Fall has come and so have the shows to avoid

I’m not a big TV watcher. However, I spend most evenings in the den with my mother as she watches TV. Usually, I’m either gaming or writing and can ignore what’s on the boob-tube. Last night was the exception as we tried watching a couple of of the new shows that we had DVR’d earlier in the week.

First up was the remake of MacGyver. I’m old enough to have watched the original with Richard Dean Anderson when it was first run. I enjoyed the show for what it was, fluff. But it had humor and, more often than not, decent writing and acting. I wish I could say the same for the new version but I can’t. I was ready to turn it off after the first five minutes. Instead, Mom watched it through and that’s approximately 40 minutes of my life I will never get back.

As my friend Nicki put it on her blog this morning, there are few if any redeeming qualities to the new show. She hits it out of the park when she criticizes the acting, writing and directing of the show. Let me give you a few examples.

In the first few minutes of the show, Mac has infiltrated a society do in order to steal a weapon of some sort. Of course, he doesn’t really know what he’s stealing and his first real challenge is that he needs more than the single fingerprint he managed to lift from one of the bad guys. Oh, and in doing so, he goes from being a guest to one of the staff by simply removing his suit jacket. Then he wanders into the kitchen and knows exactly where to find the duct tape and other odds and ends he will need.

He finally manages to get into the “really secure room” and finds the object he was after — only to pull an Indiana Jones and lift it from its container only to discover doing so turns on an alarm (I was praying for a boulder to roll into the room and smash him by this point). In rushes the first armed guard — and Mac manages to avoid being shot by lifting a silver serving tray and holding it in front of him to stop the bullets.

Not once did the security type realize he was emptying his clip into a serving tray and shoot lower, which would have been center mass in Mac’s body, but Mac never showed the impact of the shots hitting the tray. Elbows locked, feet planted, he held that tray in front of him and not a single bullet penetrated or rocked him.

After beating that guard up, another comes in with two guns — guess he was the bigger, badder bad guy because he had two guns — who emptied both clips at Mac who jumped behind a sofa, iirc. When the now empty clips hit the floor, Mac was up and — yep, you guessed it — throwing the same silver tray he had used to block the bullets from bad guy number one as a frisbee to take out bad guy number two. Then, with the tube of biological whatever, he rushes to make his mistake. Only to have the really bad guy catch up with him and his team and shoot him and his girlfriend.

Oh how I was hoping that seeing Mac shot and falling into the water far below meant the show was over less than 10 minutes after it started.

But no. Now we find it was a flashback or something and Mac has been sulking — er, mourning — his girlfriend. Now his boss (and here is yet another slap in the face of the original. Then Mac and friends worked for a non-governmental agency. Now they are working for a really super secret governmental agency that some hacker chick who is in prison knows about and who they make a part of the team to take over for the girlfriend everyone thinks is dead even though no body was ever recovered) is there with a job for them. You guessed it, Mac is off to get back the biological whatever he lost in that first mission.

It doesn’t get any better. The final action sequence has Mac realizing he can’t stop the bomb in the back of a truck that is attached to the biological. So he grabs the seemingly fragile tube with the biological in it and creates a parasail of sorts to escape the speeding truck before the bomb goes off. Of course, he does wind up hitting the pavement hard and rolling but, miracle of miracles, the container holding the biological doesn’t break. Nor does Mac even check it before the military folks arrive with containment safeguards for it.

Not. Enough. Liquor. In. The. World.

The next one up in the DVR queue was Designated Survivor. I can say it was better than MacGyver but only because at least part of the cast could actually act. However, omg, there were problems with it.

The basic setup is that there is always one member of the Cabinet who does not attend the State of the Union Address in case something catastrophic occurs. In this case, it was Kiefer Sutherland who, we learn, had been asked to resign his post just hours earlier. He had decided to do so but had not yet told the president. So, while he is at some other location, watching the president’s speech on TV, the Capitol Building is blown to bits.

Now, the designated survivor is close enough to the Capitol that he can walk to the window and look outside and see the flames. Then he is bundled into a waiting SUV (along with his wife. His kids are elsewhere. Kids being the cute little girl who is too old for her own good and teenaged son who is the rebel and out selling drugs at a club) and taken — you guessed it — straight to the White House just minutes after the Capitol has gone up in flames.

Oookay, here is the first issue I had the show (we won’t discuss having the DS so close to the Capitol that they could be caught in the fallout if a dirty bomb went off or the fact he was above ground and not in a bunker somewhere). The White House is approximately 2 miles from the Capitol Building. If someone has just blown the hell out of the Capitol and you are still trying to figure out what is going on, I don’t think the Secret Service is going to rush you that close to what is effectively Ground Zero. That is especially true when another bomb is found in the rubble. What happened to checking to make sure there is no such danger at the White House?

The Sutherland character is pretty namby-pamby for most of the show. He grows a spine — maybe — after he hears a speechwriter railing against him being president while they are both in stalls in the bathroom. There is the obligatory evil military man who is already planning on removing Sutherland from office. After all, he wasn’t elected president.

Oh, and in the magic that is Hollyweird, they were able to locate and ID the president, the vice-president and all members of the Cabinet in attendance at the State of the Union in a matter of minutes because Sutherland is informed by his Secret Service escort that he is now president. Amazing how quickly a scene can be searched and forensics checked, isn’t it?

I will at least give this one another shot. As I said, the acting was better and I want to see how they handle most, if not all of Congress having been killed as well. As for MacGyver — nope. Not gonna watch that one again.