October 12, 2007

What to Watch: Coming Up on Cable

The Sopranos' Jamie-Lynn Sigler is back, in Lifetime's two-part spookfest this weekend, The Gathering; and more upcoming cable programming.

Tube Stake: Programming Reviews by CableWorld Editor Seth Arenstein

THE GATHERING: Peter Gallagher and Jamie-Lynn Sigler.

• FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12

Twitches Too, original movie, 8pm, Disney Channel.

Nothing succeeds like success, the axiom goes. That’s why it’s nearing Halloween and we have a second installment of the Twitches franchise on Disney Channel.

Let's see: High School Musical was followed by High School Musical 2. The Cheetah Girls’ successor was The Cheetah Girls 2. And last year’s Twitches begat this year's Twitches Too. Yes, the marketing team at Disney knocked themselves out coming up with that name.

Kidding aside, Twitches Too is a good ride for the youngsters, and it’s not bad for their parents, either. The silly tale about two modern-day sisters who are blessed (or cursed) with magical powers is, in a way, Shakespearean.

Besides the magic, there’s mistaken identity—understandable because the sisters are the twins Tia and Tamera Mowry—family quarrels, class distinctions, social commentary, love, ghosts, handsome princes and comic relief, provided nicely by Karsh (Pat Kelly) and Ileana (Leslie Sieler). And, like much of Shakespeare today, the casting is colorblind.

The key, though, isn’t the script or the terrific costumes. It’s the Mowery twins, who, even at age 29, play teens with the best of them.

• SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13.

The Gathering, part 1, 9pm; part 2, Sunday, 9pm, Lifetime.

One of the lessons of Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho is that things and people aren’t always what they appear to be. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) doesn’t look like or seem to be a serial killer; and Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) doesn’t seem to be your garden-variety thief.

In The Gathering, a horror film that nobody will mistake for Psycho, Peter Gallagher is a successful doctor whose wife playfully says one night that he doesn’t really know her. Sure enough, a slew of people in this film aren’t who they seem to be either.

A few minutes into the 4-hour, 2-night mini, Gallagher is called in to the hospital on an emergency. During that late-night duty Gallagher sees a raven in the hospital. After he shoos the bird away the doctor returns home to his wife, they smoke some pot, make a little love and Gallagher has a nightmare.

And what a nightmare—loaded with blood and the image of his daughter sans eyeballs (can you say The Exorcist?). Gallagher’s wife enters the nightmare carrying a dead (you guessed it) raven, the bird oozing blood. The doctor awakens to find that his wife’s gone, but there’s blood on his living room sofa—and (drum roll) it’s not human blood.

OK, a decent start, but the problem is the fractured storytelling. Gallagher eagerly searches for his missing wife, but everyone who seems able to provide answers goes just so far, straining the film’s believability.

More than that, the character list grows large, involving everyone from Gallagher’s daughter (Jenna Boyd, who looks like a teen version of Kyra Sedgwick) to her teachers, the mother of her one of her teachers, the police, a medical tech and a doctor at the hospital where Gallagher’s character works, an omniscient real estate mogul (played by a quietly scary Peter Fonda), a homeless man, even a candidate for Mayor of NYC.

Needless to say what began as a promising premise devolves into all sorts of silliness, including a creepy group of victims’ families meeting at night under the Big Apple to fight the witches who are snatching their loved ones. And then there’s Jamie-Lynn Sigler, playing a school teacher who’s a better detective than the police (well, Tony and Carmela  wanted her to become a lawyer, right?). 

Another lesson from Psycho that isn’t adhered to by The Gathering: telling a believable story simply and directly is a great way to hook audiences.    

• SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14      

Titanic’s Tragic Sister, 9pm, History Channel.

She had several advantages over her sister, including a double hull, designed to absorb damage and prevent water from flooding her quickly. She also had a series of watertight bulkheads. If those two improvements failed, she had far more lifeboats than her fabled sister.

Still, on her sixth voyage, with only crew aboard, Britannic, a luxury liner converted into a hospital ship during WWI, sunk in 55 minutes, faster than Titanic. Amazingly, only 30 people perished; more than 1,000 survived, including Violet Jessup, the only confirmed survivor of both Titanic and Britannic. The culprit was a German mine. Still, the sinking and the rapidity of it remain puzzling.

Britannic sits today some 400 feet down in the Aegean, whose choppy waters make dives to the wreckage a hazardous trip. Still, a team from The History Channel believes that the answer to the mysterious sinking can be found through dives, specifically an inspection of what should have been watertight doors between boiler room number five and six. After several aborted attempts, the team will make one more try.

We won’t reveal the outcome, although that means you’ll have to slog through 60 minutes to find out. It’s a shame, since this fascinating story plods along slowly, although capably, in History’s hands.  

Pressure Cook, series premiere, 9:30pm, MOJO.

With apologies to Ecclesiastes, there isn’t much new under the sun. At HD network MOJO, it seems they’ve stitched several Travel Channel shows together to make Pressure Cook. The most important thing, of course, is that the show works.

From Anthony Bourdain’s repertoire MOJO has lifted the idea of allowing a chef to travel the globe. Enter New York caterer and chef Ralph Pagano, a former Hell's Kitchen finalist who looks like Emeril of Food Network fame, with a pinch of a youthful Burt Young added. Like Bourdain and Emeril, Pagano’s accident is as subtle as a habanera pepper, but he has a large personality and seems willing to try anything.

The concept for Pressure Cook has Pagano plopped down into foreign surroundings each week. Fortunately, like Bourdain, Pagano feels at home in the world’s kitchens. Unlike Bourdain, Pagano has made reservations, but he can’t return home to New York unless he earns his airfare within 3 days. So Pagano uses his culinary talents to cook his way home.

In a small town near Puerto Vallarta, Pagano gets a gig in a restaurant. Dissatisfied with his paltry wage, he finishes his shift and finds work in an all-night taco stand, pulling an all-nighter. Earlier, he finds work selling cookies on the street.

From Travel's Bizarre Eats host Andrew Zimmern we find Pagano eating and cooking unusual foods. Pagano is asked to cook worms that will be used as a taco filling. He complies and a few hours later gets the nerve to down the mixture, topped with some guacamole. And he likes it. “A little fibrous…but it’s pretty good,” Pagano says. [The recipe can be found here.]

His entire first day in Mexico nets Pagano $45, a hefty sum for locals, but only a dent in what he needs to buy his ticket home. He needs about five times that much just for airfare.

The next day he’s offered a job working in the bed and breakfast he’s staying in. For making a fancy breakfast for a large party, Pagano receives $46. He then offers to work in a tequila factory, chopping and hauling the agave plant — only to find out later the plant is poisonous. And so it goes. The viewer learns about the cuisine of a country through Pagano’s various jobs. Not a bad way to educate and entertain, but watch out for those worms.

Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr: Snake Bite, 10pm, National Geographic Channel

Now I realize why I need to bite the bullet and purchase an HD set. Without it, this exciting trek into a dark Indonesian cave filled, sometimes chest high with bat guano and bats, of course, is little more than a series of black screens.

On the other hand Dr. Brady Barr makes even these sequences interesting. His description of the cave makes you feel like you’re wading through the muck with him.

But he’s careful not to make the show entirely about his ordeal, despite the show’s subtitle of Snake Bite. The stars of the piece are snakes, especially reticulated pythons, flashing their 90-odd teeth and 11-foot-long bodies (although Barr, always up for adventure, visits a "retic," as he calls them, at Zoo Negra in Kuala Lumpur, and this one measures 23 feet!) 

Barr is fascinated with these deadly crawlers, who bite their prey and then curl their considerable fins around them, crushing the helpless victims to death.

Generally he’s a snake lover. Note his near ecstatic emotion when he encounters a spitting cobra. Also note Nat Geo’s terrific camera work with this creature, as it spits venom onto the lens of the camera. 

But back to our cave dweller, the human one. Why is Brady in this smelly cave? He’s trying to test the hypothesis that reticulated pythons hole up in these cool but dank and dark caves to avoid the heat.

The beasts can do plenty of things, including using the edges of their mouths as a second pair of eyes to help them kill in total darkness, but they can’t internally regulate their body temperature. That’s why they seek relief from the heat by retreating to the caves, Barr’s colleague Dr. Mark Auliya believes.

Barr pays a heavy price for his scientific curiosity, as a retic takes a chuck of Barr’s flesh during one of his cave visits. (Read his first-person account here or check out NGC's sneak peek on YouTube.) Fortunately, Barr recovers and eagerly jumps right back into his work, entering the cave so he can wade up to his neck in bat feces and other pleasant things so he can continue his inquest. This man just loves his snakes. 

Keeping Up With The Kardashians, 10:30pm, E!

By no means important viewing (not much on E! is), but it’s well done, and like the Father of the Bride genre, daddy, who, in this case is former Olympics great Bruce Jenner, takes most of the comedic heat.

Jenner has had, unfortunately, plenty of experience being the butt of jokes since his athletic days ended. Did you see him in Can’t Stop The Music (1980) or on Fox’s Skating With Celebrities last year? And that facelift. Still on this reality series, which is so offbeat that it just might work, he takes more than a few belly flops despite trying mightily to stay out of the way of wife Kris and her voluptuous daughter Kim, the tabloid princess.

Even when he’s off playing Mr. Mom to the two younger daughters he had with Kris, Jenner gets into trouble. In episode two next week, Kris decides Bruce needs some time off to play golf, so she hires, sight unseen, a nanny.

Needless to say, the nanny is a blonde, tight-bodied coed who seems great with Jenner’s two young daughters, but is a tad inappropriate with her skimpy bikini. Of course the camera catches Bruce taking more than a few peeks at the nanny’s peaks and that’s when the fun starts.