Two new series spring to life this week
Now that Scandal has wrapped up its season, ABC wants you to check out Black Box.
The high-intensity drama is going into the Scandal slot at 10 p.m. Thursday, hoping that people who have loved the craziness and dysfunction of the Kerry Washington series will be drawn to something with its own kind of extreme behaviour.
That behaviour is courtesy of Catherine Black (Kelly Reilly), a brilliant neurologist who is especially adept with her patients’ brain problems because she has one herself: She is bipolar. She also has a disconcerting habit of going off her meds and into bad behaviour, whether it’s dancing on a ledge or sleeping with a very wrong man.
While ABC is calling this “cutting edge,” it isn’t really. Viewers can add it to a long list of dramas about brilliant, but troubled people. House, where the doctor had as many issues as his patients, came to mind. Black Box (the name is a nickname for the brain) is especially close in style and tone to the Holly Hunter series Saving Grace. Black’s demons are as vividly rendered as those of Hunter’s character — though Black Box takes place on a more glamorous stage.
The première, at least, finds Black in a downward spiral, talking things through with her psychiatrist (Vanessa Redgrave), dealing with her colleagues — and helping patients whose brain-related delusions are made visible to viewers. In many respects, it is standard if stylish TV fare. But in the middle of it is Reilly.
A British actress, Reilly has become an increasing presence in American productions. She costarred with Denzel Washington in Flight and is on the big screen in Heaven is for Real (as Todd Burpo’s wife, Sonja).
In Black Box, her performance is commanding, compelling and by itself enough reason to give the show a couple of chances.
Also new this week is Bad Teacher, premièring at 9:31 p.m. Thursday on CBS and Global. (Yes, 9:31. Get used to it.)
Inspired by the Cameron Diaz movie, it stars Ari Graynor as Meredith Davis, a gold digger who has lost everything in a divorce. Discovering a host of rich, divorced dads at a local school, she finagles a teaching job. Then, of course, she actually has to deal with the young students.
Graynor knows how to seem selfish, vain and cunning, and the show’s supporting cast includes pros like David Alan Grier, Kristin Davis, Sara Gilbert and Veronica Mars’ Ryan Hansen. But the show is not content to let Meredith be a beast; in each of the three episodes made available for preview, there’s a moment where she has to turn nice — even if that goes against everything we see about her the rest of the time. And how many times will the audience be willing to watch Meredith abandon her avoidance of principle?
It’s amusing here and there. But it would have been bolder to make this bad teacher really bad.