US TV: the hits and misses of a turbulent season

Now that the dust from the writers' strike has finally settled and programmes are slowly limping back on to our screens, one thing seems clear: most of the shows launched this season are wounded, in some cases fatally reports Sarah Hughes...

We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.

But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.

Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.

It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.

Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.

The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.

Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...

The fall and rise of the Baldwin dynasty

One is in celebrity rehab, another's an evangelical preacher. And the other two? They're in hit TV shows. Andrea Hubert celebrates the rise, fall and miraculous return of the Baldwin brothers...

Audiences are notoriously fickle creatures. We'll happily hum along to our favourite tarnished pop princess' catchiest tracks while simultaneously giggling over her latest mental breakdown, justified in the smug knowledge that if she presents us with even a half decent attempt at her former glory, we'll welcome her back with open arms. Ultimately, despite our tabloid-addicted bitchy streaks, everybody loves a star that bounces back. Which is why, right here right now, it's good to be a Baldwin.

Currently riding the glorious comeback wave are Alec, in the hit comedy 30 Rock, and William, in new drama Dirty Sexy Money, as an arrogant TV exec and a politician respectively. Over in the US, the two younger, less successful Baldwins, Stephen and Daniel, are keeping their end up with appearances in Celebrity Apprentice, Celebrity Fat Club and, naturally, Celebrity Rehab. A few years ago, you'd be hard pressed to recall the last time you saw any of their faces in your living room. Now, the challenge is finding a Baldwin-free zone on your box.

Not that you'll want to. 30 Rock marked a brilliant return to form for Alec, cementing his status as not only a great dramatic actor, but a truly talented comedian. His portrayal of Jack Donaghy, the obnoxious "vice president of East Coast television and microwave oven programming" (also a member of a clearly parodic multi-siblinged Irish Catholic family prone to violent fighting), showcases his dry wit and seductive voice. It takes a truly engaging charisma to make shrink's dream client Donaghy ("I like you. You have the boldness of a much younger woman") as likable as he is. Meanwhile, former heartthrob William, now in his forties and slightly jowlier than the good old verging-on-gay-porn Backdraft days, is finally proving he's more than just a pretty face as Patrick Darling VI, a reluctant senator who (in the grandest departure from former roles one could imagine) enjoys sleeping with transgendered prostitutes. Which makes a welcome change from whatever he thought he was doing with Sliver and Fair Game.

William, though he has more skeletons in his movie closet than his older brother, has at least held down a stable marriage, to former Wilson-Phillips singer Chynna Phillips, since 1995. Alec has been far more noticeable over the past few years for his politics, his loud mouth, and an epic public divorce battle of Mills-McCartney-esque levels of bile with ex-wife, actress Kim Basinger. Their ongoing war came to an ugly head in 2007, when a ridiculously angry voicemail message from Baldwin to his 11-year-old daughter Ireland was posted on the internet, in which a publicly excoriated Baldwin called his daughter, among other things a "thoughtless little pig". With repeated reports of on-set histrionics and some amusingly inappropriate diehard democrat political descriptions (Dick Cheney is a "terrorist" while George W merely "a trust-fund puppet"), Alec's public profile has taken something of a battering.

Which only makes his return to popularity all the more remarkable. Perhaps it's because everyone loves a celebrity dynasty. The Kennedys, the Barrymores, the Arquettes (don't laugh) - all occupy a sacred space in the hearts of Yanks who cling to any scrap of legacy that could be deemed as historically significant. They'll put up with a lot from their dynasties, and even when every member is wading neck-deep in a cesspool of career sludge, they'll still give them enough wiggle room to dazzle us with a brilliant new album/movie/TV show/presidency (delete where appropriate). And there's something endearing about those slightly chubby Baldwin boys.

No matter what risible antics they get up to, they're an indelible part of popular culture, scratched into our consciousness firstly in Clueless as a byword for hot ("Okay, so he's kind of a Baldwin") and later by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, first in South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut, when Canada bombs the shit out of their cartoon mansion ("Hey Alec," yells 'toon Billy, in painfully ironic last words, "you know what sucks about being a Baldwin? Nothing!") and later in Team America, where they remind us, cheerfully, in cruel song, "You are worthless Alec Baldwin/You failed in every way/And now my stock in you has fallen/Your career is stallin'." Sung with love, obviously.

Besides which, the Baldwins are significantly useful in areas of life that people actually care about. While William's the poster boy for happily ever after, everybody's least favourite Baldwin, drug-addled overweight Daniel (does anybody even remember that two-year career zenith on Homicide: Life On The Street?) is drying out and losing weight on camera. And Alec, despite his marital strife, self confessed OCD, and unsteady string of girlfriends (Ally Sheedy, Kristin Davis and Tatum O'Neal to name a few), has fully embraced an issue close to many people's hearts - animal rights. A strict vegan, he recently narrated Meet Your Meat, a promotional PETA video that shows the appalling conditions of tasty animals. "What you are about to see is beyond your worst nightmares," he warns, leaving you terrified, a little turned on, and (ashamedly) waiting for a punchline. Now how many PETA videos can claim that?

Fresh from his onscreen feud with Piers Morgan in the US Celebrity Apprentice (we love you Stephen!), the littlest Baldwin has gone one further, heading straight to the heart of middle America by eschewing a potentially successful acting career (he was one of The Usual Suspects) to become an evangelical preacher, combining the word of the Gospel with extreme sports. And in true Baldwin fashion, he's not holding back even a little bit. His best-selling memoir, The Unusual Suspect, includes an open letter to Satan's alleged disciple Bono, criticising his dedication to erasing third world debt.

Oh, and he also promises that if you try and stop him making disciples of the youth of America, he's going to "break your face". It's a tough call working out which is funnier - 30 Rock or this?

As champions of the underdog, even us Brits have to agree there's no feeling warmer than seeing formerly chubby, formerly shamed or formerly addicted members of a notorious dynasty blast their way back from the brink of oblivion. Our boys may once have been a laughing stock but if you think they're ever out of the game, you really don't understand what it means to be a Baldwin.

Dirty Sexy Money, Fri, 9pm, C4

Peter Krause on Dirty Sexy Money

Peter Krause tells Benji Wilson about playing the role of an altruistic lawyer to Donald Sutherland's corrupt family in Dirty Sexy Money.

Something of a Faustian journey’ is how Peter Krause describes his role in Dirty Sexy Money, Channel 4’s new US drama series, which starts on Friday. This is a significant understatement – Faust merely made a pact with the Devil. Krause’s character Nick George makes a pact with the Darling family, and that, he soon learns, is much more complicated.

An amalgam of the Kennedys, the Hiltons and the Osbournes, the Darlings – who are the richest family in New York City – will soon become the most monstrous family on television. Patriarch Tripp Darling (an imperious Donald Sutherland) is as close to a functioning human being as the clan possesses. The rest of them forcibly insert the filthy into filthy rich. Tripp’s wayward scions include Patrick (William Baldwin), who’s running for Senator while seeing a transsexual lover; Reverend Brian (Glenn Fitzgerald), a Torquemada-style man of the cloth; the giggling, vacuous twins Jeremy and Juliet (Seth Gabel and Samaire Armstrong); and the serial divorcee Karen (Natalie Zea).

Nick enters their charmed circle because his father Dutch had been their lawyer. The young Nick thus grows up with a healthy contempt for mammon, instead becoming a do-gooder attorney with a stock of pro bono clients.

But when Dutch is killed in a mysterious plane crash, Nick finds himself drawn back into the Darlings’ affairs by an offer of $10million a year to spend on his good works, and the chance to find out what happened to his father. Minutes after accepting, he’s on his way to bail out Jeremy, who’s just ‘won’ a yacht full of illegal immigrants on an all-night poker binge.

As the title suggests, there is enough glitz and intrigue in Dirty Sexy Money to bring back memories of the Eighties heyday of US imports such as Dynasty and Dallas. But since then, American television has upped its game and the boundaries of comedy, drama and soap have been eroded by smart hybrids such as Desperate Housewives. Dirty Sexy Money straddles every genre – it has unashamedly madcap plotlines (for example, Reverend Brian passing off his illegitimate son as a Swedish orphan), it’s got more complexity than a sitcom, and it’s funnier than a drama.

Even so, the casting of Krause is a surprise. Krause (it rhymes with ‘wowser’) turned down the role three times because, he says, ‘I was terrified of the show being successful and having to do it for seven years. I have commitment issues.’

His commitment issues arise from the fact that programmes with Krause in the lead have a habit of succeeding. After two years playing a television presenter in Aaron Sorkin’s much underrated Sports Night, he went on to five award-laden series of Six Feet Under, one of American television’s recent highpoints.

When that finished in 2005, Krause went off-piste. Rather than cashing in with, say, an action movie, he starred in a controversial indie film about America’s post-9/11 paranoia called Civic Duty (‘I got accused both of being anti-American and also a real right-wing American’) and then a science-fiction miniseries, The Lost Room. Craig Wright, who wrote some of the standout episodes of Six Feet Under, convinced him to return to series television.

‘Craig’s aim here was to conduct an exploration of wealth while providing an entertaining show,’ says Krause. ‘Craig has created a very complicated psychological world. In life, Nick’s father was practically dead to him already. He doesn’t want to see him. He doesn’t want to talk to him. Then when he dies, out of guilt he feels that he should be responsible for finding out whether something did happen to his father.’

In Six Feet Under, a drama about a family of undertakers, Krause’s character Nate had repeated imaginary interaction with his dead father and ended up – reluctantly – doing his job. Dirty Sexy Money has no dream sequences, but it does have a similar love-hate father-son dynamic.

‘I think that’s a universal theme – the desire to differentiate yourself from your parents,’ says Krause. ‘If there’s something in your father that strikes you negatively, then you say, “I am not going to be that way.” I was the same – I didn’t want to become my father. And yet you find yourself magnetically being drawn towards those very things which you so abhor.’

Wright has said he created Nick with Krause in mind. That’s quite a compliment – Nick is unfailingly altruistic, the model of probity. But Krause suggests that Nick will not prove beyond reproach. ‘This show wants to ask some very basic questions,’ he says, ‘such as, do the ends justify the means? Does power corrupt? And along the way, we’ll have fun exploring human desire, what people want, and how we foolishly go about getting it.’

Dirty Sexy Money is on Channel 4 on Friday, 21 March at 9.00pm

Further reading: William Baldwin talks...

Amorality is the glue of the television family

Amorality is the glue binding TV clans together- and none is stickier than the Darlings in Dirty Sexy Money insists Stephen Armstrong...

Television was created with the family in mind. Being British, we started with a high-minded mission to educate and inform, but soon gave that up and got in the sitcoms. In America, however, Congress was insisting television should be about and for the family as early as the 1950s.

In the 1970s, the small screen saw the family through misty eyes - in Family, Eight Is Enough, The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie – while the 1980s of Dallas and Dynasty revelled in it as a focus for high fashion and high finance. By the 1990s, however, family was on reality television in Oprah and Jerry Springer, washing its laundry with bile and venom. This led scripted series to create “new family” units, such as the guys you hung out with in Friends and Seinfeld. Now, with the new series Dirty Sexy Money, the family is back, taking the fiction of New York’s wealthiest clan and gorging on its dysfunction. The Bible Belt must view its arrival as an omen of the end of days.

We see the Darlings through the eyes of purity. Idealistic Nick George (Six Feet Under’s Peter Krause) reluctantly becomes the family lawyer for the ultra-wealthy, eccentric New York Darlings when his father, their previous attorney, dies suspiciously. The machiavellian patriarch, Donald Sutherland, buys George’s soul by donating to his fiancée’s charity - although he had hoped to hire Bill Clinton. Within seconds, Nick is bailing out the wastrel Jeremy Darling when he wins a yacht that’s packed with illegal immigrants in a poker game, covering for the aspiring politician Patrick Darling’s trans-sexual affairs, smoke-screening three murder investigations and fending off hatred from the Rev Brian Darling and sexual advances from the sultry Karen Darling. He’s busy, busy, busy.

Of course, it’s not hard to see where the executive producer, Greg Berlanti, gets his material. The matriarch, Letitia Darling, is in the Jackie Kennedy mould - where “mould” means “exact template”. Samaire Armstrong’s Juliet Darling, meanwhile, is a peroxide-blonde heiress trying to make it as an actress while slutting her way through New York society. Paris Hilton has never seemed so interesting - but Armstrong’s script is better. Indeed, the show seems to be pouring scorn on the likes of Hilton and her gadabout gang just as their own families are rebelling at the monstrosity of their excess.

American television has been creeping in this direction for some time, of course, with the coruscating influence of blood ties firmly at the heart of Six Feet Under and last year’s Brothers & Sisters. Joining Dirty Sexy Money on our screens is Jimmy Smits, in Cane - a business epic about scheming Cuban-American rum magnates - giving us more feuding clans to watch than the UN observers at Culloden.

There’s no question where this particular trend began: in New Jersey in 1999. David Chase had been touting his Sopranos script around Hollywood for three years before HBO spotted its potential. The idea of family shows - even shows about “the family” – was dead, he was told. Yet, in this post-Sopranos world, amorality at the heart of all relationships delights US primetime audiences, from Desperate Housewives to the forthcoming Pushing Daisies (in which the romantic lead is basically a serial rekiller). Even Heroes features messed-up failures barely managing to get by. Which is why the time is so perfect for Sutherland.

As Dirty Sexy Money’s camp insanity unfolds, he lurks at the centre, channelling Mephistopheles as beautifully as ever. When the plots wobble too far from their tracks, when the bodies smother credulity, he can freeze screen time with just the slightest, barely audible breath.

When we meet on the set, he is in wisecracking form. What keeps a 72-year-old working so hard? “Debt,” he deadpans. And how do you think Dirty Sexy Money compares with 1980s family sagas such as Dynasty and Dallas? “I didn’t see Dallas and Dynasty - I was really somewhere else in the 1980s.” I laugh. He looks mock-outraged. “Now you’re guessing,” he says.

His character, he believes, is not a devious man. “He’s someone who pursues the poetry of truth,” he smiles slightly. “I mean, I know a lot about manipulation, but he doesn’t.” And does he believe the show’s premise - that wealth and power are dirty and sexy? “It’s true there are certain aspects of power that are associated with money,” he nods. “If you look at Bill Clinton, you know power corrupts, and absolute power makes you really horny. But look at Warren Buffett. Look at Bill Gates. They certainly feel their power, but they feel an obligation to participate economically and socially in the community they live in.”

He pauses and grins. “The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky talked to a graduating class at Dartmouth in 1989. He looked at them and he said, ‘You know, this is the best day of the rest of your life. Everything else is going to go downhill from now on. You’re going to get things. The more things you get, the more boring it’s going to be. In the middle of it all, try to stay passionate. Leave your cool to the constellation. Passion alone is a remedy against boredom.’”

Dirty Sexy Money is on Channel 4 from March 21 at 9pm

Further reading: William Baldwin talks..;