24

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Here’s a little ditty about Jack and Assad, two torture experts both tragically flawed. Yes, among the myriad of dynamic pairings on display in the compelling season six of “24,” the most brutal is that of our heavily scarred hero, Jack Bauer, and Hamri Al-Assad, a handsome, Islami...
- Stan Friedman   January 17, 2007

City of Men

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If “Sesame Street” had a dangerous back alley, it might very well resemble the rough and tumble roads inhabited by the big-hearted children in the “City of Men.” Spun off of the hit 2003 Brazilian film City of God, this unnerving look at growing up in the slums of Rio de Jane...
- Stan Friedman   December 20, 2006

Sleeper Cell

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Deep into the second episode of the second season of Showtime’s “Sleeper Cell,” the FBI falls for one of the oldest tricks in the book. And it’s not even a trick unique to al-Qaeda, the show’s arch enemy. It was used at least as far back as the 1991 film Backdraft by a ...
- Stan Friedman   December 20, 2006

The Lost Room

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“The Lost Room,” on Sci Fi, is furnished to appeal to geeks of every demographic. Old “Twilight Zone” buffs will be reminded of that show’s opening line, “You unlock this door with the key to imagination,” when Detective Joe Miller stumbles upon a key that w...
- Stan Friedman   December 13, 2006

One Punk Under God

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There are times when it makes sense to embrace the church. If your father is an adulterer ex-con who barely speaks to you, and your mother suffers from Stage 4 lung cancer, and you have a history of alcohol and drugs, Christianity could certainly be a sanctuary. But if your parents are Jim and Tammy...
- Stan Friedman   December 6, 2006

The Unit

NYPress.com
IN THE ZONE
‘The Unit’ fights the good fight

With David Mamet, you know what you’re getting. In films like Glengarry Glen Ross, and The Spanish Prisoner, he makes no secret of his love for sharp, staccato dialogue and his fascination with the group dynamics of strong men who have secrets to keep. So when he encountered Eric Haney’s book, Inside Delta Force: The Story of America’s Elite Counterterrorist Unit, it was a perfect storm. What could be better Mamet fodder than a top-secret militia that comes complete with its own macho vocabulary? But instead of making a movie, or even an obscenity-laden cable series, he (and producer Shawn Ryan of “The Shield”) created “The Unit,” now in its second season of clandestine maneuvers on CBS. These soldiers don’t get to cuss, but they do like to call each other by code names like “Blue 6” and use poetic banter under pressure: “How’s the world look to you? Light and bright.”

In the real world, Delta Force is off the radar until something goes wrong (see Blackhawk Down or the botched 1980 rescue of hostages from Iran), but in TV-land, we are treated to all the on-target shoulder-launched missiles and morally questionable yet necessary assassinations that makes primetime worth living. In many ways the show resembles Mission Impossible, while justifying its killings using the anti-terrorist logic set forth in “24.” Each week, a team of pros—led by the golden-throated Jonas (Dennis Haysbert)—find themselves in “deep kimche” in some forlorn part of the world. Using their survivalist wits along with all kinds of cool pyrotechniques, aircraft, electronics and a lot of rope, they extract themselves, kill the villains, eliminate threats to the homeland and bond in manly ways. Episodes often start in mid-escape, allowing viewers the pleasure of piecing together the plot from the inside out.

A unique perk of Delta Force is that its men are able to go home between missions. This allows “The Unit” a secondary arc, an Army base “Peyton Place” populated with sexy tomboys who dabble in infidelity and addiction to painkillers while trying to raise children and keep their husbands’ job under wraps. There are surprisingly few shower scenes considering the soldiers’ grime and the steamy performances of desperate housewives Abby Brammell and Audrey Marie Anderson. But, given a helicopter crash in Siberia or a team member trapped in a Bulgarian prison, sex will just have to wait until sweeps week.

- Stan Friedman   November 29, 2006

Breaking Bonaduce

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It’s one thing to believe that all child actors are cursed; it’s another to actually watch one die. But that’s seemingly the moneymaking goal behind VH1’s totally irresponsible yet all-consuming “Breaking Bonaduce.” At age 12, on “The Partridge Family,”
- Stan Friedman   November 22, 2006

30 Rock

NYPress.com
FEY ACCOMPLI
Tina Fey looks unstoppable in ‘30 Rock’

Being the best new sitcom of the season is a little like being the prettiest gal in the leper colony, but “30 Rock” keeps face with many a good reason to tune in. First and foremost is Tina Fey. Adhering in extreme to the old adage, “Write what you know,” Fey has taken her experience as head writer of “Saturday Night Live” and created the part of Liz Lemon for herself, the head writer at an NBC late-night comedy show. Fortunately, Fey is no hack. With hints of “Arrested Development” and the movie Airplane!, the scripts are full of silly cut-aways, obscure references and, God bless her, intelligence. Remarkably, NBC is letting her bite the hand that feeds her: Liz’s new boss, Jack (Alec Baldwin), is the “East Coast vice-president of TV and microwave oven programming for NBC-Universal-GE-Kmart.” And in a snide homage to Aaron Sorkin (whose identically themed NBC dramedy “Studio 60 …” is on life support), Liz and a cohort carry on a conversation as they stroll the studio hallways only to find that they’ve gone in a circle. “Good walk and talk,” they assure each other. Fey even turns out to be a surprisingly adept physical comedienne. Consumed with fear of choking to death, a series of self-Heimlich maneuvers puts the work of Julia Louis-Dreyfus to shame.

Jack’s character is still in formation, sometimes too hard-nosed, other times too compassionate; but Baldwin is uniformly funny—having taken his cue from the Leslie Nielsen school of deadpan. He assumes Liz is a lesbian because of her fashion sense and explains matter-of-factly that her shoes are “definitely bi-curious.” Tracy Morgan, another “SNL” alum, is also on hand as a movie star with a touch of insanity who’s been brought in by Jack to boost ratings. His less lucid moments are his best, such as a poker night scene when he suggests playing Texas Doozy (“Face cards are wild, threes are jinx and fives are twos”). Meanwhile, Jack McBrayer, a barely known improv comic, has scored the role of his life and steals every scene he’s in as Kenneth, a naive NBC page with a blank-slate face and near-perfect comic timing. Supposedly, Jane Krakowski is a series regular, yet she disappears for weeks at a time. Fey and company will hopefully have a long enough future to find more room for her as NBC moves the show to an all-powerful Thursday night timeslot beginning Nov. 30.
- Stan Friedman   November 15, 2006

Heroes / Jericho

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CITY CITY, BANG BANG
Both ‘Heroes’ & ‘Jericho’ go boom

The atom bomb must have seemed a charmingly retro device back in pilot season, a pleasant escape from post-9/11 fertilizer, cell phone and shoe bombs. But now that Kim Jong-il has demonstrated that everything old is nuclear again, two network shows suddenly find themselves at the fore of the apocalyptic zeitgeist.

NBC’s “Heroes” looks and feels like a graphic novel—the kind you can’t put down despite yourself. Taking a cue from “Lost,” the show introduces a menagerie of attractive strangers, then warps the rules of physics around them. They encounter both a mysterious enemy and the prediction of a mushroom cloud over NYC. The kicker is that, like an R-rated X-Men, each character has a seedy superpower. An artist can paint the future, though only after shooting up (i.e. a hero on heroin). A cheerleader is impervious to injury and ceremoniously sticks her hand down the garbage disposal. She’s a bit more distressed when she wakes up dissected on a coroner’s table, but her splayed open abdomen is the best gross-out of the TV season so far. A stripper has a murderous doppelganger albeit they both inhabit a tiresome subplot, and a Japanese clerk with the ability to traverse time and space might save the world if he can just learn a little English. Even Milo Ventimiglia shows up (with much larger biceps than he had in “Gilmore Girls”). He has no powers of his own but, in a nice twist, can absorb those with which he comes in contact. With Batman-like angst and Spider-Man-esque self-obsession galore, the question is: Can these individuals defy their egocentricity and band together for truth, justice and a second-season renewal?

Whereas “Heroes” speeds toward a big bang, CBS’s “Jericho” begins with a handful. Denver, Atlanta, Chicago and maybe a dozen other cities have gone bye-bye in a nuclear attack. This leaves the good folk of Jericho, Kan., in quite the quandary. Love thy neighbor? Do unto others? Yep. Torture to death a stranger suffering from severe radiation burns in order to get some answers? Well, OK. In the heartland, no one freaks out, but no one is particularly interesting either. The joys of “Jericho” lie in the 10 minutes or so per episode when the show embraces its inner “Twilight Zone.” Yes, communal paranoia and creepy tragedy beat bad dialogue and clichéd relationships every time. Whether they can be used to beat “Dancing with the Stars” in the “Jericho” time slot is another matter.

- Stan Friedman   November 1, 2006

The Wire

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“The Wire” is literally stunning. There’s so much turmoil on so many levels, such vibrant performances from the 51 cast members and such fierce, reality-based writing firing at breakneck speed that one almost wishes HBO would throw in a simple-minded commercial. But no, the only op...
- Stan Friedman   October 18, 2006

The Bob Newhart Show (DVD)

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As Conan O’Brien recently observed, kids aren’t watching TV, “they’re on YouTube watching a cat on the toilet.” It was the same in 1975, only instead of surfing the Internet, kids were out dancing The Hustle and committing other grievous acts of disco. This left parents...
- Stan Friedman   September 20, 2006

Prison Break

NYPress.com
GIVE A BROTHER A BREAK
Pros hunt for cons on ‘Prison Break’

If they gave an Emmy for Creepiest Performance in a Forgotten Drama, William Fichtner surely would have won last year for playing the alien-infested sheriff in ABC’s “Invasion.” Now exorcised of space creatures, but with the same heart-stopping glare, Fichtner is Alexander Mahone, the FBI agent assigned to capture eight escapees in the fine second term of “Prison Break” on FOX.

Season One was tense and macho. Lincoln Burrows (how’s that for the name of a righteous runaway), was sentenced to die for a murder he did not commit. His brother, Michael Scofield (preferring his mother’s maiden name), botches a robbery in order to get to his brother’s keeper and hatch an escape. As played by Wentworth Miller, Scofield oozes sweaty calm like a young Clint Eastwood. He also happens to have blueprints of the prison mapped on his body, disguised as an elaborate tattoo. As the days counted down to zero for Burrows, Scofield and a gang of six, managed to free Lincoln, scale the wall and flee into summer replacement season.

September finds the convicts scattering in various directions, Mahone’s nerves all atingle and Scofield stuck with some pretty insinuating skin art. The most outlandish of the other criminals is T-Bag, an Alabama rapist and animal abuser who spends the better part of two episodes toting his severed hand in a beer cooler before forcing a veterinarian to reattach it to his bloodied stump. Fresh from a kill, T-Bag partakes in an amusing bit of product placement as he activates the OnStar Hands-Free Calling system of a stolen SUV and asks for directions. Meanwhile the brothers head to Utah, where there might be some buried cash, and the rest avoid being killed off, with varying degrees of success. Additionally, there’s a redneck prison guard out for justice, Stacy Keach wandering around as the forlorn warden, and a secondary plot involving assassination, a house with no exits and the vice president’s brother.

Despite such unlikely scenarios and hilarious villains, the writers manage a cohesive intelligence. Fichtner’s honed performance brings it out in scenes such as a press conference in the premiere episode, where he lectures on John Wilkes Booth and then perfectly encapsulates the prison show genre by observing, “In 140 years, the fundamental mind of the escaped man has not changed. He is still afraid. And he will stop at nothing in his attempt at flight.”

- Stan Friedman   September 13, 2006

30 Days

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Morgan Spurlock sports a silly Fu Manchu moustache instead of a trucker cap, but in nearly every other way he’s managed to mirror the early stylings of documentary and TV show wise-guy Michael Moore. Moore dealt a blow to corporate America in the film Roger & Me, and then capitalized on th...
- Stan Friedman   August 30, 2006

The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman

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You know a show is cold-hearted when its most tender moment involves a cameo appearance by Andy Dick. Such is the case in IFC’s new series, “The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman.” Jackie, played by nightclub comic Laura Kightlinger, is a writer for a cheesy L.A. movie magazi...
- Stan Friedman   August 23, 2006

The Closer

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Like the candy and ice cream that Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson cannot resist, season two of TNT’s “The Closer” is a rich, gooey, addictive mess. As portrayed by Kyra Sedgwick, Johnson is a sugar-rush in latex gloves and curls. Scenery, as well as dessert, gets chewed, but it&rsquo...
- Stan Friedman   August 9, 2006

Life On Mars

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In the classic 1986 BBC miniseries, “The Singing Detective,” a hospitalized man named Philip Marlow escapes his pain-ravaged body by hallucinating that he’s a private eye from a bygone era. Invert that concept, throw in an iPod, and the result is the enjoyably dark “Life on M...
- Stan Friedman   August 2, 2006