Television, my window to other … times (#SFWApro)

I finished watching three shows this week, all qualifying for my book, none of them qualifying as a recommendation.
THE FONZ AND THE HAPPY DAYS GANG was an early-1980s Saturday morning cartoon, following a long tradition of adapting prime-time TV shows into ‘toons (My Favorite Martian, Gilligan’s Island, The Addams Family and The Dukes of Hazard all went that route). In this Happy Days spin-off, time-traveler Cupcake (Didi Cohn) crash-lands in 1957 Milwaukee in  a malfunctioning time machine. Arthur “Fonzie” “Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler) restarts it, but Cupcake’s magic transports the Fonz, his friends Richie and Ralph (Ron Howard—yes, the Ron Howard—and Donny Most) onboard, after which they’re stuck bouncing from era to era battling vampires, sorcerers, robot invasions and dinosaurs as Cupcake struggles to return them to Milwaukee. Only Fonzie’s uncanny abilities to seduce women and control machinery keep them ahead of the week’s perils. A weak show; I do wonder if the console in Cupcake’s time machine doesn’t look an awful lot like the TARDIS. “There’s nobody driving this coach except—a bat!”
CHARLIE JADE is a plodding, would-be SF noir from a few years back. In a parallel world where Vexcor and other multinationals control everything, Charlie (Jeffrey Pierce) has managed to stay independent, building a career as a PI. While denying the existence of other realities, Vexcor has built a dimensional link into our world and the idyllic Gammaverse to suck out water for their own use. When a Gammeverse revolutionary blows up the link, Charlie gets hurled into our world and begins working against Vexcor to find out what’s going on. Pierce doesn’t convey any of the toughness the role really needs and the corporate dystopia doesn’t feel anywhere near as vivid as Continuum. On top of that, the story moves with hideous sluggishness—I think this might have made a decent TV movie, but no more. “You said none of us have a choice, but I don’t think you believe that.”

The British import MISFITS started its fourth season (I’ve already seen the first, second and third) without any of the original cast and a pretty flat season it was—I know it’s not primarily a show about the characters’ powers, but this really felt at times like it aspired to be nothing more than Skins, the Beeb’s raunchy teen drama (I had problems with Nathan in the first couple of seasons but Rudy’s several times more annoying). The final episode with the Four Bicyclists of the Apocalypse picked up, though, and so did the fifth. In that one, the cast and some of the other metahumans begin to consider becoming actual super-heroes and Rudy joins a super-power support group to boot.

Unfortunately the relationships are really a mess (and not in a good way). Finn’s obsessed and possessive over Jess despite her making it clear she doesn’t want him, but the stories seem to treat him as if he had some legit claim to her. Rudy, having started dating Jess, decides to discourage Finn (without losing him as a friend) by secretly filming Jess taking a crap, then emailing that to Finn. This behavior is, I think, supposed to be endearingly stupid, not creepy. So I wouldn’t quite recommend it, despite some entertaining strangeness. “So you’re saying you have an ironic penis?”