The TV Set (0/10)

by Tony Medley

This doesn’t rise to the level of awful. Like priests condemned to Dante’s Inferno, there is a lower rating for movies this bad.

I didn’t see it at a screening. Apparently the production company was smart enough not to invite many people to see this before they released it. As I was waiting in the lobby for my friend after the showing, a couple walked by and the lady said to her gentleman friend, “I think this is the worst film we’ve ever seen together.” Another lady in the lobby said she had seen worse films, but it had been a long time. Nobody at my showing had anything good to say about this.

Written, directed, and produced by Jake Kasdan, this is apparently intended to satirize a writer of a proposed TV show, Mike (David Duchovny), as he tries to get his show produced. He’s working with TV executive, Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), to get a pilot filmed and on the air.

There is a good movie to be made out of this story; a struggling writer, “suits” who think, for example, a writer’s macho heterosexual protagonist should be changed to a teenaged lesbian; compromises to be made, etc., etc. In talented hands this is a satire crying to be made. Unfortunately, the key word in the foregoing is “talented.”

There are lots of things that burden this film, not least of which is the barest of production values. Obviously this was made on a shoestring because there really aren’t any production values. Only 87 minutes long, and they are very long minutes, indeed, Mike must make compromise after compromise to get his show green-lighted.

I’m sure it must have been an ordeal for poor Mike. But his ordeal is nothing when compared with the ordeal of an audience having to sit through watching his ordeal and the actors mouthing the lines from the lame script with which they work. There is not one funny line or situation in this film.

Weaver is particularly ineffective, although how much of it is her fault is debatable, since the lines she is forced to mouth were not written by her, and since she was probably just following directions in the way she played her role. Even so, the net result is that there is no humor in the way she emotes. Weaver shouldn’t really have any excuse, however, since her father was Pat Weaver, who was the major honcho at NBC in its glory years, President from 1953-55. Sigourney grew up with a character upon which her character is based! Of everyone involved with this disaster of a movie, she should know better.

Fortunately, you now know better than to waste your money and time on this.

April 7, 2007