How to Get Away With Murder

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Catch

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Decisions on whether to cancel or renew TV shows are fundamentally mysterious to me. Loads of good TV gets canceled (and sometimes not even because of poor ratings) while crap gets renewed. Maybe there are monetary or political considerations at work in these decisions. A good example of this, for me, is the show The Catch. It’s the fourth of Shonda Rhimes’s shows to be on the air at the same time. Her grip on network television feels almost dictator-like, as the trio of her hit shows – Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, dominate. The long-running Grey’s has hit a creative renaissance, while (for me) Scandal and How to Get… suffer. Scandal grows increasingly ridiculous while How to Get hit a popular nerve in its first season, but seemed to grow less interesting in its second season. Maybe it was just me, but I grew weary and considered whether I should even continue (especially because it lost its magnetism for me).

Given this backdrop, The Catch was pitched as some kind of sexy mystery caper. Helmed by the usually solid Mireille Enos as Alice, it is immediately obvious that this show is not the right vehicle for Enos … or frankly for anyone in the show, including Peter Krause, who plays Enos’s conman fiance. He has conned her and her investigative firm, but doesn’t disappear into thin air afterwards because he has, apparently, actually fallen in love with his mark. The premise is flawed because it’s like it was written for the span of an eight-episode mini-series, not for a multi-season regular tv show. But it was nevertheless renewed for a second season, despite the weakness of the plot and the apparent discomfort of all the players in the play, so to speak. The script and story make all the characters look foolish and dumb, not at all the clever, canny, intuitive people we’d expect to be successful heads of major investigative firms or successful swindlers and con artists. I am prepared to buy into things that are not necessarily believable premises, but things like The Catch – with its bad plots, bad writing and overglamourizing its main characters – isn’t one of those things.

It’s boring; it’s a story that has been told multiple times before; it’s not even got a hook to differentiate it from stories like it before.

Lunchtable TV Talk: How to Get Away with Murder is Damages

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As I tuned in for the much-anticipated start to the sophomore season of How to Get Away with Murder, hot on the heels of a deserved Viola Davis Emmy win, I was struck by how a lot of TV is about placement and timing. See, How to Get Away with Murder is basically Damages with much more diverse cast and much better promotion.

Damages had a worthy rival to HtGAwM’s Annalise Keating in a strong, ruthless and tightly wound Glenn Close as Patty Hewes. Both women are conniving, bright, cutthroat and lethal in their own often twisted pursuit of their own definitions of justice. Both have done insane and questionable things. And most of all, both women have very little control over – and are practically unhinged in – their personal lives. It’s in their personal lives that things come apart. The story comes from those cracks in the power-hungry, driven veneer they project. And both stories are compelling and revealed key pieces of information in fragments, so you might think you knew – sort of – what was going to happen later in the season based on glimpses of things you had seen earlier – but not until the final episode would the entire story have unfolded.

The difference… Damages got short shrift, at least from viewers. Damages was intense and critically praised, but never found an audience. It was technically cancelled, in fact, after FX decided to get rid of it after three poorly performing seasons. It was given a two-season reprieve via a deal with DirecTV (which also revived the loved and lauded Friday Night Lights after NBC wanted to cut it short). With the way it moved around, it certainly never found its footing, and was gone too soon despite stellar casting and tight stories for all five of its seasons. In addition to the formidable Glenn Close, Damages featured Rose Byrne, Timothy Olyphant (the one and only from both Deadwood and Justified), David Costabile (increasingly visible all the time in all manner of shows, from Flight of the Conchords to Breaking Bad, from Suits to the rather irritating and cancelled Dig, from Ripper Street to Low Winter Sun), Janet McTeer (love her and sad her recent show, Battle Creek, was cancelled so soon), Ted Danson, Lily Tomlin, John Goodman, William Hurt, the ubiquitous
Željko Ivanek, Ryan Phillippe and the leader of the John Hannah School of English Elocution, John Hannah.

When I binge-watched the compelling first seasons of HtGAwM, it felt familiar in many ways because it covered a lot of the ground Damages had already tread. It was still fresh because it has its own story and feel, but it made me feel regret that Damages was so little seen during its original broadcast (hopefully people are picking it up on Netflix). None of this takes anything away from the magnetic nature of How to Get Away with Murder, but instead, it’s worth stating that if you like it, maybe you will also like Damages.