Kill Your Television

We watched The TV Set, starring David Duchovny, on DVD the other night. It wasn't nearly as good as I'd hoped. It was written by Jake Kasdan, of The Zero Effect and Walk Hard, which I haven't seen) and produced by Judd Apatow, of, well, everything. If follows the trials of a writer trying to get his tv series picked up as a pilot, then as a series, while the network suits (led by Sigourney Weaver) strip out everything personal about it. It's ripe territory for satire, and I loved a Kevin Bacon movie from the 80s called The Big Picture which pretty much did the same thing with movies.

Problem is, having seen The Big Picture, I didn't see anything new in The TV Set. Even worse, the "heartfelt, personal" script that the show begins with felt tin and corny. Everyone talks about how good it is, but what we see is pretty much dreck -- it's just sappy dreck instead of lowbrow, fart-joke dreck. There are some okay moments in the film (I really liked a character bit about Taxi Driver -- in fact, Arrested Development's Judy Greer gives the best performance in the movie), but the film as a whole never really gets going, and is gone like the blue pinprick of light we used to see when we turned the tv off.

Maybe the main difference is that the The Big Picture was a romantic comedy, and The TV Set plays like a comic tragedy. But it's a personal tragedy for Duchovny's character alone. In the end, his personal vision for the show has been lost. For the viewers at home, a mediocre-at-best show has been replaced with a bad one, which isn't much of a loss at all.

Rob
(And no wonder The Big Picture is better; it's a Christopher Guest movie. I didn't know that until I fetched the link.)