It’s hard to know where to start with this one. Christian Slater is not particularly believable in either personality, which is certainly a problem, but I think the real problem is simply the premise. It’s a fine premise for, say, a half-season arc of Alias, but it seems unsustainable for an ongoing series. It seems like the writers know this, since they pretty much drop all pretense of “the two personalities don’t even know the other exists” before the end of the pilot. I suppose there are interesting things to be done there, but, once you have a series based on “normal guy who knows lots of spy stuff,” you’ve pretty much got Chuck, right?

I probably shouldn’t be entirely surprised by the CW’s attempt to aggressively target the Gossip Girl demographic, but the speed with which they’ve moved to corner the market on teen and pre-teen girls is pretty impressive.

Anyway, this is yet another show that doesn’t really care if people like me like it, which is fine. It’s got a few really questionable elements (the combination of the gay confidante character with the endlessly wise person of color seems unfortunate), but I’m sort of glad to get a show that, at least in the pilot, doesn’t entirely buy into the ongoing cultural admiration of the exceedingly wealthy. There is a fairly decent level of scorn for the rich (something that doesn’t really show up on 90210 at all). That’s not enough to get me to watch the show on a regular basis, but at least it exceeded my extremely low expectations.

It seems a little sketchy to put a show on the air that is strikingly similar to an already aired, but little watched show (which is to say Cupid), but even more so to put one on that is strikingly similar to a show that another network is planning for mid-season replacement (again, Cupid).

Perhaps I’m not being fair. Once you get beyond the “Greek god(s) help people fall in love,” the shows are pretty different in tone. Valentine has the production quality and overacting of Charmed, which isn’t really a good thing, but my main complaint was with the structure of the pilot.

A fairly standard technique in a pilot (or a movie, for that matter) is to introduce an audience surrogate who knows nothing about the premise of the show, thereby allowing the other characters to explain all the necessary information. It’s a clunky, but effective, tool for dumping a lot of information on viewers, but it really only works if the character is introduced fairly early on in the story. The pilot for Valentine introduce the audience surrogate about halfway through the episode, by which point we’ve pretty much worked everything out on our own, without the need for clunky exposition and the introduction of a personality-free character. I don’t understand the thinking at all, but perhaps I should just chalk it up to the endless series of rewrites this show probably went through before production.

Back during our last attempt to cut down on our TV viewing, Supernatural was one of the casualties. It was a great looking show, but they seemed determined, particularly in the first season, to have each episode simply knock off a popular horror film. Some of them were well done enough, but it didn’t really seem like required viewing.

Since then, I started hearing more people talk positively about it, so I figured it was worth another shot. I’m not sure it’s a particularly great show, still, but it is pretty decent and has dropped (or at least played down) its derivative tendencies. I’m inclined to give Ben Edlund a bit of the credit for this, but that might not be fair as the episodes he wrote tend to be a little jokey.

The overarching storyline isn’t quite as compelling as they hoped, I think, but it’s a decent effort and does a nice job setting up the next season. And I’m always glad to see Katharine Isabelle getting work.

Well, this pilot is dramatically better than the unaired pilot, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. I understand the decision to relocate to New York, but it sort of undercuts the genre commentary of the original. I can’t really think of any 70’s cop shows that were set in New York, so you don’t get the added weight of transporting a modern day cop show character to the same genre of thirty years ago.

This version of the pilot also sticks much more closely to the pacing of the British pilot, but it just doesn’t feel right. That moment when Sam and Gene (or whatever they call them here) both come to the same conclusion and spring into action is such an awesome moment in the original and feels so tossed off here. It’s just one moment, but it’s a critical one, and shows how poorly they understand the source material.

While I’ve never seen the Australian original, I can pretty safely infer what it’s like from watching the remake. I’m willing to accept that it probably worked better there, but this version is painfully unfunny. I know that’s not a particularly original sentiment, but I had at some hopes (despite the ads I’d seen for the show) based on my overall like of Selma Blair. She’s profoundly awful here, which is a shame, but I can’t really imagine this show is going to be on much longer.

It’s sort of interesting to see the quantity of derivatives The Sopranos has inspired. I would have though the subgenre would have burned itself out by now, but it seems like we’re getting even more “Sopranos with ______” than usual this year. Easy Money gives us “Sopranos with a payday loan empire” which isn’t a particularly compelling premise, but it’s reasonably well executed, possibly because it’s actually created/written by Sopranos alums. Laurie Metcalf does a nice job as the family matriarch, but I think they perhaps do too good a job with making her offspring horrible, self-involved people. It’s hard to commit to sit down and spend an hour a week watching horrible people, even if it’s to watch their shady business empire crumble.

I managed to miss the pilot for this one, but I don’t think I really missed out on much. The show is awful, though perhaps slightly better than the title of the show suggests. Most of the credit goes to Mohr and Marshall, who are still likable even with painfully bad writing. Hopefully Marshall’s ongoing abilities as a show-killer will kick in at some point and free up both of them for better work.

Oh, I also should mention that Ed Begley, Jr. made me laugh every time he was onscreen. I’m not sure when I became the sort of person who finds Ed Begley, Jr. amusing, and I’m not sure it’s a positive development, but there it is.