Midterm Report Card The best and worst of the midseason replacement shows.

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by Alex Castle

After a long holiday break, the networks have cleared the dead wood out of their schedules -- we won't have Prime Suspect, Man Up!, The Playboy Club, or Charlie's Angels to kick around anymore.

Not to worry, though -- there's a whole new crop of midseason replacements to take up the slack. There are an awful lot of them, though, and unlike most people, we've got the time to watch them all, so here are our letter grades for the new shows that have aired so far. I for one would have welcomed a little fair warning before wasting time on a few of these! I will never recover the 44 minutes I wasted on the execrable Work It -- but no one will suffer that experience again, as the show was not only immediately canceled but also taken off VOD. Anyway...

Alcatraz
With J.J. Abrams as executive producer and Jorge Garcia in the cast, this supernatural crime drama is inviting a lot of comparisons to Lost, and they're not completely unfounded. The premise imagines that all 240 inmates at the maximum security island prison vanished in 1963, and are reappearing in San Francisco in the present day. An oddly young and attractive female detective (Sarah Jones) finds herself drafted into finding and returning the inmates to Alcatraz, aided by an Alcatraz expert (Garcia) and the shadowy agency that knows, but won't tell, what happened, how, and why. If it sounds a little cluttered, that's because it is. The mystery of what exactly is going on is a little too big to be left dangling the way it is, and Jones is too young and too attractive to be completely plausible as a police detective. And in what universe would a shadowy government agency deputize a comic-book store owner to do such important work? The individual plots are fine, though, and as a procedural it hits its paces capably.
Grade: B-

Are You There, Chelsea?
Through the first two episodes of this adaptation of Chelsea Handler's ode to drunken singlehood, Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, I never so much as cracked a smile, much less raised a chuckle or God forbid a laugh. Laura Prepon (That '70s Show) stars as Chelsea Handler, and she looks way too amused by the unfunny material, while Chelsea Handler stars as Chelsea's prudish older sister. This show confuses raunchy with funny, and the result is so terrible it makes Whitney look like Seinfeld.
Grade: F

House Of Lies
Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell head up the cast of this comedy series about a group of management consultants who get rich by soaking the way richer. The mechanics of the plots are super complex, but the show helps out by freeze-framing the action while Cheadle pauses to explain what's going on, and these sequences are clever and amusing. But the meat of the show's comedy comes from the crackling interplay between the four principals: Cheadle, Bell, Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation), and Josh Lawson, all four of whom have emerged as fully drawn characters in only three episodes. It's a little too cute and far from perfect, but it's the best of the new midseason crop.
Grade: B+

The Finder
As weird and quirky as a network procedural is likely to get, The Finder is a spinoff from another Fox procedural, Bones and concerns Walter Sherman, an Iraq War vet (Geoff Stults) who, as the title would suggest, is able to find anything, no matter how small (in the second episode, he finds a bullet fired 20 years ago in a place that has since been turned into a parking lot). This thing doesn't take itself the least bit seriously, takes full advantage of its tropical setting, and has a nice light tone that keeps it agreeable. Oddly, I don't much care for any of the three supporting characters -- the teenage girl is terrible and Michael Clarke Duncan is spectacularly miscast as Walter's attorney and sidekick -- but Walter himself is charming and weird enough to keep the whole thing afloat.
Grade: C+

The Firm
This show is totally puzzling. An adaptation of the 1993 Tom Cruise thriller about a young attorney who gradually learns he's been hired by a firm that represents the Mob is not a bad idea for a series, but this version inexplicably makes it into a sequel, so the same character (now played by Josh Lucas) gradually learns the exact same thing is happening to him again ten years later. That very strange choice aside, the real problem is that the show is really, really boring, despite opening each episode in media res with a chase scene. Josh Lucas, though not at all bad, is a weird choice in a role made famous by Tom Cruise, and the rest of the cast fails to move the needle at all, with the exception of Juliette Lewis as the secretary.
Grade: D-

Rob
Here it is, the Rob Schneider sitcom we've all been clamoring for: it seems the immortal star of Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo has met and married a much younger, taller, and more attractive woman of Mexican extraction (Claudia Bassols), not realizing that he's married into a huge family headed up by -- wait for it -- Cheech Marin. Trading on easy ethnic humor and lazy stereotypes, this thing is offensive even to people who don't get offended. Schneider's character has exactly one trait: he has OCD, which might be good if Courteney Cox had not gotten every scrap of meat off that bone 10 years ago.
Grade: D

Napoleon Dynamite
In a reversal of the tragedy of the Tenacious D movie and the Strangers With Candy movie -- both made many years after they could have mattered or built on their initial appeal -- the 2004 cult comedy Napoleon Dynamite has been turned into an animated Fox comedy, with all the movie's cast returning to lend their voices. Seems like a great idea, if a little late, but it did not make me laugh, and I liked the movie quite a bit. I don't know if it's me, or if it would have played any better if it had been made in 2005, but something has been lost in the mists of time, or maybe the translation from live-action to animation.
Grade: C 

Angry Boys
The mastermind behind the irreverent Summer Heights High, Australian comedian Chris Lilley, pushes things a little farther with this series, which follows four characters, all played by Lilley, through unconnected stories and sketches: a pair of rural Australian twin brothers; a former surfing champion; a Japanese mother trying to market a line of products around her son's skateboarding career; and a black hip-hop artist in Los Angeles. This is not exactly subtle humor, but it is very funny, much more so than I expected.
Grade: B+