Apr 08 2009
The Unusuals: Uninteresting and Unfunny
With the finale of Life on Mars last week, I’d been looking forward to watching Law & Order again at 9pm Central on Wednesday night. Sadly, tonight’s episode turned out to be a rerun that, unbelievably, we’d already seen. There was nothing else on, so we decided to give the new show The Unusuals a try.
I sit before you, dumbfounded and disappointed that this is what we get instead of the deliciously enjoyable and quirky Life on Mars. I have no idea what The Unusuals is supposed to be. Absurd things happened, characters had quirks, but everyone was playing it straight so I had no idea if it was supposed to be funny or not. Early previews had labeled it a comedy, but when watching the commercials, I’d wondered if The Unusuals was supposed to be dark comedy or just quirky drama. Honestly, it’s none of those things. Perhaps it was something that looked good on paper–misfit cops solve crimes and save the world. But in its execution, it was just uncomfortable to watch.
We begin with a female cop undercover as a hooker on the street. Her mother calls her while she’s working on the street. Ha. Ha. Then a potential john pulls over and she tries to score an arrest, but it turns out it’s another cop, telling her she’s moving from vice to homicide. A cop has been killed, and she’s going to be his replacement. That’s right, she’s going in her hooker outfit with the dead guy’s partner to notify the new widow. Was this supposed to be funny?
The partner, who runs a restaurant when he feels like it even though he can’t cook (ha ha), goes through the dead guy’s locker to scoop up all of the embarrassing material the wife doesn’t need to see. He clears out stacks of porn, S&M gear, and bags of cocaine, all while talking about what a good guy his partner was. Again, maybe on Scrubs this could have been funny, but the actors are playing it like it’s NYPD Blue so it just comes off as badly written drama.
Maybe there’s more to the show. Maybe something better happened or will happen. But 12 minutes in, I realized that I already regretted the time wasted on something that wasn’t funny and wasn’t making me at all interested to know what happened next. Once they got to the guy who was reporting his dead cat, my husband and I switched it off. We put our newly purchased Extended Cut DVD of Stargate on instead and had an enjoyable two hours of slightly cheesy 90s sci-fi entertainment.
So seriously, you can go right now to Buy.com and get Stargate for just $5.99 — to watch next week instead of The Unusuals:
You’ve got Kurt Russell, a floppy-haired James Spader, and the androgynous Jaye Davidson of The Crying Game fame and lots of Egyptian lore and space travel and excitement and even some actual humor that will actually make you laugh. Trust me, this will be a lot better use of your time.
It’s still on here now, but I’m taping it. I just glanced at your title — hah! Maybe I’ll put the tape at the bottom of what’s getting to be a big pile.
Well, you’ll know if you’re going to like it right away. We turned it off after 12 minutes! And that’s rare for me–usually curiosity gets the better of me and I’ll almost always finish something out. But this…it just didn’t work for me at all. If you do watch it, let me know what you think!
Well, I finally watched the tape. The show was a big mess, it made no sense, they stole a whole scene straight out of “The Wire” (fooling a dumb suspect into believing that a xerox machine was a lie detector), and Harold Perrineau never once yelled “Waaaaaaaalt!” — and yet, I kind of liked it.
I wouldn’t seek it out, but I might watch it again.
Speaking of shows which I might watch again if I’m not doing something else, last week I watched “Dollhouse” for what was only the second time. Like “The Unusuals,” I found it mildly entertaining. “Dollhouse” was creepy though, and “The Unusuals” — for reasons I can’t explain at the moment — made me smile.