by Daniel Erenberg

Three new television shows premiered last week, amidst much hype and ubiquitous advertising campaigns. All three shows turned out to be ratings disappointments, but the networks certainly couldn’t be blamed this time. They got those shows out there. For one, who here hasn’t heard of Kings? That show has been everywhere these last few months. I haven’t been able to take a damn train without seeing that orange butterfly flag waving. NBC, the show’s home network, has also had an extended trailer for it in front of every movie at every movie theater in New York City. The show has HBO-level production values, a superb cast, including Deadwood’s Ian McShane and underrated character actor Dylan Baker (so incredible in Happiness), and an ambitious premise, conceived by Heroes writer Michael Green. NBC gave it a high-profile two-hour premiere on a Sunday night, and it managed to grab just 6 million viewers, who bought into the hype. I was one of them, and I also decided to DVR the new ABC comedy series, Better Off Ted, by Andy Richter Controls The Universe co-creator Victor Fresco, which has been endlessly compared to Arrested Development, largely because of Portia de Rossi’s presence in the capable cast. And, just to round things off, I also taped Party Down, the new Starz original series about a party planning company, which lists Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas and Paul Rudd among its writers, and boasts fabulous comedy pseudo-legends, like Ken Marino (The State), Jane Lynch (Best In Show) and Martin Starr (Freaks and Geeks) in its unbeatable cast.

Reading the day-after ratings for Kings the Monday following its premiere was depressing. I’m really impressed with this show, but I understand why some would be turned off. At the network upfronts last May, Kings was introduced as a modern-day retelling of the Bible story of David and Goliath. Simple enough. But, what they didn’t tell us was that it took place in a new world, where the royalty-led lands of Gath and Gilboa were fighting a war for land and honor, which may be taking place in an alternate universe, but could also just be the very distant future. It’s odd, but the world is instantly well defined, and the pilot looks absolutely beautiful, as filmed by Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend), a filmmaker whose portentous sensibilities, I find, work much better on television than on the big screen. The problem with the marketing for Kings was not that there wasn’t a huge abundance of it, but rather how it made the show look. It seemed like a very white-bread and overly soapy drama. It left out all of the wonderfully bleak questions that the characters must ask themselves, and most of the great cast, beyond the pretty young fellows, like Christopher Egan, who plays farm-boy/war hero, David Shephard. As an experiment, I made a very picky friend watch the pilot, who made his opinions very clear on how stupid he thought the movie trailer looked. While he didn’t love it, he did say that it seemed like a completely different show from the one he watched the trailer for.

ABC seemingly always has trouble launching new comedy series (one recent exception is Samantha Who? which ABC cleverly launched in between Dancing With The Stars and The Bachelor), and Better Off Ted, which premiered after a mid-eighth season episode of Scrubs, only managed to gather up 5.5 million viewers. It should probably be noted here that Better Off Ted has, perhaps, the worst title of any series ever put on the air. I see what they’re trying to do with it. The show is quirky and very odd, and wears that oddness firmly on its sleeve. But the title Better Off Ted makes me think of a bad three-camera sitcom, one of those ones that would get cancelled shortly after premiering between Friends and Seinfeld (remember Stark Raving Mad or Union Square?). This is unfortunate, because the show Better Off Ted is actually quite good. Sure, it’s basically just a redux of Andy Richter Controls The Universe with the same writer, but it’s a damn good redux, with a fun cast of underrated actors, including Allison Anders (squandered so badly on Joey and The Class) and Andy Richter’s hilarious Jonathan Slavin, who gets cryogenically frozen in the pilot episode before being accidentally thawed out by a negligent serviceman, who picks up his cell phone while transporting the cryo-chamber to the basement. The show has a lot of fun bits like this, and isn’t afraid of going off on tangents to fully explore them, but it also has time to show Ted (Jay Harrington) spending time at home with his wonderfully rational young daughter. I have a feeling Better Off Ted doesn’t have much more than half a season in it, but it should be a fun run.

I do, however, desperately hope that Party Down (the first good Starz Original Series!) has more life in it than a half season run. It’s an absolutely hilarious show, but, more surprising than that, it’s quite moving and sad in its ultra-real portrayal of a bunch of poor bastards working a shitty day job, who just want to get famous. One of them, played by Adam Scott (so heartbreaking in the HBO show Tell Me You Love Me and so hilarious in last year’s Step Brothers), has tasted fame via a series of obnoxious television commercials, but is now back at his old day job, actually working under one of the sons of bitches he left behind (Marino, brilliant as always). There’s also Lizzy Caplan (Cloverfield, True Blood), fantastically underplaying an aspiring comedian in a troublesome young marriage, Ryan Hansen (Veronica Mars) as a pretty-boy wannabe actor/celeb and the forever-underrated Starr, as a pretentious writer, who only likes people who get his references to Repo Man. It’s the stuff of dark, bleak drama, and the show is shot as such, using a low-budget, grainy, hand-held style, and exclusively found locations, but it’s also the funniest show of the year so far. I won’t be ready to let Party Down go for a long, long time.

KINGS: A-

BETTER OFF TED: B

PARTY DOWN: A 

Tags: Party Down Better Off Ted Kings tv reviews
March 25, 2009 at 10:19pm ∞