'Scoundrels,'
or not. Who's to say?
New ABC show suffers from multiple personalities
By Tom Conroy
Jun 17, 2010
The more complicated the situation in a situation comedy, the more the first episode has to work to explain to us who the characters are and how they fit in the story machinery.
ABC’s new series “Scoundrels,” a combination situation comedy and drama — a sitdram? — spends its first episode introducing us to a family of crooks, explaining the various roles they play in their scams. And then the last 15 minutes completely change the situation.
Thus the premiere makes it nearly impossible to judge whether the series will succeed in the long run. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine what the second episode will be like.
But one can assume based on the quality of the premiere that the acting will be good. The plotting and dialogue, which are more important, probably won’t be enough to keep us interested.
In the premiere, airing this Sunday at 9 p.m., we meet the West family. Wolf (David James Elliott) and Cheryl (Virginia Madsen) run various scams, including fencing stolen goods.
The couple has two daughters: Heather (Leven Rambin) is a dimwit who wants to be a model; Hope (Vanessa Marano) is smart but refuses to attend high school so she can work on a screenplay.
Their son Logan (Patrick John Flueger) is about to start work as a lawyer; Logan’s brother, Cal (also played by Flueger), is a fool who seems to be in charge of stealing things to be fenced.
The comical elements help us suspend disbelief and accept that such a family might exist. But in general, charming crooks work better as characters in the fantasy realm of the movies than they do on TV, which we view at home, surrounded by the things that crooks, charming or not, might take from us.
We’re supposed to like the Wests because, as Cheryl says, they’ve always lived by two rules: They don’t invade people’s homes, at least not if the people are in them, and they don’t use violence. Oh, and they don’t deal drugs. OK, three rules.
The writing doesn’t help the actors much. The children are either so smart or so stupid that they have little else to them. Flueger’s portrayal of Cal is skillfully over-the-top and funny, but to make Logan seem different, he plays him so under-the-top that we can’t get a handle on him at all.
The characterization of the parents is slippery. Like most fictional husband-and-wife criminal teams, they have a hot love life and what marriage counselors would call good communication skills. But then, when the plot calls for it, Wolf starts telling half truths to Cheryl, and she stops listening to him.
The punch lines could be a lot stronger. Trying to persuade her mother to support her modeling career, Heather uses Gisele Bundchen as an example, asking her mother, “Do you know what she made last year?”
“Some dirty old men very happy,” replies Cheryl.
The show is based on a series from New Zealand called “Outrageous Fortune,” and it doesn’t exactly reek of research into the actual workings of American criminals. When representatives of a rival crime family called the Hongs show up, they look like extras from a James Bond movie.
Silliness can work fine for a pure comedy. But toward the end, Cheryl realizes that the family has to change its ways in order to survive. Madsen struggles hard to make us feel Cheryl’s pain, but the change in tone is jarring.
A more jarring change awaits next week, when a show about a family involved in crime will become a show about a family not involved in crime. The switch may inspire the writers to new heights of creativity, but the premiere episode suggests they’re not up to the job.
|
|
|
