New Nickelodeon comedy ‘Haunted’ by lame concept
Dear Nickelodeon: Young viewers are not idiots. And they are not deaf. So they don’t need to have dreadful, ancient rimshotstyle jokes screamed at them repeatedly, as they are on the new supernatural comedy “The Haunted Hathaways” (7:30 p.m. Saturday).
How horrible is “Hathaways”? Hideously so.
Whenever I have to review children’s fare, I try to remember what I was like as a kid and what I watched. I may have been young and foolish, but I wasn’t a fool. I could read between the lines. Children can be terrifically self-absorbed. But they’re also intensely sensitive to some of the really big questions, like life and death. And death is a subject that is never broached on “Hathaways.” That’s peculiar, because it’s a ghost story.
There have been plenty of comedies featuring ghosts. “Beetlejuice,” “Topper,” “Blithe Spirit” and “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” come to mind. They’re not morbid. Each deals with death in its own light way and then lets the ghosts carry on their comedic or romantic escapades. But the stories can’t make much sense if you don’t dispose of the bodies. Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” a holiday favorite for all ages, deals with death in its opening lines: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”
Apparently, Nickelodeon doesn’t believe that the same kids who appear in “Christmas Carol” pageants every year can handle the truth about ghosts and death. So instead, “Hathaways” features Michelle Hathaway (Ginifer King), a recent divorcee who moves her two spunky daughters, Taylor (Amber Montana) and Frankie (Breanna Yde), to New Orleans to open a posh pastry shop.
They soon discover that their funky fixer-upper is already occupied by the ghosts of a youngish hipster jazz musician, Ray (Chico Benymon), his precocious and ingratiating tween son, Miles (Curtis Harris), and his other more spirited son, Louie (Memphis native Benjamin “Lil P-Nut” Flores Jr.).
Louie is not only a child’s ghost, but also somebody’s apparent reincarnation of Gary Coleman — and all of the baggage that entails. Just as it avoids death, “Hathaways” completely evades the subject of race, even while loudly tap-dancing around stereotypes. And its implicit, if unintended, message is: The only way three white women can live with three black males is if the guys are dead.
Ambitious series come in three f lavors: good, bad and train wreck. Over the past two seasons, there have been two notable disasters — shows that should have been good but turned out so awkwardly miserable that you couldn’t avert your eyes. NBC’s “Smash” was one. HBO’s “The Newsroom” (9 p.m. Sunday) is the other.
Like “Smash,” “The Newsroom” got a second season to work out the kinks and find redemption. But the problems that plagued the f irst season are back with a vengeance. Nearly every character sounds exactly alike. People don’t have conversations; they give speeches. And creator Aaron Sorkin’s brand of screwball comedy banter that was practically musical on “The West Wing” is now clunky, contrived and recycled from his other shows.
“The Newsroom” is proof that the more viewers get used to a popular and esteemed writer/ producer, the more they can see through his or her tricks. This became painfully obvious with every David E. Kelley production, post-”Ally McBeal.” At one point in Saturday night’s season opener, Sorkin even seems to be channeling Kelley, having glum newscaster Will (Jeff Daniels) conduct an arch, rather pretentious conversation with his producer (Emily Mortimer) while pretending to be an old-fashioned late-night FMdeejay, blasting Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” for effect.
The most annoying flaw of “The Newsroom” is its insistence on revisiting news events of recent years and reporting them anew, as they ought to have been covered. Want to relive the Romney cam- paign? Here’s your chance.
Things get doubly retrospective as this season’s plot unfolds in flashbacks to events leading to a major lawsuit against Will and the network for defamatory coverage. The legal angle allows the show to introduce Marcia Gay Harden as a no-nonsense lawyer who gets to trade brittle Sorkinesque patter with Will.
“The Newsroom” is clearly intended for news junkies and media nerds, and I consider myself to be in that crowd. So I found it a little weird that the show sets a crucial broadcast on Aug. 24, 2011. On that date (you can look it up) Hurricane Irene was already a Category 3 storm on a devastating path toward the East Coast. The president would declare a state of emergency the next day, postponing the dedication of a memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. Now that’s news. Or was news.
When you’re stuck in the past, you need to get your facts straight.
SATURDAY’S OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
A young girl works to save her school’s art program in the 2013 TV movie “An American Girl: Saige Paints the Sky” (8 p.m., WMC-TV Channel 5).
Hope for Theo on “Zero Hour” (7 p. m., WATN-TV Channel 24).
Jane discovers her mother’s fate and her link to the Drake on the series finale of “666 Park Avenue” (8 p.m., WATN-TV Channel 24).
Jason worries for Ian’s crush on “Do No Harm” (9 p.m., WMC-TV Channel 24).
“Being Human” (9 p.m., BBC America, TV14) enters its final season.
SUNDAY’S OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
Missed the acclaimed Sundance series? Catch the “Rectify” (8 a.m., AMC) marathon.
Scheduled on “60 Minutes” (6 p.m., WREGTV Channel 3): a “mercy killer” confesses; endangered turtles.
“Pop Innovators” (7 p.m., E!) profiles will.i.am.
Murder in Oxford on the “Masterpiece Mystery” (8 p.m., WKNO-TV Channel 10; WMAV-TV Channel 18) presentation of “Endeavour, Series 1.”