The Studio 60 Effect: The Black Donnellys Edition

So, Studio 60's gone, thank goodness. I hope Steven Weber, Ed Asner, Nate Corddry, and Cal/Danny Concannon can find other shows where they can display their distinct, yet underused talent.

In the wake of Aaron Sorkin's overhyped trainwreck, NBC has given us Americans The Black Donnellys. I only taped this on Monday night because my friend told me it looked not so bad, and I had extra space on the video cassette. I would have recorded over it later this week without watching it, but I stumbled across this witty piece of writing: the Black Donnellys review over at Pajiba. The TV Whore writes:

As you have surely figured out by now (if you didn’t already know this from the endless NBC promos), Paul Haggis is the exec-producer of the series and the writer of the premiere. So you should already be able to figure out the show’s core: bad characters, worse dialogue, and clichés out the yin-yang. But you’re in for a real treat here, because at the show’s tasty center is a heaping pile of bad acting, overblown music, bad acting, flashy quick cuts, and, lest we forget, bad acting.

The acting wasn't that bad, but the writing certainly was. The music was heavy handed and often unnecessary. The worst part was the voiceover, coming from Joey Ice Cream, a locked-up friend of the Donnelly Brothers, who won't tell the coppers where his friends hid the bodies.

I had gotten temporarily excited because Tom Guiry, of Lassie, The Sandlot and We Were The Mulvaneys fame, was going to be on the show. Of course, I didn't know this until I read the Pajiba review. Good promotion, NBC. Sadly for me, Tom has not aged well, and his character in the show, Jimmy, is a profligate heroin(?) addict who can't stop finding trouble for himself. Additionally, Sean, the brother who's supposed to be cute enough to steal his brothers' girlfriends, is not as good-looking as Jonathan Tucker's Tommy, or their actually cute brother Kevin.

My biggest source of irritation is that the pilot episode, and therefore the premise of the entire series, is a ripoff of The Godfather. We the audience are supposed to sympathize with Tommy, the leader of the Donnelly family, because he committed every action in the show to protect his brothers. Except, his brothers brought the problems on themselves. His brothers gambled, lied, stole, then kidnapped and murdered a man to somehow rectify the first crimes. So, I'm not buying this latest excuse to show more disturbing, egregious acts of violence during primetime, masquerading as a dark family drama.

I still haven't seen Crash, but I coming to understand the Haggis hate. Any show that could make me long for the self-righteous whimsy of Studio 60 needs to take a hard look at itself.

Addendum: The LA Times review of the show. With a line like, "[The Black Donnellys]... is in a familiar-seeming if less tangible place — it might be Hell's Kitchen, but it feels like Scorsese's Creek," how could I resist? Read it while you can!