Aah, the critics (Bochco related)

[bump]

As I was reading Maggie's latest post, I was thinking "this guy needs to retire" but then I read that he's semi-retired. Maybe it's time for him to go all the way or at least refrain from writing about things for which he hasn't done his homework.

How very frustrating that reviews like this guy's possibly turned people away from giving Blind Justice a chance. His punishment should be to write a pro-Blind Justice article even if it's too late.

He seems as out of date as Andy Rooney.

[maggiethecat]

Now stop that Maggie Jane stuff, Doobrah. Jeez, I shoulda deleted that bit.

Oh, we all know that Mary Tyler Moore and Bob and Carol Burnet and M*A*S*H were great, but get over it, Mikey. The drama back then really was pretty awful, before we got some edgy writing. And the rest of the comedies -- apart from basically what came out of the Grant Tinker stable -- were baaaaaaaad. Good Times, anyone? Let's think for a minute about the ethnic stereotypes in 70s television. What chance do you think a character like the one Andre Braugher played on Homicide would have had? Heh.

And I LOVE that TVThemes site, which you put me on to. Great fun, and I urge everyone to try it -- the list of shows, which goes on forever, will reinforce the general lousiness of TV in that era.

[anna]

maggiethecat said:

What chance do you think a character like the one Andre Braugher played on Homicide would have had? Heh.

Andre Braugher!! Gideon's Crossing!! ABC barely gave it a year. (Excuse me for going so far off topic. I love Braugher, and I loved that show.)

[inuvik]

I do wonder though, how many people would actually have been influenced by this critic, or any other?

I try just about any show once, and decide whether or not to continue based on the show itself. For movies, with $ involved, I read reviews, but in order to find out about plot. I wouldn't not go see something I wanted to based on what a critic said. Similarly, I wouldn't go to a movie I wasn't already interested in based on a critic's rave review.

[maggiethecat]

inuvik said:

I try just about any show once, and decide whether or not to continue based on the show itself. For movies, with $ involved, I read reviews, but in order to find out about plot. I wouldn't not go see something I wanted to based on what a critic said. Similarly, I wouldn't go to a movie I wasn't already interested in based on a critic's rave review.

Well said, and sage advice for us all. Karma for you!

I do have to laugh, though, when you think about how this particular critic said he had watched Blind Justice a couple of times but "couldn't get past the gimmick." I wonder if he started with The Pilot. Can you imagine anyone watching the first two minutes of The Pilot and not being drawn in by the acting, the directing, the cinematography, and the editing?

We can only hope that, as Doobrah suggested, viewers in Milwaukee have long since stopped paying attention to Mikey. ;D

[maggiethecat]

anna said:

Andre Braugher!! Gideon's Crossing!! ABC barely gave it a year. (Excuse me for going so far off topic. I love Braugher, and I loved that show.)

That's not off topic for me -- you're just reinforcing my contention that we never would have seen a realistic African-American character back in the 70s, let alone one who headed up the cast. And we also have Steven Bochco to thank for the first Latino actor in a realistic part -- Jimmy Smits in L. A. Law.

Nor would we ever have seen a realistically portrayed blind character like Jim Dunbar. I remember Longstreet and realistic it was not, although give them two points for trying. Remember Ironside? Another dramatic entry from the era, and the only man in a chair who never encountered sidewalks without curb cuts (and this was back before access was federally mandated), or stairs. So the phrase "We've come a long way, baby" really does apply when it comes to network television characters that go beyond physically perfect white bread.

Mikey really needs to wake up and smell the coffee. Whoever it was that compared him to Andy Rooney really hit the proverbial nail on the head, and thanks! ;D

[housemouse]

I have to jump in here and kudos Maggie! I am very happy that you so eloquently defended our show.

I honestly can't imagine any TV critic pining away for the "golden days" of 70's television. Can anyone say The Brady Bunch?

[maggiethecat]

From a Google search I set up ages ago, an interesting review now that Blind Justice has started running in Australia: I'd call it mixed but on the up side.


www.theage.com.au
By Robert Lloyd
December 1, 2005

ALLOW me to start by calling for a moratorium on serial killers on screens big and small, and also on the use of naked corpses of good-looking young women (discovered typically in weedy fields or abandoned warehouses) for cheap titillating effect. We've had enough of them to last until mid-century. Last night's premiere episode of Blind Justice on Channel Ten offered both.

Given that the producer is Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, Murder One, NYPD Blue), whose great delight it has been to increase the square footage of flesh showable on broadcast prime-time television, you can imagine that there's more body on display here than usual. Who will join me? We can make bumper stickers and fridge magnets.

Blind Justice concerns Jim Dunbar (Ron Eldard), an NYPD detective who is, yes he is, blind. In spite of the sadly obvious title and a smattering of ailments so common to the genre and to the medium that we may factor them out, it's a decent enough show, well acted and nice to look at. If a little over-full of happy coincidence, stock characters and situational cliche, it also has an admirable stillness of tone, even when ratcheting up the suspense, and except in the accepted ways, it does not insult your intelligence.

A year or so after having heroically lost his sight in the firefight that opened the first episode, Dunbar returned to the force; he has had to sue the department to get his job back. When he arrives at his new post, with his handsome guide dog Hank, he is not greeted, as one might imagine, with friendly interest or professional solidarity but as if he were moldy cheese. None of his fellow officers want him as a partner, for fear he'll slow them down or get them killed. They are petulant and suspicious, in an adolescent manner.

They'd be less so, perhaps, if they understood that Dunbar is merely the latest iteration of a long line of blind detectives, all of them exceedingly capable. The idea isn't even new to television. Longstreet (starring James Franciscus) did it in 1971.

It runs back deep into the last century, to such sightless sleuths as Clinton H. Stagg's Thornley Colton; Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados, who could read newspaper headlines with a touch of his fingers; and to Baynard Kendrick's Duncan Maclain, played by Edward Arnold in a couple of 1940s B-films. More recent precursors include the blind samurai Zatoichi, subject of more than two dozen Japanese films, and the inspiration for the Rutger Hauer movie Blind Fury.

There is also the British series Second Sight, with Clive Owen going blind from a rare virus. Even Dick Tracy lost his sight for a spell, back in 1938-39. And there's comic hero Daredevil, of course, though he has the advantage of actual superpowers, having lost his sight in a rain of radioactive gunk.

But even the ordinary fictional blind detective has recourse to uncannily heightened senses of smell, touch, hearing and, I suppose, taste, though that has not come into play yet.

Dunbar sniffs the faintest trace of cordite in a stolen car and knows a gun was fired there; the bad cologne of a fellow cop identifies him as complicit to a murder; the sound of swarming flies tips him to a buried corpse.

We're meant to regard him as just an ordinary guy with better than average reflexes, but also, in the way of TV detectives, as a superman. The atmosphere is one of limited realism - a sprinkling of grit, an outpouring of emotion - without being actually naturalistic.

It was Bochco's big idea, after all, going back to Hill Street Blues, to graft a rarefied form of soap opera onto a police procedural; this combination pulls his shows inevitably towards melodrama. Blind Justice has the feel of something made by people who know their job too well, have become incapable of the sort of "mistakes" that let life in.

The dialogue sounds like dialogue, the dynamics of Dunbar's fraught home life and fraught workplace seem to have been ordered from a catalogue. Even Dunbar's "human qualities" - his bottled-up temper, his defensiveness, his self-centredness, his paranoia, his alternating coldness to and jealousness towards his very nice wife (Rena Sofer) - seem, so far, grafted on.

The series' primary asset, for now, is Dunbar's wary chemistry with partner Marisol Nichols, who despite being too young for her job, makes herself seem qualified for it. A fine, modest actor, in terms of his chosen effects, not of his talent, Eldard is perhaps best known from an extended tour of duty on ER, but my own viewing memory associates him with a superior 1998 US TV movie called When Trumpets Fade, about the battle of the Hurtgen Forest.

He is worth watching any time. And there is the well-photographed, colourful City of New York, which is intelligently allowed to stand for itself.

Copyright © 2005. The Age Company Ltd.

If the only determining factor had been the Oz market? I'm guessing we would have gotten a second season.

Mags

PS. And I never did hear back from Mikey after my second response to him. Guess I shut him down. Heh.

[greenbeing]

Ahem--treated "as if he were moldy cheese"? That's an interesting way to look at it.

I'm glad the show is being seen in Australia; the wider the audience, the more likely a DVD release becomes, eh? And the more potential fans out there!

Thanks for sharing the review!

--GB