No Ordinary Family
Whenever I write more than one tweet about a subject, I figure I really ought to just knock it off and post to LiveJournal instead.
So I watched the pilot episode of ABC's new show "No Ordinary Family", which is a free download from iTunes at the moment. I liked it.
It's clearly the product of the Pixar film "The Incredibles", which is very good, and the NBC TV series "Heroes", which started out strong and then just fell to pieces. If the Incredibles side of No Ordinary Family's lineage can win out over the Heroes side, it'll be a fun show to watch. If the Heroes side wins out, every character named in the pilot will develop super-powers, die tragically, or both; the series will wimp out on its first-season finale and never recover from the suck. Either/or.
Julie Benz plays the female lead. It's good to see her getting work- I know her from her role as Darla on "Angel", and in the very earliest episodes of "Buffy". Her super-speed is done with more visual flair than I can recall seeing in live action before. Michael Chiklis does a very credible job as a live-action interpretation of Mr. Incredible. Their powers are the physical ones, giving me hope for some good Mom & Dad fight scenes while the kids are off at school in the B-plot.
Some girl from the Disney Channel and a kid who looks like every other teenage-boy character on TV are the kids, and they're underdeveloped in the pilot. The son has a learning disability and then (spoiler) develops super-intelligence, which could be a really interesting plot if done well. I'd like to see some Amadeus Cho action out of him (the only comics character I know of to make super-intelligence a visually interesting power). A teenage girl with telepathy, meanwhile, isn't that interesting to me. Buffy took that idea to its logical extreme, and Jean Grey was always the most boring X-Person.
So that's my opinion on "No Ordinary Family": Cautiously guarded optimism. I've set my DVR to record the second episode tonight, and I'm looking forward to it.
Of course, I've got the current (4th) season of "Chuck" and freshman show "Undercovers" queued up on there, in their entirety, completely unwatched. This whole "school" and "having a life" thing is really cutting into my TV time.
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