You know it's summer in TV land when Dancing with the Stars, an ABC reality show featuring washed-up pseudo-celebrities in a ballroom dancing competition, is one of the week's highest-rated shows. It used to be that summer meant people turned off their TVs because all that was on were reruns; now summer means people are apparently too catatonic to turn off their TVs to avoid watching Dancing with the Stars. I can think of no other explanation that doesn't take away my remaining faith in humanity.
Although last summer gave us the broadcast networks' first genuine efforts to provide viable year-round programming, this year they're back to cut-rate reality shows almost exclusively. Even Fox, which touted its year-round scheduling approach incessantly last year, offers up only one new scripted show, the dark crime drama The Inside (Fox, Wednesdays, 9 p.m.). It's a show with a troubled history—the pilot was reworked with a completely new concept and only one of its original stars—but a solid pedigree, and one I was expecting to like far more than I did.
Originally conceived as an update on the 21 Jump Street concept of a young officer going undercover in a high school, The Inside is now closer to The Silence of the Lambs—a little too close, really. It follows young FBI agent Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols) as she joins an elite team of agents in LA who take on the most serious crimes. Locke bears a number of similarities to Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling from Lambs, and it doesn't help that the three episodes provided for review all feature the killer of the week playing mind games with Locke and putting her in peril at some point. The annoying, whiny Nichols is also no Jodie Foster.
With creators Tim Minear (Wonderfalls, Angel, Firefly) and Howard Gordon (The X-Files, 24) and writers including Jane Espenson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Ben Edlund (Angel) and David Fury (Buffy, Lost), The Inside has one of the most talent-packed writing staffs on TV. But its gloomy, plodding procedural tone doesn't play to any of their strengths, instead offering up sub-CSI crimes, uninteresting characters and a less intriguing premise than its original, scrapped concept.
Much, much better is The Closer (TNT, Mondays, 9 p.m.), which has a strikingly similar concept and a vastly more effective execution. It's no surprise that, as always, the best summer programming is on cable. Instead of The Inside's pretty vacant Rachel Nichols, The Closer gives us older, wiser Kyra Sedgwick, an infinitely more talented actress, as the female outsider who comes into an elite squad of crime fighters in LA. This squad is part of the LAPD, not the FBI, and their crimes are a little less intense, but otherwise the setup is the same. The difference is that The Closer's creators don't feel the need to oppress the audience with manufactured darkness, instead allowing characters to develop organically. Sedgwick does more with a few looks and gestures than Nichols can with her character's entire overwrought back story.
Cable already has a lock on quality summer scripted shows, and now it looks like they're raising the bar on reality shows, at least a little. 30 Days (FX, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.) doesn't even want to be called a reality show; it's a "documentary series" from Super Size Me filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who takes the concept of his hit movie and extrapolates it into a series. In the movie, Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's for 30 days to demonstrate the deleterious effects of fast food. In the first episode of 30 Days, Spurlock and his fiancée live on minimum wage for a month to show how being poor affects everyday living.
Further episodes feature others engaging in various life-changing behavior, including a devout Christian living with a Muslim family, a pair of city dwellers attempting to live off the land and a conservative straight man living with a gay man in San Francisco. Spurlock serves as host and narrator on those episodes, which suffer from his relative absence. Although the show avoids crass reality-TV tropes, it can be dull and preachy, and would probably benefit from a shorter running time. But at least Spurlock doesn't dance.