The Daily Beast: "Revenge: What Went Wrong with ABC’s Once-Daring Thriller?"

Last year, Revenge was a thrill-a-minute vengeance fantasy but now, in its second season, it’s a convoluted mess. My take on the show’s head-scratching fall from grace.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Revenge: What Went Wrong with ABC’s Once-Daring Thriller?" In it, I ponder just what went wrong with ABC's Revenge that caused its shocking second-season drop in quality.

What a difference a year makes, particularly in the life of a serialized television narrative.

At this time last year, ABC’s Revenge—Mike Kelley’s modern-day retelling of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, set among the Hamptons polo set—was a dazzling vengeance fantasy, reveling in its dark nature and the even darker journey of Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), a woman scorned who was out for payback against the wealthy clan who destroyed her life and shattered her family.

It functioned on several levels and tapped into the zeitgeist of 2012; it could be seen (as I had written) as “not only winking noir … [but also as] a retribution fantasy for the 99 percent,” as Emily looked to take down the conspirators who ruined her life and set up her father (James Tupper) as a fall guy for a terrorist-funded financial scheme that resulted in the downing of a passenger plane. Her vast fortune—acquired from a tech mogul, Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann), whom her father had helped when he was starting out—was used in service of her holy mission of vengeance.

And each week, Revenge found Emily immolating her sense of morality as she concocted yet another grandiose revenge scheme, caring little about the collateral damage she was causing around her. She was entrancing, as I wrote last year: “Emily—criminal mastermind, computer hacker, cat burglar, and willing arsonist, not to mention a ronin in Giuseppe Zanotti stilettos—recalls Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander as much as she does Dumas’s Edmond Dantès.”

Where did that character disappear to? Season 2 of Revenge has seemed, in comparison to its deftly (and magnificently) plotted first season, a convoluted mess. Rather than further the central conceit—Emily’s quest for revenge against the Grayson clan, headed by femme fatale Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) and robber baron Conrad (Henry Czerny)—the show has meandered into all manner of narrative trouble: plots about a broader conspiracy, psychotic mothers, vengeance buddies (see: Barry Sloane’s Aiden), computer programs, kidnapped sisters, waterfront shakedowns, lazy double-crossings, and a ruthless terrorist organization called The Initiative, whose operative (Wendy Crewson) appears to do little besides be chauffeured around New York all day long.

In the first season, Stowe’s Victoria provided a menacing nemesis for Emily, but her role has been usurped by The Initiative, which is more evil and ruthless than even Victoria. But that’s a problem: by making Victoria the puppet of people even worse than her, it’s taken away much of her power. Additionally, Crewson’s Helen Crowley proved to be not half as interesting, complex, or scary as Victoria Grayson. The balance of power didn’t just shift in Season 2, it fell right off the scales.

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The Daily Beast: "Fall TV Preview: Where We Left Off"

Can’t remember how Revenge, Homeland, The Good Wife, or Dexter ended? Refresh your collective memory about the cliffhangers for 27 returning shows—and previews of what’s to come.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Fall TV Preview: Where We Left Off," in which Maria Elena Fernandez and I refresh your memory about how 27 shows--from Revenge and Homeland to The Good Wife and Boardwalk Empire--ended last season... and offer a glimpse about what's to come.

Carrie remembered stuff! Leslie was elected! Sheldon took Amy’s hand! Gloria is pregnant! Nucky whacked Jimmy! Victoria Grayson’s plane blew up! Dexter…oh, Dexter!

The fall TV season is officially here, which means we can all breathe a sigh of relief and pull ourselves up from the cliff-hanging precipice. Sure, there’s a bunch of new TV shows across the dial champing at the bit for your attention. But we want to focus on your returning old favorites.

What’s next on Scandal—will we find out who Quinn is? Will Emily track down her mother on Revenge? How will Captain Cragen deal with that dead hooker in his bed on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit? And just what will the gang at Greendale get up to on Community without Dan Harmon at the helm?

To refresh your memory after the long, hot summer, The Daily Beast has a guide to the good and bad times of last season and a peek into what’s coming next this fall.

Parenthood (NBC; Tuesdays at 10 p.m.; returns Sept. 11)

Where We Left Off: You’ll be forgiven for not remembering, since Parenthood wrapped its season way back in February. Crosby (Dax Shepard) and Jasmine (Joy Bryant) finally tied the knot; Adam (Peter Krause) and Crosby decided to keep the Luncheonette open; Mark (Jason Ritter) proposed to Sarah (Lauren Graham), even though the two were at odds about whether they wanted to have children. Elsewhere, after the heartbreak of not getting the baby they meant to adopt, Julia (Erika Christensen) and Joel (Sam Jaeger) instead adopted a five-year-old Latino boy, Victor (Xolo Mariduena).

Where We Pick Up: The entire Braverman clan prepares for the departure of Haddie (Sarah Ramos), who is heading off to Cornell. Sarah and Mark are happily engaged, and Sarah stumbles onto a job working for a curmudgeonly photographer (Ray Romano). Amber (Mae Whitman) is now working with her uncles at the Luncheonette, while Drew (Miles Heizer), now a high school senior, is ecstatic about the return of Amy (Skyler Day) from camp, but the course of (young) love never did run smooth. Kristina (Monica Potter) and Adam consider getting a dog for Max (Max Burkholder), while one of the Bravermans faces a—SPOILER ALERT—potential medical crisis. Prepare to cry. A lot.

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The Daily Beast: "TiVo’s Top 20 Shows Watched Before Bed: Jimmy Fallon, Lost Girl, and More"

Just what are you watching before bed? Do you tune in to watch a 10 p.m. drama? A late-night talk show? Or reality television?

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "TiVo’s Top 20 Shows Watched Before Bed: Jimmy Fallon, Lost Girl, and More," in which I examine data obtained from TiVo about the top 20 shows that people watch before they go to bed, from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and Revenge to Chopped and NCIS: LA.

It’s no secret that many Americans turn on the television as part of a nighttime ritual before bed. But what is surprising is just what they’re watching before their heads hit their respective pillows.

According to data provided by TiVo to The Daily Beast, the top program watched at bedtime was NBC’s Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, while TBS’s Conan was the most-watched cable show before bed.

“Perhaps it’s not surprising that many late-night talk shows are watched before bed,” Tara Maitra, TiVo’s general manager of content and media sales, said in a statement. “But we found it interesting that many people are also tuning into light-hearted reality shows before falling asleep.”

In fact, 22 percent of shows watched at bedtime are reality shows, with Bravo and HGTV appearing most often with 11 percent of cable programs represented (though Food Network’s Chopped crops up in the top 20), while the most-watched non-news or reality show watched at bedtime is Syfy’s Canadian import Lost Girl. Despite the fact that it went off the air in 2007, The King of Queens—now airing repeats in syndication—scored an impressive high spot at No. 23.

The top 10 recorded, rather than live, programs watched before bed included Glee, Modern Family, NCIS: Los Angeles, Smash, The Mentalist, Revenge, America’s Got Talent, American Idol, and Cougar Town. (Wait, Cougar Town?!?)

A few caveats first. The data provided by TiVo came from a sample group of 47,000 opt-in households who are TiVo or DVR subscribers and were generated by the last program—both live and recorded—that they watched after 10 p.m. on weeknights (Monday through Thursday). Multiple-day viewership was factored in as well, which is why late-night talk shows like Late Night and The Tonight Show ranked so highly here, as they air throughout the week. Finally, the percentage listed is indicative of the percentage of viewers (TiVo boxes) out of all boxes that watched at least one show during the four days of ratings analysis, including both recorded and live programs. (All times are ET/PT.)

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The Daily Beast: "Revenge: The 10 Most Memorable Twists in the Wicked First Season"

In its first season, ABC’s Revenge offered numerous twists and turns. With the first season ending tonight, I look at the show’s most memorable moments so far.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Revenge: The 10 Most Memorable Twists in the Wicked First Season," in which I offer up the most surprising, exciting, or upsetting moments in the wicked drama to date.

The first season of ABC’s Revenge wraps up tonight, likely leading to a major cliffhanger that will propel the Mike Kelley-created drama into its second year of betrayals, bait-and-switches, and vengeance plots, as Emily Thorne (Emily Van Camp) continues her campaign of destruction against the mercenary and venal Grayson clan.

Revenge itself can be looked at in several ways: a revenge fantasy for the 99 percent against the wealthy ruling class embodied by the morally corrupt Graysons, an ensemble drama set in the heightened reality of green-screen backdrops where the high cost of privilege is explored, or simply a wickedly good soap about one woman attempting to avenge her beloved father’s death and pay back those whose deeds led to her own family’s destruction.

While “Reckoning” will see Emily coming face to face with the man directly responsible for her father’s death, don’t expect all of the various subplots to be tied up neatly. Under the watchful guidance of Kelley and his writing staff, Emily’s quest for vengeance has expanded significantly enough to provide several seasons worth of plot for Revenge’s story engine. Along the way, the plot has swelled to include a number of intriguing, villainous, or plain crazy characters who have either ended up becoming part of Emily’s master plan … or collateral damage along the way.

While it’s impossible to include all of the many twists and turns this season, the list below reflects 10 of the most surprising, exciting, or upsetting moments on the first season of Revenge, from the death of a loved one to kidnapping, murder, and the truth about what happened on the beach.

WARNING: The below contains specific plot details about the entire season of Revenge, so proceed with caution if you’re not up to date.

Mystery Date
It was only recently that Emily learned the truth about her father’s death, something that the audience has suspected since the start of the season: David Clarke (James Tupper) wasn’t killed by an inmate during a prison riot, but murdered by an associate of the Grayson family, a man referred to rather enigmatically as “The White-Haired Man.” This is hardly a surprise, given the grand scale of the show, but it does connect the Graysons even more tightly to David’s destruction.

While the identity of “The White Haired Man” is still unknown, here’s what we do know: he’s the Graysons’ fixer and cleans up their messes. This includes the murder of David Clarke (with whom he was photographed—posing as a prison guard—on the day of his death), the hanging of former Grayson henchman Lee Moran (Derek Ray), and likely multiple other casualties along the way. He may be connected to a terrorist group that was responsible for the downing of passenger plane Flight 197. Conrad Grayson (Henry Czerny) was laundering money for the group. When he was exposed, the Graysons framed their business associate David Clarke for supporting the group financially, using their friends and colleagues to engineer a conspiracy. It didn’t hurt that David was having an affair with Conrad’s wife, Victoria (Madeleine Stowe), who later—unbeknownst to Conrad—became pregnant with his child, Charlotte (Christa B. Allen), who—shock!—is Emily’s sister.

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The Daily Beast: "Revenge is not only winking noir, it’s a retribution fantasy for the 99 percent"

ABC’s hit nighttime soap Revenge is not only winking noir, it’s a retribution fantasy for the 99 percent.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, in which I visit the set of Revenge and talk to its creator, Mike Kelley, and cast members--including Emily VanCamp, Madeleine Stowe, and Gabriel Mann--about the show’s popularity.

It’s difficult to escape the narrative lure that ABC’s nighttime soap Revenge—equal parts vengeance fantasy, noir-tinged thriller, and sprawling character-based soap—casts in its wake. The drama (Wednesdays at 10 p.m), inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, has been featured everywhere from the cover of Entertainment Weekly to a sumptuous Oscar-night promo.

Every one of its deliriously unexpected plot twists is voraciously dissected on Twitter by the Revenge faithful, captivated by the show’s premise: a young woman, Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), returns to the Hamptons to wreak havoc on those who destroyed her family, exacting a bitter, um, revenge that tightens a noose around the necks of the wealthy residents of the Long Island community, even as she finds herself caught in a love triangle between Daniel (Joshua Bowman), the son of femme fatale Victoria (Madeleine Stowe) who destroyed her family’s fragile happiness, and her childhood crush, Jack (Nick Wechsler). Emily—criminal mastermind, computer hacker, cat burglar, and willing arsonist, not to mention a ronin in Giuseppe Zanotti stilettos—recalls Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander as much as she does Dumas’s Edmond Dantès. Forget about the Hamptons, this show is firmly based in Crazy Town, as Emily commits every crime short of murder to achieve her ends.

“She wants them to suffer the way that she has suffered her entire life,” said VanCamp, sitting in a smoke-filled dive bar a few blocks from the ocean, which is standing in as a low-rent meeting place for her character. “That’s the only satisfaction that she can ever get. She’s missing that forgiveness is ultimately the best way out.”

While VanCamp said this, she was wearing a brown wig, sapphire-blue contact lenses, and the sort of low-cut skimpy dress that would have landed Lindsay Lohan in the tabloids back in the day, a disguise pulled from Emily Thorne’s figuratively bottomless bag of tricks. This costume is fairly standard fare for Revenge, which deals easily in vertiginous doubles and assumed identities, among other tropes. An attempted murder is caught on tape from the belly of a whale statuette; two characters are revealed to be unlikely siblings; a down-and-out stripper bludgeons a private investigator to death. It’s heady and out-there stuff, the show’s innate campiness fusing with a dose of actual homoeroticism at times. From the outside, Revenge is a show that should never have succeeded, one with a seemingly ludicrous and close-ended plot, stuck in a dead-end time slot, and with a star who had made her bones in earnest fare like Everwood and Brothers & Sisters. Yet it’s getting roughly 8 million viewers per week, with just the right sort of audience in these ratings-starved times.

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The Daily Beast: "Fall TV Report Card: The Winners and Losers"

With the 2011-12 television season in full swing and the cancellation orders stacking up, Jace Lacob rounds up the season’s winners (Revenge! Homeland!), losers (Man Up! Whitney!), and draws.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest story, "Fall TV Report Card: The Winners and Losers," in which I offer up not a critic's list, or a Best of 2011 TV list, but a business story selecting the winners and losers (as well as draws) for the first half of the 2011-12 television season. (Those selections are in the gallery.)

With the 2011-12 television season well underway, it’s become increasingly clear that this isn’t the best fall the broadcasters have ever had. Back in May, when the networks touted their new offerings to advertisers, it appeared they were trying to take some risks with their programming.

But the opposite is true: most of those shows featured what the networks hoped were built-in audiences for retro brand settings (Pan Am! The Playboy Club!) or remakes of vintage television (Charlie’s Angels, it’s back to pop-culture heaven for you), but viewers largely stayed away from these and many of the new fall shows.

Those claiming that viewers’ attention is elsewhere, such as on the Internet, likely don’t have a response for the oversize audience for things like AMC’s The Walking Dead, now the highest-rated cable show on the air, or the first post–Charlie Sheen episode of CBS’s Two and a Half Men. (The latter could be due to sampling, but the show has remained consistently in the range of 14 million to 16 million viewers since then.) It seems as though people are watching television, but they’re increasingly just not that excited about what’s airing on the broadcasters. (Just look at the declining fortunes of once-invulnerable reality franchise The Biggest Loser.) Which is downright worrisome, as the networks have to replace aging series and churn out new and zeitgeist-grabbing programming on a yearly basis. And sorry, Fox, but that wasn’t The X Factor, despite the nonstop hype.

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The Daily Beast: "TV to Watch (and Skip) This Fall"

The fall television season is now upon us, and the offerings seem pretty underwhelming for the most part.

From must-watch entries like A Gifted Man, Revenge, Homeland, and Pan Am to the better-forgotten Terra Nova, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, Man Up!, and Grimm, I break down which new shows you should be watching this fall and which will have you running from the room, in my latest feature at The Daily Beast, "TV to Watch (and Skip) This Fall."

What will you be watching this fall? And what are you skipping altogether? Head to the comments section to discuss.

The Daily Beast: "Desperate Times for TV Networks"

The fall of 2004 kicked off a television season that brought us some of the biggest hits of the last decade, launching Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, and House. Seven years later, those supernovas are either burning out or dead altogether, victims of audience fatigue or oversight, as their once-huge numbers dwindled year after year.

ABC announced on Sunday that Desperate Housewives will end its run in May—-the demise of the once powerful drama signals a death knell for serialized storytelling at the broadcast networks.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Desperate Times for TV Networks," in which I examine the death of massively popular scripted TV, with the announcement that long-running drama Desperate Housewives is to end.

Have the days of 2004-05 season--and those massive ratings--gone for good? Does Terra Nova have a chance in hell? Head to the comments section to discuss and debate.