"How much do you need the money?"
That was the question. Followed by, "Exactly what won't you do for money?"
Standoff airs Tuesdays on Fox. We're supposed to add "for now" but despite the talk of pulling the show shortly, they've got nothing to replace it with other than wall to wall American Idol. Translation, although viewers blinked, snoozed and ran, expect the Standoff to continue for a bit longer.
How much longer? A full season is what a friend working on the show's hoping for. A full season and then on to other things. That's what he told us when we asked the questions.
The whole thing reminds us of another friend, who did a pilot in the eighties to meet some bills, thinking the show was so hideous there would be no pick up. The thing made it to air. Not only that, it got some good reviews. She ended up stuck with a show she hated and she couldn't stop bad mouthing it in public. It didn't last a full season but she didn't need it to.
We kept waiting to hear a similar story from our Standoff friend, that the whole thing was never supposed to make it to air. According to him, the problem is just that you can't blend certain elements. Romantic comedy and hostages seemed like a winning idea (to someone) but it didn't play out that way.
Possibly because there's no romantic comedy?
Hart to Hart was escapist fair. No one would call it a romantic comedy. Successful romantic comedies in the last two or so decades, on TV, have built around the will-they-or-won't-they bit. Will Maddie and David sleep together? Will Sam and Diane sleep together? Will Fraiser and Niles sleep together?
Okay, maybe not that last one.
But a romantic comedy needs hurdles. Instead of providing hurdles, Standoff treats the still not developed character Emily, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, as one. She's the hurdle Matt, played by Ron Livingston, leaps pretty much every episode. There's no suspense of will-they-or-won't-they because, in the show's first episode, it's announced they're lovers.
Now you could work with that and fall back on a sex comedy or a battle of the sexes comedy, but you really can't shape a romantic comedy that way. That those developing the show couldn't grasp that explains a great deal of why Standoff is unwatchable.
It wasn't created, it was assembled. With a check list. Crime? Check. Low comedy? Check. Loose cannon? Check. Glowering African-American woman? Check. Right there they had covered the franschise shows, the action shows and the reality shows. Someone decided romance would help them with viewers.
Probably the same someone who thought Matt being dubbed the "jack hammer" would have all the Grey's Anatomy gals tuning in. Those are the elements, we'll get to the scripts in a minute.
First, let's talk acting.
Whether you want to pin it on Brando, Kazan, Tennessee Williams or a spurt of life in Broadway, a new era in acting was ushered in following A Streetcar Named Desire. A decade later Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Al Pacino and others would usher in another era. With vehicles masking as films for some time now, there's really not been a new 'new era.'
If things are standing still for film, it's worse for television -- never have so many given so little.
Already people are wondering how the nominations (lead and supporting) will manage to field a full slate next fall when it's time to hand out Emmys?
We blame it on the franchise shows. Those paint-by-number scripts don't require acting and to try to act in any of those usually leads to embarrassment. The quick cuts and music, the gore and the moralizing are supposed to provide the entertainment and the blank cyphers stand around reciting their lines.
What could be worse than a cast made up of performers who ignored their craft in the work factories of Dick Wolf and Jerry Bruckheimer? How about tossing in one who emerged from Joss Whedon's?
Watching these rejects trying to act may provide you with a few moments of laughter. Someone tell "Jasmine" she's a long, long way from Angel. Gina Torres barks out a lot of orders like Omarosa and, after awhile, you start to wonder if she grasps that America tuned in to The Apprentice to hate Omarosa? The role of Cheryl, as it is barely written, really shouldn't make the viewers seethe anger.
The biggest embarrassment is DeWitt because Emily is a lead character. Her past work hasn't prepared her for a one-shot, let alone a lead. As if to help you grasp how limited DeWitt is as an actress, Tuesday's episode was followed by House with Sela Ward guesting.
Sela Ward? Oh, yes, an actress. An actress who can handle romantic comedy. Ward can also handle a brush and the hair department is strongly encouraged to take one to the heads of all the females on this show -- regulars and guest stars.
DeWitt comes off like Oscar from The Odd Couple in clothes and appearance which makes the scene where Emily explains to Matt that "girls talk" all the more laughable. If you're going to try to girly-girl it, you probably shouldn't butch up every other minute to the point that audiences wonder if Emily and Matt bonded over a farting contest?
There's no explanation for them as a couple. They have nothing in common, the actors have no chemistry and, from all the talk (but oh so little shown) the sex isn't all that. Maybe their affair was part of the job description?
Standoff is about an FBI team in the Crisis Negotiation Unit -- or CNU: Dullsville. Emily and Matt are hostage negotiators who rarely find themselves in a crisis that bad banter can't worsen.
Like Emily, Matt appears to believe rumpled is the new high fashion. Any acting Livingston might provide (he can act, even on this show) is undercut by a ridiculous haircut. Some obsess over how someone as talented as Livingston never found the breakout role. Us, we can't believe his Hall of Bad Hairstyles didn't land him on daytime TV. When you have that jaw, you stay the hell away from hairdos that make you look like a Ken doll. It's as though he's attempting to be the new Wallace Kurth and if you just asked "Who?" -- we respond "Exactly."
While wondering that, you might want wonder about the writing as well. On Tuesday's episode, the FBI team goes out to a hostage situation after they're called and . . . Oh wait, it didn't happen like that at all.
There was no call for help. No, the FBI found out that a bankful of hostages were being held by illegally monitoring phone calls. They overhear a woman being given a demand. They rush to the woman and question her then dismiss her. Dismiss her may be too nice to describe how they treat her. She's providing them with answers and observations and, in fact, tells them that she used to work at the branch, know the layout, knows the employees and they tell her they'll call her if they need her.
Turns out they quickly do. Instead of calling her, they send out several cars to block her on the street. These aren't cop cars so there are no sirens, just big SUVs trying to run her off the road for all she knows.
If any of the above offends you, or the fact that she leaves her car in what will be the middle of the street once the SUVs pull away, this was actually one of the better episodes, this is the one our friend praised. He brought over tapes of other episodes.
In one, a man is holding hostages and talking to a shock jock on air. Omarosa, er Cheryl, wants the broadcast ended. Wants it ended right away. They scheme, the Feds, and plot for ways to take the station off the air, for ways to cut the call, and for ways, if they cut the call, to prevent the hostage taker from getting through to the station if he attempts to call back.
As with the illegal eavesdropping on phone calls, some of the above might bother anyone with even a slight grasp of what we believe is still supposed to be the First Amendment.
As if trashing that isn't bad enough, next week they head off to Mexico where, as Matt puts it, their "stinking badges" don't mean a thing -- no jurisdiction. But that doesn't mean you won't get plenty of gun fire, folks. It's as though they're channeling the James Baker Circle Jerk and Thomas Friedman.
If the whole ugly thing reminds you of anything, it's probably the thankfully cancelled Threshold.
After you start picking up on a detail here and one there, you wonder if this may actually be worse than Threshold (which had a police officer keeping a suspect -- never booked -- hostage in a 'cargo pod' for days and days) and begin to question why they didn't just call the show Badges Knows Best?
That's what it plays like. There's not a law that can't be broken, there's not a person up to their moral fortitude (not even the Christian woman who actually is more on the ball than anyone on the team). "Stinking badges" is exactly right, they give off a strong odor in this show.
All the more so because the audience is supposed to be amused, supposed to root for these bullies.
With less fawning or a different point of view (the show told through the victims' eyes?), the whole thing would be hard to sugar coat. The fact that there's no attempt made shows you how far down the toilet TV has gone.
We were provided four episodes on tape. We watched two. Yeah, we blinked.
We wonder if, anytime soon, people will start rebelling and refusing to work on shows like this?
Yeah, everyone needs to put food on the table. But at some point, shouldn't people be asking themselves about the morality of doing these debasing shows? Oh wait, if they asked that, 'reality' TV would die in an instant.
So we're stuck in the gutter. And what's even worse, we're stuck with performers coming up the pipeline who did guests shots in the gutter and are now being elevated to regulars and leads.
We'll repeat the question (which was only answered with a laugh), "Exactly what won't you do for money?"
You can't win a standoff with Standoff. But you can, as audiences have, retreat and, though Bully Boy can't grasp it, sometimes that's the smartest thing to do.