As a public service, Raleigh & Company watches every new show of the fall season. All of them.
Don’t feel too bad for us. We don’t watch each show in its entirety. In fact, the amount of time we give each show is a good indicator of its quality.
Here’s the first of several installments of our No Effort TV Reviews for the Fall, 2016 season.
Today, we look at Lethal Weapon and Pitch. Surprisingly, only one of them is garbage.
Lethal Weapon, CBS Wednesdays
Damon Wayans is in this, which is exciting. But I have a bad feeling we’re not going to make it far enough into the show to see him.
Because we open with the new version of Riggs. Instead of a crazy-eyed Mel Gibson, we get someone out of the Dukes of Hazzard, He leads a police chase in El Paso, driving a pickup truck and “whoo”-ing it up.
The bad guys open up with a machine gun, which (as machine guns normally do) punches one bullet hole in the pickup’s windshield. “This was a new jacket!” Duke-boy Riggs yells. “Dang it! My wife’s gone’ kill me.”
Then he whips up a batch of grits and checks on his moonshine still. Not really, but given all the character depth we’ve seen so far, he might as well.
I decide I can’t in good conscience fire a show 17 seconds in, so I keep watching. His phone rings and, while dodging bullets and driving through the desert, he answers, “Hey honey! Just eatin’ doughnuts and writing parking tickets.” And … is 40 seconds enough time? I stick it out.
Riggs’ wife is in labor. Anyone who has seen the movie knows she’s going to die in a car crash. Anyone who hasn’t seen the movie has no reason to be watching this. Actually, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen the movie or not. There’s no reason to watch this.
Riggs needs to get to the hospital, so he pulls the truck over and whips out a giant rifle.
“Only three people can make that shot!” exposits his partner. Surprising absolutely no one, Riggs hits the truck, which flips over. And now he can go to the hospital to find out his wife died en route … in a car crash. Time for more “whoo”-ing.
It’s also time for something else… Time of Death: 2:05
Pitch, Fox Thursdays
I didn’t expect to need anywhere near an hour to review this show. The promos looked sappy and preachy, taking advantage of a “women can do anything” spirit surrounding Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. The opening shot, of a bouquet of flowers congratulating MLB’s first female pitcher from none other than HRC herself did nothing to change my preconception.
Then a funny thing happened—the show started.
This is a show about a woman breaking baseball’s gender barrier, and the writers and producers did something that most sports shows and movies neglect. They got the baseball right.
The show is a thoughtful, insightful look at what conditions would bring about a woman making the Major Leagues, and how that would be received by sports talk hosts, fans and the players in the clubhouse.
Early in the episode, we flash back to the pitcher—Ginny Baker—as a young girl, working with her dad. She has a strong arm, but, her dad tells her she’ll never get to the Majors with her fastball. She simply can’t throw as hard as the boys, he says, as Ginny reacts with outrage.
“It’s biology,” he says. The only way she can make it to the big leagues is if she has a trick pitch, dad says, and he proceeds to teach her a screwball.
Why is this scene so remarkable? I spoke to a former Major League player about Pitch, when the show began saturating baseball broadcasts with commercials, and he said the exact same thing as Ginny’s father—word for word. The only exception was that he suggested she learn a knuckleball.
This isn’t a sappy Disney princess baseball movie. Getting to the bigs is hard, and the show is a hard, gritty look at Ginny’s journey.
Kylie Bunbury blew me away with her portrayal of Ginny. She didn’t play a woman trying to make the Major Leagues. She played a ballplayer. She turns away from a lobby full of screaming fans without any type of acknowledgement. She takes off her headphones when her new social media manager begins speaker to her, then puts them back on wordlessly when she realizes who he is.
Spend enough time around ballplayers, and you quickly learn that a large number of them are jerks a large amount of the time. Kylie does jerk as well as the worst of them.
The least realistic part of the show came when Ginny watched Colin Cowherd discussing her debut on a TV monitor in the elevator of her hotel. You can’t get Colin’s show on Fox Sports 1 in most hotel rooms, let alone in the elevator.
Mark Paul Gosselaar does such a good job playing the wisecracking veteran catcher that I didn’t realize it was him until checking IMDB to see what episode he was going to join the show after watching the entire episode.
This was a show that looked like it had no shot, but it was funny, gritty and created drama on and off the field. Not only did I watch the full 60 minutes, I’m kind of looking forward to next week.
