FALL TV EXTRAVAGANZA

MOTIVE

** (out of ****)

Motive is one of those rare shows that came up with a halfway decent gimmick for their otherwise common procedural: the killer is revealed within the first ten minutes of the show, and then we spend the hour trying to figure out the Why, instead of the Who. Unfortunately it’s harder to think of how to cleverly execute a gimmick than it is coming up with the gimmick, and Motive winds up buried with all of the rest of its colleagues. It’s getting to the point where there’s just a clear problem with the genre in general; it’s as if there was a genre of music where you could only use one musical note to write your songs and only the words “poo” and “pee” to write your lyrics. You’re asking for a fully fleshed out, original mystery, believable villains, compelling heroes, and multiple character moments, all within the course of a 44 minute episode. If you demand that from someone, than corners are going to get cut. If that’s a known fact, and we’re just depending on the plot of the episode to be so good that it pulls us through, look somewhere else.

HIT THE FLOOR

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

I kind of miss Baywatch. I never watched it — it made far more sense to me to watch two minutes of porn, and then an hour of The Sopranos, than to somehow try to combine the two, and get none of what I wanted — but I liked that it was on, or at least, I got why it was on. It seemed important to some people. It might be being marketed to young girls who need some heroes, and if that’s the case, the promos for Hit the Floor are full of shit. It’s the same plotless cheesecake that Baywatch gave us for 45 seasons. Hit the Floor is the story of the Devil Girls, the fictional cheerleaders for the Devils, the fictional Los Angeles basketball team for whatever the NBA is in this fictional world. These girls are strong and tough and mean and sasha and fierce and forward and they speak their mind and 75 percent of this show is close-ups of their body parts (all the good ones) jiggling to today’s biggest dance hits. I get why the acting needs to suck — the producers chose to make dancing the priority, over acting, at the casting call. I don’t have a problem with that, but there’s a lot of tiny details here (a purely evil-for-evil’s-sake protagonist, incredibly stupid plot twists) that this show doesn’t believe in its girls, or in the world it’s trying to build. For use only when your internet goes out.

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR/THE HAVES AND HAVE NOTS

* (out of ****)

I’m sure Tyler Perry is a very nice guy. He’s an upstanding family man, and he is always there for his community. But that doesn’t change the fact that he has time and time again proven himself completely incapable of producing anything remotely close to something even slightly resembling quality entertainment. If I wasn’t totally sold on this before (I was), OWN’s new Tuesday lineup has proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt. Love Thy Neighbor is everything that you’ve come to expect from a sitcom with Perry’s name attached. It’s impossible to be more broad or less funny. There were no sitcoms that were around when we wuz kids, when sitcoms were king, that were even close to as awful as this. This would have been the worst, and it has no problem with that. There’s no reason to sit here and harp on it. It’s Grade-Z schlock, and that comes as a surprise to no one. What does come as a surprise is that there’s something that could be even worse than that.

The Haves and Have Nots, based on the promo picture alone, looks like Blownton Blabbey, but the depths of its awfulness go so much farther than a cheap, blackicized ripoff of a popular show. I’m not even sure where to begin. The term “prime-time soap” is given to hour-long network dramas that have soap opera-like qualities, like Beverly Hills, 90210 or Melrose Place. This is mostly in reference to the twisting storylines, as their production values much more closely resemble other network dramas, as opposed to daytime soaps. Make no mistake, this is a daytime soap that happens to be aired during prime time. Daytime soaps take a certain amount of getting used to – you have to be prepared for the stilted writing and acting, and the cut-every-corner budgets. Tyler Perry shows take some getting used to, as they are the worst things you have ever seen. For these two “genres” to crash together and make a hate-filled, twitching, reject, shit-smelling, garbage filled fetus such as this is something  that I hope no one besides me ever has to experience (It’s OWN’s highest rated show of all time, so so much for that). It’s impossible to know which aspects of the show they tried really hard to do well, which they tried really hard to do poorly, and which ones they just said “fuck it” to, but the only interesting part of watching the show is pretending to try and figure it out. Everything here is awful on every level, which would almost make it fun if it wasn’t so fucking boring. The main draw of a soap opera are its twists, twists that can be so ludicrous that no one bothers to care about the rest of the show. These twists are telegraphed from light years away. I essentially spent the first half of the show  watching in horror, and the second half, after picking up the tone deaf rhythm of the actors and the dialogue, saying the lines before the actors could stutter them out. Fucking awful garbage.

-Ryan Haley