K-Ville and Gossip Girl

The new TeeVee season is here. Huzzah!

So far I've caught K-Ville and Gossip Girl, and now let me tell you what I think (you're all dying to know, right?).

K-Ville

K-Ville's a cop procedural set in post Katrina New Orleans. It's a premise with huge potential, though I didn't feel the pilot quite lived up to it.

My main problem was one of inconsistency. There were some absolutely fabulous bits, and then there were ones that left me groaning and scratching my head. Boulet (Anthony Andersen) and Cobb (Cole Hauser) have good chemistry. Boulet is an interesting character, a cop dedicated to saving his hometown, but not all that concerned how he goes about it (drinking on duty, torture, pulling a gun on his partner). In a lot of ways he reminds me of Vic Mackey (of The Shield). Cobb's character reveal at the end of the pilot was nicely done, and made for an interesting twist. The rest of the shows characters get little but lip service (tough but lovable captain? Check!), but you can't develop EVERY character in a pilot.

The city of New Orleans made for a nice backdrop. It's cool to see a city that's not LA or New York up on the screen. I also thought that the show made good use of its premise, namely that it's about cops in a city recovering from tragedy. Just like Rescue Me is about firefighters dealing with the aftermath of 9/11, K-Ville plumbs the same depths in New Orleans. All of its characters were damaged by the storm. Some of the best sequences of the show were the ones that dealt directly with this issue. The opening sequence where Boulet's partner Charlie abandons him. The super creepy firehose through the window bit and the Boulet's family reaction to it. Cobb's revelation of his past. These are the sequences that set this show apart from the rest.

There were a couple of things that really didn't work for me. The action sequences were so over the top as to be ridiculous (I haven't seen a cop fire so many bullets since Live Free or Die Hard), the procedural mystery of the week was, well, weak, and the preachiness started to get to me after a while (yes, we know New Orleans got hit hard by Katrina. Yes we know you're fighting to get it back to where it was. We can SEE that on screen, do you really have to keep telling us the same thing?).

Tone down the action melodrama, get rid of the preachiness (we really don't need it), beef up the mystery (in all fairness I think a lot of this problem can be attributed to the fact it's a pilot. Tough to set everything up and still have a compelling, complex mystery) and we'll have a winner. Until then K-Ville's average. I'll give it a couple more episodes to see if it finds its feet. If it doesn't then it probably won't make it into my TV schedule.

Gossip Girl

Now this might cost me my RMC (that's Real Man Card for the uninitiated), but I actually quite enjoyed Gossip Girl. Sure it's full of sturm und drang, and populated by some thoroughly unlikable caricatures...erm...characters, but for all that it's pretty fun.

Like everything else, it all comes down to execution. Say what you will about Josh Schwartz, but the guy can do some pretty darn good teenage soaps. Gossip Girl feels like you're watching The OC: New York (and we're talking first season OC here). There's some nice banter and verbal fencing (especially between B & S), the plot moves along at a nice clip (though some early strands were seemingly forgotten...little suicidal brother I'm looking at you), and (for once) the use of a voice over narrator didn't piss me off to high heaven (a lot of which I attribute to Kristen Bell). It also helps that none of the actors are as bad as Mischa Barton (ugh).

On the down side Gossip Girl's missing the humor that made The OC enjoyable (it's hard to see them celebrating Chrismukah on Gossip Girl). Like The OC they seem to burn through plot at a prodigious rate (now is this endemic to all things Schwartz? or is it merely a blip in the pilot?). Also the characters really aren't all that interesting (not sure how much depth they have to plumb).

All in all I'd say that Gossip Girl's one of the new shows to watch, I think it'll find an audience.

Oh, and boys, my RMC's in the mail...