SUMMER TV EXTRAVAGANZA

 

CEDAR COVE

*1/2 (out of ****)

As much as a defender of television’s artistic merit as I am, I don’t mind when some of my TV viewing feels like a complete waste of time. There’s a lot of situations where this could be the case. Maybe I’m finishing out final seasons of Dexter or Futurama, shows that have nothing more to say about their characters, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to quit now. Maybe there’s a marathon of Fresh Prince of Bel Air on, and I’m watching incredible episode after incredible episode, hoping to see the incrediblest episode.

Maybe some TV show I used to watch as a kid is now streaming on Netflix, and I watch a couple to see how big of a moron I was. All of these various forms of watching TV have their merits, but none of them will be talked about in the 2013 Television Wrap-Up episode of the PopFilter Podcast, and if we’re being honest, preparing for end-of-the-year top ten lists is the only reason to consume television anyway. But there’s a fourth, much more common, much more awful way that watching television shows can be a complete waste of time: if they’re anything like Cedar Cove.

Cedar Cove is exactly what you would expect from the Hallmark Channel’s first scripted drama, based on a series of books you buy at grocery stores, starring Andie MacDowell. How much can you really shit on it if it’s exactly what you expect? A lot, because that’s totally fucking unfair to me. I could have closed my eyes, thought over my expectations, and then sat down to write a review. Or I could have spent an hour and change watching the eternal pilot, and BEEN IN THE EXACT SAME POSITION. Those examples of time wasting I listed off earlier, relatively speaking, aren’t a waste of time at all. They  aren’t the most productive way to spend my time, but they certainly aren’t the least, for no other reason than they aren’t Cedar Cove.

Cedar Cove is one of those towns that only exist in TV shows from the eighties and nineties and shitty TV shows in the 2010’s. It’s small. It’s in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows each other. Everyone has their quirks. Whoa, hold on there, professor. Hallmark Channel finds quirks a little too quirky. It might be best to make all of these characters the same, and then put those characters through no drama. I haven’t seen this many cardboard people interact since Kevin McAllister threw a fake house party. But all of this lack of drama pales in comparison to the least dramatic thing of all time: the whole pilot revolves around the fact that Andie MacDowell, Cedar Cove’s resident judge, got a job as a federal judge, and has to leave Cedar Cove! The star of the show! The main character! The only actor on the show that anyone has ever heard of! She’s not going to leave the show! So this is all build up for nothing! She can’t leave the show! And then she decides not to leave! And you’re simultaneously full of hate and disappointment! And I just watched a show created by people who make greeting cards! Fucking waste of time. Breaking Bad is almost here.

 

 

THE AWESOMES

** (out of ****)

Where is our great superhero commentary? It took the comic book world 25 years after the release of Fantastic Four #1 to give us Watchmen, commentary so well done that it’s on lists of the greatest fiction of the last hundred years, so maybe 2013, just a decade and a half since X-Men, isn’t enough time. And if it is, The Awesomes isn’t it. The Awesomes, created by SNL’s Seth Myers and Michael Shoemaker, doesn’t have the ambitions that Watchmen did, but it would be nice if it had the ambitions that Mystery Men did. Instead, it’s evident that the creators have simply just seen Mystery  Men; between the first two episodes, the show takes a lot of cues from it, but never really expands upon it. As an animated Hulu exclusive, The Awesomes has so many fields to choose from to say something new: television, animation, superheroes, superhero movies, and superhero comics. Instead, it plays more like a superhero show that had jokes added because the two comedians who were responsible didn’t trust the fact that they could tell a straight superhero story. But we have enough middling cartoons and superhero stories these days to make this wholly unnecessary. I really like Seth Myers, winning me over after initially thinking he was just a smug butthole, and it’s totally possible that this show needs to get its premise out of the way in order to say what it really wants to say. At this point, though, it couldn’t be more basic. Breaking Bad is almost here.

 

-Ryan Haley