COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: JV players get their shot at the big time
Such as it is, here is the biggest (and most sophisticated) laugh I’ve had all year at prime-time TV:
On “The Mentalist,” a smirking Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) was setting up the murderer with one of his usual elaborate play-acted traps. In this case, the murderer was an over-the-hill actress who had been conned by Jane and his sneaky buddies into thinking she was rehearsing a scene in the new movie whose producer —her rich indulgent husband— she’d just rubbed out.
Jane, out of nowhere, suddenly sprang up out of his spectator’s chair and— ridiculously—took over as director while the actress began to break down from the guilty weight of it all and reveal what really happened that night. With his smirk even more smug than usual, Jane was beginning to annoy the hell out of the megalomaniac actress, who kept on insisting on the “truth” of every one of her performances.
So she erupted in true anger and took a swing at his face.
Jane, in pseudo-director mode, caught her arm in midswing, shook his head and told her it wasn’t what her character would do, in truth. She was being a little too, uh, daytime soap— you know?
Now that’s funny—wickedly funny because it gets right to the heart of a real truth about TV acting —that the actors making movies and prime-time network series really do feel genuinely superior to those (possibly including themselves once upon a time) still plugging away in the dramatic trenches of daytime TV.
Don’t get me wrong. If I started to list the major actors who got their start in soaps, I’d be here until Dyngus Day. (Among the more famous are Kathy Bates, Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Meg Ryan, Marisa Tomei, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne and Ray Liotta—selected almost at random).
It’s just that whether they really began in soaps or not, there are a ton of performances in new TV series that, as a smirky Patrick Jane might put it, are just a little too daytime TV.
When I first saw the leads of ABC’s “Castle”—Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic—I laughed out loud at how perfect they both seemed for an afternoon soap (it turns out, in fact, that Fillion is, indeed, a serious soap veteran).
ABC’s “Cupid,” in case you’ve missed it (congratulations, if so) is one of the more fascinating ideas on current TV—a redo of a witty, prime-time flop of 1998. The original 10 years ago had a terrific theme song by The Pretenders and starred the irreplaceably obnoxious Jeremy Piven as a psychiatric patient who claimed to be Cupid himself, god of love and all.
It was an interesting, way-out premise the first time with lots of opportunities for craziness to reveal the madness of being normal. It was, in fact, quite witty the first time around. That’s solely because the stupendously annoying Piven was perfect casting for a loquacious, overly bright fellow taking over the nearest psych ward or group therapy session.
Remember that the real Piven— who now gets to play annoyingly “self-involved” and weaselly on “Entourage” —recently resigned from a Broadway gig in a revival of David Mamet’s “Speed the Plow” because—as reported— he claimed too much sushi had given him mercury poisoning.
Whereupon playwright David Mamet said that for his next job, Piven was auditioning to be a thermometer.
Imagine how much fun a weekly TV show might be if the lead were as annoying as Piven may well be in life.
Taking his role, though, in the new 2009 “Cupid,” is Bobby Cannavale, a good journeyman TV presence who, in full gesticulating pseudo-megalomania, doesn’t begin to have that outrageously annoying spoiled quality Piven emanates just sitting quietly in a chair.
Cannavale is way too conventionally good to play “Cupid,” in the series. They needed Piven to go a little “afternoon soap” all over the place.
Take a look at “The Unusuals,” on the other hand, and you’ve got a classic prime time triumph of the hard-plugging Junior Varsity who’ve finally, at long last, made the varsity after years of trying.
We’re not talking here about a Simon Baker in his second major starring role in prime time finally smirking and charming his way into being a smash hit, we’re talking about actors who might, just yesterday, have been patroling hospital beds or making out in a car on a prime-time soap (or a prime-time series that didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.) The lead of “The Unusuals,” for instance, is Jeremy Renner, a good actor but a fellow with a generic character actor’s face. Russ Tamblyn’s daughter Amblyn—an alumna of “General Hospital”—plays the show’s post-ingenue, a Park Aveneu heiress moonlighting as a cop. Adam Goldberg (with credits including the likes of “Head Cases” and “Joey” as well as “Entourage”) plays a depressed cop with a brain tumor and a preternatural ability to evade death in front of oncoming subway trains and shotguns blasts in small rooms.
“The Unusuals” isn’t nearly as much wacko fun in its cast as “Life on Mars,” whose time slot it now occupies (Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli and Gretchen Mol in the same prime time cast was casting genius on someone’s part) but the minute I saw all those TV JV stalwarts plugging away in the varsity I decided I was going to be on this show’s side, no matter what.
By all means, join me.
And while you’re at it, think of all the ratings failures of yore that ought to be recast and brought back, a la “Cupid” for one more throw of the dice in prime time.
Now there’s a parlor game any self-respecting couch potato can play.
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