A Man. And His Blog.

With the start of the new TV season, there are going to be some minor changes on my blog. It all began with the idea of going more into TV pilots, which will now be called “Pilot Watch”, when I post those reviews. The new blog order continues with the review and dissection of the hyped neo-noir soap drama from The CW, titled RINGER…

Sarah Michelle Gellar is back in television, and everybody was waiting for that for seven years. After the finale of BUFFY, THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, she hasn’t done much, except starring in some low-budget flicks, leading a marriage life with her Prinze and shitting out a baby girl in 2009. And even though Gellar always told herself she would star in a cable drama, if she returns to television one day, she eventually ended up in RINGER, the CBS pilot about a woman, who is on the run from the mob and police, meets her twin sister, who suddenly dies, and all of a sudden we have a more soapy version of THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY.

RINGER starts with a sequence every noir drama should have: a flash forward. A young woman (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in a studio apartment, hiding from an unknown man, who is creeping her down in the middle of the night and expects to kill her right the second. She tries to hide, but a mistake of hers leads to an attack during Patsy Cline’s “I Fall To Pieces”, where she only has to say the following: “You have the wrong girl.” Jumping back nine days, and we are introduced to this young woman: Her name is Bridget and she is an addict. She has been sober for six months, which is longer than the relationships she had. She tells us she finally has gotten a response from her sister Siobhan, but she is not ready for some family now. Some seconds later, we will learn even more about Bridget. She is currently under witness protection after being the only eye-witness to a murder. But obviously, Bridget isn’t really hot for those FBI guys following her around, and decides to ditch them, going to the Hamptons, and meeting up with Siobhan (also Sarah Michelle Gellar).

That’s when shit is starting to happen. During a boat trip in a greenbox, Siobhan kills herself, leaving her wedding ring behind, as well as a confused Bridget. The latter twin makes another decision, which could ultimately change her life: She takes over Siobhan’s identity (because no one knows that Siobhan has a twin sister, and no one except Bridget knows that Siobhan is dead), hoping to start a new life in New York. Unfortunately, life as Siobhan seems harder than expected, after Bridget realized that even her twin sister didn’t really know how to lead a perfect life. Siobhan’s marriage with Andrew (Ioan Gruffudd) is a farce, her affair with her best friend’s boyfriend Henry (Kristoffer Polaha) is nothing but a complicated anchor in her life. Now Bridget has to live Siobhan’s life, managing herself through the obstacles of a rich New Yorker girl, who has more flaws under the surface than the woman, who took over her life.

But it’s more complicated. Bridget’s disappearance is being investigated by the FBI, especially Bridget’s handler Victor Machado (Nestor Carbonell), and Siobhan herself is being targeted by unknown assassins. Bridget is in the middle of a dangerous double cross: hunted by the FBI and the mob as Bridget, hunted by her life and unknown men as Siobhan – what is she going to do? What secrets does Siobhan have, and why did she kill herself? Unfortunately for Bridget, she doesn’t know nearly as much as the audience does after the pilot…

So, what’s the pilot ultimately about? Well, no one really knows. RINGER wants to be a noir thriller of some sorts, but can’t get over the fact that it’s more of a glamorous soap with a mystery. RINGER wants to be intelligent with all those noir elements and heavy-with-meaning scenes, but can’t get over the fact that the noir elements are not nearly as working as expected, and those aforementioned scenes are merely a farce. RINGER wants to be a great playground for Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has proven to be a great actress (in a movie like VERONIKA DECIDES TO DIE for example), but can’t get over the fact that the pilot didn’t deliver a reason why the series should be considered both intelligent and sophisticated. RINGER basically has one problem: The low-standard writing kills the sophisticated part of the show; and the arc isn’t nearly as interesting as both CBS and The CW want to say about the show.

Because the complete hour felt pretty cheap in my eyes. All noir elements aside, but not even the wide shots (like Bridget in the studio apartment near the end, before she gets attacked) were showing me that RINGER is an expensive program, and that the producers used all the money for the episode. Or did they actually had money? The boat scene is already infamous after such a short time, and it could be considered as one of the worst scenes in a television show this season. How is it possible that a scene like this is looking so much like a greenbox/bluebox/whatever, and so much like fake? How was it not possible to actually shoot on sea, especially since the production was in New York for the pilot? How was it not possible to shoot this scene on the water, to make the pilot look more “realistic”, more noir-ish? The producers want RINGER to be a noir-thriller, don’t they? And then they decided not to shoot the boat scene on sea, even though it could have been a great element to add some real suspense? The boat scene did one thing for sure: It killed the mood of the situation, and it made be believe the producers weren’t in it with their hearts. So why should I follow a TV show, when I notice this exact fact in the pilot already? Why should I invest some of my precious time, when the producers are not ready to invest their precious time?

Maybe the production schedule was a reason for this crappy boat scene. After all, the scenes, where Bridget talks to Siobhan – which means that Sarah Michelle Gellar is executing her double role, completely alone – don’t look really great as well. Gellar didn’t put any effort in those scenes, she never found time to separate her two characters. Both Bridget and Siobhan are literally one person. Which basically means that either the writing didn’t develop the twin sisters over the pilot, or Gellar wasn’t good enough of an actress to pull of the double role. Or maybe it’s just the infamous pilot curse, and the actors have to find themselves into their character first – that always takes a couple of episodes more than anyone would expect.

The last two paragraphs show why RINGER is not having a good pilot episode. Instead, those two paragraphs are literally the biggest stumbling blocks the TV audience could ever imagine to stumble upon. If you get through those scenes and actually liked them, you won’t have difficulties in liking the whole show, even with those soap elements. But if you’re like me and most of the TV critics out there, who felt disturbed and betrayed by those scenes, you probably lose faith in whether RINGER will be a good TV series in the future. Fortunately, those two paragraphs show the only bad things about the pilot, because the rest was actually … well, solid.

Yeah, the characters need a whole bunch of work. Andrew, Henry, Gemma, Victor, Juliet… They all need way better material to work within the story, and they all have to be connected to the story, to make RINGER to something big in this TV season. At the moment, I’m seeing a lot of drama in this show, which doesn’t need to be there, and which can’t be connected to Bridget and Siobhan’s mystery plot at all. Just take the relationship between the father/daughter team Andrew and Juliet (Zoey Deutch) for example. She gets kicked out of boarding school for her drug habits. Which is basically a story element taken right from the CW soaps GOSSIP GIRL and/or 90210 (which makes me ask, if this scene was in the episode, when the pilot was still a CBS contender). In addition, Juliet was obviously introduced to let Bridget have some maternal feelings, or having a daughter to talk to she never has. It could actually work, together with the pregnancy twist, and the whole story surrounding the death of Sean. As if Juliet was introduced for the long run, to have her connected to Siobhan.

And I don’t even need to talk about the clichéd affair between Siobhan and Henry. It could surely lead to some awkward and hilarious moments, when Bridget is going to realize that her twin did not lead a perfect life, but Henry’s behavior of not getting any sex, because Siobhan behaves awkwardly, was just a big stereotype. For now, Henry is too much of a boner, who thinks about sex every time and is mad, when he’s not getting any. That he thinks he is the father of Siobhan’s child makes it a bit better, but here I ask myself if Andrew never asked himself, if it is his baby. Considering what Henry said about Siobhan’s marriage with Andrew, Andrew should definitely ask himself, if it is his baby, when he hasn’t even slept with Siobhan for months… But maybe that’s just a story to come, and the next episode(s) will focus on that. But for now, it is a plot hole, or better, a storyline not followed through.

But I have something to say against all the people, who say that RINGER is slow-paced (I’m looking at the IMDb comments especially): You are all nuts. While watching the pilot, I felt like watching a movie. Somehow the episode wouldn’t stop, somehow one twist came after another, and a lot happened in the first 40 minutes. Not all of it was good and/or bad, but a lot happened. Not one single scene was slow-paced or unimportant. Everything seen in the pilot is viable to the storyline, whether the writing was good (at some points) or bad (at some points). That it doesn’t look good on screen is another thing – just look at the boat scene.

And what about the ending cliffhanger? What a shame that the CW promos already took the ending away, but I am glad they did it. It makes the actual mystery of the pilot (why did Siobhan kill herself?) much smaller, when you look at the pilot with the information you have been giving from the trailer. The CW wanted you to focus on Bridget’s double life, and the characters, and they didn’t want you to ask the questions about Siobhan’s death. In addition, it was a very good choice to let the audience know about Siobhan in the pilot, and not later. Now that we know she is still alive, has faked her death, we know she has an agenda, and Bridget is somehow involved in it. At the end, we can only assume that the twin sisters are very much different, and we can assume that RINGER will lead to a storyline, which could bring us a protagonist/antagonist situation between twin sisters. When did we have something like this in television before? It is in fact intriguing, but that doesn’t make the pilot much better.

At the end, RINGER stays solid. At least for me. Yes, I hated the infamous boating scene, and Sarah Michelle Gellar wasn’t really on top of herself in the pilot. But as a TV junkie, I can look over those flaws, and look for the future. As long as the writers have learned from their mistakes over the first episodes (that we will see after five, six episodes), RINGER could be an excellent show, for The CW standards. And let’s be honest: We won’t see much of Sarah in TV in the future, when RINGER fails this year. So let’s keep it alive. 6.5/10

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

... who's the hardest twin sister of all?