You'd think it shouldn't be too hard to put talented (and attractive) actresses like Caroline Dhavernas and Summer Glau into decent shows, right? Well, apparently it is.
Off the Map 1x01:
Wow, that was... bad! Well, 'bad' is pretty much what I expected from a show described as "Grey's Anatomy in the jungle", but still. Three young American doctors flee from their mysterious (at least for the first 20 minutes or so, because then they all decide to just babble it out to some stranger, who in one case, doesn't even speak their language) past to some South American country (no really, some unnamed country!). None of them speaks only one word of Spanish, yet they manage to (more or less) solve their first cases, including curing an 80-year-old woman from her so far undetected asthma, which also tells us that the veteran doctors are morons. They are, pretty arrogant morons, actually. But they are hot, can climb trees and jump off cliffs. On top of that, we get a really cheesy ending so the best thing I can say about the pilot (aside from some nice location shots) is that surprisingly everyone kept their pants on. That I didn't expect. Anyway... Poor Caroline, poor Zach Gilford.
The Cape 1x01:
Wow, that was... bad! (Guess it would have been fun to watch it with Troy and Abed in their dorm - actually, there were some scenes when I immediately thought of "Kickpuncher - His punches have the power of kicks" :D). Let's see: It's obvious that they had a point they wanted to have reached by the end of the pilot: A superhero fights a supervillain to save his city (and his family). They had 45 minutes to establish that, so they didn't waste any time - our hero gets framed, declared dead, picked up by some criminals and trained to be a superhero in about half an hour. You can imagine how 'deep' the storytelling has to be to achieve that goal. The confrontation with the villain (whom he already almost defeats and who barely escapes) was as unnecessary as already revealing Eyes Only's Orwell's identity to him (or the viewer, for that matter). And what could have been the most interesting part (the training of a regular guy to become a hero) also had to be sacrificed, just because they wanted him to run around in that cape as soon as possible. I'm aware I'm not entirely fair here (Sadly, to sell a network-show these days you seem to have to establish the premise in minimum time), I just think that if they had ended the pilot with the beginning of his journey to become a hero, this might actually have been interesting. And in the end, when it comes to quality entertainment, it fell flat not only in the 'quality'-part. With the exception of the raccoon-scene of course, this one was hilarious!
So yeah, since both will probably be cancelled soon anyway, I guess I shouldn't bother waiting for them to get better.