The Strange World of Thomas P. Coombe

Five Comic Book Series That Would Make Great TV Shows

  When FOX announced its winter schedule last week, one of its new shows was Human Target, an action/drama series based on a character from DC comics. Meanwhile, AMC -- which has had an amazing track record with Breaking Bad and Mad Men -- is adapting another comic book series, Robert Kirkman's addictive life-after-zombies book The Walking Dead.

 Visit a comic shop these days and you'll see plenty of titles based on the world of TV, from Joss Whedon's continuation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to (really) Oprah Winfrey. But going from comics to TV? Doesn't happen very often, at least not that successfully. (Smallville, now in its 45th season, is an exception. And it's based on a well-established character.)

 It's too bad, because there are quite a few titles that have come out in the last few years that would make for great TV series. Here's a look at just five of them:

 

Sons of Anarchy: Didn't Even Have to Use My AK

I'm a big fan of video games like the ones in Nintendo's Metroid and Legend of Zelda series, where you have to explore labrynthian dungeons and planets, fight horrific monsters and look for tools and weapons, in order to reach your goal.

My only complaint about these kind of games is that they'll often stick in some sort of eleventh hour busy-work quest just as you're about to face the big boss, totally slowing down the momentum of the story.

 I mention this because that's how I felt at the end of "The Culling," the next-to-last episode in what's been an amazing season of Sons of Anarchy. We've reached the end, but it feel the show has thrown in some needless obstacles just to get us to the final episode.

Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Finale: The Revenge of Mocha Joe

Ever since switching to season-long story arcs a few years ago, Curb Your Enthusiasm has followed a rule: No matter how weak the season is overall, the finale will be satisfying.

 And Sunday night's finale maintained that tradition.

 Part of what made it satisfying was seeing the Seinfeld crew do what looked like a classic Seinfeld episode on HBO. (We only see a few minutes of it, but enough to know it felt more like a part of the show's universe more than the actual Seinfeld finale from 11 years ago.)

  Part of it was seeing Larry -- in the midst of professional and (later) personal triumph -- continue to carry out his petty crusades: dealing with vengeful coffee vendor Mocha Joe, bartering for the lives of Jason Alexander's vicious dogs, and attempting to prove his innocence in the "ring staining" of Julia Louis-Dreyfus' antique coffee table.

 

The Office: Tough Crowd

Like I said last week, any time The Office gets outside the world of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton pretty much makes for a good episode.

 Last night's outing -- with Michael, Andy, Oscar and Dwight traveling to New York for the company shareholders' meeting -- was no exception.

 Michael is there to be honored as one of the struggling paper company's few bright spots.

 (The other bright spot, hilariously, is a new "waste pulp repurposing plant.")

 My only really complaint was that I didn't buy the way Michael won over a hostile, serious minded audience using a few vague and clearly unrealistic promises (a 45-day, 45-point plan, and going carbon neutral).

Fringe: Who Watches the Watchmen?

Fringe's first really solid episode last year was its fourth. It was called "The Arrival," and marked the first real appearance of the entity known as "The Observer," who shows up to watch all the weird stuff that goes down in the Fringe universe.

 And eventually, we came to learn to things: 1. There are several Observers. 2. The episodes involving them -- beyond just spotting a bald guy in a crowd shot -- tend to be pretty good.

 Yet an episode that was pretty much all about the Observers, wasn't quite the event I was expecting.

What I've Been Watching (or Not Watching)

 We're getting to the end of the year (and the end of the decade, which doesn't seem possible), so I'm at work now on putting together my "Best of" lists for 2009 and the 00s.

 And in some respects, this entry is sort of a trial run for the end of the year list, as I try to formulate my thoughts on what I consider 2009's best shows.

  

• One of them is Parks & Recreation. What started off last year as a half-assed Office clone has turned into TV's best and most charming sitcom. (The year's two critically acclaimed newcomers -- Modern Family and Community -- are also funny, but to me don't measure up.) If you're not watching, P&Ris a mock-documentary about mid-level bureaucrat Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler, above) in a small Indiana city. Like The Office's Michael Scott, she can be remarkably un-self aware. But unlike Scott, she's far easier to root for. Another way the show has borrowed from The Office (in a good way): it's fleshed out its supporting cast in such a way that you begin to know and like these characters after just a few episodes. (My favorite -- and everyone's -- might be Leslie's deadpan boss Ron Swanson. I think the moment I was completely won over by this show might have been the episode that revealed Ron had a side job as a beloved jazz musician named "Duke Silver.")
• I can't really berate people for not watching P&R because I wasn't a viewer until last week. No, I'd spent the previous weeks, like a masochist, watching FlashForward in the vain hope that it would become somewhat compelling, or even marginally interesting. Maybe in a few weeks, somebody will write to me and say "Oh, it's gotten a lot better in the past few weeks." Fine. I'll watch it in one big chunk on DVD. (That's how I watched the first season of Heroes. I'll bet if I'd seen it week-to-week, I would have gotten pretty bored.) As for FlashForward: great, great premise, lousy execution. I barely cared about the characters or the story by last week, and when I realized the plot was about to turn on a card game, that was it for me.
• Wow, this whole blog could be about Thursday night TV. I don't normally blog about Supernatural, because it airs at the same time as Fringe/The Office, and I usually wait to watch it Friday night or Saturday with my girlfriend. But it's always been a fun show, and has only gotten better in its last two seasons, as the writers introduced God, angels and the devil into the show's mythology. It's as scary as the X-Files, and (almost) as clever as Buffy. And these days, it doesn't feel at all like a show in its fifth year.
• Finally, a confession. In the past few months, my girlfriend has gotten me hooked on Hell's Kitchen. Normally, I hate these kind of contest shows. I hate the meanness, I hate the confessional camera scenes.  I hate the way reality TV has conditioned the people who appear on it to act like people on a reality show (hence the endless, endless repetitions of "I didn't come here to make friends, I came here to win.") But I am fascinated by Gordon Ramsay and the show's awestruck hero worship of him.  Also, as Megan says, it's just fun to watch him yell.

 Tom Coombe

Sons of Anarchy: The Gospel of John

 Even though some baaaaaad stuff is about to go down, tonight's Sons of Anarchy was mostly about peace, love and understanding, a nice soft breeze before the violent wind that's going to blow through Charming in the next two weeks.

 That's not to say this was a leisurely episode. Quite the opposite; in the first half-hour, all of the following things happened:

 

Curb Your Enthusiasm: No Cure for Groat's

 Some quick thoughts about the next-to-last Curb Your Enthusiasm of the year:

• I felt like this one really flourished when it was on the Seinfeld reunion set. So much to like here: Funkhouser's repulsive joke, Larry and Jason Alexander's continued, smiling-through-gritted teeth hatred of each other, and of course, seeing the Seinfeld cast do their stuff.
• None of that, however, was topped by the brilliant scene where an uncoached Leon tries to convince Michael Richards that he's a survivor of the fictional "Groat's Disease." I'm not sure what I found funnier: Leon's ignorance of how a bar mitzvah works or his made-up Groat's disease symptoms ("Everything I ate tasted like peaches...I forgot how to multiply.")
• Almost as funny: Funkhouser inadvertently blowing the whistle on Leon and Jerry's scam by introducing the widow of the real Groat's sufferer and confirming that the man Leon had been impersonating had in fact died "a long painful death."
• But like I said, once the episode got away from the set, it fell kind of flat. I'm not sure what kind of bad restaurant experiences Larry David has had between seasons 6 and 7, but something has caused him to make waiters/maitre d's into his foils this year. And it was obvious early on that Larry's continual and wayyyy-too-casual reference to the little girl's rash would come back to haunt him.
• Next week brings us the finale. The show has yet to put together a bad one.

 Tom Coombe

The Office: I Do Declare...

The Office does its best work when it allows the harsh real world to intrude on the wacky tube city that is Dunder Mifflin. 

We saw that last season when Michael battled a new boss, quit the company, and tried starting his own business.

 And we saw it again last night with "Murder," in which he leads the entire staff through an elaborate Clue-like party game to take their minds off some grim-yet-vague (which is somehow worse) financial news about the corporate office.

 

Fringe: Oh Yeah? Make Me...

This week's Fringe spent a lot of time with Massive Dynamic, the shadowy, mammoth company that -- so far  -- has figured into much of the show's mythology.

 But despite the settting and more Nina Sharpe than usual, "Of Human Action" felt very much like a monster-of-the-week episode, and it's becoming more and more apparent that those are the type of episodes this show doesn't do that well.

 I'm going to leave aside the fact that it was pretty obvious who the bad guy was within the first 10 minutes of the hour.