COMMENTARY
A show that deserves new ‘Life’
Jeff Simon
04/24/09 07:57 AM
It’s time, I think, to prevent loss of “Life.” The Wednesday night series on NBC, I mean. That’s why it’s in quotation marks.
The fix is in, it seems, which is never good news. That’s why we can supposedly count “Life” out.
It’s what’s called “Bubble Time” in the TV biz with all sorts of TV series “on the bubble” of cancellation before the TV networks present their new slates to affiliates.
Frankly, there are precious few I really care about losing if their bubbles were to suddenly burst—and none of them more than NBC’s “Life,” that strange little Wednesday night joke about a decidedly strange red-haired cop given to gnomic, Zen-like utterances and the occasional ability to revert to the old savage self that got him safely through a very long—and unjust—stretch in the Big House. (Upon release, a good lawyer won him an eight-figure settlement. He doesn’t know, then, what to do with either his life or his money.)
If you’re on the side, then, of star Damien Lewis and co-star Sarah Shahi and their “Life,” by all means, make your feelings known to Channel 2 or NBC. According to the Hollywood trades just a few days ago, it’s not looking good for “Life’s” life.
The only other potential casualties I’ll lament, to be honest, are NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” a ratings catastrophe that was way too good for the room, and CBS’ “The Eleventh Hour.” Again, according to the trades, they share some notable bubble discomfort with “Cold Case,” “The Unit” and “Without a Trace,” all expendables, it seems to me.
In the current massive inundation of Geniuses With Gorgeous Protectors on television, “The Eleventh Hour” was one of the best—not as much strenuous fun, perhaps, as its ABC bubble-mate “Castle,” but good enough when Rufus Sewell and Marley Shelton were running around the country making America safe for science, high foreheads and very piercing eyes.
But “Chuck?” “Dollhouse?” “The Unit?” “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles?” “Cupid?” Who gives a remote? I confess that early on in “Chuck’s” high ride on the wave of Nerd TV, I was actually on the show’s side. That was before I realized that it really had only one or two plots and that everything else that happened on it was going to be extremely annoying.
What we all realize, of course, is that at floundering NBC, things were bound to be a lot more bubblesome than anywhere else. When you’ve already announced that your entire weekday 10 p. m. time slot has been given over to Jay Leno, it puts a whole lot of viable television on notice that oblivion beckons.
And that’s where it seems to me, TV needs to take ever greater advantage of the “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” solution.
When, at one point, there seemed to be more “Law and Order” franchises in America than Pizza Huts or Dunkin’ Donuts, NBC simply wrapped up “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” and shipped it off to the USA network.
Now there, I tell you, is precisely the way things ought to work at bubble time in American TV.
The networks function as a kind of supermarket.TV shows are there free and therefore for everyone, once everyone who needs to gets with the program and obtains a new digital converter. They’re the big places to go to buy milk, paper towels and floor wax.
The cable networks are for the boutique goods, specialty shops, mall chain stores, the places where the goods aren’t always network-style mass-produced drivel.
So when you’ve got a “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” where Vincent D’Onofrio is just too weird for prime time, by God, find a home for him on cable. If something like “Life” and its star Damien Lewis are far too strange to get big prime-time ratings—or “Parks and Recreation” just too infernally smart—by all means ship them over to a cable network with an open time slot.
To celebrate “Law and Order: Criminal Intent’s” existence as the lunatic asylum on the whole “Law and Order” campus, a new cast member hits the show at 9 p. m. Sunday —Jeff Goldblum, who was Damien Lewis (sans the red hair) long before any of us knew who Lewis was.
In other words, he’s the magisterially strange fellow with the melodiously arch line delivery, the sinister twinkle in his eye and the smile from somewhere out in the Crab Nebula. That he managed to lock into a movie career of billion- dollar box office makes him even that much stranger.
I’m a fan of any weekly home at all for Goldblum on your living room screen.
I just wish that NBC and USA would relent a little and find some sanctuary nearby for his spiritual younger brother Lewis and his series “Life.”
But then maybe I’m just blowing bubbles, you know?
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