`Wonderland,” the surprising and probably doomed new ABC series, conveys the feeling that, always, something is about to happen, and it could be just about anything.
Debuting Thursday (9 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7), it is an edge-of-your-seat show, sometimes more busy than compelling, but always with a sense of excitement and risk-taking.
That is, perhaps, not surprising, given that it is set in a New York mental-health facility. Crazy people have a way of doing the unexpected.
But multitalented creator/writer Peter Berg, a movie director/writer (“Very Bad Things”) best known as a “Chicago Hope” star, has much more to offer here than just the usual pictorial tour of the ways mental illness manifests itself.
To portray the medical staff who are the show’s focus, Berg has assembled a first-rate ensemble cast, including Ted Levine of Chicago theater and “Silence of the Lambs” fame and Michelle Forbes of “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
He has incorporated a quick-cutting documentary camera style as visceral as anything since the early days of “Homicide.” It’s a perfect visual representation of chaos barely controlled.
And he demonstrates in the early episodes that he is not afraid of the dark. These stories, at least in the first two episodes, try to visit the dimly lit corners of human deeds and motivations. Time, if this series gets it, will tell, but Berg seems willing to let things be a little murky, unlike the more neatly packaged NBC hospital show that is its direct competition on Thursdays.
The staff at Rivervue Hospital includes a Lothario (Billy Burke), an intern (Joelle Carter) and a married couple expecting their first child (Martin Donovan and Forbes).
But the center of the show is Levine. All pain in his personal life, passionate patient advocacy in his professional one, he suggests a boiling pot barely covered as Dr. Robert Banger, head of the forensic psychiatry department. As a spree killer is brought in in the first episode, Banger is in court trying to win custody of the boys he deeply loves against the wife he does not want to divorce.
In addition to writing that rarity, child dialog that is entertaining and believable, Berg gives Levine an achingly potent scene of father love, as his character is forced to play with his kids in front of court representatives to demonstrate his parenting skills. In every gesture, there is the futility of his knowledge that it would take a miracle for the mother not to get custody.
The spree killer, meanwhile, gets out of hand in the hospital too, and his shocking actions there force the characters played by Donovan and Forbes to make a wrenching decision.
It is, in truth, a little too much action, too soon, typical of pilot episodes. What is so promising about this series, though, is exemplified in its handling of the couple’s decision: Another show might drag it out over a whole episode or even two. Here, they make it quickly and without expounding on the pros and cons for the benefit of the audience. The drama isn’t so much in what they decide as in our profound realization of what it will be like for them to live with that decision.
If you like television that takes some chances and challenges you to pay attention, “Wonderland” is entirely worth your while. Watch it now, while you still can.
Oscar aftermath: Amazing, isn’t it, that new Oscar producers Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck swore off big dance numbers and still managed to turn in the longest statuette-dispensing soiree yet Sunday night?
I thought the whole point of movie producers, which is what the Zanucks usually are, was to draw the line and move things along. No one, apparently, told the tandem that drawing the line doesn’t count if it’s done on an Etch-a-Sketch.
The duo were, at least, true to the movie producer image in one respect. They — how to put this — lied. The Robin Williams delivery of the “South Park” movie song “Blame Canada” was certainly a production number, albeit an appropriate one, and all that dancey business during the song medley segment cried out for Michael Flatley, Savion Glover or Rob Lowe.
Still, the broadcast’s Gap ads paying homage to “West Side Story” proved that a little interpretive dance is not necessarily a bad thing and that interpretive dance about movies is nowhere near as entertaining as interpretive dance about pants.
By the Tribune’s count, the Beast that Ate Your Sunday Night checked in at 4 hours, 9 minutes, including an astonishing four minutes of credits at the end. There was even one very suspicious credit for “choreographer” Kenny Ortega, one of the seven warning signs of dance numbers.
How the show got to be so long is something of a mystery. While it certainly tested viewers’ patience, it didn’t feel quite as leaden and overloaded as last year’s. It had only one moment of studied overexuberance by Roberto Benigni, after all.
The 2000 Oscars set the third consecutive record for longest show ever, which should tell you and me that Hollywood has moved past pride and into hubris. Sally Field was there, sort of, parodying herself and selling out in a financial services ad, but the whole broadcast now has that “you really, really like me” tone.
The arrogance is astonishing, but I suppose as long as People In Style stays so popular, to cite one example of the celebritocracy, Hollywood has no reason to think we will stop watching, even if the show hits 4 hours next year and includes a loving tribute to past Oscar night interpretive dance numbers.
How about if next year, along with pretending to cut dance numbers, the producers pretend to cut movie montages, pretend to cut honorary Oscars and pretend to actually limit acceptance speeches? Then we can all pretend to watch.
