The Stew

“Stargate Universe.” Mostly harmless.

Pilots are funny things. They’ve got either .75 or 1.5 hours to make a good enough impression on you to keep tuning in. They’ve got to introduce a bunch of characters and a situation that is compelling on its own, but ripe enough with possibilities so that the remaining shows in the season don’t suck.

“Lost” had an amazing pilot.  “Star Trek: The Next Generation” had a pretty lousy one. SGU, as it’s known in the biz, just had a mediocre one.

It cribs visually from “Battlestar Galactica” and thematically from “Star Trek: Voyager” (or “Lost in Space,” for you old-timers.) There are too many characters. The setup is oddly contrived. The one thing it has going for it is that there are possibilities for the rest of the season.

So far, two thumbs enthusiastically sideways.

Okay, so their cheap envelopes force the USPS to crack Blu-ray discs. Other than that, what’s not to love about Netflix?

This isn’t a post about “Leverage” per se, despite the photo. (The show is amusing enough, and definitely worth checking out.) I just noticed last week that Netflix offers instant streaming for episodes of the show from season 2. As in, the season that is currently airing Wednesday nights. Each episode apparently becomes available for streaming the day after appearing on TV.

Oh, and the episodes are in HD.

That makes Netflix, in my mind, the best thing out there since sandwich bread started coming in packages already cut up. It also brings to mind two questions, and I’ll rely on you for answers:

1. Are there any other series that Netflix is offering this way?
2. Are the cable companies crapping their pants? Seriously, if I hadn’t already scaled back my cable to the lowest of the low packages, this sort of thing would have pushed me over the edge.

“Guilt is a Useless Emotion” is a track off the most recent New Order album. That title came to mind when I read a recent story on CNN.com about “TiVo Guilt.”

Apparently, people are having to deal with the fact that they’ve used their DVRs to record more TV than they can reasonably get to. I understand this concept for a couple of reasons. First, I grew up Catholic, so I know something about guilt. Second, I recently upgraded the hard drive in my home-built DVR from 200 GB to 500 GB — and I’m constantly in danger of running out of space.

However, even this recovering Catholic finds it hard to feel guilty about either not watching something contemporaneously with its broadcast (what is the point of a DVR, after all, if not for time-shifting) or deleting something without watching it at all. Here’s some unwatched stuff that I purged recently, without shedding a tear:

• The last half of season 2 of “Heroes.”
• The entire second season of “Notes from the Underbelly.”
• Five episodes of “The Graham Norton Show.”
• The movie “Flightplan.”

Some of these were probably worth watching. None of them were worth losing sleep over. And guilt? Please. Now I’ve got room for a few more episodes of “Fringe,” which I’m almost caught up on. But if I don’t get to them for a while, I think I’ll live.

Lowered expectations FTW.

I’m not a huge Shrek fan. I thought the first one was amusing, the second one was mildly amusing, and the third one — well, I couldn’t be bothered with it. The missus reports that it was slightly less than mildly amusing, so at least it fits a pattern.

So I almost skipped the TV special Shrek the Halls. Can you blame me? Look at the incredibly lame promotional still. These things are supposed to make you want to watch the show. In the modern parlance, epic fail.

In order to get me to actually watch this thing, two great truths won out: 1) broadcast TV is still free; 2) DVR space is cheap. So I devoted roughly 3 gigs to recording it.

I can’t believe I actually thought this thing was funny. Laugh-out-loud at times, even. It should have been as completely lame as this picture, but it wasn’t.

It helps that the entire star-filled cast was involved. You’d almost expect a series of B- to D-listers to be asked to do the voices, just to keep costs down. (Let’s fill the comments with who could have provided voices. How about Kathy Griffin for Fiona?) These are real actors doing, generally, a really good job. Cameron Diaz seemed to be the only one who wasn’t having a blast, but that’s because Fiona spends the entire show being the straight guy… gal… ogre. Antonio Banderas and Eddie Murphy are both better than they needed to be, and Mike Myers, when his accent isn’t going all wonky, is perfectly acceptable.

The animation in HD looked pretty damn good, but Dreamworks can’t match Pixar when it comes to facial animation. At times, it seemed like the voices were floating out of the heads of the characters, rather than being perfectly in synch with what their mouths were doing. It’s possible that the sound was broadcast just a hair off from the video, but I think I remember that phenomenon at the movie theaters with the Shrek movies as well.

All in all, definitely worth a look. Especially for the 20-second “pigs in a blanket” meta-joke.

I’m used to having my TV shows replete with unrequited or dangerously requited love. Buffy and Angel? Tragic. John and Aeryn? At times, equally tragic. And I’m old enough to remember that we really, really didn’t want Maddie and David to ever hook up — because of the shark-jumping potential we knew such a liaison would surely hold.

I’m at a loss, then, to explain why I find the Pam and Jim relationship on The Office to be so completely different from just about every other on-screen relationship. After a couple of seasons of the requisite unrequitedness, the two were suddenly a real couple. And yet, magically, the show doesn’t suck because of it.

I like Pam and Jim as a couple. They’re cute without being saccharin, they’re happy without being unrealistic, and they’re still incredibly funny. Watching the two of them in last week’s episode come to Dwight’s rescue — each in the best way that he or she knew how — was repeatedly hilarious and touching.

Is this a magic combination of acting and writing, or merely a function of me growing old and sappy? I can’t rule out either hypothesis.

(Slight bit of trivia, because I can’t help but be proud of it — Jenna Fischer and I went to the same university. I think our time there only overlapped by a single semester, but I’m sure she secretly wishes she had gotten to know me.)

Honest, the first show that went through my mind as Pushing Daisies got around to explaining its premise wasn’t Dead Like Me (creator Bryan Fuller’s other death-obsessed comedy-thing), but rather the first episode of Torchwood. In that show, a murder victim is brought back to life for less than a minute in order to find out who did the deed. In this show, murder victims are brought back to life for less than a minute in order to find out who did the deed, for fun and profit.

Pushing Daisies has been at the top of most best-of lists for this season, and it’s easy to see why. It looks like nothing else on TV. It sounds like nothing else on TV. Director Barry Sonnenfeld lets out his inner Tim Burton in a way he wasn’t allowed to in last year’s mid-season comedy Notes from the Underbelly.

The cast is pitch-perfect, with supporting player Chi McBride getting the best line (”Bitch, I was in proximity”) of the night. It’s funny, touching, and deserves to be watched.

Which is, frankly, why I’m worried about its future. It managed to narrowly win its time slot, which is a good sign, but whether audiences will stick with something this quirky remains to be seen. In the meantime, I’ve got to thank ABC for bringing us stuff like Twin Peaks back in the day and this show now. It’s a ratings risk, but one I’m glad they took.

Speaking of Peaks, I finally managed to catch the first two episodes of Reaper. (The common element is, of course, actor Ray Wise, far right.) This is the other show of the new season that has been topping best-of lists, and again with good reason. It’s funnier and more human than that other slacker-centric sci-fi show, and it’s got a lot of places it can go. Expand the current circle of friends for the lead, kill or maim one or more of the current ones, and you’ve got a perfect Buffy replacement.

Every now and then, there’s a magic summer for movies. 1982 was like that: with “E.T.,” “Blade Runner” and “Star Trek II” all in theaters, it was a good time to be alive. Alas, the opposite is true as well — there is, every now and then, a summer of black holes, sucking the time and life out of us. 1998 was like that: with “Godzilla,” “Armageddon” and “Star Trek 10,” it was a good year to play outside instead.

So far this year, it’s been more magic on TV than black holes — not as magic as 1982 (nothing ever will be), but we’ve exited a trough and are on our way up. New shows just seem better than they have in the recent past. I’m willing to chalk some of that up to lowered expectations (Bionic Woman), but some shows are just plain good (Journeyman).

Let’s talk bionics, first. Bionic Woman (notice the lack of a “The,” which isn’t the only departure from the original) is a re-imagining of the 70s sci-fi TV series, from the same minds that brought us the re-imagining of another 70s sci-fi TV series, Battlestar Galactica. As with the other re-imagining, this one is darker and sexier than the original, though not necessarily smarter.

Let’s face it, this is a dumb show. The pilot is basically a series of scenes we’ve seen in other, better projects, ranging from “The Matrix” to “La Femme Nikita” (the movie, not the TV show) and about a dozen other sources. Michelle Ryan may be the hottest thing on TV right now, but that’s not enough to get people other than me to tune in. Well, maybe a few more people than me.

The thing is, this show had such a negative buzz going in, based on the leaked pilot episode (which I never watched), that I had absolutely zero expectations going in. And I was richly rewarded for that, because this reshot pilot is a lot better than I expected. Dumb, but okay. Maybe a little better than okay. Definitely good enough to keep watching, which is more than I can say for shows like Standoff from last season.

Journeyman, on the other hand, is genuinely good. Equal parts Quantum Leap and Life on Mars, it’s almost as derivative as Bionic Woman but it cribs from better material. It’s also better written and acted, which is a huge plus.

I like the complicated dynamics of the cast, and the way they were introduced. When lead character Dan Vassar has a conversation with his brother Jack in a police station, in the span of two sentences it becomes clear that Dan is now married to one of Jack’s old girlfriends and there’s some residual feelings about that. They managed to get this information across in a natural way, without stilted dialogue that explicitly spells out the relationships. Of course, a few scenes later, they explicitly spell out the relationships for people who weren’t paying attention.

Still, this is one of the most promising pilots I’ve seen since Lost. It’s also nice to see someone who was in “The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra” getting some regular work.

Next to check out: Reaper, which I’ve been led to believe is another example of how this TV season is shaping up to be a good one.

Meet Chuck. He’s got a new show on NBC this season.

It’s a comedy, sort of. It’s an actioner, sort of. It stradles a lot of lines, some of them better than others. (The stradling, not the lines.)

Chuck is an average geek, and this show revels in its geek cred. Look, he plays “Gears of War”! Look, he understands technology! Look, he looks at porn! The last one is actually an important plot point.

The show is generally breezy, but then gets all dark and heavy before getting back to breezy. It feels more “True Lies” than “Spies Like Us,” but that’s a good thing. The acting is mostly adequate to the task, with the exception of the extremely pretty and improbably named Yvonne Strzechowski – who, as female lead “Sarah Walker,” has all the physical presence of Jennifer Gardner’s Sydney Bristow with about half the acting ability. Here’s hoping that gets better.

Definitely worth checking out. If you missed the pilot, I’m sure it’s available online somewhere.

Welcome to the fall 2007 television lineup. I don’t have the time or inclination to watch everything new this season (I’m looking at you, Kate Walsh), but I’m more than willing to spout off about the programs that I do watch.

To that end, welcome the pilot for “Back to You.” The biggest problem with “Back to You,” besides the unnecessary and distracting laugh track, is that it’s so incredibly mediocre. I don’t mean that it’s bad, it’s just exceedingly average.

For a show with such an appealing cast and above-average pedigree, I expected more than I got. While there were a few laugh-out-loud moments, there were plenty of other moments that left one overwhelming impression: “That could have been a lot better.”

Take Ayda Field’s weathergirl character as an example. Field, fresh from playing an attractive and inteligent character on “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” here plays a slutty and dumb cartoon character. For no good reason, since there are fewer laughs than cringes when she’s on the screen.

You could forgive some misteps in the minor characters — they will inevitably change, assuming the show has a shelf life — if Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton, no noobs when it comes to sitcoms, were trying just a little harder. I wasn’t looking for Frasier in Grammer’s character, but I found it anyway. He’s capable of much more, as Sideshow Bob has continually shown us.

Overall, it’s a solid “C” effort, but that won’t be enough to keep it programmed on my DVR. I’ll give it a few more chances to show me something better, but I’m not holding my breath.

I recorded the premiere of the new Flash Gordon series on Sci-Fi a few weeks ago, and finally got around to watching it. Well, some of it, anyway.

I made it through about 40 minutes before it got deleted, as did my DVR’s instruction to record new episodes.

Look, I’ve got a very high tolerance for bad science fiction. I’ve seen The Ice Pirates. I sat through Alien Apocalypse. But this show was so bad, so inane, so lame, so tired, so… bad.

Don’t watch it. You probably don’t, but don’t. You’ve been warned.