Celebrity Apprentice: F [Yep, it’s that simple]
Red Widow: This new ABC drama (that stars Radha Mitchell as a crime family widow forced into the drug smuggling business after her husband is killed) gets caught between worlds as it’s not realistic enough to be gritty but not unrealistic enough to be fun. So far, there’s not enough intrigue to really keep us hooked (the primary mystery is exactly who killed Radha’s husband, played by Hell on Wheels’s Anson Mount…although my guess is her father, the bad guy from Taken 2 and a hundred other movies), and the “harrowing” drama of watching a vaguely mobbed up housewife become fully mobbed-up is a far cry from David Simon or HBO. Still, I’ll admit that the show is worth watching a couple more times. The pilot episode of any broadcast drama is never the full-story of what a show will be, and Goran Visnjic is a smoothly menacing presence as the show’s resident bad guy. Radha can do wonders with thin material, and I think this warrants a few more episodes to see just exactly how thin the material winds up being. Grade for two-hour pilot: B-
The Bible: The first part of this History Channel miniseries is an unintentionally hilarious travesty. It’s neither historically accurate nor a faithful depiction of what’s in the world’s most widely read book. There’s a lot in the first part about Egyptians and Moses, with the Egyptians looking like rave kids with ultra-heavy eyeliner. But man oh man, when you get to some crappy, ultra-fake looking CGI (like Moses parting those waves), this thing almost becomes campy enough to be fun. I recommend watching it as I did: on fast forward. Grade: D
The Vikings: This is from the creator of The Tudors and that same creator promised us “a revolutionary” new look at Vikings as we’ve never seen them before. Well…he’s pretty much wrong. If the goal was to convince us that vikings were anything but ignorant, corrupt savages that care only about war and pillaging, then that goal has failed. Ragnor makes for a nicely sociopathic lead character (it’s like Sons of Anarchy for the stone age), and Gabriel Bryne is a long way from In Treatment (a show I liked a lot better than this), but the show is shrouded in too much hocus pocus to be fully realistic. Still, it’s got a nice opening credits song (which I first heard on Breaking Bad’s 4th season), and it might be worth watching a couple more times before fully giving up on it. Grade: B-