Mercy - Can We Get That Drink Now?

Network: NBC

Time: Wednesdays, 8:00-9:00pm

Cast: Taylor Schilling, Michelle Trachtenberg, Jaime Lee Kirchner, James Tupper, Diego Klattenhoff, Guillermo Diaz, James LeGros

Creator: Liz Heldon

Summary: With the cancellation of ER, NBC has decided that we need another medical show on television, so here it is.  Mercy follows three nurses who work at a hospital in Jersey City.  Each one of them has their baggage, of course, and the show tries to mix their personal lives with some medical miracles that might even impress Dr. House.

Review: Watching NBC struggle for quality programming is a constant source of amusement for me.  I feel like their strategy is to find a show that works and find a similar, but less good, version of it.  Mercy is no exception.  ABC found TV-ratings success with Grey's Anatomy, a soap opera-esque show about doctors (not to be confused with a medically focused show like ER).  NBC found Mercy, a soap opera-esque show about nurses.

If Grey's could spawn a slightly impaired clone, it would be Mercy.  Where the characters in Grey's are quirky in amusing ways (or at least they were when it started), the characters in Mercy are quirky in socially retarded ways.  The show focuses on three nurses.  There's Veronica, who was a nurse in Iraq and occasionally has these post traumatic flashbacks.  She's clearly not handling being back in the States too well.  Also, she had an affair with a doctor in Iraq who followed her back to New Jersey to be with her, only to have her reject him in favor of the husband she cheated on him with (hmm, shades of Meredith and Derek there).  Confused yet?  We're only getting started. 

There's also Sonia, who has some weeeeeeird view on relationships that I can only liken to Cristina Yang's view of them.  Sonia wants to find a man with money.  Instead, she falls for the cop who shows up in the ER with a wounded suspect.  She's sassy, with an attitude and a chip on her shoulder.

And there's Chloe, who's sweet and naive and really thinks she can make the world a better place, kind of like Izzie in the first season of Grey's (before they took her character, ran her through a blender, smashed her with a hammer and put her back together with the parts all looking funny).  She's played by Michelle Trachtenberg, who was my childhood idol as Harriet the Spy, and who was actually my main draw for watching this show.  And I have to admit... she doesn't deliver.  Out of all the nurses, none of whom I'm particularly wild about, Chloe annoys me the most.  She acts like she's never run into a difficult situation in her life before.  I know she's supposed to be from East Nowhere, Middle America, but come on.  She is just way too unrealistic.  At least Veronica and Sonia, for all their faults have a little bit of spunk.  Chloe just gets steamrolled by everyone.  And then she whines about it.

The guys are, for the moment, pretty unremarkable.  There's the pretty doctor who moved from California to New Jersey to be with Veronica.  Right now, his role seems to be confined to being the pretty doctor.  We'll see if he develops a character somewhere along the road.  There's Veronica's husband Mike, who is a struggling architect who's building their house.  Also, he and Veronica are trying to make their marriage work when she's, to put it quite simply, not putting in an effort.  Veronica has some brothers who I remember laughing at, but not much else.  Her parents are alcoholics, and she's not a big step away from it, which is more irritating than amusing.  It's one thing to have the characters drinking occasionally, like to unwind after a tough shift (for example, hanging out at the bar in Grey's after work sometimes).  It's another thing to go too far and have them just drink all the time, which Mercy was bordering on with Veronica's family.

Even the plot structure is pretty much a rip off of the early seasons of Grey's Anatomy (I only watched Grey's until season 3, so all my knowledge of that show is based on the early years).  There are three important medical cases, one for each nurse.  Somehow, these cases tie in with their personal life.  Like a formula.

I know I'm really ripping into this one, but it actually wasn't all bad.  There are certain aspects about Veronica and Sonia that I find intriguing, and I'm hoping to get to know a little more about them as the series goes on.  I am really interested in the idea of Veronica as a former military nurse.  I think that's an aspect of the show that hasn't been done before, and they could really run with it if they want to.  

I also really like that Veronica didn't get back together with the pretty doctor (Chris) when he moved to New Jersey.  I like that she's trying to make it work with her husband, and that the problems they're having aren't really related to the relationship she had with Chris.  They're more to do with Veronica's own issues after serving in Iraq.  I'm so sick of the shows where the main character throws away a perfectly good guy (or girl) for their "one true love."  I'm all for romance, but I'm sick of the predictability.  I'm glad Mercy is at least acting like they're going to be different.  We'll see if they doesn't do the Meredith-and-Derek-hooking-up-in-every-room-even-though-they're-not-together thing.

I'm going to give this one a shot, but I may drop off mid-season.   Life is too short to watch shows I don't like just so I can give them bad reviews.  For now:

Rating (this episode):
[1] Run in the other direction
[2] Don't bother

[3] Worth a watch if you've got nothing better to do
[4] Definitely try it out
[5] A total keeper

Modern Family - Pilot

Network: ABC

Time: Wednesday, 9:00-9:30

Cast: Ed O'Neill, Sophia Vergara, Rico Rodriguez II, Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell, Sarah Hyland, Ariel Winter,

Creators: Christopher Lloyd, Steven Levitan

Summary: This show follows three individual families that make up one larger family.  There's one nuclear family: husband, wife, and three kids.  There's one gay family: two boyfriends and an adopted daughter.  And there's one divorcee who's now married to a much younger woman and raising her young son.  The story has a documentary feel to it, with all the characters doing confessionals and speaking to the camera either by themselves or with their spouses.

Review: As a general rule, I'm a much tougher critic of a one-hour show than a sitcom.  For a sitcom to be good for me, all it has to do is make me laugh a few times and not bore me.  I don't have to like the characters.  Oh, sure, it's nice when I do, but it's not essential.  Generally in a sitcom, characters are fairly static anyway.  Look at Friends or Seinfeld as an example.  The characters age, sure, but they don't actually *grow*.  There's little personality change between Chandler of season 1 and Chandler of season 10.  The audience expects their characters to be a certain way every time they watch the show.  Whereas the Josh Lyman in season 1 of the West Wing is a much more relaxed, humorous character than the Josh Lyman in season 7 who takes the weight of the world on his shoulders.

The point of that mini-rant is that, unlike dramatic television, a sitcom's greatest weapons and biggest liabilities are snappy dialogue and good jokes.  Without both of those, nothing else in the show matters.

Modern Family has the whole package.  Right from the start, you are walking into a funny show.  It's set up like a mock documentary (read: mockumentary), with The Office-style confessionals to the camera.  These confessionals can be solo, but usually each couple is together.  It's better that way because it allows them to play off each other.

And, boy, are they good at that.  I don't know who was in charge of casting for this show, but they managed to find a set of actors with the kind of chemistry most shows can only dream of (so good, infact, it made me end my sentence with a preposition).  From the first episode, we're supposed to believe all these people are related--a father and his two children from one marriage, each of their families (one heterosexual, one homosexual), his new wife (who's roughly his daughter's age) and her son from a previous marriage.

And I buy it.  For awhile we only see each individual family and their troubles.  There's Claire, who's trying to raise a teenage girl (Haley), a pre-teen girl (Alex), a pre-pre-teen boy (Luke), and a husband (Phil, who, frankly, is the least mature of all of them).  The entire family dynamic is real enough that I turned to my viewing partners and said, "If I had had an older sister, I'd have been exactly like Alex."  Sure, they're wittier and the comebacks are snappier than most families are, but, at least in the case of my family, it gives us something to aspire to.

Then there's Mitchell, who lives with his boyfriend Cam.  In the pilot episode, they just adopted a little girl from Vietnam, and they (read: Mitchell) are worried about how to tell his father, who's just accepted the fact that Mitchell is gay.  This is another realistic relationship.  They have their stereotypically gay quirks, but it's refreshing to see that even they know when they take it too far.  It seems that homosexuality is the new "in thing" to have in a television show.  See Glee for an example of what happens when all the gay characters are unashamedly flamboyant, and you'll see, as I do, that's it's refreshing to see a gay couple that acts more like real people.

Finally there's Jay, Mitchell and Claire's father, who lives with his new wife Gloria and her precocious grade-school son Manny.  This is a point to consider later, that Mitchell and Claire's stepmother is roughly their age, and their stepbrother is the same age as Claire's son.  Ed O'Neill is probably the only name I recognized going into this show, and he delivers spectacularly.  His wit is dry, his demeanor is gruff, and his bluntness is balanced with a dash of sweet. 

All of this combines to give the first episode a lot of laughs and a heart-warming ending that makes you realize that all families are dysfunctional in their own way.  Because, when you get to it, all these related characters make up a pretty normal family.  They have their craziness, but, really, what's normal anyway?

Rating (this episode):
[1] Run in the other direction
[2] Don't bother
[3] Worth a watch if you've got nothing better to do
[4] Definitely try it out
[5] A total keeper