Dirty Sexy Life Money

I'm off to the Abbot Kinney festival in Venice today. Love Abbot Kinney! Hippies and tough guys and preppies and people with strollers all joining together to listen to some unknown band and examine the prices of hand-blown glass thingers. Fun.

In the meantime, we must continue to wade through the pilots for the new season.

I begin to wonder if there are any new ideas left. It seems like everything is just a mutation of what has come before.

I watched Life yesterday. It's kind of hard to do a cop show anymore because there are so many of them, you run out of ways to make it new. This show kind of reminded me of the unfortunately canceled Touching Evil because of Damian Lewis' odd way of responding in a zenlike method to all the problems he comes across. Maybe a little Vincent D'Onofrio on L&O too, but with less leaning over. And even though it's got echoes of some stuff we've seen before, Lewis' damn adorableness is what prevents this from being like every other show. I want to watch just to see him being so freaking cute all the time. And I like his partner's own interesting side story, which definitely is different because on most cop shows your hot female partner has no backstory at all. She's just there to serve as a foil for the lead's quirky behavior. But this girl is interesting. Also I kind of dig the way they intercut pieces of a documentary on his experience. I hope they keep that for every episode. I'm tentatively adding it to my schedule.

I also watched Dirty Sexy Money which has a terrible title and would be way better off just being called Dirty Money. Somebody in some cubicle somewhere must have said "people like shows with sexy in the title!" and there it was.

It was pretty flawed in other ways too. Oh look, a show about a poor boy who has to risk losing his soul to take care of rich people's problems. I think we've seen this before.

The cast is fabulous, but I don't know what the hell this show is supposed to be. It was a premise pilot, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still have to create a problem and solve it by the end of the episode. At the end of the pilot nothing was really resolved. There was so much going on the whole time with each member of this wealthy family that lots of cans of worms were opened and not one of them closed. So it was nothing more than a string of events that just sort of sat there moving around until the time was up. Even on Lost the episodes have self-contained stories within the larger piece. This show did not. I won't be adding it to my schedule.

And what is with rich men and trannies? That's the second transexual storyline in two days. Is that the new thing now? Did all the showrunners watch Transamerica in the off season or something?

So I'm off to Abbot Kinney. Unfortunately my movie took all my money so I won't be buying any saris or hand-made bowls this year, but it will be fun to look around.