In honor of the series finale of its much longer-running American cousin, I thought I’d share a look back at the original The Office.

Seeing as this one came first I’ll resist the urge to point out which British character = which American one.

A cold open, selected for the sole purpose of showing us the main character’s lack of ethics, shows an executive at his desk. With some alliterative, fast-paced business jabber, he offers to give the man across from him a job as a forklift driver without having passed a forklift-driving test. He seems quite pleased with his deception as he smooth talks someone on the other end of the phone. We never get a look at the unlicensed forklift driver, but that’s not who we’re here to meet. It’s all about the boss, David Brent (show co-creator Ricky Gervais).

After that first scene, we launch into the mockumentary style the show helped popularize, with characters exuding dramatic irony in interview segments breaking up the regular workday activity — and by regular, I mean squabbling, practical joke-pulling nonsense. (Zero days since our last nonsense).

A few key relationships are set up:  Tim (a much younger-looking Martin Freeman) and Gareth (Mackenzie Crook. Hey, did you know he was the dude with the glass eye in Pirates of the Caribbean? I didn’t.) They hate each other. Lighthearted Tim torments the way-too-serious Gareth. Then there’s Tim and Dawn (Lucy Davis). It’s suggested that he likes her, but could just be that he really hates her boyfriend. I said I wouldn’t compare but this Jim and Pam aren’t as syrupy. Then there’s boss-from-corporate Jennifer (Stirling Gallacher), who’s so far at the end of her rope with David you figure they’re bound to sleep together.

The crisis du jour is that corporate is planning to combine two branches of the paper company and “eliminate redundancies.” The gravity of the situation provides fertile ground for illustrating David’s complete lack of a clue, let alone ethics. As the audience, we’re left with the possibility of characters we’ve already met exiting, or new ones starting.

The show introduces a tone that is so banal, and dialogue so tossed off, it’s dead easy to miss things. Throw in the British accents and slang, and Americans are at a further disadvantage. The monochromatic surroundings and bland, unattractive characters make it easy to lose interest entirely until David says something so off the wall as to demand attention. One can see how even an Americanized version would be an acquired taste, and for many, not acquirable with only the pilot.

As a bonus, here’s a video on how to suspend a stapler in jelly (or as we Yanks would call it by its brand name, Jell-o).

There isn’t much to explain about the premise of The Booth at the End. A weird, nameless dude sits in a booth — at the end — in a diner and gives people cryptic assignments to complete in order to obtain things they want. It’s like The Wizard telling Dorothy to kill the witch, whom she’s never met and has no beef with, in order to go home.

Booth is a Hulu original series, but the episodes run the length of an ordinary televised show. That’s probably a bit long for a series of basically all bottle episodes.

As The Man (Xander Berkeley) sits in his booth, one can’t help but think of The Observer in the Fringe episode, “The Arrival,” but this doesn’t have the same payoff in terms of action. With this character, the creators have taken the reticent mentor trope (Being Erica, Dead Like Me) and stretched it to its limit. You really have to buy into the premise that these people are desperate. However, with the exception of the first one, their problems are pretty normal. One client just wants to be prettier, for God’s sake.

There are a ton of people in this cast, given the show’s seemingly narrow scope. (Incidentally, several of them appeared on 24. Berkeley played George Mason.) Over the course of the half hour, The Man is visited by two men, a young woman, a teenager, an elderly woman, and a nun (Sarah Clarke). They’re at various stages of their agreements with The Man; doing his bidding is apparently a multi-stage process. None of them is on screen long enough for us to care about them, at least not in the space of the pilot.

The first client is supposed to kill a child in order to save his own. A later client is told he has to watch over a little girl and protect her. We don’t know from what. That’s just one example of the information The Man frustratingly withholds. Is he protecting the same child that the first client is planning to kill? Are the clients’ assignments intertwined? I found myself hoping, but not convinced, that this was the case by episode’s end. If there’s no connection among these characters then we viewers are really wasting our time here.

A second episode didn’t give me much confidence that this thing had potential to rise above the feel of something created as a film school project, but if anyone knows differently, leave a comment.

1. Give Me a Ring Sometime

2. Serenity

3. The Beginning

4. Boardwalk Empire

5. Flowers for your Grave

6. We Just Decided To

7. The Man Trap

8. Movin’ In

9. Death Has a Shadow

10. Help Wanted

Answers after the jump.

Answers: Cheers, Firefly, NCIS, Boardwalk Empire, Castle, The Newsroom, Star Trek (one of two “first” episodes), Diff’rent Strokes, Family Guy, Spongebob Squarepants

Elizabeth and Phillip as they look in their “everyday” life.

Sex on TV can be a cheap way to get attention, whether it’s in advertising or entertainment, shorthand for “look at this!” And a pilot is where, above all else, a show needs to grab attention. It’s the rare cable drama of the past ten years that doesn’t feature at least one sex scene in its premiere episode. The pilot of The Americans, which premiered on FX several weeks ago, features not one, but three of them.

It’s easy to view the ubiquitous romp in the sheets (or airport supply closet, or… wherever) with cynicism. In this case, however, the sex serves the story brilliantly, and I’ll get to why.

The Americans tells the story of a pair of Russian spies who, in 1981, have been living undercover as a married American couple in suburban Washington D.C. for 20 years. Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Phillip (Matthew Rhys) have two kids and all the trappings of a stable family life. (On a side note, the set dresser for this must have a blast. The brass headboard. The pink walls. Oh, the 80s.)

It’s been widely observed that the show is not about espionage, per se, but about the main characters’ marriage. True enough. To take that viewpoint one step further, the show is about suppressing one’s true self. Keeping who you are under wraps, day after day, whether it’s a lifestyle choice you mask from co-workers or something as dramatic as being a spy, takes its toll. (In a much later episode, FBI agent Stan  (Noah Emmerich) states, “You can’t be married and not have secrets.”)

We see this element in Phillip, certainly, but his enemy Stan also knows something of living a lie, having just come off an assignment working undercover with the KKK. The question is, when you live a lie long enough, do you start to believe it yourself? A sequence in a shopping mall reveals that Philip enjoys at least two distinctly American activities: boot scooting and embarrassing one’s teenage offspring. That stuff isn’t faked. Neither, it seems, is his love for Elizabeth.

… and Elizabeth in the first of her many disguises.

But the identity issue is explored more in Elizabeth than in anyone else. There are two different points at which Elizabeth looks at her reflection — we’re left to guess at what she’s thinking.

By episode’s end we’ve seen Elizabeth having sex three times, in three ways. In the first, the opening scene, she’s the one with the power, disguising her real identity and manipulating a target. The next, a flashback, shows us Elizabeth being over-powered by an authority figure, a trauma that’s come back to haunt her today. Finally, we find her initiating sex with Phillip — an act done with mutual desire and, equal power, and something like love. It’s an act of celebration in fact, as they’ve just finished a mission.

It all adds up to a complex, fascinating character. Elizabeth isn’t “good” in any traditional sense; she represents the enemy of America, she likes to her family, and she’s a woman in charge of her sexuality. But she’s clearly our hero, the one we’re going to root for in this bizarre world.

I’m glossing over a lot of stuff in the pilot, because there’s just too much going on. If you haven’t watched yet, you’ve still got a few weeks to check it out before season finale.

So I just saw the pilot for the first time. Structurally, it’s solid. It uses a twist on the familiar First Day of School pilot trope. The jokes are fairly predictable, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Gregg, as ex-husband Richard, carry it. Louis-Dreyfus has that dry, earnest sensibility that makes her seem oblivious that everyone’s laughing at her. By contrast, Gregg wears that omnipresent smirk that makes you think he’s in on every joke–including the ones of which he’s the butt. He exudes coolness even in a multi-camera sitcom environment.

The premise is that Christine has just enrolled her third grade son, Richie, in an exclusive private school. But although Richie’s the one in a new school, Christine is the one with the case of first day jitters. The question becomes not “Is this move the right choice for Richie?” but “Is it the right choice for his parents?”

Christine and Richard have divorced their way into becoming best buds, a point that is set up in the opening scene. But at the mid-point, a new wrinkle is introduced in their relationship. Her name is Christine, too (Emily Rutherfurd; did you know she was in Elizabethtown? Great, underrated movie). Hence our heroine becomes “Old Christine.”

The airbrushed moms at the new school dislike Old Christine because she’s — I don’t know, different somehow. The show seems like it’s trying to suggest that divorce is exclusive to “poor” people; poor, in this case, meaning middle class. Apart from being neurotic and a brunette, there’s no obvious reason why Christine is painted as an alien in this foreign land. Actually, she’s every bit as shallow as the other moms. We’re just supposed to accept that she’s in above her designer purse budget.

I was surprised to realize that Barb, Wanda Sykes‘ character does not appear in the pilot. At later points in the series, she proves instrumental in drawing out Christine’s various neuroses and generally being hilarious in her own right.

The show certainly has some weak moments — cheap physical comedy with Christine trying to run in heels, and cliche jokes about sexless marriage. And if laugh tracks are to be believed, the mere mention of Dennys’ Moons Over My Hammy is hysterical. But the strong acting makes it worthwhile. It’s also a strong set-up for interesting conflict, with the Christine vs. Christine motif. That’s actually stronger, for me, than the Prius-driving working mom vs. plastic surgery victims motif. And it ends with a genuinely touching mother-son moment that ties it all together.

I am a little too old for this show, meaning I didn’t grow up with it. It incites great love and devotion to 90s children, and I can’t quite relate, except to suppose maybe it’s their Growing Pains. If the pilot is any indication it’s pretty cheesy, but in a lovable way that makes you want to see these characters through their first world problems.

The show, which ran for seven seasons, begins when its main character, Cory (Ben Savage — yes, Fred’s little bro) is eleven. Knowing that Cory and heart-throb Topanga ended up married (oh, um, spoiler alert), I thought the show must have hit fast-forward on their ages at some point, but no. They got married at 18. So these pre-teen and teen years we’re about to witness are precious.

The pilot is noteworthy for the fact that it doesn’t seize on any of the standard pilot tropes for its premise; it’s not the first day of school, there’s no new student in class, it’s not an anniversary or the day someone dies. The opening scene in the cafeteria lets us know this is just a typical day in which Cory eats junk food and talks back to authority figures. Side note: Why do television sets of school interiors always look like they’re made of cardboard?

The theme of the episode is fresh-faced, smart-mouthed Cory’s lack of understanding about love. His English class, under direction by his nemesis Mr. Feeny (William Daniels), is studying Romeo & Juliet. Reluctantly playing Romeo, Cory refuses to stab himself on the basis that love isn’t worth all that. As if the whole world is conspiring against Cory in this love thing, older brother Eric (Will Friedle) ditches him to take a girl to a baseball game. No matter, because Cory ends up stuck in detention on the night of the game.

We meet Cory’s good-natured and happily married parents, little sister, and two best friends — one of whom (Rider Strong) is as identified with the show today as the leads.

Further complicating Cory’s prepubescent angst now and — I’m guessing — for the duration of the show, Feeny lives next door to Cory’s family. Cory can see into Feeny’s house from his tree house. This device provides a moment of character development in the pilot, and will likely come up again.

In a classic “Locked in a Room” trope, Cory and Feeny develop a new respect for each other during the aforementioned detention. In the process, they muse about love, Romeo & Juliet, and loneliness. It’s all wrapped up nice and neat by the end, with plenty of laughs boosted by an incessant laugh track.

If you’re a fan, you’re well aware of the forthcoming sequel series, Girl Meets Word. If you’re not, here’s the low-down.

We’ve come to associate Abrams with time- and universe-hopping, futuristic warfare, and badassery. All good omens for the new Star Wars. But you do know he created Felicity, right? That teeny-bopper mellow-drama from the era of Dawson’s Creek? Fanboys and girls, I think this show warrants some examination.

Felicity was crazy popular and helped establish the WB (now CW) brand. Don’t hold that against it. I just watched the pilot and it’s really good. It opens during a high school graduation ceremony where our heroine, one Felicity Porter (Keri Russell), is graduating with honors. In a voiceover, she explains that, on this momentous day, she is lacking in all of the expected enthusiasm. She’s not looking forward to her future, which her father has planned out carefully. She is set to attend Stanford University before continuing to medical school and an illustrious career.

The scene that really grabs the viewer — that grabbed me — is this. As the ceremony winds down, Felicity approaches The Most Popular Boy in School, whose name is Ben (Scott Speedman), to sign her yearbook. In a beautifully staged dance, he begins to write, standing up, then sits on the grass, fully engrossed in his composition. Felicity circles him self-consciously before joining him on the ground. Felicity and Ben don’t know each other. Felicity has admired him from afar for four years, only now mustering the courage to start a conversation. When she finally reads what he has written, her stars align. It turns out Ben has noticed her, wondered about her, maybe even likes her. Just like that, she decides she’s going to college in New York. Where Ben’s going. It sounds ridiculous, but if you let yourself get caught up in the moment, you buy it. I probably would have done the same thing.

Felicity may not have a lot in common with Abrams’ other work, apart from having a one-word title. But Abrams, who co-created the show with Matt Reeves and wrote this episode, talks right to the shy, quiet, smart teenage girl inside us. That’s what Abrams does well — he gets nerds. He gets us!

Naturally, Felicity’s decision has serious consequences. We jump ahead a few months to find her at freshman orientation. And there’s Ben. He’s kissing some other girls and he seems to barely remember Felicity. Teen boys are fickle; who knew? All of the usual facets of college life are introduced — strange roommates, giant lecture halls, overbearing advisors and, most importantly, disapproving parents. Everything seems to point to New York being a bad decision, and Felicity has the perfect chance to bail. Obviously, she stays.

This pilot works well as a stand-alone story. It’s a clearly laid out hero’s journey, with our hero “defeating” her evil parents by choosing to own her mistakes rather than accept their safety net. I don’t even care what happens next. That’s a bad thing, strictly speaking, since I’m supposed to want to keep watching: Does she ever get Ben? Will she fall for the cute R.A., Noel (Scott Foley)? But I can already see where this is going. Tell me if I’m right. Eventually, Ben will start liking her but then it will be too late because she’ll be with someone else, probably Noel, and then the reverse will happen a season or so later.

If we can learn anything from this, it’s that Abrams is a damn good storyteller, regardless of genre. He creates great characters, especially female ones. (I can think of some parallels between Felicity and Olivia Dunham. Discuss amongst yourselves.) That’s a relief since the most beloved franchise of all time is now in his hands!

And, if you prefer to stick with his work on the small screen, he has two more shows in the works. Does this man sleep?

UPDATE 2/6/13: While we’re on the subject of J.J. Abrams, holy crap!!!
Portal, the Movie: Valve, J.J. Abrams Team Up for Future Games, Films

I admit when I first heard this news, I was hoping the imagined show was a drama — something along the lines of I, Robot meets The X-Files. This is not that.

Asimov was prolific as both a purveyor of gripping narrative and a scientist in his own right. The purpose of his show was “exploring the faint and ever-shifting boundary separating science from science fiction.” You see, he not only lent credibility to science fiction, often dismissed as escapism, but he inspired us to think about the future of science. ”How do you differentiate between science and science fiction”? he asks. The icing on the cake is that, since we’re seeing this footage 21 years on, much of what lay in his future is now our reality.

Unfortunately, as cool as the premise is, the execution is dry as Tatooine. He may be a genius, but for entertainment value he’s no John Noble.

The video opens with a long voice-over narrative, recorded after Asimov’s death, mostly relating biographical information. Visually, it’s painfully boring, consisting mainly of still photos and shots of book covers. When Asimov himself at last appears on screen, he goes through a long, academic introduction before we finally arrive at the first of the episode’s three topics, Space Travel. It’s followed by Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering, Superconductivity and, simply, Matter (which is a super simple primer on particle physics). Each new segment is introduced by a title card and some zippy little music.

I wonder whether each of these segments was recorded as the introduction to its own episode, or if the pilot was to be a sort of an overview, the first lecture on the syllabus. Each discussion is very general so, ostensibly, he would have dug more deeply into each one as the show progressed.

Lest you get bored of looking at his bolo tie and wild mutton chops, there are video clips and animations to illustrate what he is saying. Much of what he says, while uninspiring in its delivery, really is pretty moving. He speculates on traveling to Mars, racing from New York to San Francisco via maglev train, and genetically engineering human beings.

“The purpose of this program is to advance ideas and suggestions as to what is liable to happen, what is on the frontiers of science now, and how, possibly, we ought to react to it.”

Cognizant of the sociological implications of futurism, our professor advises to be prepared for negative outcomes of technological progress, what he calls the “possible unpleasantness.” Like a sentient computer replicating itself and nuking the Earth into oblivion? Yeah, I guess he means stock up on number 2 million sunblock.

Bain was known to the world well before Diff’rent Strokes, having co-starred on the long-running series Maude (along with Golden Girl Bea Arthur, which gives me an idea for a new game, Six Degrees of Golden), among numerous other screen and stage credits. But he is probably well-remembered to many who were children during the time he was playing the most generous millionaire dad on the small screen.

The pilot episode is set entirely during Arnold and Willis’ first day in the Drummond household. For the uninitiated — if you exist — Philip Drummond is a WASPy Park Avenue millionaire who has agreed to take in the two sons of his deceased housekeeper. Fourteen-year-old Willis (Todd Bridges) and 11-year-old Arnold (Coleman) are black and have lived their whole lives in Harlem. To them Manhattan may as well be Mars. Well, if Mars were the headquarters of Toys ‘R Us. Drummond also has a teen daughter, Kimberly (Dana Plato), who doesn’t do much in the pilot but pout and squeal.

Drummond delivers the exposition by explaining it all to the maid. The maid, Mrs. Garrett, has just been hired to replace the boys’ mother. The chemistry between the two actors is too good to make us believe these characters have only known each other for a day, but the device works.

When the boys arrive, there are a lot of fish-out-of-water gags, including one with an actual fish, and lots of chubby-cheeked young Arnold mugging and wise-cracking. Drummond wants the boys to love living with him, while Willis refuses to accept their new circumstances. Basically, that’s the whole plot. It’s just one conflict, one through-line, one note. In the end Arnold talks Willis out of leaving, not that they have anyplace to go, by playing the “it’s what Mom would want” card.

Drummond instantly treats the boys like part of the family, and his warmth is undeniable. Awkward as he may be, falling all over himself to impress the boys, he’s fully likable, almost faultless. Perhaps his having a lovely, well-adjusted daughter helps us accept him as a beneficent father figure. Viewed through the lens of today’s cynicism, it would be hard not to find his motives suspicious. He spends an inordinate amount of time talking up the pleasure of hot-tubbing. In fact, the plot is finally resolved by Willis deciding to take a soak. Yet, somehow Drummond pulls off seeming innocently happy with two shirtless boys splashing around in his palatial bathroom. It was critical for the writers to convey in the pilot that his motives were entirely altruistic. Incidentally, pedophilia did not go unaddressed on he show. Who can forget the bicycle shop plot?

It’s a pretty frothy pilot devoid of any too-deep emotion. Subsequent episodes would dole out a little more information about the boys’ parents and how they died, so we’re not left with a Brady Bunch situation where deceased parents are swept under the rug.

Here’s some more trivia about the show.

I didn’t stick with the show for very long. I know there’s wine. I know there’s a cul-de-sac. And I’ve heard that Jules and Grayson got together — hardly a surprise, based on the pilot alone. Even from the beginning the title didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, and from what I’ve heard, made less so over the years. I honestly didn’t think the show would last long. (After all, how many Tom Petty songs are there?)

I’m guessing that I’m not the only person out there for whom the TBS premiere, “Blue Sunday,” was a sort of introduction to the show, so in some ways it needed to function like a pilot. Or so I thought.

The episode doesn’t leave fans behind even for one second. The very first bit is a “we’re back” joke. (As seen in similar situations on Futurama and Family Guy.) You would expect that. But then it launches right into the story, picking up a week from where the previous season’s finale left off. It doesn’t even feel like a season premiere.

Now there’s nothing I hate more than spoon-fed exposition, and it doesn’t take a lit major to follow the plot of a wacky sit-com. It just seems as if TBS was so eager to assuage any fan fears that they’ve changed the show, they may have left potential new viewers out in the cold.

The only back story given is that Jules (Courteney Cox) and Grayson (Josh Hopkins) have been married for a week. There’s a quick reference to Jules’ failed marriage in ’06, but no mention who it was to, even though her ex, Bobby (Brian Van Holt), figures prominently into the episode. You could probably put it together based on Travis’ lineage, and a quick question from Ellie to Bobby late in the episode, but it’s not spelled out. There’s also the suggestion that, at some point late last season, Travis (Dan Byrd) admitted to having feelings for Laurie (Busy Philipps). Meanwhile, Laurie has a continuing long distance relationship with a solider on deployment. Ellie (Christa Miller) and Andy’s (Ian Gomez) marriage is just weird, and, to me, their pseudo-date-rape style sexual encounter bordered on offensive — but maybe I just don’t know the characters well enough. (Maybe?)

Clearly much has changed since the start of the show in 2009. Jules is not portrayed as anything resembling a “cougar,” not that she ever really was. But maybe Laurie is about to take up that mantle by getting it on with young Travis (ick). And the only real cougar from the first season (Carolyn Hennesy), who I found hilarious BTW, has apparently been long abandoned.

There were probably many in-jokes that went right past me, but plenty of other bloggers have that angle covered. Personally, I didn’t laugh once. Okay, maybe a little about “coffee bitch,” but by the end of the episode I was pretty bored.

Oh, in case you were wondering, there is, in fact, a song by Tom Petty called “Blue Sunday.” Here are the lyrics and a downloadable ringtone.