After a couple seasons of home runs in new programming that gave the network some genuine hits and/or critical successes (The Flash, Jane the Virgin, The 100, iZombie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), The CW hit a bit of a snag last year with only one of its three pilots returning for a season two with Riverdale. Both fall freshmen failed last year (No Tomorrow, Frequency), and if the pilots of the two newbies this season are any indication, it could be another rough year for non-superhero shows on The CW.
Valor (Mondays at 9:00 on The CW)
The setup is very CW, with Madani (Christine Ochoa) becoming one of the first female pilots in the Special Operations Aviation Regiment and struggling to come to terms with a failed mission that has left her with PTSD, a pill addiction, and a secret that everybody hints at endlessly in the first hour. This secret is what drives the plot (rather than the procedural format of The Brave and SEAL Team) and also what is ultimately Valor's biggest undoing. This secret, this mystery to be solved, is so confusing and convoluted that I found it nearly impossible to follow in just one episode, so I can't imagine having to parse it out over an entire season. (There's something about at least one coverup, but maybe another too? And a prisoner who was supposed to be dead but is now just missing? And the CIA is there? I really don't know.)
The characters are also messily drawn in that they are almost exclusively defined by their sexual tension with each other. These are clunky, boring characters. Jimmy (W. Tre Davis) was left behind on the mission and captured, which should make us care about him, but the only thing we really know about him is that he has a wife and child awaiting his return. We should feel for Madani, being in an impossible position as a woman and as a soldier, but she's so thinly sketched that the show never really feels like it belongs to her. Ochoa's thoroughly middling performance doesn't help matters, but Kyle Jarrow's script really does her (and the other characters) no favors, focusing instead on soap opera cliches (who's sleeping with who, who has authority over who, jarring flashbacks) and prolonging this completely uninteresting mystery.
There's also the matter of Jarrow's horrendously obvious and wooden dialogue, which contains at least a half-dozen variations of "this is bad" (including "that's not good" and "that's messed up"), interspersed between random sex scenes and walk-and-talk pieces where the mission is spoken of in shadowy terms ("What we did was a mistake!"). It takes actors a hell of a lot more magnetic than Ochoa and her supporting cast, among them Sleepy Hollow's Matt Barr and Chicago Fire's Charlie Barnett, to make that kind of dialogue engaging and a director with a bigger budget and better vision than TNT mainstay Michael M. Robin to bring to life. All around, Valor is just a slog, a confusing, cheap, third-rate attempt to mix international intrigue with a youthful soap that fails on nearly every level.
Dynasty (Wednesdays at 9:00 on The CW)
The plot is basically the same as the one you remember: Fallon (a dull Elizabeth Gillies) and her brother Steven (James Mackay, in an awful performance) are jockeying for their father's, Blake Carrington (Grant Show), fortune and the future of his multi-billion dollar company. A wrench is thrown into the family dynamic when they learn Blake is engaged to Cristal (Nathalie Kelley) and giving her the promotion Fallon wanted. Cue the conniving, backstabbing, and theatrics.
Bits have been updated and modernized, such as the setting (Atlanta rather than Denver); the ethnicities of certain characters (Cristal is Latin, Michael and Jeff Colby are African American) and genders of others (Sammy Jo is now a man); and the reasons for the rift between Blake and Steven (he's openly gay but his father disagrees more with his liberal politics than his sexuality). But most of this Dynasty stays true to the spirit and style of its predecessor, from an abundance of workplace sexual harassment to the infamous spectacle of woman-on-woman face-slapping and hair-pulling. It simultaneously makes the show feel dated (Are we not beyond the spectacle of catfights?) and surprisingly timely (especially watching in the wake of Harvey Weinstein).
It all is lent to a pilot that comes across as trying too hard to resurrect something that is dead and rotting. Dynasty and Dallas were game changers, but just like the latter show's reboot failed to bring anything new to the table in a deluge of similar primetime soaps, this Dynasty feels superfluous. In an era of peak TV, when there are hundreds of options, nothing about this pilot makes me want to stick around and see more, because it feels like something we've seen countless times before. What does Dynasty bring to the equation that other shows don't? What is unique about it? Just because you take a formula that worked well nearly forty years ago and inject it with a more diverse cast and a lot of references to fracking doesn't mean you have something to say.
Now don't get me wrong, I don't think every TV show needs to be important or deep or one-of-a-kind. But I do think there should be something about every show that distinguishes it from the pack. Dynasty doesn't have that thing. It's a perfectly fine guilty pleasure, but that's not enough anymore. Even guilty pleasures have elements that make them enjoyable, especially considering much they've grown and expanded since Dynasty left the airwaves 28 years ago, but this lifeless reboot seems to wed to just redoing what its parent series did. We need (and deserve) more now. Look at how shows like Gossip Girl, Revenge, and Empire took the formula laid out by shows like the original Dynasty and twisted them; Dynasty 2017 doesn't do anything like that, so it comes across as unnecessary and uninspired rather than fun and juicy.
Comments
Post a Comment