Scoundrels debuts tonight on ABC at 9 p.m. Eastern.
A few years back, The CW outsourced its Sunday night lineup to an advertising group called Media Rights Capital, an independent producer that quickly flopped in its mission to improve the network's ratings on that night. One of the shows MRC thought would do the trick was a dramedy called Easy Money, starring Laurie Metcalf and Judge Reinhold as the center of a family of loan sharks. It was a surprisingly good show – coming from two former producers of The Sopranos – and it got at America's anxieties about the crumbling economic infrastructure of the country about as well as any series had up until that point. It wasn't perfect, but it had the makings of a show that could have been terrific. But it averaged viewership of 650,000, and that meant it was soon gone (though you used to be able to find it on Hulu).
I bring this up because Scoundrels, ABC's new dramedy, has a lot in common with Easy Money. They're both about kooky families who skate by on both sides of the law. They're both obviously shot on the cheap. They both take place in out-of-the-way desert corners of the U.S. (Albuquerque in Easy Money, and Palm Springs in Scoundrels). And they both want to be funny. The major difference here is that Easy Money was surprisingly good, and Scoundrels is surprisingly terrible. It's on a network that knows how to do this stuff, yet just about everything in it misfires, even though a really terrific cast has been assembled to stand around and be witness to the misfiring. Virginia Madsen deserves some sort of award for being the lead in this mess and not completely falling apart at any given moment, for, indeed, trying to restore a certain sense of dignity to the enterprise.
Scoundrels, based on a New Zealand series that is apparently wildly popular (and looks much better than this merely based on the trailers I've watched on YouTube), is ABC's second attempt – the first featured work from Veronica Mars and Party Down creator Rob Thomas! – to nail down the story of a family of criminals that decides to make some fairly significant changes when the father goes to jail. (Yes, yes. Shades of Arrested Development.) Mother Cheryl decides to take over, and this leads to a series of events that lead to what's supposed to be a big twist in the last five minutes but, instead, ends up setting up the whole premise of the show. I don't mind a good premise pilot, but a.) this one isn't good and b.) we don't even have a clue of what the show proper is going to look like from this episode, outside of the suggestion that it will feature lots and lots of wacky hijinks.
The tone of this show needs to be rather over-the-top. Instead, it takes what appears to be a $5 budget and just relentlessly makes the show look sort of dingy and tacky. Low-budget TV doesn't need to look as crummy as it does here and over on Starz's Gravity. There are plenty of shows done with tiny budgets that either turn that low budget into a virtue – see Party Down – or somehow make everything look more epic than it should (like Friday Night Lights). Scoundrels doesn't bother with any of this, and everything about the show looks flat and poorly lit and uninteresting. There's a character who pretty much relies on a wig and makeup to make his character work, and that wig and makeup look awful, like something dragged out of the back of a prop room at a college theatre department.
For the most part, the cast is good. Madsen is legitimately doing great work with a part that's ridiculously poorly written. Vanessa Marano is good as daughter Hope, who only wants to be a filmmaker, not a teenager. Leven Rambin is just there to be hot as other daughter Heather, and she does fairly well with this. David James Elliott is mostly just goofying around as paterfamilias Wolf, but it's a fun goofing around. The weak link here, sadly, is a pretty big one. The producers have cast Patrick John Flueger to play both straitlaced lawyer brother Logan and washout brother Cal. Flueger plays both of these characters exactly the same, despite the fact that one is graced with the Worst Wig Ever and the other is supposed to be Captain America. It's like he has no idea that playing diametrically opposed twins is an invitation for scenery chewing and not an invitation to audition for a 2002 WB teen soap. So much of the pilot's plot revolves around Cal that Flueger's affectless portrayal of the role hurts what's already a strained series.
The bigger problem is that everything here is badly misjudged. There's a scene where there's an attempted date rape, and twinkly music plays in the background, the better for you to know that you shouldn't be taking this seriously and should be finding it "winning" and "cute." (ABC does this a lot, and I won't stop complaining about it until the music stops holding me by the hand or, at least, is completely done by Michael Giacchino.) There are constant cutaways to fill in gaps in the storyline that are supposed to be funny but are, instead, grating. The series brings in a bunch of broad, Asian caricatures and thinks all it has to do to make them funny instead of borderline offensive is slap the name "Hong" on them. And there's a lot of business with a goofy looking heirloom statue that may be more than it appears to be but never seems to be worth all of the hassle the characters go through for it.
I often try to end these reviews with a sense of what might be worth looking at in one of these shows (since I'm an optimist at heart), but outside of Madsen's work, there's really no immediate suggestion of just why ABC thought this was worth putting on the air. It's a puzzling misfire of a show, of the sort that rarely gets past the pilot phase (or, hell, rarely gets past the pilot script stage). It looks cheap, has at least one completely terrible performance, and doesn't offer up many suggestions of just what the series proper will look like, beyond the idea that it will probably be bad. There's no good show inside of Scoundrels. There's a good performance, surrounded by a sea of incompetence.
Stray observations:
- I honestly can't tell if this was filmed on location in Palm Springs and Indio, but I would wager it was. It has the look of those weird desert towns. This makes me think someone should make a series – filmed on location – about the diehards who keep thinking the Salton Sea is going to come back as a thing.
- Has anybody seen the New Zealand original? It seems like it might be fun (and I read Rob Thomas' script a few years ago and liked that), so I'm wondering if this is just a case of poor execution or if the whole idea was cursed from the first.
- Elliott looks nothing like I remember him looking on JAG (though, granted, I rarely watched that show). I don't think he's changed so much as my memory of him has. I have no idea why certain actors are that way.