stuff about stuff
* My hockey team lives another day. Depending on tonight's Montreal-Toronto game, tomorrow could be a death match -- any kind of win and they're off to DC for a rematch of last year's agonizing playoff round; any kind of loss and they go golfing and I go cry in my soup. (Which will probably be leek soup, just for the record.) If Toronto manages to win in regulation tonight, Les Boys could still be mobile, but this is not the season to count on the Buds for anything and I fully expect to be a very sad panda by dinner tomorrow.
* NCIS... so we've been given three adult women (i.e., over-35, which is not 'older' because I'm 34) this season for Gibbs to meaningfully interact with: bitchy-smug annoying lawyer lady who is working for the corrupt military contractor, kick-ass Coast Guard investigator, and the thoughtful, intelligent, red-headed DC madam with a soul. What sort of self-lobotomizing process led to choosing the first one as Gibbs's presumptive girlfriend? Does anyone know anyone who has liked Rena Sofer's character? Anyone?
I get why Abigail can't be the one -- she's Hollis Mann working for the Coast Guard. (Although, really, Jethro goes for types and it's not a fatal flaw.) I don't see why Holly Snow can't work her way under Gibbs's armor. She's halfway there already, she works well with the existing cast (she hasn't had a scene with Ducky yet, but I think they'd get on like gangbusters), and she's a really interesting character. I know it was probably completely accidental on the part of the distracted and lazy writers, but I really loved that Ziva was totally unaffected by Holly's former profession and Abby was totally not and how Holly dealt with the latter. The boys were as expected, especially this season: Tony was immediately revealed to be utterly lacking in savoir faire, Tim was intimidated by a strong woman, and Gibbs was totally about the black-and-white up until the moment he showed acknowledgement of the gray. (And raise your hand if you thought using Ducky as the decoy John would have been more interesting?) But I really, really like Holly, really like the actress (who has completely blotted out the miserableness of Birds of Prey), and think that I could totally get behind a Holly-Jethro relationship -- it would have to be a romantic relationship because Gibbs is not friends with girls, ending lines aside. Also, Franks would flip once he found out.
But, if I have to choose one or the other, I'd sacrifice Holly just to never see Rena Sofer again on this show playing that part.
* Criminal Minds, or, why CBS should seriously rethink their methodology of spinning off shows. I've sat through... *counts on fingers* four launchpad episodes: JAG (spinning off NCIS), NCIS (NCIS:LA), CSI:Miami (CSI:NY), and now this one. And they all suffer from the same fatal flaws*: (1) they make the mothership show's cast look either inadequate or like assholes and (2) they get knocked out by the Exposition Fairy faster than Spinks fell against Tyson.
Both points can be addressed at once by changing metaphors. Instead of looking at this like a double date where you spend an hour selling your wingman on the promise that the hot chick's sister is just as hot, look at is as getting on a highway. (Yes, I know, I don't drive. Work with me.) You may have to start from a slow speed or a stop sign at the entrance ramp, but you have to speed up PDQ to merge without incident. The highway is the mothership show's universe, the cars already on it are the characters, and your job is to get your new-character cars on to the highway without a ten-vehicle pileup.
To drop the metaphors, just begin as you mean to go on. Don't have three out of every four scenes be about Mothership Show's characters interviewing Spinoff Show's characters about themselves or, worse, about other characters. Don't give us Spinoff Character's life stories at all beyond what is immediately relevant -- hell, the characters might not even make the standalone pilot (which happened with both NCIS launches), in which case you've just wasted everyone's time. Just write an episode with the Mothership Show's cast doing what they normally do and the Spinoff Characters either doing the same thing in supporting partnership or acting in direct conflict, in which case you write them as you do any other foils.
The CM writers failed so very badly at this despite taking the excellent first step of just throwing the BAU team's names and ranks up on the screen as a shorthand for the massive introductions. They could have had an equally excellent second step of assigning Cooper's team a supporting task -- finding the father/daughter pair -- but they botched it by having Prophet solve that mystery in about as much time as it would have taken Garcia in an episode where the Unsub gets a lot of screen time and then not give them anything else to do besides exposit and show up the main cast.
Details:
I suspect Criminal Minds II, Electric Boogaloo will be more like NCIS:LA is to NCIS than how the CSIs are to each other -- i.e., not very. They'll be part of the same agency, but they'll have totally different purpose, activity, and methods. The spinoff is a pretext to get an already-made audience and not a promise of similar routines performed by a different cast. And you know what? That might not be awful. Cooper's team is clearly not going to function the way Hotch's does and a smaller team, one populated by misfits, could be interesting.
*CSI:Miami is a mild exception because David Caruso and his ego chew so much scenery that there was no room for anyone else, from either cast.
* NCIS... so we've been given three adult women (i.e., over-35, which is not 'older' because I'm 34) this season for Gibbs to meaningfully interact with: bitchy-smug annoying lawyer lady who is working for the corrupt military contractor, kick-ass Coast Guard investigator, and the thoughtful, intelligent, red-headed DC madam with a soul. What sort of self-lobotomizing process led to choosing the first one as Gibbs's presumptive girlfriend? Does anyone know anyone who has liked Rena Sofer's character? Anyone?
I get why Abigail can't be the one -- she's Hollis Mann working for the Coast Guard. (Although, really, Jethro goes for types and it's not a fatal flaw.) I don't see why Holly Snow can't work her way under Gibbs's armor. She's halfway there already, she works well with the existing cast (she hasn't had a scene with Ducky yet, but I think they'd get on like gangbusters), and she's a really interesting character. I know it was probably completely accidental on the part of the distracted and lazy writers, but I really loved that Ziva was totally unaffected by Holly's former profession and Abby was totally not and how Holly dealt with the latter. The boys were as expected, especially this season: Tony was immediately revealed to be utterly lacking in savoir faire, Tim was intimidated by a strong woman, and Gibbs was totally about the black-and-white up until the moment he showed acknowledgement of the gray. (And raise your hand if you thought using Ducky as the decoy John would have been more interesting?) But I really, really like Holly, really like the actress (who has completely blotted out the miserableness of Birds of Prey), and think that I could totally get behind a Holly-Jethro relationship -- it would have to be a romantic relationship because Gibbs is not friends with girls, ending lines aside. Also, Franks would flip once he found out.
But, if I have to choose one or the other, I'd sacrifice Holly just to never see Rena Sofer again on this show playing that part.
* Criminal Minds, or, why CBS should seriously rethink their methodology of spinning off shows. I've sat through... *counts on fingers* four launchpad episodes: JAG (spinning off NCIS), NCIS (NCIS:LA), CSI:Miami (CSI:NY), and now this one. And they all suffer from the same fatal flaws*: (1) they make the mothership show's cast look either inadequate or like assholes and (2) they get knocked out by the Exposition Fairy faster than Spinks fell against Tyson.
Both points can be addressed at once by changing metaphors. Instead of looking at this like a double date where you spend an hour selling your wingman on the promise that the hot chick's sister is just as hot, look at is as getting on a highway. (Yes, I know, I don't drive. Work with me.) You may have to start from a slow speed or a stop sign at the entrance ramp, but you have to speed up PDQ to merge without incident. The highway is the mothership show's universe, the cars already on it are the characters, and your job is to get your new-character cars on to the highway without a ten-vehicle pileup.
To drop the metaphors, just begin as you mean to go on. Don't have three out of every four scenes be about Mothership Show's characters interviewing Spinoff Show's characters about themselves or, worse, about other characters. Don't give us Spinoff Character's life stories at all beyond what is immediately relevant -- hell, the characters might not even make the standalone pilot (which happened with both NCIS launches), in which case you've just wasted everyone's time. Just write an episode with the Mothership Show's cast doing what they normally do and the Spinoff Characters either doing the same thing in supporting partnership or acting in direct conflict, in which case you write them as you do any other foils.
The CM writers failed so very badly at this despite taking the excellent first step of just throwing the BAU team's names and ranks up on the screen as a shorthand for the massive introductions. They could have had an equally excellent second step of assigning Cooper's team a supporting task -- finding the father/daughter pair -- but they botched it by having Prophet solve that mystery in about as much time as it would have taken Garcia in an episode where the Unsub gets a lot of screen time and then not give them anything else to do besides exposit and show up the main cast.
Details:
- What could have been -- and mostly was, to be fair -- worked in gracefully to the storyline: Cooper's having a history with both Hotch and Rossi and a reputation around the BAU and then Prophet being an ex-con.
- What could have been touched upon because it's important but left for fuller development in the spinoff series: hey, there's a funny-speaking guy on your team! The actor was fine and engaging, but Prentiss was repeatedly stuck with the episode's clunkiest and stupidest lines giving us a whole Marty Stu background for him. Seriously, wtf was that line about the special forces? Why would Emily ask that? Why was she stuck holding the stupid stick all episode? And all of this without actually addressing the one question that was actually important -- the fact that you need to be a US citizen to work for the FBI as a Special Agent.
- What was omg-so-irrelevant and did not need to come up until a passing reference during some mid-season episode of the spinoff: Girl Agent's Daddy Issues and Army Brat backstory. (And why the hell did Morgan know any of that? That's creepy-ass stalker information for someone you don't work or socialize with.) NotKensi was, btw, the only Spinoff person to engage in any kind of profiling. Actually, she might have been the only person on either cast to engage in any kind of profiling.
I suspect Criminal Minds II, Electric Boogaloo will be more like NCIS:LA is to NCIS than how the CSIs are to each other -- i.e., not very. They'll be part of the same agency, but they'll have totally different purpose, activity, and methods. The spinoff is a pretext to get an already-made audience and not a promise of similar routines performed by a different cast. And you know what? That might not be awful. Cooper's team is clearly not going to function the way Hotch's does and a smaller team, one populated by misfits, could be interesting.
*CSI:Miami is a mild exception because David Caruso and his ego chew so much scenery that there was no room for anyone else, from either cast.