ROUND ONE

 

RED BAND SOCIETY

VS

THE MYSTERIES OF LAURA

 

SEE THE BRACKET AT http://challonge.com/popfilter

 

 

Red Band Society is the kind of trash that, once you’ve been watching pilots for a couple of years, you find yourself almost hoping for. It’s not good, and it suffers from a severe case of pilotitis, a disease that includes such symptoms as exposition overload, and a tone that’s all over the place. But it moves just fast enough to keep you from hating it, and you can see a slight aura of potential around the edges.

Shows like The Mysteries of Laura, however, are depressing, especially when they come so early in the fall TV season. If The Mysteries of Laura is the fall TV groundhog, letting us know whether or not we’re going to have a long, horrible winter, then we are all so, so fucked, and may God have mercy on our souls.

There is nothing to like about The Mysteries of Laura, and that goes far beyond something as cute and adorable as pilotitis. It’s not just that it isn’t sure what type of television show it is; it seems unsure of what a television show is. NBC, along with everyone involved with the show, is so proud of its premise, in which a woman is both a cop AND a mom, that it infuses every single line of dialogue, every scene, every shot with that information. When told that a hitman killed someone for $2500, Laura Mysteries replies “That’s enough for a year’s worth of mac and cheese, but not enough to kill someone.” See? See?!? SEE??!?!?!?!?!?!?!? She’s a mom, but she’s a cop, but she’s a mom.

The best part about Laura (and by best part I mean most fun thing to point and laugh at, not the part that makes this show good) is that it’s hard to determine whether she’s worse at being a cop or worse at being a mom. The one thing you do know is that she’s terrible at both. If this show was some sort of conservative condemnation of working mothers, or a docudrama shining a spotlight on how mentally handicapped people shouldn’t have kids or be detectives, everything would have made more sense. But instead, we’re supposed to find Laura endearing because she shoots a hostage taker while he’s holding a hostage in front of him, or how she loads her kids up with cough syrup so they’ll pass out during an interview to get into a prestigious pre-school. I’m sure that being a single, working mom is difficult. I’ll never know how difficult, thanks to my genitalia. But what I do know is that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who know exactly what it’s like, and I can’t imagine them looking at this fucking idiot shithead of a main character and feeling empathy or entertainment. I truly hope that The Mysteries of Laura is the worst pilot of the season. Red Band Society coasts to an easy first round one.

We had one too many shows, so Red Band Society and The Mysteries of Laura had to play something of a play-in game, with the winner entering the tournament of 32. So, next up…

RED BAND SOCIETY VS TIM AND ERIC’S BEDTIME STORIES

 

– Ryan Haley