2007: Worst of TV

NOTE: I forgot to mention the following three shows in my original post -- they must have been so horrible that I repressed the memory of them.
1. Private Practice: Perhaps this show improved, but after watching the dismal pilot episode, I decided that I didn't need to see another one. (For reasons that I cannot remember, I did end up watching a second episode early in the season, and it was just as bad.) What makes Private Practice so awful is that there is absolutely nothing original here -- the medical humor/drama schtick has been done, ad naseum. PP would have been better if it had focused on the more lighthearted aspects and left the emergencies/patients-who-seem-fine-but-suddenly-code/mystery diagnoses to its parent show Grey's Anatomy (or to ER, which is inexplicably still on the air).
2. Stuido 60 on the Sunset Strip: Another show with tons of promise, Studio 60 was written by The West Wing's Aaron Sorkin, and starred plenty of WW alumni. And I liked the show's concept, following characters behind the scenes of a SNL-like sketch comedy show. But instead of creating its own style, Studio 60 simply gave WW characters new names and a new setting...and stopped there. What's worse, is that seeing its dialog cloned in such an awful new way makes The West Wing a little less likeable.
3. Sleeper Cell: American Terror: The first season of Showtime's Sleeper Cell, which followed an undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated a terrorist sleeper cell -- was great; it was full of action, drama, suspense and some humor. And then came the awful second season, which would've been better named Sleep Well.

Here are my picks for the worst TV shows of 2007. I'm only including shows that I actually watched, so these aren't necessarily the absolute bottom-feeders. Though in a way, they're worse. I mean, avoiding something like 'Til Death is a no-brainer, but these shows actually wasted some of my time, damn them!

The Best of 2007 coming soon...

1. John From Cincinnati – What a pretentious, boring waste of humanity’s time. This show had a ton of potential. It had a great pedigree, coming from David Milch, creator of HBO’s acclaimed Deadwood series. It had a great concept and setting, following three generations of surfers and others in a smallish California beach town where weird things start to happen. On paper, it sounds a little like Lost. In execution, it just was lost. The acting was terrible. The characters were boring. Its mysteries were manufactured and deliberately obscure, its dialog and humor were too self-aware. Well, at least the online debate about the show was entertaining. For those of you who don’t have time to read, I’ll summarize: “JFC sucks, bring Deadwood back!” / “JFC is brilliant, you’re too stupid to understand it (and bring Deadwood back)!”
   

2. Prison Break – The first season of Prison Break was excellent. The second season got a bit tiresome, but was still a mostly entertaining show. So far, the third season sucks, plain and simple. I don’t know what’s happening in the plot and I don’t care.
   

3. 24 – I remember very little from this season, other than how mortified I was at its lame season finale. Dammit!
   

4. Dirt – Although Dirt wasn’t completely awful, it just wasn’t very good either. It earns my ire because it was another show that should have been better. First, because it’s from FX, which may be the next-best-thing to premium channels in terms of quality dramatic original programming (Rescue Me, Damages). Second, because it’s a drama about tabloid news reporters – how do you make that concept this boring? Dirt’s first mistake was to follow the lives of the same couple of mopey, dopey stars in each episode, making them part of the cast, when they should’ve stuck to the staff at the mag and perhaps introduced a new story around a new celeb each week. Its second mistake was to try so very hard to make Lucy (Courtney Cox) a sympathetic character when they could have had a lot of fun keeping her a dirty, greedy villain protagonist.
   

5. The Sopranos – The Sopranos wasn’t actually anywhere near the worst of the year, and I’m not listing it here because of its controversial ending. I’m putting it here because of this unbelievably condescending interview that David Chase, the show’s creator, gave regarding the reaction to the series finale. It’s pompous enough that it deserves to get some flack somewhere, so here goes:

“We knew there would be people who would be perplexed by it and shut their minds to it.”

Ah, so it’s people who had their minds shut to it who didn’t like it. And here I thought it was just people who had a difference of opinion. Silly me.

“And then, all of a sudden, [viewers] wanted to see [Tony Soprano] punished for all that…I thought that was disgusting, frankly…The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”

Well, Tony Soprano is a fictional character and therefore, viewers can both root for him and root for him to get it in the end. Yes, we can have it both ways. Because when you put something fictional out into the world for the entertainment of others, you give up a lot of your control over it. Viewers can think whatever they want about your characters. And even involved fans still relate to a fictional character differently than they do a real person, so thinking that it’s “disgusting” for people to turn on Tony like that seems pretty weird to me. Frankly.

“There was a war going on that week and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings.”

Although I’m sure that there were some obsessed fans couldn’t let the ending go, for most viewers, talking about onion rings was only one of a gazillion things that they did that week. Now, I couldn’t agree more that Americans should be more engaged with current events that extend beyond this week’s American Idol or Spears family trainwreck. But c’mon, Chase has made millions and millions from the show. Are we supposed to take his finger wagging seriously?