TV is the New Reading

‘So You Think You Can Dance’ a grand disappointment

First and foremost, my bad, I got some wrong information on the “Medium” finale, which is apparently airing this week, Monday night at 10/9c on NBC. It looks like Allison is going to go to sleep on NBC and wake up this fall on CBS.

Shows have survived and thrived in trips to other networks, and I have every confidence that this will package perfectly with that network's “Ghost Whisperer” when it returns to the airwaves.

Less sensible is losing the show in the first place. Seriously? They picked up another season of “Parks and Recreation” and got rid of “Medium”? Oh well, in the past I would’ve questioned a new season of “Heroes,” too, but from the season four finale it looks like show creator Tim Kring’s got a handle on some of the worse excesses of the superhero genre, they’re taking real-world consequences into account and really it’s the best we can hope for, with the exception that we’ve got an unknown quantity in a position of high authority and the mind-control may be wearing thin.

‘24’

“24” went to extreme lengths to prove that President Allison Taylor is an honorable president, turning her daughter over to the authorities for her role in assassinating the man responsible for killing her brother – Taylor’s son. Another mom might’ve swept the matter under a rug and then baked her remaining child a cake – heck, the last few presidents on this show were venal weaklings and corrupt ne’er-do-wells who were at least as dangerous to the nation’s security as the terrorists themselves. But Taylor, played pitch perfectly by Cherry Jones, clearly feels the full weight of her office and despite her husband’s objections, is resolved to put this legal matter in the hands of a jury, since revenge and vigilantism can so quickly and so easily get out of hand.

The presidency is only one part of “24,” of course. Presidents come and go, but Keifer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer has returned twice from the dead and with the help of his daughter’s DNA – hey, check it out, Kim is good for something – may return from his bout with a bioweapon for an eighth Worst Day Ever.

Season Seven was a rebuilding season of sorts. For one thing, the Counter-Terrorist Unit offices in Los Angeles were so poorly lit they became riddled with moles and eventually blew up. It would’ve been nice to take that opportunity to paint everything a bright clinical blue and light the place, but instead it stayed a dank dark bat cave and ultimately flooded with neurotoxins, so really, no one wanted to hang out in there anymore.

Instead, they sent a core group of CTU operatives to D.C. to support no less a mensch than the embattled Tony Almeida while he infiltrated a gang of Sangalese military resistance and a munitions factory-slash-private militia to get closer and closer to the center of a conspiratorial cabal.

Tony had to cause some real damage to get there, and even attacked Jack in the course of his private resistance movement. Fortunately, he got help from computer-wizard Chloe O’Brien who is able to see all, do all and hack all, but even she needed some help from Janis Gold, played by Janeane Garofalo, while Jack was getting help from FBI agent Renee Walker.

This got interesting. As the national discussion continued about the effectiveness of torture in intelligence gathering, a show that has witnessed “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as getting zapped with a stripped electrical cord, a man’s wife being shot in the leg in front of him, the execution of a CTU officer in order to maintain cover and the withholding of pain killers from witnesses in extremis, and Jack himself actually being tortured to death and then revived, Agent Walker confronted Jack about his use of such techniques in tracking down bad guys, while Janis talked about people and their civil rights.

I’m guessing there are a few people in the “24” viewership who enjoyed Jack Bauer screaming directly into the face of Janeane Garofalo about yes, some of their moves being politically incorrect, particularly where racial profiling is being used by a group they’re investigating so they’re using it themselves to follow the group, and then giving her a moment, earnestly, plaintively, come up with some alternate approach, and Janeane – I mean Janis, of course – not coming up with one.

Personally, I enjoy Janeane Garofalo, I think she speaks from a place of personal truth and I enjoy her earnestness and the observations she makes and she’s got a great talent I believe for comic timing, but hell, even I enjoyed those scenes, because indeed, it is possible to be too politically correct and passive-aggressive and I imagine a citizen might want our nation’s operatives to generally be opposed to corrosive influences, contain them and keep us safe from them and let the courts sort it out, and that kind of wish-fulfillment is part of story-telling and fiction.

In the final moments of Day Seven, Jack prays for forgiveness with a Muslim cleric in a scene that honestly got me choked up some, and then has a conversation with Agent Walker, about how yes, he’s done things and used methods in trying to protect people and knows he’s gone way over the line, and how he can’t tell her how to run her own investigation, but just whatever she does, make sure it's something she can live with.

So, in making a decision whether to interrogate some bigwig sleazeball and get him to incriminate himself somehow when she knows he’s guilty of a massive criminal conspiracy and crimes against humanity, she shuts Janis down and goes for it.

Wild. It’s hard to know where Day Eight will pick up, if there is one, but if the show returns, they’ve got a solidly honorable president with some palace intrigue in her back 40, an even more nuanced Jack Bauer, a possibly useful Kim Bauer and a hard-nosed FBI agent to coordinate with.

‘Rescue Me’

In other embattled blonds, Denis Leary, if you haven’t been watching “Rescue Me” on FX, track down this week’s episode, titled “Iceman.” It’s just impossibly good, and centered around Leary as Tommy Gavin, a bad boy Noo Yawk City firefighter and a mostly functional alcoholic.

I say “TV is the New Reading” a bit tongue-in-cheek because TV writing doesn’t always stand out. Often you can see where it’s filler to set up the next funny sight-gag or pointless banter to close out a scene.

So when you encounter really good writing you have to salute. The first half of the show would work well on any stage in the land. You’ve got Tommy "I See Dead People" Gavin amidst the wreckage of closing time alone in a bar, pouring himself a glass or two of Grey Goose vodka and taking the opportunity to speak with his dead dad, his dead brother and his dead cousin and his dead son about, oh, all sorts of things: His father’s infidelity, his actions at Ground Zero, his nephew joining the brotherhood and so forth.

It’s all out on the table in this episode. Tommy gets broken down and shot at and ultimately gets to confront what a jerk he is to the living as well.

It’s all go in this week’s “Rescue Me” on FX, which airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. and gets repeated a few times during the week. This past week’s episode is probably on hulu.com or will be soon and yes, Denis Leary comes with an MA rating, so viewer discretion is absolutely advised. But really, check out this episode. It’s phenomenal.

‘So You Think You Can Dance’

You knew I was going to get to FOX’s summer talent show “So You Think You Can Dance?” sometime or other, but like I said, it was grandly disappointing and I’ve kept putting it off.

Here’s the thing. At this point, I can take it or leave it. The truth is at this point everyone on the screen is going to be a reasonably capable dancer, so the title doesn’t make any sense any more. Of course they think they can dance. A coterie of judges have already determined that they can dance. So now it’s all going to be stories of personal triumph and inspiring biographical histories involving farmland and horses and clinics and prisons and ... oh never mind.

The only value the show has for me is, same as in “American Idol,” the audition rounds. The outliers, the different, the wacky. The freaky. The just plain unscripted bad of people showing up and frustrating the judges by being terrible.

And I sympathize with the showrunners. They want to showcase talent. They’d prefer to come across as human beings with souls rather than the crushers of dreams. But in the case of the audition rounds, it’s at least as much a public service to actively discuss what should never appear on stage. You see all of those long lines of people and you know that all of them are there to do something. Don’t bore us to death, but certainly there were more inappropriately bad dancers out there than we as a viewing public witnessed.

The show has got many, many episodes remaining to do the uplifting backstories and showcase the incredibly talented. My advice to the show is DO THAT ON YOUR OWN TIME, and use the audition rounds more for the falling about and the unintentional comedy.

At least this week also saw the premiere of “Wipeout,” airing at 8/7c Wednesdays on ABC. You want to see more “So You Think You Can Dance?” you can track that down on your own. Myself, I'm done with it for another year.

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