When the entertainment industry gets desperate, it's never pretty. When the well runs dry, there's a tendency to grab for ideas anywhere. One that you'd think they'd given up on is games. What should have been the nadar was assuming that if you enjoyed being Miss Scarlet or Col. Mustard during a board game, you'd love to see Clue play out on the big screen. Box office returns slapped the film industry in the face but didn't prevent Mario Bros and other snooze-fests. Now TV's joined in the dullness. It takes questionable talent to suggest that if board games and video games have failed, the thing to try now is a parlor game. Hence ABC's Six Degrees.
How bad is this Thursday night offering? So bad it should come with a warning label or Bo Derek in the cast -- either would ward off unsuspecting viewers. Even without such precautions, the word's obviously getting out to judge by the sinking ratings.
After how the show managed to get on the air, the biggest question appears to be what happened to Campbell Scott's hair and why it was brown in all the promotional material but gray on the show? Answer: Because there's more than six degrees between the reality of the show and the way it was promoted.
It was promoted as an involving, complicated drama that would hook viewers. Since it comes from JJ Abrams, we knew better. Early on, we heard that the cast couldn't do a thing with what was on the page. One viewing and you'll grasp why.
The show wants to follow a group of characters who sometimes interact with one another and sometimes don't. The connections are the Kevin Bacon parlor game where every actor can be connected to Bacon in six steps (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon). Surely the same 'geniuses' will next tackle Dungeons & Dragons and other 'games' that most people don't play and won't play.
Campbell Scott. Let's all face reality here, he can make it on the stage, he can't in film or TV. He killed Singles with his wooden performance. Dying Young was the first bomb Julia Roberts experienced post-Pretty Woman and a large portion of the blame is his. His only true success (we don't count his bland performance in Longtime Companion as a hit) was in The Spanish Prisoner where his stiffness was built into the writing. On stage, his natural hestiancy and belaboring can work. On screen the only role for him is Principal Skinner in a live action film of The Simpsons.
In Six Degrees, the Tinman plays Steven Caseman and we're not sure what was more laughable, Scott attempting to play a stuff shirt on extasy or how he ended up accidentally taking the pills. The love-drug came off like the like-drug and, like the child playing Scott's son, we were creeped out as well.
Scott is the child of actors George C. Scott and Collen Dewhurst. That sentence is the closest Scott will ever get to onscreen greatness. He lacks his father's onscreen energy and his mother's onscreen warmth. For a forty-five-year-old actor who's been making films since 1987, he doesn't have a great deal to show for it. Six Degress won't change that.
Hope Davis has been cast as Laura. She's never achieved much either so it's no surprise she doesn't in the show. In fact, the only surprise may be that her character's not paired up with Scott's but, apparently, there's a line of dullness that even this show dares not cross -- at least one.
Laura can't seem to pull it together on Halloween (the episode aired a week too early) so she ends the night at home, on the couch alone, drinking a glass of wine, and reading a magazine. There's no music playing from the stereo and the quiet death that's supposed to represent the character just respresents one more burial in Davis' career.
Three actors try very hard to overcome the scripts (we'll get to the scripts in a minute): Jay Hernandez (playing Carlos), Erika Christensen (Mae) and Bridget Moynahan (Whitney). Moynahan has created her own character and comes off the best. Hernandez and Christensen try too hard to bring the writing to life and suffer for it.
In Campbell's extasy trip, you see all that is wrong with the show. He starts out with his (much younger) girlfriend. He can't go out with her to a party, he's promised the day to his son. Apparently while trick or treating in broad daylight, he begins tripping but seems to think he's having a stroke (maybe he was watching his performance on a monitor?). After a paramedic explains to him that he's tripping, he sends his son packing and ends the episode at the party with said girlfriend. No one cares, no one is involved. There's nothing in the performance, as written or played, that makes anyone give a damn about Steven. Viewer curiousity, if it exists, revolves solely around how such a bland, inward driven character could hook up with a young girlfriend who clearly enjoys life? (Many more days around Steven will kill that love.)
One scene Thursday captured the audience's reaction, Mae's brother was on the run (don't ask) and she turned him in (ditto) only to return to Laura's where she's the nanny of Laura's child. Laura looks up at her (possibly smashed on booze but it's hard to tell with Davis' stilted acting) and asks Mae about her night. The overly long recap (of what the audience has seen the past hour) includes many pauses and, most importantly, not many questions from Laura. Told that Mae's brother wasn't doing well but now he may be getting the help he needs, Laura (like the audience) doesn't care enough to ask what happened to him? She just nods, sips and ends the scene by noting the possibility of meeting him sometime.
Oh, maybe, Laura, maybe someday.
The scene was as uninvolving as the show and Laura's tepid interest in Mae's life mirrors the audiences' interest in the characters.
The concept was a parlor game. What the writers rip off is Play It Forward -- a movie that damaged (if not destroyed) the careers of all involved. If, during a holiday season, audiences didn't want to ponder the inner workings of the human soul embodied in sub-strata, the writers should have known they were addressing a theme that would cause viewers to reach for the remotes.
The tedius nature of the characters is supposed to play 'real' in the same way that Hope Stedman was supposed to strike you as 'complex' a decade ago. In both cases, more was in the brain than on the page and none of it made to the screen. Six Degrees is really about ennui. Can the human heart survive . . . boredom?
It's doubtful ABC can and that's why the suits are grumbling about the fact that Abrams promised more involvement in the show than he's delivered. (His distancing from the show is matched only by the detachment in Davis' performance. We would add Scott's performance as well but, warning, he attempts to 'act' in an episode that will air shortly. It's not pretty and is to acting what Seinfeld's Elaine was to dance.) Moynahan breaks through the tedium but, though you can picture her character at a Sonic Youth concert, there's only so much one performer can do. Hernandez too often settles for a 'literal' interpretation of the script and comes off like a pretty boy who studied acting under David Charvet. Christensen would do well to grasp that 'twinkling' rarely transfers from the page to the screen. (Despite what the writers of this show believe.)
As you watch and yawn, you're left to wonder is ABC's attempting to broadcast a sleeping aid? ABC, on the other hand, wonders how they got stuck with this program? It's quite simple. They wanted to please JJ Abrams and they bought a questionable concept and his assurances that he would be hands on. If there's a lesson for the network here it is: The next time Abrams attempts to sell you on a parlor game, quickly suggest he play one: The Quiet Game.
We'll all be a lot better off.