Stumptown and Perfect Harmony

Andrea and I came in on the ground floor of a couple of new TV shows.  A bit unusual. It seems that most shows we watch, we catch up on after the fact through reruns.

It’s watching reruns this summer that’s made Andrea a fan of Young Sheldon.  Yep, we’re watching Young Sheldon now.  It is a genuinely sweet and funny show.

Anyway, as to the total newbies we caught on to this past week.

Stumptown is bases on the comic book created and written by Greg Rucka. The series follows Dex Parios, a woman with a traumatic past whose barely holding life together in the here and now. She stumbles into being a private eye. Dex is played by Cobie Smulders which is a good way to get me on board. I’m a big fan of Cobie as Robin on How I Met Your Mother and as Maria Hill in the Marvel movies. 

My selling point to get Andrea to watch this was it’s like Jessica Jones but a bit funnier. Dex has no super powers but as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, she knows how to kick ass. Like Jessica Jones, Dex doesn’t really have time or patience for social niceties. Stumptown seems an odd fit for ABC, a broadcast network. But hopefully it will stick around. There are a lot of plot points and characters touched on in the first hour that demand a closer look in future episodes.  For example, as irresponsible as she is, Dex is somehow the guardian of her younger brother, a special needs child.  The story behind how Dex has become a de facto mom is a story I want to see developed.

The other brand new from the ground floor up show Andrea and I watched was Perfect Harmony. As members of a choir, both my wife and I were intrigued about the premise.  Arthur Cochran is a music professor from Princeton who is stuck in a small town in Kentucky; it’s where his wife came from and where she wanted to die from the illness that was claiming her life. We meet Arthur alone in his car outside of a church; he’s depressed and suicidal. He’s been drinking and he’s got a bottle of pills to chase down whatever he’s been drinking. But before he can knock back the bottle of pills, he hears singing coming from the church.

Oh, the blessed beauty of music has restored his soul, right? Nope, he finds the singing so horrendous, he wants to make sure it’s not the last thing he hears before he kills himself.  He staggers into the church, eviscerating this choir’s lack of musical talent while getting in some devastating digs in on their individual social and emotional foibles. Then he passes out drunk on the floor.

Hooray! This hapless choir has discovered their new director!

Bradley Whitford saves this show. For all the mean and biting things Arthur has to say about every single damn person and damn thing that irritates him in this damn podunk Kentucky burg, Bradley manages to infuse this cranky curmudgeon with some warmth and humanity.

Perfect Harmony is not an entirely new thing. We’ve seen the collegiate urbanite in a small rural town before a lot so there’s no new ground here. What will save this show from mediocrity is if the supporting cast can do some heavy lifting. Anna Camp has potential for being a strong counterpoint to grump Arthur. Anna plays Ginny, a single mother and waitress who leads the choir.The rest of the cast are barely sketched in and that needs to be changed soon if the show is to survive.  

More TV stuff to come in future posts.