It's 1963. The jet age has dawned, and we're going around the world with the crew of a Pan Am Clipper. That crew is made up of a captain searching for his gone-missing stewardess girlfriend, his co-pilot who appears to be Pan Am's version of Pete Campbell, and four stewardesses. Two are sisters, one the black sheep of the family, the other the golden child who bolted from her own wedding and wound up on the cover of Life magazine after joining Pan Am. One is a burgeoning feminist/free thinker, as we're shown by her living in the Village and having some guy at her apartment using Marx as an excuse to not answer the phone. The fourth is a Frenchwoman who was apparently sleeping with a married man, which she learned when he brought his family on a flight.
Oh, and did I mention that the black sheep has been recruited by the CIA at the suggestion of the stew who went missing?
Ridiculous espionage subplots aside, there is a certain charm to this show. The sisters have a troubled relationship, but they're secure enough with each other to be honest and have each other's backs when their manipulative mom shows up on a flight. The captain, as much as he's trying to project the alpha male characteristics expected of someone in his position in 1963, is clearly hurting, and his dedication to find his girlfriend is a welcome vulnerability.
The other characters, well, I'm not so sure where they're going. They may be a little to tightly defined as horndog/bohemian/French, and it'd be nice to see them get some range.
As for the show's ability to capture Mad Men's vibe, well, no. They try very hard, certainly with the costumes and music, but try too hard by inserting incidental dialog that sounds like a forced attempt to remind us that it's 1963. The writers do not have Mad Men's ability to come up with dialog that sounds like it would be spoken by people in the 1960s but not sounding like they're trying to prove that it's the 1960s.
Still, this is a pleasant enough show, and the airline setting does allow for a broad range of locales and potential plots. I don't know how much of a chance we'll have to explore the world with this crew, though, as the show's ratings are dismal, thanks in no small part to the anemic numbers put up by Desperate Housewives, whose last season is, almost unbelievably, stupider than any of the previous seasons. I also don't see a good time for them to move the show to without possibly making the show weaker, ratings-wise.
So while this experiment in ripping off basic cable is going better than The Playboy Club, I wouldn't actually call it a success. It's likeable enough, but it doesn't keep me from hoping that March 2012 would just get here already.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
New on TV: Terra Nova
It's 2149, and Earth is screwed. Population growth, pollution, whatever, it's clear that the planet is not going to be able to sustain life - at least human life - for much longer. At some point in the relatively recent past, a hole in space-time was discovered that allows people to be sent back 85 million years on to a parallel Earth. The idea, apparently, is that this new Earth will serve as a lifeboat for at least a segment of humanity.
That's where the Shannon family comes in. They've been selected for the 11th pilgrimage (mom is a doctor), but there's wrinkle; dad is in prison thanks to his assault on a police officer who discovered that the family had an illegal third child. Mom is apparently more resourceful than first thought, as she engineers a lame escape for her husband and lays down enough bribes to get him through the portal - with their third child.
Terra Nova is run in a quasi-military camp style, led the no-nonsense commander who founded the colony as the very first pilgrim. But there's trouble in the past, as a group of people from the sixth pilgrimage - know as Sixers - split off from Terra Nova and are actively trying to thwart it. They live in the jungle, steal supplies and energy as needed, etc. They also have a belief - not stated explicitly but suggested via comments as subtle as a jackhammer - that this new Earth is actually the old Earth, and the Terra Nova settlement is a ploy made by various people back in 2149 to gain or maintain power.
The Shannons, for their part, get mixed up in this pretty quickly when the dad saves the life of the commander, leading him to a favored spot on the commander's security team. The dad has also been a captive of the Sixers, and is beginning to suspect there's more here than meets the eye. There is also a variety of family drama - a son who resents his dad for being away, a daughter who's already caught the eye of a solider, and none of it is all that interesting.
In fact, this write up is, I think, at least as interesting as the show, a condition I ascribe to the lack of dinosaurs. Oh, there's at least one dino per episode - and there was one episode where a flock of flying dinos attack the Terra Novans, as they've built their settlement on the dino's nesting ground - but the real draw for watching this show isn't to see what bits they've ripped off from Lost or how problematically on the nose it was for them to cast the Marine commander from Avatar as the Terra Nova commander. I want to see dinosaurs, lots of them, preferably fighting each other. That would be at least as interesting as the whole thing with the Sixers (which I think they've tipped too early) and much more interesting than the family dynamics stuff.
Bottom line, I'm a little disappointed with the show, and the ratings suggest that I'm not alone. My thinking: more dinos, more ratings. Make it happen, Fox.
That's where the Shannon family comes in. They've been selected for the 11th pilgrimage (mom is a doctor), but there's wrinkle; dad is in prison thanks to his assault on a police officer who discovered that the family had an illegal third child. Mom is apparently more resourceful than first thought, as she engineers a lame escape for her husband and lays down enough bribes to get him through the portal - with their third child.
Terra Nova is run in a quasi-military camp style, led the no-nonsense commander who founded the colony as the very first pilgrim. But there's trouble in the past, as a group of people from the sixth pilgrimage - know as Sixers - split off from Terra Nova and are actively trying to thwart it. They live in the jungle, steal supplies and energy as needed, etc. They also have a belief - not stated explicitly but suggested via comments as subtle as a jackhammer - that this new Earth is actually the old Earth, and the Terra Nova settlement is a ploy made by various people back in 2149 to gain or maintain power.
The Shannons, for their part, get mixed up in this pretty quickly when the dad saves the life of the commander, leading him to a favored spot on the commander's security team. The dad has also been a captive of the Sixers, and is beginning to suspect there's more here than meets the eye. There is also a variety of family drama - a son who resents his dad for being away, a daughter who's already caught the eye of a solider, and none of it is all that interesting.
In fact, this write up is, I think, at least as interesting as the show, a condition I ascribe to the lack of dinosaurs. Oh, there's at least one dino per episode - and there was one episode where a flock of flying dinos attack the Terra Novans, as they've built their settlement on the dino's nesting ground - but the real draw for watching this show isn't to see what bits they've ripped off from Lost or how problematically on the nose it was for them to cast the Marine commander from Avatar as the Terra Nova commander. I want to see dinosaurs, lots of them, preferably fighting each other. That would be at least as interesting as the whole thing with the Sixers (which I think they've tipped too early) and much more interesting than the family dynamics stuff.
Bottom line, I'm a little disappointed with the show, and the ratings suggest that I'm not alone. My thinking: more dinos, more ratings. Make it happen, Fox.
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