From Water Cooler to Parking Lot at the Mortuary

Remember those TV shows we used to talk about at work the next day?  The thrillers or science fiction or cults shows or action series that everybody was watching then; they were the talk of the lunch room and water cooler and the first ten minutes of any committee meeting you didn’t really want to attend. In the old days it was shows like The X-Files, Friends, and ER. More recently, it’s been Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, 24, Survivor, and Lost. And as this season began, you heard some chatter about V and FlashForward.

But here's the weird thing.  According to our patent-pending mega-scientific Rush Survey, there is exactly one show on that list that people are actually still talking about ... yet all the rest  are still on the air.

What happened?

Check out longer, wider and uncut (?) ruminations over on Contrariwise. Meanwhile ... what did you think of the Lost re-premiere?  The beginning of a satisfying conclusion or Much Ado?

Bye Bye Echo. We Hardley Knew Ye

So Dollhouse finishes up with an episode that's a sequel to a year-old episode that never actually ran on FOX.  And if there was ever pure evidence of an idea wasted by ... what, network timidity?  The shortfall of a creative vision?  Or just the structure of American television itself? ... this is the one.

Usually series like Dollhouse end with no real resolution at all (i.e., Jericho) or a hurried and unsatisfying whip-whap-whup (i.e., the American version of Life on Mars).  Once in a great while, they actually get to finish what they started just as the creators intended, as seems to be the case with the wind-up of Lost.  But rarely -- ever? -- has an essentially failed show -- a show that had obviously failed before its first season was in the can -- actually finished stronger than it began.  Only after its fate was sealed and nobody at the network seemed to give a rodent's rear did Joss Whedon find his voice and move the Dollhouse concept forward, in a dark and relentless direction that left those boring and embarrassing "kick-ass or touching hooker of the week'"storylines in the dust.

You can read a bunch more on Contrariwise, out big-long-essay section. But briefly: Epitaph Two is great.  If only the rest of Dollhouse had been half as challenging, exciting, touching, or just plain cool.  You can catch the finale right here on Hulu, and on Fox as well.  It's good stuff, especially if you saw the prequel, Epitaph One, floating around the net or hiding on the Season One DVD.  Either wait, it's worth it.

Too bad it was too late for Joss Whedon and Dollhouse -- not that a season either way would have mattered; it's more like the timing was always off, from the very beginning.  Still, it's a shame: it could have been so cool.  

The Human Target: A Secret Comic Book (but not really...)

FOX is rolling out a new action/adventure show, called The Human Target, and it's not bad.  Mark Valley, not known as an action star (at least not in Boston Legal or even in his strange dead-partner appearances in Fringe) is remarkably convincing at Christopher Chance, the private operative who protects people who need protecting and elminates threats to the innocent, or semi-innocent.  The show has a wicked sense of humor as well as failry interesting supporting characters in Chi McBride, whom we've loved since Night Court, and Jackie Earle Haley, whom we've loved since he was a child actor stomping people to death in Day of the Locust (and oh, yeah, there was that Watchmen thing, too, but a guy's got to eat).  Anyway: Valley isn't bad, the script popped right along, and it's worth a second look.

You'd never know it was based on a comic book.

The fact is The Human Target has been a C-grade superspy hero in the DC universe since ... well, for more than fifty years, if you go back to his very first appearance in a single Batman story.  He was re-invented by comics writer Len Wein and artist Carmine Infantino as "Christopher Chance," a master of disguise who put himself in the place of threatened innocents, way back in 1972, and he's been skipping around the edges of teh DC Universe ever since. (If you're interested in the complete and almost psychotically details history of this minor faivure, there's an excellent article at http:/at Human Target Online.

In this version, however, FOX and serires devleoper Jonathan E. Steinberg has really retained nothing except the cool name for the series and the equally cool name of the hero: Christopher Chance.  Gone is the 'master of disguise' schtick and any other high-tech or superpowerish elements.  This is just a truly resourceful guy with your typical mysterious past, either in Special Ops or Gangsterland (which will no doubt soon be releaed as episodes progress; they're certainly dropping enough hints about it).  Valley has a couple of good fight seens and plenty of snappy repartee; this doesn't seem so much of a breakout show as it does a competing action-adventure we could all enjoy for a year or three.

Not that he's any Rick Springfield, 'cause, come on, who is?

The thing is, Springfield, back in his light rock "Jessie's Girl" days of 1992, actually starred in a pretty awful version o the same comic for ABC TV.  Barely half a dozen episodes aired (this was from the same production company, Pet Fly, that had perpetrated a couple of other equally horrid action/adventure shows -- Viper and The Sentinel, as well as another comics-based show, the near-career-ending version of The Flash starring John Wesley Shipp and featuring a pre-Munch Richard Belzer.  The "master of disguise" schtick was stil in place for this show, but that didn't help much: it chalked little more than half a dozen episodes before cancellation, and Christopher Chance went back into hybernation for 18 years or so.

It's interesting to note that FOX is not playing up the comic book aspects of the show at all; in fact even the credit to DC comics is buried deep in the end credits, with a card that goes by so fast you're not sure it's there at all.  This is much closer to a James Bond (or Remington Steele, really), and relies pretty heavily on the charm of the key actors and the cleverness of the plots.  Which, after exaclty one whole episode, it has displayed in adequate amounts.

DC, however, is not about to let the connection be forgotten: they've just released a trade paperback of Peter Milligan's re-imagining of the character, and character creator Len Wein, still in there kicking (and making not a dime on all this, we assume, since he created the character back in the days of work-for-hire, pre-creator's rights) has authored a brand new six-issue mini-series -- a kind of back-door pilot all its own -- that premieres in comics stores on February 10.

Any actual relationship bewteen the the Christopher Chance of the comics, the Nineties, and today is almsot entirely coincidental.  But it is a cool name.

Check out the first episode on Fox On Demand

Buy the Trade Paperback of the Human Target's Earlier Incarnation here.