WKPT Gets Back In The News Business

Has it really been only a week since we buried The Office? The laughs may have indeed vanished, but the workplace angst and resentment burns on in Fox's late-season experiment in true office awkwardness, a reality show called Does Someone Have to Go?, in which the boss hands over the reins to the employees, who evaluate one another and decide who should get fired. Does Someone Have to Go? provides little in the way of a grand statement or meaningful takeaway. In one regard, the show is very much a reflection of how we work and what we’re willing to do to cling to mediocre pay and unsatisfying jobs. In another regard, it’s simply another stop on television’s eternal trip on the humiliation train.

NBC’s new sitcom Save Me, starring Anne Heche as alcoholic housewife who begins receiving what she thinks are messages from God after a near-death experience, seems to be striving for the pungency of cable satires like HBO’s Enlightened and Showtime’s Weeds. But its premise often makes it feel like something out of the era of situation-heavy sitcoms like Bewitched.

Motive, a Canadian crime drama beginning on ABC, reveals early the who did what to whom; it’s the why that’s held for the climax. It’s reasonably smart, reasonably interesting and reasonably well acted without being particularly good. You might enjoy it as a low-key alternative to hyped-up American cop shows, or it might strike you as a mingy and borderline dull reworking of cop-show formulas. Either way, it’s likely to stick around: a second season has been ordered in Canada, and the price point for ABC is probably pretty low.

Here's a man who's accomplished the seemingly impossible — making Lewis Black seem upbeat and Larry David positively cheery. He's Marc Maron, real-life host of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron and star sour ball of IFC's darkly amusing new Maron which the network describes as a "fictionalized version of Marc's life." Probably not that fictionalized, though. Maron will probably never be wildly famous, which likely wouldn't please him anyway, but Maron should put him more firmly on the map as a seriously funny guy who takes in stray cats but swears off dogs because they're "too needy." Take it from him, "If there's gonna be somebody crying and panting in my house, it's gonna be me." Meow to all that.

Why, on so many levels; why? It seems tragic that, given the number of comedy writers out there, ABC didn't come up with a stronger vehicle than Family Tools. The show is just another set of prefab sitcom tropes pasted together with cheap jokes. The ensemble, led by Leah Remini and J.K. Simmons, has as much chemistry as an organic farm.