Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is an airless, somewhat smug, fatally mild-mannered satire about the production process behind a doomed television drama. Duchovny plays a writer/producer whose autobiographical show is, bit by bit, compromised by Weaver's executive -- the casting, the tone, the plot and even the title are all eventually distorted by a suit who takes demographic readings from her teenage daughter.
This war between artistry and commerce isn't exactly breaking news, and in fact it was already tackled years ago by the smarter, funnier "The Big Picture."
"The TV Set" is pitched too loose. Though he has plenty of opportunities, Duchovny's character never really articulates any kind of vision, and the film loses a lot of tension because the story he wants to tell really doesn't look much better than the compromised version. Even when the final version of the show appears, he seems more angry over its implied failure than he does over the loss of his vision.
Ioan Gruffudd plays a supposedly ingenious BBC executive lured to America who seems to have Duchovny's back but he, too, never asserts himself in a realistic way -- his character seems like an incomplete thought, as does the go-nowhere failed courtship/feuding between the show's two leads. And Weaver's lines are all on-the-nose jabs at a corporate mentality ("Original kind of scares me," she says, surprisingly without the accompaniment of a rim-shot).
What's up with Kasdan? He made the wonderful "Zero Effect" followed by the sort of cynical teen comedy "Orange County" which wasn't nearly as funny as the films that inspired it. But I miss the wit and imagination that I thought "Zero" offered a promise of. Those qualities certainly don't arrive in "The TV Set."
One ammendment to my 2-star review: There's a commentary track on this disc between Kasdan and Judd Apatow that, to my mind, is far more enjoyable than the movie itself. They don't talk a lot about what's going on on-screen, but spend more time discussing the television work they've done that inspired the movie -- "Freaks and Geeks," "Undeclared," "Larry Sanders," "The Ben Stiller Show." I give that commentary 4 stars. Well worth listening to.
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An insightful and fast-moving comic look at the world of network television development.The story follows a TV pilot as it goes through the network TV process of casting, production, and finally airing, while showing that there is as much entertainment behind the cameras as there is in front.
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