Beginning this week, nearly a half-dozen midseason replacement shows - or the second-string series that take up the slots left by failed fall series - debut on television. Here are reviews of two. More to come next week.
Say "I don't": For whom do "The Wedding Bells" toll? They toll for no one - at least no one with at least half a brain who wants to see a good television comedy/drama. Fox's "The Wedding Bells" is like a marriage doomed from the beginning.
It's an arrangement of horrid writing, awkward comic timing and cartoonish caricatures. How something this wretched could come from the likes of TV producer David E. Kelley ("Picket Fences," "Ally McBeal," "Boston Legal") is beyond anyone's guess.
Even the premise seems like something from the waste bin of failed television pilots. Three sisters, Annie (KaDee Strickland), Jane (Teri Polo) and Sammy (Sarah Jones), inherit their mother's wedding planning business and find that designing the day of brides' dreams is much tougher than they could have imagined. In the pilot, which had a sneak preview Wednesday and is repeating tonight at 8 on KSTU Channel 13, the sisters are planning the nuptials for a type-A bride-to-be who is micromanaging every step of the process.
In another episode that is even worse, the trio designs "the wedding from hell" where the groom is an effeminate, boa-wearing heterosexual who - surprise - everyone assumes is gay. Both episodes lead to all kinds of mishaps involving the handsome chef who has an eye for the married Jane; the wedding photographer, who once had a relationship with Annie; and the passionate Sammy, who likes to have secret trysts with members of the wedding party. It's all typical, wacky sitcom behavior wrapped in an hourlong series and tied with a not-so-shiny bow.
The people and situations of "The Wedding Bells" are so artificial and unfunny, this is definitely one nuptials you should skip. It "Raines," it pours: Jeff Goldblum seems quirky enough in real life that showcasing a television series around him seems inevitable. But throw in tired crime-drama conventions and the overused "talk-to-dead-people" shtick, and you've got yourself one wholly unoriginal series.
That's what NBC's new series "Raines" feels like. It's "Monk" with a little "Medium" and "The Sixth Sense" thrown in for good measure. Goldblum plays eccentric Los Angeles police detective Michael Raines, an off-center investigator who learns he can see and talk to the dead victims involved in his cases.
In the pilot, which airs Thursday at 9 p.m. on KSL Channel 5, he converses with a murdered woman who may have been a prostitute involved in a steamy circumstance.
She likes to give him subtle clues to the investigation that lead him in the right direction. That would seem frustrating after a while. Wouldn't it be easier to just tell him who the killer is?
Of course, that would result in a five-minute episode instead of an hourlong crime drama, but there was so little intrigue in the pilot that anything as drastic could have shaken up the story line. "Raines" began with a fine lead actor. It just needed to finish up with a more compelling, and certainly more original, premise.
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