Elias Koteas is the unflappable leader of the medical staff at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan in ABC skein “Combat Hospital.”
Filmed in Toronto by Sienna Films and Artists Studio. Executive producers, Daniel Petrie Jr., Jennifer Kawaja, Julia Sereny, Gub Neal, Justin Thomson-Glover, Patrick Irwin, Simon Vaughan, Douglas Steinberg; co-executive producer, Sara B. Cooper; producer, Michael J. Maschio; director, Iain MacDonald; writer, Petrie Jr.; story, Jinder Oujla-Chalmers, Steinberg, Petrie Jr..
Col. Xavier Marks - Elias Koteas
Dr. Rebecca Gordon - Michelle Borth
Dr. Simon Hill - Luke Mably
Grace Pedersen - Deborah Kara Unger
Capt. Bobby Trang - Terry Chen
Cmdr. Will Royal - Arnold Pinnock
Drama predicated on the U.S.' post-Sept. 11 wars in the Middle East -- including FX's laudable (if perhaps too soon) "Over There" and HBO's "Generation Kill" -- have hardly been commercial blockbusters. So it's scarcely a surprise to read the fine print and see "Combat Hospital," set in Afghanistan five years ago, is a Canadian-British co-production ABC doubtless acquired on the cheap as summer filler. The promos notwithstanding, it's a low-key, well-acted pilot, where characters tend to speak wearily in hushed, sleepy whispers. While the result is hardly a failure, the prognosis doesn't look particularly good.
Part of the problem, practically speaking, is the series suffers from a been-there, done-that feel, even if something like "MASH" was several misguided wars ago. War (or "police actions") remains hell, and doctors still nobly rally -- no matter how exhausted they are -- when the sound of choppers grows louder.
Two new arrivals to Kandahar Airfield provide the wide-eyed window into "Combat Hospital," where the medical staff is overseen by the unflappable commander, Col. Xavier Marks (Elias Koteas). Rebecca Gordon (Michelle Borth of HBO's "Tell Me You Love Me") is a trauma surgeon, while the inexperienced Bobby Trang (Terry Chen) is thrust into the ER.
The wounds are gruesome, the pace frenetic, the rest of the senior personnel either lascivious (Luke Mably) or blase (Deborah Kara Unger), in a site conveniently staffed by NATO forces -- the better to secure international tax credits, presumably. Meanwhile, Rebecca wrestles with personal issues, which threaten to complicate, or perhaps even truncate, her stay.
Overseen by producer Daniel Petrie Jr., the show wastes little time in throwing the newbies into the fire -- being told to mop the bloody floors and dealing with local soldiers and CIA regarding an "EHVI" (Enemy High Value Individual, of course, or Taliban).
Shot in Toronto, the series credibly recreates the dusky sense of its locale, and there's some gallows humor woven into the serious doings, including one particularly jarring uninvited guest to the operating room.
Still, for a show chronicling this modern conflict, "Combat Hospital" seems painfully old-fashioned, as the script by Petrie, who shares story credit with creators Jinder Oujla-Chalmers and Douglas Steinberg, recycles any number of hospital-show cliches in the pilot alone.
Borth is the most appealing character, and while she's a relatable conduit into the proceedings -- which have been heavily promoted during the NBA Playoffs -- that's not much incentive to return.
"Nothing prepared me for this place," she concedes to the commander.
Perhaps not, but viewing a fair amount of television certainly would.
Camera, Gavin Smith; production designer, Rob Gray; editor, Lisa Grootenboer; music, Edmund Butt, Samuel Sim (additional); casting, Lisa Parasyn, Jon Comerford. 60 MIN.
We live in a post-The Vampire Diaries, post-Battlestar Galactica, post-Revenge, post-Teen Wolf, post-True Blood, post-Breaking Bad world. Sure, some of these series are still airing, but the toothpaste is already out of the tube: GOOD TV MOVES QUICKLY. There is no going back! It is 2012. The only way a network serial can possibly survive is to learn the best lessons from its higher-quality cable
competitors: Keep the characters fascinating and the plot points flowing—particularly in the pilot, when the storytelling should be nothing less than habit-forming. Unfortunately the pilot for ABC's new supernatural thriller 666 Park Avenue eschewed both of those elements and settled for being more like the middle section of a particularly uninspired horror film; you know, the part that comes after the terrifying cold open, but before the heroine actually figures out what's going on, where she's just entering dark hallways going, "Hello? Anybody there?" It was THAT for an hour.
Based on a book most of us had never heard of, 666 Park Avenue is from the evil geniuses at Alloy Entertainment. They're the ones who've made an industry out of publishing ghostwritten YA thrillers and adapting them into TV shows (The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, The Lying Game). But this older-skewing premise exercises an astonishing lack of imagination and almost no scares that could reasonably surprise or hook anybody's interest. The premise itself proved to be a bit of a disaster: A young, impossibly attractive couple answered an ad for a new building manager at The Drake, an insanely posh apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Jane (Charlie's Angels' Rachael Taylor) has a background in architecture, while Henry (Brothers & Sisters' Dave Annable) works for the mayor—two qualifications that seemed to impress the building's devilish owner, Gavin Doran (Lost's Terry O'Quinn), and his wife, Olivia (Ugly Betty's Vanessa Williams). So the young couple moved in and that's when weird (and weirdly unoriginal) things started to happen to them and a half-dozen of their unmemorable neighbors. Anyway, the premise's disastrousness is this: Every tenant of the building has somehow sold his or her soul to the devil in order to be there, so what we're dealing with is essentially a haunted-house story in which the characters can't or won't leave. Is there anything less compelling than that? Who cares about the devil's lease agreements? How can we possibly root for characters who stay in a bad situation for more than two episodes, let alone SIX SEASONS? The first season of American Horror Story essentially admitted that the premise can only last for about 12 episodes, and even that felt like a stretch.
To get around this obvious fatal flaw in its premise, 666 Park Avenue will undoubtedly be stretching out the amount of time it takes for Jane and Henry to even realize that Gavin Doran is the devil (basically—it's already clear this show will be backtracking/secularizing the whole satanism thing). But that's the premise's second fatal flaw: It relies on the heroine's ignorance to maintain plausibility, and that's just not how good TV works. Like most main characters, Jane is our audience surrogate, so by definition she should not be as in the dark as we are. Jane spent most of the premiere episode having only tangential encounters with supernatural phenomena, but none of them were serious enough to give her pause or write them off as anything other than stress-related nightmares. In keeping her discoveries restrained and her curiosity minimal, 666 Park Avenue has promised us a feast and served only an appetizer. That's just not acceptable anymore.
This lack of storytelling momentum might be acceptable if 666 Park Avenue had anything original to say or an even remotely scary idea in its head. Truly addictive TV shows all have killer "gotcha" moments just before commercial breaks, but 666 Park Avenue's were straight-up boring. One pre-commercial stinger featured a character we'd just met washing his hands. Boom! Commercial. Another was that same, barely featured character hugging someone we'd never seen before. Boom! Commercial. Even the episode-ending cliffhanger was boring. A teenager in the building had stolen a necklace and suddenly had a VISION of Jane running somewhere. Boom! Credits. Sorry writers, you need to Netflix up some TVD and see how this sort of thing is done, because so far you are failing.
Speaking of TVD: To be fair, its pilot was not its best episode. We know this now. The primary reason for lackluster quality of TVD's first few episodes was that Elena (the audience surrogate) didn't know that vampires existed until about Episode 5. Frustrating! That unforgivable ignorance is happening here, too. But at least the TVD pilot managed to bust out some thrills and twists during its 42-minute runtime, like a truly scary cold open, a brutal "murder" of a character we'd gotten to know (Vicki), and the sudden appearance of a surprise villain/heartthrob (Damon) followed by a brutal vampire fist fight. In 666 Park Avenue a lady got her head stuck in an elevator and later a man got sucked into some wallpaper. Not the most compelling stuff. Probably the biggest shock was when Jane woke up from a nightmare (in which a character she'd never met fell off the roof), only to reveal that her feet were FILTHY. But that didn't so much scare me as remind me I need to Swiffer my floors.
I'm tempted to admit that 666 Park Avenue has potential to improve, but the characters are all so boring and the premise so maddening that I really doubt it. You're telling me the subplot where the writer spies on his neighbor is going anywhere interesting? Or the backstory of Olivia's deceased daughter? Or the psychic teen? No, I do not care about these people and I am not curious about the mosaic in the basement, either. I just don't see this happening. Good scares (and even dream sequences) are only effective when there's real tension, real stakes, and we genuinely care about the characters involved. None of these three elements were present in the pilot. Right now the only interesting thing about 666 Park Avenue is that it had the audacity to have the sign of the beast in its title. It's a great title! Unfortunately it makes a promise that the show just doesn't keep.
"You've been warned." Seriously, I warned you. Last Resort is this television season's best pilot (definitely among the broadcast networks, and possibly among all of TV), a thrilling hour of television that accomplishes so much in so little time, has a complete beginning, middle, and end, and even answers the show's most nagging question: Where can it go in Episode 2 and—yikes!—beyond?
We've known most of the show's premise since it was announced over a year ago: The crew of an American nuclear submarine refuses orders to flatten Pakistan after deducing that the "official" command to fire is fishy, then someone under the guise of the U.S. military tries to put a hole in their hull, and that forces the sub to park on the shores of a tropical island... where the crew declares themselves the smallest nuclear nation in the world and aims to prove their innocence. And that about sums up the happenings in the pilot episode, "Captain." (P.S. Please, showrunners, will more of you name your pilots something other than "Pilot"? Thanks.) Yet even though we knew almost exactly what would happen, the episode exceeded the giant expectations we've been setting up all year because it boasted a level of competence that is rare in pilots these days.
You can thank creator Shawn Ryan for making a show with a fascinating concept and characters that spend equal time kicking ass and acting like real people. Ryan's sparkling resume includes the gritty The Shield and the cult hit Terriers, and his talent for compacting what matters most into an incredibly dense hour transformed a summer blockbuster into a breezy, tense program. This is no-bathroom-break television that might burst the bladders of those skipping commercials on DVR or torrents.
What struck me about the pilot was how much of the series was already in place after just 60 44 minutes. Most shows love to slowly paint concentric circles, moving outward as they open up their universe over the course of the season, but Last Resort threw the whole paint bucket at the wall. The pilot inspired confidence that there's a clear road map of what's going to happen next, instead of half-baked ideas that are made up as they go along (I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but like I said, it inspired confidence!). We know the sub crew will be front and center, as will their attempts to prove their innocence after defying questionable orders. But we've also already established the NATO crew, the natives on the island, a SEAL team, a weapons technology specialist back in Washington, D.C., a rear admiral in the Capitol, and whatever other political figures are pulling strings for their own gain. There's an impossible amount of stuff going on, but it's important to note the difference between a ton of story threads included fill time and a ton of story threads that are interesting. Last Resort is full of interesting.
There were a couple of plots that stood out to me in particular as having the potential to explode with intrigue and give the series the stamina it needs to fill an entire season. First, Captain Marcus Chaplin (the always awesome Andre Braugher) didn't exactly knock on the door of Sainte Marina, he kicked that shit in. That in turn upset the previous big shot of the island, a charismatic warlord named Julian (Broadway's Fela, Sahr Ngaujah) who is used to the simple tactic of barking the loudest to get his way. Julian and his men are going to represent the close danger—like unmasked Others—to Chaplin's crew, preventing them from turning Sainte Marina into a Sandals resort with a few tons of plutonium offshore. That's practically a show in of itself. And the other surprising plot that jumped out to me involved the man who stood up to Julian, James King (Aussie actor Daniel Lissing). As one of the SEAL team members who was plucked out of the ocean by the USS Colorado, King's the mixed-up man who knows a lot more about what's going on than most. The guy was in tears watching the destruction on TV, saying it was his fault, and his wounded buddy pretty much said they hit the wrong target. What botched secret mission were they on, and how is it connected to what happened in Pakistan? And how long before he gets freaky with Dichen Lachman's sexy native bartender Tani under a palm tree? Not-so-bold prediction: not long.
But what really drove the pilot and kept it afloat was Andre Braugher's performance as Chaplin, a man so commanding that he keeps any preposterous thoughts the audience might have at bay. I don't know about you, but if we were out of torpedoes and he told me to crawl into a torpedo tube, I would. There aren't many actors who could handle this role, but Braugher is perfect as Chaplin. Here's a man who practices defiance and patriotism, a character that both sides of the Congressional aisle can get behind. It's that dogma that's the heart and soul of the show. And just to prove that he's more than another blowhard submarine boss (I'm looking at you, Denzel!), he pulled that crazy stunt at the end of the episode. Facing death by bomber, he was prepared to back off and detonate the missile he launched on D.C., because he played a game of chicken and thought he lost. He didn't need the death of others to end up on his rap sheet. But what made him such a complex character was his decision to carry out his threat (mostly) once word of the bombers' retreat came across. This is a man practicing what he preaches. He told Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman) the genius of President Reagan's lunatic decisions decades ago: Image is everything, and if your enemies can predict your next move, they'll defeat you. And while we know he was doing it for show, there's a little spot in the back of our mind that says if he's willing to go that far that easily, could he go a little further? (Although I guess I have my doubts that a nuclear blast 200 miles offshore is completely harmless. Poor fishies.)
Having watched the pilot in advance on my computer, I can't say whether the special effects will pop as much in glorious HD on a big screen, but what I saw looked fantastic. Fact: Missiles flying out of the water (or into the water) look awesome, and while most or all of the submarine shots weren't real, I couldn't tell and most importantly I wasn't trying to differentiate between real and fake. I also loved the tilting camera angle as the sub pitched and yawed, and that the interior shots felt both claustrophobic and authentic. I would assume that moving forward we'll spend less time inside the sub, though, as it will be used more as a symbol of power than as a means to get around.
The biggest compliment any pilot can get is a burning desire to tune in for Episode 2, and that's what we have here with Last Resort. This is a cable show that somehow found its way to network television, and it'll have that uphill battle to climb (not to mention a difficult time slot against CBS comedies, The X Factor, and, well actually not NBC any more so never mind). Good television does not always translate to a successful run, but this one has a chance.
NOTES
– One other thing I noticed, or should I say didn't notice, was the necessary exposition that typically drags down pilots. Details flowed in normal conversation because things were written in a way that weren't intrusive or insulting to our intelligence. And it didn't hurt that Autumn Reeserdid some (s)exposition in her delicates. It may take a few rewinds to hear what she said, but it certainly didn't grind things to a halt.
– The character I was most worried about in the series was Grace Shepard (Daisy Betts), the pretty third-in-command on the sub with no experience who fills the requisite "C'mon, a bunch of dudes are going to take orders from a chick?" question. But having her kill a guy in the first episode certainly raised her beyond the expected stereotype. And to Betts' credit, she played nervous and awkward very well as her character roamed a sub full of people who didn't think she belonged there.
– I'm having problems figuring out the estimated location in which everything took place. From the maps on the NATO screens, it appears Sainte Marina is in the Indian Ocean. Does anyone else have a better estimate?
It is our duty as rational thinkers to constantly compare, contrast, evaluate, quantify, and qualify every sensation or notion we experience during our brief existences in this realm. These snap judgments are not only necessary for learning and adapting to new things, it's how we develop tastes and the ability to seek out the best things. So it's good, then, that terrible things exist, because terrible things help us determine what's great. That is one good thing about Beauty and the Beast: As the undisputed worst new show of the fall season, it makes the good shows seem even better by contrast. The Vampire Diaries. Teen Wolf. And yes, The Secret Circle. But yeah, no. There is nothing else redeemable about this thing. IT IS THE WORST.
The list of ways in which Beauty and the Beast is terrible is long and maddening, but let's begin with the titular Beauty. In the most outrageous bit of miscasting all season, Smallville's tiny, permanently teenaged Kristin Kreuk stars as Catherine Chandler, a tough-as-nails NYPD detective (!) whd turned to a life of crime-stopping after her mother was murdered by some random hoodlums in the pilot's first scene. That cold open itself was a huge red flag for just how creatively bankrupt this show would turn out to be: Catherine and her mother were simply attempting to jumpstart Catherine's car when two dudes drove up and shot Catherine's mom in cold blood. Yup, that's it! By comparison, think back to the nightmarish fire-murder that beganThe Secret Circle, or the terrifying highway-homicide-from-above in The Vampire Diaries' first episode. Beauty and the Beast just had some middle-aged lady getting shot. Good brainstorming! Nothing says supernatural-sci-fi-fantasy-romance like a rote shooting. Way to put your best foot forward, professional storytellers! Anyway, that was terrible, as was Kreuk's entire performance. This role made her stint as Chun-Li seem PERFECT AND INSPIRED.
Now let's talk about the titular Beast. As you may have noticed from the above picture, as Doctor-Soldier Vincent Keller, Jay Ryan is nobody's definition of a beast. Nope, not even with that scar on his face. As the pilot unfolded and we learned that HE had been the mysterious creature that saved Catherine's life from the men who killed her mother, there was a lingering hope that the more we learned about Keller, the more his beastliness would come into compelling focus. But nope! The more we learned about him, the worse the premise became. Apparently after 9/11 Vincent was inspired to hang up his surgical scrubs, join the army, and allow the army to alter his DNA to include genes from tigers, bears, wombats, crickets, baby sharks, who even knows. So he's sort of a beast now! Sometimes! Like sometimes he'll lose his temper and tear up a criminal or shout at Catherine. Other than that he's kind, empathetic, sensitive, hot like fire, ultra boring, and a perfect catch for an unconvincing NYPD detective. Oh, and just FYI because this is important, he doesn't even have the decency to appear half-naked at any point. Teen Wolf this show is not.
Aside from the characters' introductions to one another and Catherine's slow acceptance of Vincent's alleged beastliness, the rest of the pilot featured an outrageously boring crime plotline that, believe me, you will not care about. In fact, what was especially amazing about this episode was that its most compelling aspect was how dramatically it called into question the creators' and The CW's thought processes.
• Why remake an old '80s TV series but change basically everything about the premise and character dynamics?
• Why tell us that Catherine is a seasoned cop but then constantly put her in situations from which the beast must save her?
• Is having our heroine fall in love with a man who readily admits he may snap and murder her really a good message to send to young girls?
• Was Kristin Kreuk really the best choice for this role?
• Was this show really the best choice for Kristin Kreuk?
• If you're going to make the decision that the beast look handsome and sexy, then why is he still so unappealing?
• Did it concern anybody that a show with romance built into its premise has lead characters with absolutely no chemistry or charisma whatsoever?
• Did it concern anybody that at no point in the pilot does anybody say anything clever or original?
• Did anybody voice concerns that maybe tying in the beast's origins to 9/11 wasn't the most tasteful idea?
• Did The CW legitimately believe that this series would develop a larger or more passionate fan base than The Secret Circle?
• How did a rough-draft script get filmed? Was there a mix-up at Kinko's?
• How could a show so cravenly based on a calculated business decision still fail so spectacularly at achieving a minimum standard of entertainment?
• How embarrassed is everyone on the cast and crew of the work they've done here? Very? Enormously? Infinitely?
I don't have answers, only questions. But for now Beauty and the Beast is such a fundamental failure that its badness isn't even FUN to watch. It's so bad it's bad. It was a waste of my time and if you watched it, it was a waste of yours. Jump in a dumpster, Beauty and the Beast.
