TV Is Back: My Own Worst Enemy & Crusoe

Oh, NBC, there was a time when you were the most exciting channel on TV. That's still true to a certain extent. You have "30 Rock," and "The Office," which are far and away TV's two best live-action comedies. You have "Heroes," for whatever it's worth (given the current popularity of super heroes, imagine how many people would watch it if it was GOOD), and "Chuck," which is still so much fun, even if no one's really watching. You have "Saturday Night Live," which isn't as biting as "The Daily Show" these days but has its own loopy place (McCain: "Sen. Obama, my invisible friend Simon can't be appointed to the Cabinet. He's a Unicorn. I think you know that.").

But now you've put out an entire new slate of shows, and every single one of them's a dud, without exception. "Knight Rider" is incredibly awful, and I ended up watching most of the last ten minutes of "Kath & Kim" the other night against my will and there wasn't a single laugh in that entire time. This week came the debuts of "My Own Worst Enemy" and "Crusoe".

"My Own Worst Enemy" is, as a concept, about identity. It's billed as a sort of modern-day Jekyll & Hyde story mixed with James Bond. That probably sounds good to you, but the show simply fails to deliver. Its biggest problem is that it's hard to tell its Jekyll from its Hyde. This is a show whose fundamental premise is that two distinct personalities share one body, that of (very) poor-man's Tom Cruise, Christian Slater. One is supposed to be a cool, dark secret agent who can kill people with his feet, and the other is a normal guy who works in an office. But we're not left thinking the two of them are that different, which is fatal.

The first problem is that Slater is horribly miscast. Some actors could have a field day with dual role. Slater is definitely not one of them. As a secret agent he's stoic, and as a regular guy he's... pretty stoic, actually. He's not really capable of anything else. When he figures out he's two different people, he seems mildly perturbed. Then there's the other issue, which is that the normal guy's life is actual a very Hollywood version of a normal guy's life, which makes it almost as glamorous as secret agent guy's. Secret Agent Guy sleeps with hot women, Normal Guy sleeps with his hot wife. Secret Agent Guy drives a cool new sports car. Normal Guy drives... a cool new car given to us by our friends in the product placement department. Secret Agent Guy hangs out in spectacular hotel rooms. Normal Guy hangs out in... a spectacularly large, nice house.

I am normally good with suspension of disbelief. You want me to believe that we're on the rings of Saturn fighting the aliens with laser beams coming from the eyes of the space whale we're riding, I'm good with that. But I need the actions of characters and groups within the story to make sense. The explanation of why our Secret Agency would go through all the trouble of creating Double Personality Action Christian Slater isn't really there here. And without any basis in reality, we're left with nothing but Christian Slater failing to give us two separate people.

On to "Crusoe," which was probably the best of the NBC bunch so far, though that's saying oh so little. The pilot gives us Sam Neill and Sean Bean, but both are in flashbacky guest roles. The star is supposed to be one Philip Winchester, who spends most of the opening episode showing us his chest muscles, which are certainly impressive. He has his sidekick Friday (Tongai Chirisa), who is a lot like Crusoe, in that he seems to be good at everything and also has nice chest muscles. In any case, I was mildly entertained for about 45 minutes. I soon discovered to my horror that the opening episode was actually two hours long. The plot involved pirates who happen to wash up on shore, many of them ending up killed by Crusoe himself (which I think we're supposed to think is funny), except for the hot sword-fighting chick.

These guys come off as the "Pirates of the Caribbean" understudy company, and that's the whole point of the show. I wondered when the schedules came out where the idea for a Robinson Crusoe series could have come from. Surely it wasn't an extremely late attempt to rip off "Lost"? Thankfully, that's not the case. Just as the original "Battlestar Galactica" was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the "Star Wars" phenomenon, "Crusoe" is a blatant attempt to capitalize on "Pirates." I suppose you can't blame them for trying, though it's so blatant we're left thinking about that rather than the what's going on on-screen.

Neither Crusoe nor Friday end up as much of a character. They're just sort of good at everything. Robinson seems to have some ability with ropes and pullies and inventions. He has a contraption that squeezes five lemons at once. Because you need to do that all the time. He has a bridge over pirahna infested water (go to the NBC website to learn how to build your own!) that consists of a very strange wheel mechanism and a complex series of ropes. I was left wondering why he didn't just build a regular rope bridge. As scruffy pirate guy says, "Seems like you've had too much time your hands."

The series is also pretty much robbed of any sense of reality by its crappy production values that reminded me of nothing more than a Halmi miniseries, or maybe "Hercules"/"Xena" type syndicated shows (which, I was not surprised to find, Halmi was also involved with). So what we end up with is a sort of stilted stageplay on a tropical island that plays like kids making up a story based on all the crappy movies they've seen lately while wearing halloween costumes. It's only really worth sitting through if they're your kids, chest muscles not withstanding.