Courtesy of ABC
This week, Vulture's taking a look at the best and worst of the new season's picked-up TV shows. Which are good? Can anything replace Cavemen? And, most important, what's worth a DVR season pass?
Title: Life on Mars
Stars: Jason O'Mara (Grey's Anatomy), Colm Meaney (The Unit), Rachelle Lefèvre (Boston Legal), Stephanie Jacobsen (Battlestar Galactica)
Network: ABC, Thursdays at 10 p.m.
The pitch: David E. Kelley's remake of the beloved BBC series (the setting is moved from Manchester to Los Angeles) in which a contemporary cop travels back to the seventies where he's free to solve crimes unencumbered by modern-day annoyances, like political correctness and search warrants. Of course, Kelley recently left his role as executive producer, and ABC now plans to either tweak or scrap the entire pilot, so it may end up a sitcom for all we know.
Pilot report: LAPD detective Sam Tyler (O'Mara) is on the trail of a serial killer when his girlfriend, fellow cop Maya Robertson (Jacobsen), gets abducted by a suspect. Understandably upset, Tyler walks in front of a car while listening to the titular Bowie song. When he regains consciousness, it's the seventies and he's wearing bell-bottoms. He stumbles onto a crime scene where he meets his Fourth Amendment–flouting new boss, detective Gene Hunt (Meaney), and learns the LAPD of 1972 is expecting him as a transfer. Tyler suspects he's either dead or in a coma, but a man has needs so he befriends Annie Cartwright (Lefèvre), his department's only female detective, who inexplicably buys his story, and helps him crack a murder case not dissimilar to the one he'd been working on in the future (thereby solving that one too). At episode's end, he considers leaping off a building thinking it's his ticket back to the present, but Cartwright — whom he's known for approximately a day — convinces him not to.
Representative dialogue:
Tyler: I used to get all my CDs here!
Cartwright: Your what?!
Or:
Hunt: "I don't like him. I admit he can solve crimes, but he seems kinda mental."
Breakout star: O'Mara doesn't exude much charisma, and Chaves-Jacobsen gets kidnapped before she has a chance to do any acting. If ABC keeps any of the original cast, we hope it's Lefèvre who transcends her sidekick status and manages to be charming despite her limited screen time.
Worth a season pass? Not in its current form. Kelley's pilot works from the same script as the British version's series premiere, which suffers from trying to speed through the exposition plus pack in an entire episodic story line. The fast pace requires coincidences and logical leaps even more fantastical than the show's time-traveling premise. Still, the original got better as it went on, and there's no telling how ABC might retool it. Maybe it's the next Cavemen!
Mysteries of 'Life on Mars' [LAT]
Wednesday 11 June 2008
Thursday 5 June 2008
Spare us toe-curling attempts at viral marketing, says Peter Robinson
Writing for websites, one of the biggest pleasures of my working day generates an inbox groaning with press releases from two sets of publicists. Twice in the last month I have been treated to a new development in the music industry's continuing failure to co-ordinate its work: a label will send over a YouTube link with a note saying, "Here's a video we've just had done", only for the same link to arrive from another representative later the same day screaming, "OMG this is funny but the label aren't happy about it."
"It's been appearing everywhere and looks like it might take off as a viral in its own right," announced one recent missive. "Let me know if you would like more info about the anonymous London hedge-fund managers and the well-known TV composers who are actually behind the song!" Cheers...
Entire industries have been built on developing viral campaigns. Movie and games companies lead the way with clever, funny and attention-grabbing ideas. These are shrewd campaigns which normal web users will instinctively Fwd to their friends. Predictably, aside from occasional successes like Wiley's Wearing My Rolex playing over footage of Macca and Heather Mills, the music industry's attempts to embrace this technique have been chronic, and a video clip sent from Band A's PR with the subject line "Here's a Band A viral clip" isn't going to win many marketing awards.
Here's a recent press release for Mötley Crüe's piss-poor Crüefest: "JVC Mobile Audio premiered a viral video featuring Josh Todd of Buckcherry and Jacoby Shaddix of Papa Roach having an 'experience' in a car surrounded by the latest JVC audio/visual technology, a cast of hot babes and a ton of soap bubbles." Well done, JVC. Well done everybody.
A few months ago I witnessed the painful sight of a PR employed by music download service We7 posting a plug for the service on an internet forum. We7's business model is to offer free music downloads, as long as downloaders also listen to an advert. The ad revenue is then passed on to record labels. By funding legitimate downloads through advertising We7 offers hope to an ailing industry, but by advocating a sneaky free plug on a messageboard kept online thanks to ad revenue, the company has talked itself out of its own business model.
Bands and singers are often launched with campaigns in which forums, MySpace pages and websites are bombarded with covert spam. Of course, labels and managers have been the source of "fan letters" to magazines and radio stations for 60 years but, tragically, the entirely innocent practice of grown men posing as 13-year-old girls may soon come to an end.
From May 26, it will become a criminal offence for brands to seed positive messages online without making their origin clear. It shouldn't be too much of a problem in the world of pop, though. All it will take is for the music industry to be transparent, honest, and to treat its consumers with respect.
What could possibly go wrong?
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