HI, I’m MIKE TV

Television for the week of January 16th. 

Alcatraz

** ½ (out of****)

 Bad Robot’s (J.J. Abrams production company) latest little gift to television aired Monday night on Fox. Alcatraz has gotten the numerous “Lost” comparisons, due to the creators behind both, the fact that it centers around an island, the mysteries of the show and the time travel involved- but that’s totally forgetting the X-File comparisons that should be made.

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Alcatraz wants so badly to have the formula where the bad guy of the week shows up to keep things fresh and exciting, while also having the overarching mysteries and developing relationships to keep the audience coming back for more. I’m not even using formula in a derogatory manner; plenty of shows have used it successfully. Buffy and Smallville jump to mind, and I know I’m probably in a Fortress of Solitude on my stance that Smallville was good. Reference!  The problem is Lost and X-Files succeeded where a lot of shows that follow this formula fail. They let the mysteries remain mysteries for a long time, not feeling the need to blow their mysterious load in the first act.  Alcatraz assumes that its entire audience consists of ADD infected morons who can’t wait for more than 2 minutes to get the answer to the riddle that has just been posed to them.

Before the pilot is over, we’re force fed a plethora of information that would’ve been better sprinkled throughout the entire season. The crux of the entire show is that the year Alcatraz closed, 256 inmates and 43 guards vanished into thin air and at least the inmates have started to reappear in our time not having aged a second. This is revealed immediately instead of building up through the first half of the pilot (which was needlessly 2 hours, the second half was a completely separate plot. There was no reason to add this second hour, except to burn another episode maybe? This is far too long of a parenthetical statement. There’s a good chance you’ve forgotten what it was originally referencing.). They could have used the entire pilot to subtly shift from the boring cop procedural that is it’s obvious skeleton into a full blown scifi mystery, but instead they throw the scifi in our face AND THEN become a boring cop procedural like any Law and Order/CSI bullshit that’s thirty times a night. The creators assume the audience doesn’t want to think, and that they want what they normally consume but with a slight twist- Like the weirdoes who drink Bud Light Lime. What the fuck is wrong with those people? You can’t put a bow tie on a man with one tooth and say he’s classy.

 The pilot also revealed that Sam Neil’s government character TOTALLY has another super secret Alcatraz hidden in underground somewhere. Which is another mystery load blown, that Sam Neil knows for sure that he prisoners were going to reappear. That motherfucker.

I like Sam Neil most of the time….let’s make that some of the time. He knows his niche and goes for it, and that’s fine. But like many people who stay in the world of science fiction, Neil’s set speed is to overact, and it takes the people behind the camera to tell him to the chill the fuck out. Apparently no one on the set of Alcatraz informed him that this isn’t dinner theater from the 1930’s, and he doesn’t need to be the most clichéd of dickish government drone with a sordid motive. Not for a single second do you think he isn’t working his own agenda and totally using the main character and the Doctor for his nefarious means. Which brings me to the point that the cop and the doc barely stumbled upon what was going on, and Neil decided to let them in on this huge government secret for no apparent reason and with no real vetting. I know it’s dumb to start tearing a scifi show apart based on logic, but I’m fine with time travel and futuristic technology- but have the government work how it always fucking work. There’s no reason to instantly get all of the protagonists working together, where they could have used the opportunity to have three parties (Neil’s shadowy government organization, rogue cop and Jorge Garcia’s Alcatraz expert, and the returning inmates) interacting with very different goals for most of the season. It’s the creators’ fear-based decisions that lead the show to fall flat, and I think that’s what it will eventually bury it. They need to take risks like Lost did, and even though there were times that Lost failed incredibly, they also succeeded incredibly- and incredible failures are better than yawn-inducing ones.

The main character, played by Sarah Jones, is utterly two-dimensional as the hard ass female cop who’s recently lost a partner and now has trouble working with others. Obviously she’s a softy deep down, obviously we’ll learn more clichéd facts about her that make her the way she is, and obviously Dr. Hurley will help her learn to rely on others, as she teaches him to believe in himself more. Because apparently a man with 2 Ph. Ds has issues in trusting that he can get shit done. None of the character work is interesting except for a couple of moments with the inmates. The only reason to tune in to this completely average show is if you sort of care why the inmate are coming back. It’s probably some aliens or something. Whatever.-MG