TV Review: Red Band Society: "Liar Liar Pants on Fire"

One of my favorite side stories in Queer as Folk is about Hunter, the young HIV positive street urchin that Michael and Ben adopt. When he's first introduced, he tells the pair that the reasons he's homeless and hustling is because his father is dead and his mother is in prison for killing him. Come to find out, his mother isn't in prison at all. He's actually a runaway, but the reason he left and the reason he lied is because his mother is horribly abusive. She actually got him started in hustling by pimping him out to guys so she could take the money, presumably for drugs. It makes the moment when she tries to come back into his life and take custody from Michael and Ben very tense. But she's a bad mother and a bad person and Hunter's fear and hatred of her makes perfect sense. It was revealed this week that Jordi's mother isn't dead after all, she's just a bad mother so he's been denying her existence. By bad mother I don't mean that she molested him, or that she allowed other people to molest him for money, I mean she likes to play poker and had parties where other people came over to play poker with her. She doesn't seem to abuse him, she doesn't seem to take these men to bed while he tries to sleep in the next room, she doesn't even seem to neglect him to an extreme extent. Sure there are nights when he has to cook dinner for himself, but in the flashback we see him doing so, he seems to be old enough to do it. So what it all boils down to is that Jordi doesn't feel as though his mother loves him as much as he thinks she should have. I'm not going to say that that's not scaring in and of itself, but I will say that it makes for a significantly less compelling story than Hunter's story with his mother. And for the record, the fact that his mother is the same woman Dr. McAndrew slept with last week doesn't make the story interesting, it just makes it melodramatic and soapy.

So that's the intro to this particular episode which left me with one overall feeling: I don't think Red Band Society is going to make the cut. I've been talking the show up to myself for awhile now because I really do want it to be good. I want to like it for many reasons, but the fact of the matter is I'm just not sure. I think there's a good show in here somewhere, but how deep is it buried, and how long will it take for the writers and producers to find it?

I don't know what the answers are to those questions, but I do know the answer isn't after 3 episodes. Which might be as it should be, 3 hours isn't necessarily long enough for a show to have found its footing, TV is a marathon and not a sprint. But how many missteps can a show make over the course of first three hours before it's acceptable to move on from it?

This week shows us that episodes in which Kara shows no kind of depth leave her seeming less than one dimensional. In the first two episodes, there were brief moments of honesty between her and one of the other characters, but this week the hour is just full of her being awful. And the more she does drugs and screws around in spite of her doctor's orders, the more I think the only reasonable outcome for her story is death.

This week shows us that there's an even worse use for Charlie's voice over than we'd known before: Charlie takes elements of the story that are implicit but obvious and makes them explicit in a fashion that tells me that the show thinks we're too stupid to figure out for ourselves. Charlie is a lot more active this week. It's almost as if without someone falling unconscious and heading to the inbetween space, the show is looking to justify the actor's presence on the show. Which leads me to wonder is Griffin Gluck some kind of big deal I've just never heard about until now? Is he the top billed actor on the show? Because the writers seem to put him to more use than they do Octavia Spencer.

Speaking of which, after three episodes, are we any closer to figuring out who Nurse Jackson actually is? She worries this week that if she can't figure out something redeeming about Kara, then it's possible she'll just let her die at some point. It's a worry, and I understand that, but I don't think we've been given anything to suggest that that's honestly possible, so it doesn't feel like a real character development moment so much as a weak justification for a large portion of the episode.

The only storyline within the episode that felt real and organic to me was the story about the jealousy between Dash and Leo. The strongest element of the series thus far has consistently been the kids trying their best to just be kids in the face of everything they're dealing with. And the connection between Dash and Leo seems to be the relationship that brings that storyline out the best. So Dash getting jealous of Leo's new friendship with Jordi makes perfect sense.

I said last week that I was going to stick with this show until the end, or until I decided to stop watching all together, and I was assuming at the time that the former was more true than the latter, but I'm honestly not so sure anymore. There's a lot I can take from a show, or from any other story medium for that matter, but there were a lot of moments this week that had me rolling my eyes because the show (Charlie specifically) felt the need to tell me things I already knew. I can take a lot from a show, but when you start talking at me like I'm an idiot, I lose patience very quickly.

TV Review: Red Band Society: "Sole Searching"

Is two episodes enough to really figure out a show's formula? I'm not sure about that since two points make a line and not a pattern, and since two episodes is no time whatsoever. Chances are the show we're seeing in Red Band Society after two episodes won't even be the same show we see in five weeks time (assuming the show lasts that long). But after two hours with this show, I think I see what they're interested in early on. Last episode centered around the St Crispin's Day Speech from Shakespeare's Henry V. The kids talked about the song in class that day, Leo quoted it in the episodes pivotal scene on the roof, and throughout the hour the show and the characters went through the motion of building the kind of close bond the speech alludes to. This week, in the cleverly titled "Sole Searching," the phrase at the center of the episode isn't from The Bard, it's the seminal classic about learning about someone by walking a mile in their shoes. As such there are a lot of shots of people's shoes, there are a number of lines about shoes, and there's a lot of trying to get to know these characters by way of seeing the world through their perspective.

Framing the story like that isn't so unique, it's actually the same method Revenge uses on a week to week basis with its episodes. And the jury's still out on whether it's the best way for this show to go, but it didn't stop this from being an enjoyable episode. I keep using the word "enjoyable" when I talk or write about Red Band, but it's still the best one I can think of. The show isn't great. This episode suffers from a lot of the standard second episode problems. There's a lot of re-establishing characters through clunky exposition telling us (instead of showing us) who they are. Said exposition is still being delivered by Charlie from his coma. And no one feels fully real just yet. But the enjoyability of this show shines in small, well contained moments that show you just how good its capable of being.

One of the storylines from this week centers around Kara and her two mothers. I could swear there was a man and a woman getting the news about Kara's condition in the last episode, but I could be wrong about that, or maybe the two people in question weren't her parents after all. Either way, giving her two mothers felt a little tacked on this week, but making those two mothers powerful LA lesbians with tangential connections to Ellen and Portia was pretty funny. Making them so singularly focused on the marketing aspect of Kara's condition and showing how that focus affected her was certainly a good idea. Watching the way Kara's birth mother would engage with her while keeping her attention locked on her phone went a long way towards showing us why Kara is the way she is. It made the hug the three of them shared at the end of the episode a lot more cathartic than I expected it to be this early in the show's run.

Also in that mode is the relationship between Leo and Dash, and the general emotional trip that Leo goes on in this episode. After spending the morning blowing off his physical therapy in order to be there for Jodi when he woke up (post surgery and minus a leg), Leo finds out (in what can only be a huge breech of doctor-patient confidentiality) that Jordi's leg wasn't amputated after all. Leo storms out before Dr. McAndrew can explain that the reason why he didn't take Jordi's leg is because the cancer's far worse than they originally thought and amputation wasn't needed just yet. So to Leo, it just looks like the kid he'd bonded with over having the same diagnosis, actually got off a lot luckier than he did when Dr. McAndrew took his leg however long ago. To blow off some steam, he puts on his prosthetic, which he's been railing against all episode, grabs his best friend Dash, and limps across the street to the Frat Party the two of them have been spying on for awhile. Leo just wants to feel like a real boy again, basically, and where better to do that than with a bunch of frat douche bags getting wasted in the middle of the day?

After spending an hour or two there, fitting in and flirting with the pretty girls, the real world tries to intrude on Leo's escape in the form of his friends and the nurses at the hospital looking for him. Dash tries to get him to leave the party, and in retaliation Leo gets mean and pushes him away. When he takes the pretty girl he's hit it off with to a nearby bedroom and she starts to get undressed and tries to undress him, the horror of her being about to see his fake leg brings the real world crashing into him again and once more he gets mean and she leaves him alone too. It leads to Dash and Nurse Brittany finding him on the floor with this heartbreaking expression on his face.

This works, in my opinion, for two main reasons. 1) It presents a great relationship between Leo and Dash. Unlike the typical TV reaction, Dash doesn't get hurt by Leo's insensitive comments and go off and sulk for awhile, or rush back to the hospital and rat him out. Instead, he finds Brittany, who is clearly way more of a pushover than Nurse Jackson, and quietly returns to help his friend get home safely. There isn't even a scene in which Leo apologizes for his actions. Dash just gets it and accepts it in a way that I found touching and refreshing. 2) It builds on the image of Leo as a generally good guy who is trying his hardest to both make and keep friends and to keep people at a distance. He admits a bit later on (in another scene that tells me this show will not be known for its subtlety) that he was really on interested in waiting for Jordi because he didn't want to feel alone anymore. So when it turned out that he and Jordi weren't sharing the same fate, he got jealous and a bit less interested. It's a very teen-drama thing to do, but it's also very human in a way I appreciated.

I don't know how long Red Band Society will be with us. I tend not to have much faith in Fox to allow shows to stick around. And when those shows are just good instead of great, I think my faith decreases significantly. And if the show wants to get "better" by any possible objective standards, there are a couple things it'll need to do. For starters, and I'm sure I'll sound like a broken record on this point for awhile, they have to figure out the voice over narration issue. Charlie continues to point out things that don't need to be pointed out at all, and that add nothing to the story at hand. Using him to bookend the episodes with a little narration about themes of the week (shoes and empathy here) wouldn't go amiss. But having him chime in on the regular workings of the hospital and makes pointless observations like "The only thing harder than sneaking out of a hospital is sneaking back in," simply isn't working. The sad thing about this is that they've actually got the perfect way to use Charlie in the episode. When Jordi goes under for his surgery, he wakes up in the in between place where Charlie lives. Charlie tries to offer him a game of chess, but Jordi claims to not be feeling his best and he collapses. Charlie rushes to his side and offers words of comfort and then we never see them in that place again. This is a wasted opportunity. Leo made mention of a similar experience when he had his surgery, and placing Charlie as the kind of monitor and the ultimate strength of this in between space would be a solid way to go. Each of these kids move in the world and interact, and they all put on a brave face to the best of their ability. Charlie is the only one incapable of moving around within the world and he's the one who has the most reason to be scared as he may never wake up. But if you make him into the character who sees these other kids at their most vulnerable and he offers them strength and comfort in those times, you could really run with that. But that doesn't seem to be the direction the show wants to go on, and it probably isn't feasible to have a character fall unconscious every week, but for my money I'd take the in between space scenes over the pointless voice over narration every time.

Either way, Red Band Society continues to be something I'll look forward to watching each week. If it can continue to be funny and moving, then I see no reason not to watch. Even if the deeply emotional parts tend to be delivered in baldfaced and slightly ham-fisted fashion, it's worth it. And so I think I'll try my best to chime in each week for however long the show lasts, or until I stop watching, or until I just don't have anything else to say; whichever comes first really.

TV Review: Red Band Society: Pilot

In what's becoming a more and more frequent marketing strategy, Fox has posted the pilot episode of Red Band Society online and also on sites like Hulu. I think this leads to an interesting question about the future distribution method of TV and whether or not we're seeing the last days of cable dominance. As more and more people are going the route of Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, and other online services in lieu of having an actual cable subscription, the TV landscape could be changing forever. But that's a topic for a different day; for right now I want to focus on just how enjoyable I found the first episode of this new series to be.

Red Band Society is the story of a hospital and the long term residence of its pediatric ward. In the first episode we're introduced (rather quickly I might add) to the principal players. The primary staff will be comprised of Octavia Spencer's Nurse Jackson and the very very handsome Dr. Jack McAndrew played by Dave Annable. The residents on the ward include the established patients: Leo, Dash, Emma and Charlie (played by Charlie Rowe, Astro, Clara Bravo, and Griffin Gluck respectively), who have all been on the ward for some time by the start of the episode. The new comers are Kara and Jordi played Zoe Levin and Nolan Sotillo.  There isn't much in the way of a story for the first episode. It mostly serves as a way to introduce the characters and establish the setting. The characters are painted with broad strokes and their backstory is filled it through exposition. Leo is the ring leader who's worried about his cancer diagnosis and tries not to form lasting bonds with people in order to not have to say goodbye. Emma has an eating disorder and used to date Leo, now they spend most of their time sniping at each other in an effort to justify some quippy dialogue. And Kara and Jordi find themselves in the hospital as of this episode. He's recently found out he's got cancer and wheedles his way into the good graces of Dr. McAndrew in order to guilt the man into performing his surgery, and Kara discovers she has an enlarged heart after she collapses in Cheer leading practice. It goes without saying that Kara's a total bitch, as Cheerleaders tend to be on TV, but somewhere underneath her brash exterior is a softer side which is hinted at and will no doubt be explored as she progresses through her illness and gets to know the other characters.

I recognize that none of that sounds wonderfully exciting or unique, and in a lot of ways it isn't. The pilot isn't spectacular, in my opinion. It suffers from the horrible exposition you tend to expect from a pilot episode, but it's worse here since it's all delivered in voice over narration from Charlie, who happens to be in a coma. The characters don't really feel like real people yet. They mostly exist to either deliver overly emotional platitudes, and to fill prescribed roles. The pilot also suffers from an odd lack of Octavia Spencer. Since the promos all suggested she'd be a major part of the series, it's an interesting choice to not fill in any of her back story just yet.

But what makes this first episode so promising are the little things. First there's the refreshingly diverse cast with black and Latino characters and female characters that I'm sure will prove to be more than just love interests. There are also queer storylines and characters that are established (or at least hinted at) in this first hour. And as cliche as it is, I really like the story of the heartless bitch girl who discovers that her problem is that her hearts actually too large. The show is also playing with what it means to be in a coma as Charlie narrates and has meetings with other characters when they're unconscious. The show has a fun sense of humor with a lot of Spencer's moments serving to bring the funny, and nice moment in a convenience store when the underage boys try to buy booze for their party. And I don't think there's any doubt that the show will bring the pathos in the weeks to come as its entire premise seems created to make you cry when the time is right. And I think the show has a great grasp of its setting. The comparison Charlie makes to life in a hospital being a lot like life at a boarding school is an interesting one and I'm curious to see the multiple ways in which that might play out.

There's still a lot of uncertainty with the show, and it has its bumps it will need to iron out to be fully believable. I'd love to see the voice over either fully eliminated or at least paired down to the basics. Charlie delivering exposition in this fashion doesn't have to be horrible, but so long as the show wants him to deliver reaction zingers to the things happening on screen, things are going to remain a bit choppy. And we'll have to get to know these characters a lot better in the time to come. They're working with a fairly big ensemble and this first episode didn't offer much hope that they know how to balance out the characters' screen time just yet. The lack of balance also speaks to the episode's problem with pacing. Jodi's ability to get Dr. McAndrew to agree to perform his surgery after the course of one conversation was a bit unbelievable, and the fact that all of these kids came together by the end of the episode and are all now, ostensibly, friends isn't something I found to be fully believable. But even with all of that being said, I think there's a lot of potential to be found in this first hour. If nothing else, I found the show to be wonderfully entertaining and I hope Fox gives the show room to breathe and to find its audience.