WINTER TV EXTRAVAGANZA

WINTER TV EXTRAVAGANZA

 

HOUSE OF LIES

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

 

Pilots have a lot of work to do. Think about it: starting with the second episode, and going to the series finale, every second of the show is dedicated to who the characters are that moment, and who they will one day become. But the pilot has to fill you in for every second of the characters life before the pilot started. In other words, if a character is forty years old when the show starts, and seven seasons later he is 42, you have seven years to watch him develop through two years, but one episode to see him develop through the first forty. That’s a lot to do for one episode, and most pilots will crack under the pressure. House of Lies, starring Don Cheadle and no one else, despite advertisements making it seem like a ensemble cast, is no exception. Having watched so many pilots throughout the course of last year, I wonder if it’s not my job to grade the pilot, but instead review the show around the garbage that’s in every pilot. Here is my first attempt.

House of Lies is about a management consultant firm. Every knows who someone who knows someone that works for one of those companies, and yet no one knows what they actually do. House of Lies makes the mistake of thinking that anyone actually cares. They decide, almost immediately, to take you through the in’s and out’s of consulting, and this is where we learn the show is not boring, but instead very cool. How do we know? Don Cheadle will freeze the world, as if he is Evie from Out of this World, and then talk directly to the camera, as if he is Ferris Bueller. In other words, we’ve seen this all before, and we didn’t think it was cool then. These little messages from Cheadle to us is what the show thinks it brings to the table that other shows don’t. It may have even been greenlit on that and that alone. But I promise you, sometime between the end of this season and the beginning of next, if it should be lucky, that shit will get dropped. All of the cool little things that the creators put into the show will be gone, and all we’ll be left with are decidedly uncool things like plot and character.

The premise of the show, beside the fact that they work for a consulting company, we’ve seen before. These are the plucky underdogs who don’t follow the rules, but if you give them a chance, they will show that they are the best. The pilot jams this down your throat, but it’s hard to tell if that will always be the case, or if they just wanted to make sure it came across in the first episode. For this show to have legs, it’s all going to depend on its four leads, or, as I mentioned before, Don Cheadle and the three supporting actors. Kristen Bell had so little to do in the pilot, but again, this was clearly Cheadle’s episode to shine, and co-stars Ben Schwartz and Josh Lawson were given even less. Schwartz is some sort of wannabe player, similar to his character on Parks and Rec, and Lawson is kind of nerdy, I guess. I don’t know. What I do know is that people are tired of watching cool people walk around being all rich and cool. I call it the Entourage backlash. Give your characters a chance to hang out, House of Lies, or you’re going to cool yourself to death. – RH