NBC has cancelled the new Christian Slater spy drama My Own Worst Enemy and the returning series Lipstick Jungle, according to Live Feed:
NBC's expectation for the return of Lipstick was modest, but Enemy was considered an important show. A spy thriller with a grown-up budget inspired by the Bourne movies, Enemy received NBC's coveted post-Heroes time period. That valuable Monday hour of scheduling real estate has become less worthwhile in recent weeks, however, as Heroes shed viewers -- weakening the lead-in for Enemy and hastening its decline.
I tried My Own Worst Enemy a few times and thought it was fun to see Slater argue with himself in video voicemail, but the series made some odd decisions, like casting pudgy comic Mike O'Malley as an international superspy. Television's Jonathan Bourne convinced me to put it on my TV Death Pool, where I ranked it the ninth-most likely cancellation.
I tried most of the new shows this TV season, giving up on everything but Fringe and Life on Mars. The latter series is a surreal cop show in which Jason O'Mara plays Sam Tyler, a modern New York police detective thrown back into the '70s, where he works cases old school with Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli and Gretchen Mol. (It appears that Tyler's in either a coma or purgatory -- there are occasional discontinuities, like when he spots a clubgoer wearing a Nirvana T-shirt at a time when Kurt Cobain would've been six years old.) The cast is unbelievably good, and the series keep finding great music in a decade where I thought none could be found.
Here's a sample episode's soundtrack, as described by Drake Lelane, who writes a regular music on TV feature for Film.Com:
- "Wild in the Streets," Garland Jeffreys
- "Ice Ice Baby," Vanilla Ice
- "I'm Gonna Keep on Loving You," Cool Blues
- "Come on and Gettit," Marion Black
- "He Keeps You," Boscoe
- "Anywhere in Glory," The Mighty Indiana Travelers
- "Everybody is a Star," Sly & the Family Stone
- "Black and White," Three Dog Night
"Ice Ice Baby" snuck into the episode when Det. Tyler used it to impress gun-toting black nationalists who kidnapped him. As Lelane observes, "only in 1973 would laying down the rhymes of Vanilla Ice's 'Ice Ice Baby' be considered cool."
