At San Diego Comic-Con there’s always quite a bit of pop culture ephemera on display, none of it more ephemeral than the screenings of pilots for the coming fall that open the show on Wednesday night. The Guardian managed to catch part of the presentation, which had plenty to recommend it despite the caveat the comes with every pilot: namely “don’t get too attached”. Two-thirds of all broadcast TV series are canceled before season two.
Powerless
Considering the anemia of the DC Comics superhero film franchises, it was a pleasant surprise on Wednesday evening to get a look at NBC’s upcoming comedy Powerless, the latest in an increasingly confident slate of TV shows that make better use of the company’s comic book heroes than any of its post-Nolan films have. Of course that’s just from its pilot, which is a bit like judging a five-course meal by the garnish. It’s funny and cleverly written, with an excellent high concept far different from Ben Queen’s 2014 pilot for the same network, A to Z, which was a cleverly written comedy with a terrible high concept.
And it is hard to imagine a fan-favorite collection of supporting players for main character Vanessa Hudgens than Alan Tudyk from Firefly and Danny Pudi from Community in this thing, but the thing itself is quite charming: it’s a workplace comedy set in an insurance company’s offices in a world where a superhero could fall out of the sky at any moment.
There are so many callouts to recent DC Comics. “After the Blackest Night comes the Brightest Day!” lectures Pudi at one point. One odd note: The concept is remarkably similar not to an established DC Comic, but to a Marvel one – Damage Control, about a construction company that has to repair the damage done to New York city by Marvel’s various superpowered brawls.
People of Earth
The Guardian didn’t make it to all of Wednesday’s pilot screenings but among those previewed, the best of the offerings in a leisurely walk was cable network TBS’s comedy People of Earth, a half-hour single-camera affair produced by comedy maestro Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels, showrunner of the US version of The Office, about a support group for oddballs who believe they’ve met aliens for better reason than most.
The Guardian may be predisposed by environmental factors to like this show, which stars Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac as a reporter who wants to cover serious news in a world overwhelmed by clickbait, and this publication is grateful it doesn’t have to work like Cenac does under a smug tech bro whose standing desk is also a Segway and whose office is as big as a house.
“When I was covering Occupy Wall Street I got tased three times!” Cenac’s character complains to the boss who claims he hasn’t recovered emotionally from a tragic car accident. “Three times, by the same cop!”
“And you will get tased again,” the boss soothes. “I promise.”
People of Earth relies on the best aspect of the Daniels playbook, namely a huge supporting cast of veteran character actors viewers will remember fondly from Coen brothers movies or Saturday Night Live: Luka Jones, Brian Huskey, Ana Gasteyer, among others. Cenac’s interactions with the support group members during and after the initial meeting are a scream: “You guys are tackling the tough issues,” Cenac says earnestly. “Interplanetary body issues and snake presidents – it’s some serious stuff.”
People of Earth, thankfully, isn’t.
Time After Time
ABC’s Time After Time is less auspicious. The hour-long drama stars Freddie Stroma as HG Wells, who gets into a time machine in the 19th century and gets out of it in the 21st, where he must chase across New York a similarly dashing guy from 1893 who looks good in vintage suits and is Jack the Ripper. The 21st-century version of the time machine is in the fictional American museum, where people say things like “I understand there was a breach in the Wells exhibit today,” for some reason. Génesis Rodríguez stars as the assistant curator who falls for Wells; the script is by Kevin Williamson, probably best known for his clever horror movie scripts and for Fox’s The Following.
Despite being based on the other Nicholas Meyer movie about crossover Victoriana – Meyer’s best-known film is The Seven-Per-Cent Solution – Time After Time seems to have been produced by people who think Kate & Leopold should have been 22 episodes long and included multiple scenes per episode of attractive women being murdered in moodily lit alleys, underscored by frantic violence, sorry, violins. We predict an end to the senseless violins by Christmas.
Frequency
In the broadcast television world, there are enough greenlights for high-concept police procedurals with supernatural twists set in the north-eastern US. I’m unconvinced this show’s title isn’t making fun of us.
