Author: Tim Goodman

There’s little doubt that Shonda Rhimes fans of Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy will also tune into tonight’s premiere of How To Get Away With Murder, starring Viola Davis. The series is created and written by Rhimes’ protege Pete Nowalk and is part of the Thursday night Rhimes juggernaut.

How To Get Away With Murder has many of the soapy/crazy elements popular in the other two, along with a very strong lead female character in Davis, who is riveting throughout. Like a handful of actors out there, Davis can shine through whatever material she’s given.

Murder is also different from the other two series in that it’s more of a murder-mystery/thriller, wrapped around a week-by-week procedural where brilliant criminal defense attorney Annalise Keating (Davis) works to free clients.

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Unfortunately, Murder has a number of flaws. For starters — and this may ultimately be appealing to some — there’s really no one likeable to root for here. Keating is tough and gruff, which is easy to get over, but she’s also manipulative, not particularly interested in justice, fairness or legality — ethically there’s a lot of gray in her life — plus the big red flag at play in this first season: there’s a murder Keating and her students are somehow involved in. Did they do it? Did she do it? Will they get away with it? Will it take a full season before viewers find out that maybe they didn’t do it and they are really just heroes?

If there’s a reason to stick around to find out, it’s because Davis is so magnetic. But there’s some logic issues that are hard to get over. For starters, first year law students in Keating’s class are vying for precious spots — working for Keating’s firm. As if these bright but super-green legal newbies would suddenly be trusted over more seasoned law students or, say, graduates who have passed the bar.

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The students are not very likeable either. (Are law students on television ever very likeable?) In Murder, you get the sense they would murder each other to work for Keating (which is why four of them appear to be covering up the murder in question during the pilot).

Eventually these competitive creatures who are quick to sell their souls to get ahead may prove to be characters the audience roots for. But part of the Murder DNA seems to be that the end justifies the means. It doesn’t look like law and order are really the central themes, which is fine, but I’m not sure devious holds long-term appeal.

It doesn’t help that Keating’s main employees at the firm, Frank (Charlie Weber) and Bonnie (Liza Weil) are weasely schemers in their own right. But maybe that’s what Nowalk is going for in Murder — glossy gray-areas and crazy, full-steam-ahead scenarios that are not meant to hold up to scrutiny.

Not that it matters much. Thursday nights on ABC are target-oriented and the audience for one is probably the audience for all three and that means Murder will get away with its faults.

Email: Tim.Goodman@THR.com
Twitter: @BastardMachine

HBO/NBC/AMC

This story first appeared in the Aug. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

There’s a lot I love about NBC’s Hannibal — the incredible cinematography, the bold storytelling, the Grand Guignol approach. But there’s also something that I really don’t like: Watching it.

While I appreciate some of the boundary-smashing going on in Bryan Fuller’s gem about Hannibal Lecter, it’s a show I’ve tried many times to watch but ultimately can’t, because it’s too gross.

And that’s a piece of the puzzle that can’t be dismissed. What if a show does everything well but is ultimately too disturbing to actually enjoy? With the current embarrassment of TV riches, whether a show is enjoyable is often the deciding factor in the choice to watch or not to watch. And, as I check my swollen DVRs (yes, plural), what I see are a number of fantastic shows, several of which indulge in grossness, begging for my free time. Are they enjoyable enough for me to watch?

In the case of AMC’s The Walking Dead, the answer is yes. It’s the grossest show on TV, but I watch immediately. Live. As it airs (cue miracle music). Because The Walking Dead is incredibly compelling. Despite the fact that there are an alarming number of beheadings. Despite the fact that the flesh-starved “walkers” are disgusting, and zombie brains and soft­ening skulls are often splattered across my screen. I’m grossed out enough to flinch but not to miss an episode. Maybe my willingness to endure The Walking Dead comes from the fact that zombies aren’t real. So on some level, I can justify the gore.

Grossness is not a new phenomenon on television. Showtime’s Dexter sliced and diced bodies for eight seasons. Forensic shows on broadcast, especially CSI and its clones, are uncommonly gross, and Fox’s The Following has a slasherific awfulness (only in America is it OK to see someone’s severed body part in primetime, but not her nipple).

Yet a spate of cable series, which could spend their time sexing it up, seem keen on pursuing the gross factor. HBO’s Game of Thrones isn’t shy about chopping off hands or putting heads on spikes. And red will the rivers of blood run at weddings if that serves the show’s warring clans.

But perhaps the grossest thing on TV these days is not a decaying zombie face but a human one on the operating table in Cinemax’s new Steven Soderbergh drama, The Knick. The show stars Clive Owen as a New York doctor in 1900 who has — like most medical practitioners of the era — an astonishingly bad record of keeping patients alive, but he is seen as a hero for his willingness to try bold new methods of treatment. There seems to be no end to people on The Knick reaching inside bodies they’ve just cut open to see what they can grab; it’s a brave new world in clamping, draining and scalpel-wielding. Owen’s character treats a woman whose syphilis has completely eaten away her nose, and another doctor manually stuffs a man’s hernia back where it belongs.

The Knick might not be “enjoyable” per se, but it intrigues by taking a premise we haven’t seen much of — medicine in 1900 — and wrapping solid characters and storylines around it. The grossness is essentially something you have to endure to get to the better stuff. Furthermore, the series would be duly knocked if it shied away from honestly portraying the medical chaos of a burgeoning nation. It’s well worth watching, even through fingers splayed on a dismayed face.

Another new show, Starz’s Outlander, also crams in its fair share of gore within the first six episodes: At least one body part is sawed off, and in one almost surreally repulsive scene, a man receives 100 lashes just a day after a first 100 lashes were administered. Blood sprays everywhere, and there are close-ups of bits of flesh barely hanging on to his back. But the show also is just too slow, despite its interesting concept and strong presentation. In other words, I probably won’t continue watching, and not just because of the grossness.

Boundaries need to be pushed in such a crowded landscape. But violence and decay can’t make or break a series; wince-inducing shock can’t be the selling point. With so much competition, the rush to outgross the grossest can’t possibly last. Nor should it.

There are so many wonderful elements that played a part in the freshman success of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black, which begins its second season on Friday (or, midnight if you wish to start binging).

Easily the most surprising twist is that there was almost zero hype to it – House of Cards having sucked up all the bandwidth and Arrested Development skimming off the rest of it. With nothing to expect, there was only the fuzzy, amorphous worry and wonder that filled the air over whether Jenji Kohan, who created Weeds, could do something with, of all things, a women’s prison drama.

Certainly my expectations were low, given that I was firmly in the camp that Weeds was a pretty great series for about three seasons, then went disastrously off the rails the rest of the way. Kohan, who walks a fine line of tapping into the available energy that bubbles around nearly-over-the-top situations, combined with a women’s prison concept, that had no buzz and a whiff of “what the hell?” to it?

Yeah, low expectations.

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But right out of the gate, with the pilot and then each successive episode, Kohan proved that she was working some real magic. Based on a true story (and a book) by Piper Kerman called Orange Is the New Black: My Year In A Women’s Prison, the series revolved around the mostly fragile, mostly entitled Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling – who, surrounded by an amazing cast, still somehow never gets the credit she deserves); a woman comfortable with expensive coffee as an upper-class New Yorker.

She’s in love with Larry (Jason Biggs) and the duo seem to have a bright future of crime-free enclaves, elegant dinners and babies, when Piper’s life changes. She’s sentenced to 15 months in prison, charged with being a drug mule 10 years prior for her lesbian lover, Alex (Laura Prepon).

The first season was basically Piper’s slow, horrified indoctrination into prison culture – a fish very much out of water. While that held a particularly rich vein of both comedy and drama, what separated Orange Is the New Black was the vast and talented cast, the multitude of characters who crossed races, age, sexual preference, weight, education and world perspectives in a drastic, enthralling cross-pollination that never let the series grow stale and, strangely, made it more compelling each hour.

Orange Is the New Black became Netflix’s critical darling, almost out of the blue, and re-established Kohan as a fearless writer who can make a lot of plot out of seemingly very little. What fueled the series in a way that few others using the visual conceit had managed prior, was a very finessed use of flashbacks for even the most minor character. The audience learned who these women were – often surprising in their depth and poignancy and, not unplanned, very different than the stereotypes Piper cast on them at first glance when she entered the prison.

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Not only did this open up the storytelling in Orange Is the New Black, but it created any number of fan-favorite characters along the way. A bonus, of course, was that these were women barely seen on television and Kohan managed to subvert stereotypes, clichés, race-blindness and triteness in a most effective manner.

Season two sees her raising that bar quite a bit, as the series shifts away from the Piper story arc to what’s happening in the prison based on race. New characters stir the pot and old ones branch out in newer directions.

But perhaps what’s most notable about the first part of season two is how Kohan is more confident in her storytelling because she laid the foundation of these diverse characters in season one while also keeping the A storyline – Piper’s shift from church mouse to aggressive, survival-mode inmate – intriguing. Now she can give more depth to the world-view that’s present in Orange Is the New Black — one of the most vibrant, surprising dramas you’ll find anywhere.

Will it go off the rails like Weeds? Who knows? (An educated guess would be “not this season.”) There’s no denying that Kohan works best without a net, but it certainly does present challenges creatively. That said, season two of Orange Is the New Black delivers immediately, stays relevant and entertaining and gives the impression that it has learned a lot of life lessons inside the system.

Email: Tim.Goodman@THR.com
Twitter: @BastardMachine