Dec 03 2008
Life for Horny Teenagers and Crusoe Leaves Friday…
It seems another of the shows I’ve been enjoying this season may be getting canceled as well. Crusoe, part of my blissfully guilty pleasure TV watching on Friday night, is being shipwrecked on Saturday nights starting this week. It’s unclear as of yet whether this means imminent doom or a last-ditch effort to save the show. Saturdays have long been a wasteland of repeats on the major networks–Crusoe will be the first original scripted show to be airing on Saturdays in years. The fact that it’s more of a family-oriented show, and that it will be the only game in town, may actually give it the boost in ratings it needs. One can always hope, but the TV Series Finale website feels the hope is pretty much in vain.
As much as I love the show, the plot turns seem to indicate a shorter lifespan than the average series. I mean, how many escape attempts can you set up for a guy in just the first five episodes and not have them pan out–how long can that kind of viewer torture go on? If, like Lost, Crusoe was meant to be a one season show–that could be expanded if viewership was stellar–it may turn out that we at least get a satisfactory conclusion to the story. It seems NBC plans to run all 13 episodes that have been made. The messageboards on NBC indicate that no one’s been able to get a definitive answer about the future of the series–I’m sure NBC doesn’t want to announce a cancellation and lose the modest audience the show currently has.
All we can do is watch, and hope we get so see more of Philip Winchester shirtless before he sails back to England…
As for Life, I’m starting to wonder if they’re letting a high school creative writing class work on the scripts now. I really like this show, but they’re starting to lose me with their continual tweaking of the show. In order to lighten the somewhat dark edge to Life last year, they’ve tried to add more humor and oddness to this year. The unfortunate result is that a kick ass character like Dani Reese (Sarah Shahi) is slowly turning into a caricature. Her sudden relationship with boss Tidwell (Donal Logue) was questionable at best, but now they start the episode with Reese doing a Playboy bunny-esque routine for him, twirling a sucker in her mouth for that adolescent schoolgirl vibe? If this weren’t bad enough, she later kicks partner Crews out of the hotel room they need to share in the desert town they’re stranded in–all because he picked up the phone when her boyfriend called. Are we really to believe that Reese is that immature? She’s going to make her partner hitch a ride through the desert to go sleep in a dead man’s trailer instead of sleeping in a separate bed in a hotel room with her?
All of this would be fine if it were an American Pie movie, but this isn’t what Life is supposed to be about. How can they sell the ongoing drama about Reese’s father and the men responsible for framing Crews when they’ve got them all acting like they’re in a sitcom? The show’s always been good about finding the humor in awkward moments, but the problem is that they’re now drawing these awkard moments out too long. They’re overplaying their hand. Please stop, Life writers. Just. Stop.
Catch Crusoe on NBC, now on Saturdays at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central. Life, also on NBC, airs Wednesdays at 9/8c.
