The TV Set

Everyone knows that the back-lot Dumpsters of Hollywood are stuffed with the remains of once-great pitches, mercilessly torn asunder by the shredders of commerce (we love your script about genocide in Darfur, but do the African characters have to die? Why not make it a comedy for the 18-to-24 male demographic instead? And can you throw in a talking dog?). But anyone who thinks film and artistic integrity don’t mix should peek through the bone yards of the boob tube. The TV Set charts the slow, step-by-step asphyxiation of one television writer’s series as it goes from personal expression to a gutted product that corporate suits still sell as something — cue overcaffeinated announcer’s voice — “you won’t want to miss!”

For Mike (David Duchovny), a veteran scribe who’s finally getting a shot at making his autobiographical pet project The Wexler Chronicles, the collateral damage starts immediately. He wants to cast a talented young nebbish as his small-screen alter ego; the scheduling executive (Sigourney Weaver) is pressuring him to go with the photogenic hack-tor who fancies himself the second coming of Bob Saget (“My daughter will think he’s cute” is Weaver’s reasoning — her pubescent offspring makes most of the network’s important decisions). Once his pilot goes into production, Mike’s vision is systematically dismantled: Major plot points, like a character’s suicide, are rewritten beyond recognition, the show’s star keeps deep-sixing delicate scenes thanks to a bad case of Methoditis, and focus-group feedback dilutes anything that might prove offensive to suburban Ohio residents. By the time his baby has been prepped for the fall lineup, the title has been changed to Call Me Crazy and poignant soliloquies have been “enhanced” with inappropriate hip-hop tunes and fart noises.

Bottom-line-obsessed brass, brain-dead divas, fragile egos and power trips…we’ve been here before in shows like 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip — but this piss-take is less a poison-pen valentine than an exorcism of past grudges. Writer-director Jake Kasdan and producer Judd Apatow were responsible for both Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared — two exemplary shows that sailed past their network patrons’ heads — so they give this parody pedigree. Yet the duo’s well-documented experiences in the trenches make their tameness here all the more frustrating. Had they included, say, comments taken from actual meetings, you can imagine the kind of corrosive fuck-you Kasdan and Apatow could have delivered. There’s a long-standing tradition of films — Barton Fink to The Big Knife, The Player to Network — that have made four-course meals out of biting the hand that feeds. The TV Set, however, leaves faint teeth marks when it should be drawing blood.

It’s tempting to think that a real-life studio counterpart to Sigourney Weaver’s tone-deaf gorgon had a hand in Severance, a British horror-comedy about white-collar workers whose team-building retreat in the Balkans turns into a bloodbath. It would explain a lot, actually. Christopher Smith’s previous feature, the don’t-go-down-in-the-subway-tunnels thriller Creep (2004), had just the right amount of nausea-inducing dread that made those ’70s splatter flicks burrow under your skin. His follow-up, however, feels like a one-sentence pitch — “It’s The Office meets Friday the 13th!” — that never got fleshed out. The fact that these drones work for a global-defense contractor suggests a commentary about chickens coming home to roost — but either the coherent version of that message got watered down along the way or Smith’s smarter ideas were simply trumped by his love of Karo syrup and topless chicks with guns.

Speaking of wasted potential…remember Luc Besson? U.S. audiences swooned over the French stylist when his breakthrough film, La Femme Nikita (1990), took a typical American action-movie premise and turned it into a masterpiece of adrenalized Euro-slickness. He then spent the next decade pissing away that film’s promise by delivering works of diminishing returns (The Messenger, anyone?). Angel-A, his first directorial effort in seven years, doesn’t suggest that the time off did any good. The story of a suicidal lowlife in debt to the Mob, and the ethereal, mysterious Dutch dame (see title) who helps him out of a jam is cloying enough to put off the most ardent of fans, and his insistence on shooting in black-and-white ups the pretension level to an unbearable degree. Still, its appeal to the 14-year-old daughters of network programmers could give it a second life as a TV series, perhaps, a sort of Touched by an Angel filtered through the aesthetic of a Calvin Klein Obsession commercial.