RAKE

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

Rake cheated. Or it figured out how the world should work. Either way, it gets a boost for one, huge reason: its first episode isn’t its pilot. I’ve watched so many terrible pilots, terrible not because the show has a bad premise, or won’t eventually produce good episodes of television. It’s because the demands of a pilot (introduce every character, all of the premise, and the tone) are too much for one episode to handle, so much so that it feels like we’re listening to a lecture at school, as opposed to being entertained. But here we have some random-ass episode of Rake (the pilot will air at some point in the future, and if it’s anything like every other pilot, it’s going to feel weird to viewers who watch it all the way through), and guess what? Everything totally made sense, even though I wasn’t force fed all of the “necessary” information immediately. I would guess that 90 percent of TV shows would be better off if, after they made a second episode, they threw the pilot away and just started with the second episode. Pilots are like previews for Broadway shows. The only people that want to watch them are people who enjoy entertainers flailing about, trying to figure out what to do.

The entire show rests on Greg Kinnear’s shoulders. In today’s TV world, every hour long show needs an antihero, and the success of the show typically rests on the antihero’s performance. What are you going to give us that we didn’t get from Tony Soprano, Walter White, Hank Moody, Dr. House, etc.? The thing that we get is Greg Kinnear, taking his persona to the next inevitable level of TV antihero. Kinnear plays Keegan Deane (notice how his name isn’t Rake. Score one for the show creators) a defense attorney who is an even bigger scumbag than other people with that scumbag job. He’s a degenerate narcissist/gambler/alcoholic. He’s the guy we all hope to be when we’re in high school, until one too many hangovers results in one too many sick days at work. The TV hangover seems like the best thing ever. You wince one time, maybe take an aspirin, and then go about your day. If I drank like Rake does on his average Tuesday night, I would wake up at some point on Thursday afternoon. Kinnear’s persona has always been slightly on the wrong side of douchey, closer to his character in Anchorman 2 than any of the antiheroes I listed above. Keegan Deane pulls him back to a more likeable side, equal parts root-for and root-against. This is the beam that Rake will attempt to balance on for the duration of its run, and if Kinnear doesn’t have it on lockdown in this episode, we already know he’s capable to get there eventually.

Unfortunately, Keegan’s bouncing between the devil and slightly-less-devilly devil on his two shoulders is the only compelling part of the premise. Most of the show focuses on whatever case-of-the-week he’s working on. There are a lot of characters introduced in the episode, but most of them are fairly uninteresting, spouting out lines that are different versions of “Keegan Deane, you’re such a rake!” as they lovingly wave their fist in the air.

So, Rake’s job is to keep showing us how bad Deane is, then show us he’s a little bit better than that, and then come up with clever cases for him to work. See what I mean? We already have ten of those shows on the air. So it all comes down to Kinnear. If we hear that the show was picked up for a second season, he’ll be why.

-Ryan Haley