Fox Picks Up Four Shows, Dumps Five

Good news today for fans of Manic Pixie Dream Girls and bad news for fans of White Sox-loving cops. With the fall season coming to a close and network upfronts on their way, Fox has picked up four new shows, including The New Girl, a Zooey Deschanel vehicle that features Mrs. Ben Gibbard as a suddenly single teacher who moves in with three guys. Also picked up were J.J. Abrams’ Alcatraz, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, and a Bones spin-off, Finder. To make room, the network is dropping poor performers Breaking In, The Human Target, Lie to Me, Traffic Light, and Sean Ryan’s cop drama The Chicago Code. Rumor is the rest of their lineup will be filled with shows with singing and Seth McFarlane. [Ed. Note: That was a startlingly accurate joke]

Bubble Watch 2011: What Shows Might Bite the Dust?

It’s that time of year again when everyone gets nervous that their favorite show that no one watches is going to get cancelled. To help ease (or feed) your fears, we’ve come up with this handy list and scale to help you out. The scale is 0-10, with 0 meaning the show is gone, 5 meaning it’s on the fence, and 10 meaning it’s a sure bet to return. So without further ado, here we go:

Parenthood

What started out as a chaotic, melodramatic show, Parenthood has become one of the best ensemble dramas on TV. It’s no coincidence that its gotten better as executive producer Jason Katims wrapped up Friday Night Lights, and any fan of the football drama that isn’t watching Parenthood needs to do so immediately. That aside, the strong ratings opposite CBS’ popular The Good Wife and the critical acclaim (rare for an NBC drama in recent years) will probably come back for a third season, even though there hasn’t been a renewal yet.

Cancellation Scale: 8

House

Surprised to see this one on here? The show hasn’t been renewed yet as FOX and the show’s studio, NBC Universal are haggling over contracts, but the long running show has ratings to back it up. Ultimately the biggest issue for TV fans is whether or not House will still be quality entertainment for another season or two. I love the cranky doctor as much as the next guy, but after seven seasons, the jokes are stale and the insane medical crisises aren’t exciting. House will be back, rest assured, but maybe its time to start thinking about pulling the plug.

Cancellation Scale: 10

Mr. Sunshine

For a show that most people didn’t like at first, it has steadily improved as its become less and less reliant on Matthew Perry making sour faces and brought the excellent supporting cast into the spotlight a bit more. The show has been ABC’s best new comedy, despite airing opposite American Idol and frequently after low rated Modern Family reruns. This isn’t a perfect show, but there’s potential, especially if its paired with Cougar Town, which shares a similar quirky vibe. If ABC finds something better, it’ll get the axe, but if not, expect to see it on the lineup in the fall.

Cancellation Scale: 5

The Chicago Code

Shawn Ryan had a rough fall with Terriers, and his cop drama on FOX hasn’t exactly done stellar this spring. Still, the show has been slowly getting stronger and has been up against lighter, popular comedies on CBS, and FOX really needs it. The network has had a rough stretch when it comes to new dramas in the past few years, and their two popular franchises in the genre, House and Bones have lost the shine they had a few years ago. It wouldn’t be uncharacteristic of the network to drop The Chicago Code and start fresh in the fall with four new dramas, but the prevailing notion is that unless something better comes along, you’ll hear more ridiculous statements about the White Sox being better than the Cubs.

Cancellation Scale: 6

Perfect Couples/Outsourced

To be clear, Perfect Couples isn’t a good show, but Outsourced is atrocious. The former should be cancelled because it isn’t fresh or entertaining enough to watch week to week, and the latter has spent an entire television season insulting smart viewers and the entire nation of India with jokes about diarrhea and culture clashes. The two shows are the weak links in NBC’s three hour comedy block, but they aren’t necessarily signs that the experiment failed. 10:00 is a good spot for 30 Rock, and renewals for Community and Parks and Recreation have proven they work in their time slots. This is ultimately an issue of quality instead of quantity, but NBC will probably run for cover and put an hour long show back in at 10. Despite this fact, it’ll be nice to get rid of Outsourced and barely noticeable that we’ll be rid of Perfect Couples.

Cancellation Scale: 1

The Chicago Code – “Hog Butcher”

For better or worse, the second episode of The Chicago Code had a lot of balls in the air. When it worked, it felt a lot tenser than the average network cop show, but when it didn’t it felt a little disorganized and busy. But, if nothing else, “Hog Butcher” made for an effective transition from the pilot while deepening the characters and their relationships.

Most of the stuff I liked came in the first half of the episode, as the cops struggled to deal with last week’s shooting of Antonio, Teresa’s young driver. Teresa and Jarek both thought the shooting was an attempt on her life by Alderman Gibbons, a tip which seems to be confirmed when Liam puts his cover at risk to tell Jarek about a higher-up in the Irish mob who was bragging about something he did last night. Jarek and Caleb go to the bar but don’t have enough to press the mobster without blowing Liam’s cover so they cut him loose, over the objections of Isaac. Jarek and Caleb eventually find the car (thanks to an industrious use of Twitter) and draw out the driver’s girlfriend by giving the press a bogus description of the car. She leads them to the (soon-to-be) dead driver, who they eventually connect to the cop from last week that Teresa pulled off the streets last week (and who could be seen on every Chicago Code promo asking if she thought she could change the way things are done IN CHICAGO).

This stretch of the episode was definitely my favorite. Jarek’s by far the most compelling character so far and his scenes with Teresa especially click. Their argument over his decision to go the press (in violation of her orders) was good, and their work in the interrogation scene was even better. Their argument over using shortcuts felt like what could end up being a mission statement for the series as a whole. How do you hunt smart and dangerous criminals while playing by the rules? Can you take them down without becoming the thing you are trying to fight? It is a well-worn theme, to be sure, but an effective one and it represents how this show is going to be different from The Shield. Vic Mackey and the Strike Team took it as an obvious given that shortcuts were necessary to catch the bad guys, but it will be interesting to see how a group of cops whose moral compasses are in tune deal with the compromises they may have to make.

But at that point, the episode may have gotten a little too messy. The resolution of the shooting itself is a little unsatisfying, as it turns out that the cop from last week incited another wanna-be cop to do the shooting. He beats Jarek and Caleb to the shooter and kills him, at a veterans-only bar that Jarek has a key to (which seemed to be about narrowing the line between Jarek and the disgraced cop; an interesting idea but one that didn’t quite hit as hard as it could). Meanwhile, Isaac and Vonda follow the mobster and end up busting him with a lot of drugs, and catching the attention of the head of the Organized Crime division (played by Brad William Henke, who was also on Justified last week playing the dumbest Bennett brother). And Gibbons arranges to take away Antonio’s family’s benefits through a rule that Teresa passed, so that Teresa owes him a favor and attracts all the anger from Antonio’s mother.

It was perhaps a little too much to swallow, but looking at it, I can certainly understand how it was necessary table setting for the rest of the season. Isaac and Vonda are now in a position to be involved in bigger cases (and probably intersect with the Irish mob) while the Gibbons plotline largely sits still to give everyone a chance to catch up from last week. Besides, a direct shot at Teresa seems like it would have been a little too direct and risky for a man as smart and ruthless as Gibbons. Teresa may not be working out like he had hoped she would, but she certainly hasn’t pushed him that far yet, so, if nothing else, this week made him an even more formidable foe.

The show also rallied with the last scene, which found Jarek in church, promising to find and kill the person who murdered his brother. That scene, and the interrogation one, show that, while the cases and narrative are still developing, the show is at its best when it focuses on and stays true to the characters.

Jonah’s Score: 64

TUiW Grade: B-

Other notes:

-A lot of really great dialogue again in this one. I particularly enjoyed the line about Caleb opening the doors between his ears.

-There was also more voiceover. I wrongfully assumed that the narration would be a pilot-only thing, since I’m not the biggest fan of that particular device. It worked for me last week and I still liked it this week, but I can see it reaching a point where it feels a little unnecessary.

-That was Chicago’s own Billy Corgan singing the theme song.

-In honor of Michael (our resident Cubs fan), here’s this week’s Cubs trash talk, courtesy of Jarek: “Is he a fan of the great game of baseball or is he a Cubbies fan?”

The Chicago Code – “Pilot”

The Chicago Code, a new cop show on FOX, comes from Shawn Ryan, the man behind two of my favorite TV shows of all time. With Ted Griffin he worked on Terriers, the brilliant-but-cancelled show about two shaggy PIs who take on some quirky cases, but his calling card is The Shield. The Shield, if you don’t know, was a gritty look at cops who don’t always stay on the right side of the law. It was sometimes sensationalized and sometimes problematic, but it was never not compelling. The show makes a pretty bang-up model on how to balance the episodic pleasures of television with a more serialized style of storytelling, and the final season was one of the finest endings in the medium.

The arrival of The Chicago Code has had me thinking about a question The A.V. Club brought up in conjunction with the premiere of the show: what is the difference between a Broadcast show and a Cable show. Not literally, of course, but what makes me willing to give a show like “Terriers” a chance, while I was relatively unenthused about The Chicago Code. I think it goes deeper than the laxer profanity standards on cable and instead speaks to the fact that there is an honesty to the characters on Cable shows that doesn’t exist on most Broadcast shows (speaking in gross generalities). In general, the characters on the best dramas of the last decade are decent people who make the wrong choices for reasons that, at the time, seem correct. That’s the common thread that runs through the Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Sopranos of the world.

But FOX at least seems to be trying to import that sort of moral ambiguity and I’m pleased with The Chicago Code, or at least what I saw from the first episode. I’m not all that picky when it comes to my cop dramas; all I ask for is a few interesting characters, some compelling mystery that takes more than one episode to solve, and a fully drawn sense of place. So far, The Chicago Code looks at least promising in all three elements. The strongest part of the first episode is the way it uses the city of Chicago itself. Despite being one of the biggest cities in the nation, Chicago has always felt a little underrepresented and victimized by easy stereotyping (Da Bears!). The Chicago Code succumbs to that in a few places, but mostly it presents a well-rounded picture of its home city (no doubt helped by the fact that Ryan is a Chicago native).

The show itself is about a few cops, led by new superintendant Teresa Colvin (played by Jennifer Beals) going up against power broker Ronin Gibbons (Delroy Lindo), who has some shaddy connections to a construction company and the Irish mob. Colvin was picked for the job because she seemed like a lightweight, but she has a plan for reform. To do so, she goes to her former partner, Jarek, to investigate a shaddy murder that may be tied to Gibbons. Jarek, a bit of a tempremental guy, has a new partner, an ex-wife, and a niece on the force. There’s a lot of backstory here, but the show dispatches most of it rather briskly, thanks to blunt, but effective use of voiceover (and it subverts the convention nicely in the episode’s big twist).

The show replaces The Shield’s gritty, you-are-there style with a more filmic style that looks nice if less distinctive. The glossy look had me worried at times, but the pilot at least carried the promise of ambiguity and greyer shading to the characters. The first episode did a good job of keeping all the various balls in the air and at least hinted at some ways the show plans on stretching the parameters of the network cop drama in interesting ways.

But at this point, my interest in The Chicago Code is still mainly due to Ryan. The Shield was one of the most effective and sharply-honed storytelling forces on television, featuring a terrific blend of stand-alone mysteries and longer-term stories that boiled over and intersected in surprising ways. The network concessions (softer characters and cleaner language) are a fair trade-off for the expanded scope and ambition of The Chicago Code. If nothing else, the show will be a top-notch procedural, but based on the first episode and Ryan’s record, it can be a whole lot more too.

Jonah’s Score: 70
TUiW Grade: B