel #NaNoWriMo #HalfwayMark #TMOTR

To Write A Novel #NaNoWriMo #HalfwayMark #TMOTR


This picture courtesy of the NaNoWriMo commission

Writing a novel can be pretty hard, y’all. Like... yeah! For those that don’t know or who have never tried, writing a full-length novel is very difficult and can be not only taxing on you mentally but quite a pain physically. And that’s even if you’re writing something you enjoy writing, something wonderful, something light and free and fluffy and lovey-dovey! Piecing everything together to create an easy, memorable and enjoyable reading experience for those future readers you one day hope to have is no easy task, but it is sometimes in this difficulty that we stumble upon (mental stumble upon. Wait, what do you call that...? Thunk upon! That sounds right) brilliance. The one drawback to brilliance is that you never quite know if it counts as such until it’s out there for others to see and consume. But that doesn’t mean you have to fret. I believe that all writing, even the fairly bad stuff, contains nuggets of greatness. That means that for you NaNoWriMo’ers this month, even if you struggle to get to your goal, even if you end the month without having completed your task, remember that you most likely have written something great.

Remembering back two years ago, I embarked on my first official (that’s very important) NaNoWriMo in November of 2015. It was a helluva month as I also decided to take on the unnecessary added challenge of NaNoBloPoMo or, wait... Is that what it is? That doesn’t sound right. NaBlo...? National Blog Post Month (NaBloPoMo! Ha!). For those that are unfamiliar with it or don’t blog, NaBloPoMo is where you post at least one blog post everyday for an entire month. Now, if you’ve read anything else on my blog, you’ll know that it is not like me to not be very verbose. Trying to both do my writing on my novel while also doing the whole blogging thing was extremely hectic and nearly pushed me over the edge. Somehow I managed to accomplish both in a whirlwind that saw me complete the month with at least 30 (don’t know the actual number. Would have to look back to check and I’m rather lazy and too busy to do that right now) blog posts and a 118,000 word first-draft mystery novel.



That novel is TMOTR (#TMOTR for social media) but you can call it by its god-given name The Man On The Roof. It was only the second mystery novel I had ever written, yet all the while writing it I felt a surge of energy that continued to push me forward each day and make me cognizant of its weightiness. I felt I was writing something that would be amazing. Now, granted, I am quite often delusional according to my therapist Bert the trash man who absolutely swears he’s just a trash man but is older, black, always has great nuggets of wisdom and totally fits the archetype of the magical negro (I swear that brotha went to Hogwarts or somethin’). But even with that I still couldn’t fight the feeling that I had created something great, which is one of the biggest reasons that kept me pushing through the project, pushing through the small snippets of writer’s block (though I find it insanely difficult to actually get writer’s block when you’re constantly writing and working on at least two different projects at once. I know it sounds crazy hard, but try it. It frees your mind) and the mental fatigue of crafting a story; pushing through the emotional roller coaster that was (and still is) my relationship with each of the characters and growing to love and loathe them as the time went on; charging forward through the quandaries and quagmires of questions that came up in the plot and how to get from point A to point C while making point B the most dramatic; creating a world and setting for not just my characters to live in but creating enough empty space for the reader to slot his or her thoughts and feelings into the setting too, in order to fill out the rest of the environment; battling to create not just narrative but atmospheric narrative; making sure each voice was right, each character just distinct enough; and figuring out a way to lure the reader deeper and deeper into the mysterious darkness while keeping them hooked on every word, every sentence, every idea put forth in the book. It’s a heck of a lot.

Now, two years after having written it, I finally am ready to release it and am looking for reviewers of this book that I think is similar to Gone Girl, The Girl On The Train, Big Little Lies, In A Dark, Dark Wood and the like. No, I wasn’t editing this the whole time. I worked on the editing for three weeks after I finished it and haven’t touched it since but only now do I think the timing for the book is right.

That’s neither here nor there. What is important is that I know your plight dear NaNoWriMo’er and for all you first-timers, I can say that it is wholly doable. Is it a challenge? Of course. And no, nobody expects you to finish over 100,000 words (which is only an achievement if the book is actually good). But push yourself further and harder than you ever have before.

First Mystery Suspense ThrillerComing In DecemberOK, now it’s that cringe-worthy time where I give you unsolicited advice. I know. I hate getting that kind of advice because it seems to almost always come from some smart-butt who thinks he or she knows everything or knows something that I don’t, and just wants to rub it in. If you don’t want to take it that’s totally fine, but I do find that sometimes this stuff helps. Sometimes it helps to hear something you already know from someone else to sure-up your own confidence and sometimes there truly are things that you didn’t think of that another person has thought of and that can be helpful to you. So, here it goes, my tips on getting through the month.

First, I know that this month, for many, is so often not really about finishing the novel but about word counts and lengths, and as we get deeper into this thing, we’re gonna start seeing more and more people posting about how many words they’ve written in one day or one week, or how close they are to the minimum goal of 50,000 words. Ignore it! Ignore it all. Is it good to keep track of just how much you’ve done, you’ve accomplished? Of course. And taking a peek at how many words you’ve logged in a day or over a week does help you to gauge your productivity level, but don’t let this sidetrack you. In fact, don’t let the word count get you down at all. This is totally gonna sound like bragging but I assure you it is not and it’s truthful (you can go back through my blog and check if you’d like). So don’t judge.

Anyways, as I was doing the posts and the novel writing, and we did have the Thanksgiving holiday on which I am always the primary cook for my family, I still also had yardwork to do. As some of my long-time readers may know, I am a vegetable gardener and all-around environmentalist (Go #CaptainPlanet) so I am really big into composting. Well, that year I foolishly, for the first (but not last) time requested a truckload of leaves be delivered to my house. Leaves which I would use both for mulching all of my aesthetic gardening beds, as well as mixing with coffee grounds, lawn clippings and food scraps to set as the base for my compost pile. The picture below is of the leaf pile.




The pile was taller than me, as long as a full-sized Sedan (maybe longer), and made of the driest, most compact assortment of leaves you can get. Most were maple leaves and they smelled amazing, like warm maple syrup. We had 70 degree temps that week in November which is unseasonably warm but pretty great because it would get dark hella early and it was the week of Thanksgiving so everybody was home and off. Moving the leaves alone, it took me four days to get them all moved from the front of my yard to all around the property where they needed to be. That was four days of not writing at all on my novel.

Whatever time I did get at the end of the night went directly to my blogging and sleep. And another full day of Thanksgiving-ing (uh... That should totally be a word. Yes, I know that thanksgiving in and of itself is technically a verb. Don’t bother me with minutia, reader) where I also hardly wrote anything. So out of 30 days I only wrote for about 25 of them. My point is that if I had stressed over word count and how much I got done during those days (I may have blogged about stressing a little), I would have volunteered my brain for writer’s block and never achieved my goal. How many words you have doesn’t matter as much as how complete the story is and how good those words are. Granted, there is some importance to the word count if all you’ve previously done is write short stories, but even then, I’d say don’t look at the word count until you are satisfactorily finished with the story, then hopefully you still have a week of time left at the end of the month to make some changes or additions within the story.

The Writer Seasons 1-3 Out NOWon Amazon KindleWith that point made, I feel everything else should flow easily. Remember, while this month is certainly focused on finishing a full novel, it’s not really about finishing a full novel, but telling a story as best you can in a way that pleases both you and a potential reader one day. Have fun with this thing. Remember that the writing is supposed to be the fun part, even if you are purging anger, resentment, depression or the like out onto the blank page (The Man On The Roof #TMOTR was written in a rage-fueled miasma that stemmed from continuing to be a failure at writing and all-around, and having poor timing in my life). Don’t stress over words. Take risks with your writing, try new things, let the story take you where it wants to venture and be willing to make mistakes. But—this is something that most other authors won’t tell you because everyone is a huge worshipper of the editing and revisions process—make your first draft as near to perfect as possible. Yes, you’ll have plenty of time to go back and tinker and fix and add and subtract, but one of the reasons why this month is so challenging is not because of the word counts or things of that nature, but because it wants you to challenge yourself to write a novel and not just slop together some pretty words that occasionally make sense. If you’re gonna stress over anything, stress over the tightness of the narrative and the believability of the characters (not even so much the relatability as each reader will pick and choose who they relate to based on their own biases).

Another big nugget of advice: DON’T TRY TO EDIT ANYTHING DURING THE MONTH!! It’s tempting, I know. And some people will tell you that it pays to be a perfectionist and if you just go back and tweak things, it’s OK. No. Stop before you do that and remember this thought: there is more brilliance deleted by authors than ever makes it into their novels. Quote from me. Michael Stephenson. If you’re a seasoned writer you should already know that you should never be deleting anything anyway, unless it is a grammatical error like mispalings and such. But sentences that don’t sound right in the flow of things, dialogue that you don’t particularly care for and even entire scenes that you think can be cut—keep all of it in your first draft. And if you want to make an edit later, then mark it as something you want to take a look at, then write whatever you wanted to edit it to be (if you already have something in mind) just below your note, but don’t delete it. And don’t slow down your mind’s conscious stream of thought to go back and question yourself if this one particular word is the right particular word in that sentence, because you could come back to the novel in a month or two and realize that your first choice was the best choice but you can’t remember what it was.

As for outlining and framework construction, I will leave it up to you. I will tell you that while I had been thinking of TMOTR for a while, I hadn’t had a proper outline and, in fact, the original idea I had for the story was drastically different than what the novel ended up becoming. Sometimes I have an outline but sometimes I simply leave prompts for myself, something which I recommend all writers do. The prompts are generally questions or brief synopses about what I want or think should happen either next in the story or what I am comfortable writing next. Again, this month should be about getting into a particular groove of comfort that allows you to open your most creative mindset. Some good questions are: what a particular character learned from what you wrote that day, when you want a crucial event to happen, how you see the characters interacting with each other at the end, and et cetera. Those are just examples, but it is important to think like a reader would which is going to actually drive your narrative. If you can get into the mind of your reader before they are in their own mind, and anticipate what they will think when reading your work, then you can reward them by fulfilling their expectations or yank them deeper into the story by throwing an unexpected twist at them. And yes, sometimes the best thing to do is to let yourself fall into a bout of writer’s block because right after that is usually when the magic happens, but never get concerned about not being able to get any words down on the page.

Extraordinary Season One Out NOW!
This month’s pursuit is solely to make you a better writer, make you a faster thinker and more agile wordsmith. It is meant to challenge your perspective on how you write from start to finish, including the planning process. So get messy, make mistakes, and most of all, have fun! And some of the best times you’ll have during this process will come, surprisingly, not from the writing, though that will be pretty amazing. Some of the best times might very well come from social media and any other offline/real-life socializing groups that you have where you can get together and talk about either writing or reading or both. NaNoWriMo is one of the few months where you don’t have to be or feel alone in the writing process. Yes, writing is often solitary but it doesn’t have to be this month. Go to wherever other writers are and share your stories of what you are doing. Give updates on what you are writing, what characters you’ve fallen in love with, which ones you absolutely loathe, or how the plot has changed from what you thought it was originally. And don’t just share triumphs, share failures, the mundane, the quirky, the questionable and the like. If you’re struggling with a particular section, don’t agonize in silence, take it to Twitter or Facebook or Goodreads or wherever and ask questions about that situation there. Yes, while there is always a bit of paranoia about idea theft, there are still tons of authors out there willing to help you solve your writing problems. And sometimes it’s just good to commiserate with others trying to achieve the same thing. Make friendships and more importantly, make enemies, too. Seriously, haven’t you always wanted a nemesis? You could totally have one and have that person be a writer just like you. It’s perfect!

Anyway, that’s my two cents. To all my fellow writers and authors who dare to participate in the 2017 November NaNoWriMo, I wish you good luck and happy writing. And for anyone interested in reviewing my novel The Man On The Roof, I would love it if you did. Here’s a description:
“There was a man on your roof.” And so starts the psychological intrigue. A small, quiet, Northeast Ohio suburb plays host to a murder when the body of a teenage ne'er-do-well is found hanging from a street banner on a summer morning. At the end of the lane where the murder took place, live five different couples and one old man. Neighbors make for convenient friends as all five couples consider themselves one collective group. But someone here is a murderer. Lies, betrayal and twisted deeds come to light as fingers point and eyes narrow. Who's lying? Who can be trusted? Who has a secret worth killing for? As spouses turn against each other but one thing is for sure: The boy's murderer was trying to send a message. The murderer will kill again.

A psychological mystery thriller in the vein of Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies, The Man on the Roof is told in 10 distinct voices that dig into the inner marrow of the lives and secrets that the people at the end of Shady Lane hold. Designed to be re-readable and keep readers on their toes, it will keep you up at night and have you second and third-guessing every theory about who done it and why. You might want to take notes on this one because you'll surely be talking about The Man on the Roof (#TMOTR) all year long! If you'd like to review it, let me know in the comments below and we can set something up. Currently, it will only be an ebook but hopefully within six months I will have hard copies.

Otherwise, I wish you all as much success as you can stand this month and beyond. Write something cool, and if it isn’t cool don’t fret, nobody actually reads books anymore anyway ;). Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend . #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinaryon Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.
Until next time, (looks at book on coffee table) “Wow! Have you read that book?” ‘Uh... Yeah, totally.’ “I love the part when she takes the paddle and starts spanking the guy and he turns into a dragon and—” ‘Well, actually, I haven’t read it at all. I’ve just been using it as a coaster for my tea mug. Dat tea be hot and delicious!’ (exasperated head shakes)
P.S. Yes, I know that was a long sign-off. Don’t judge me. I should be judging you, reader. You totally know that you have at least one or two books that you have been meaning to read but is now serving as a cup coaster somewhere or is sitting somewhere in plain sight to make you look well-read. For shame! Well, at least drink a cup of tea for me. Cheers! I’ll think of a better, shorter sign-off line next time.

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