"Law & Order L.A." is back! (Did you miss it?) So, sort of, is "Upstairs Downstairs" (but not really). Meanwhile, "Army Wives" keeps rolling on

Last week on Army Wives, Frank Sherwood (Terry Serpico) thanked psychiatrist Roland Burton (Sterling K. Brown) for all he did for Jeremy, which turned out to be making him well enough to get killed in Afghanistan. (As the grieving Roland had said to his wife, Colonel Joan, "I was really looking forward to watching his life unfold, you know?")

by Ken

Finally today I had some time to catch up on some DVR-stored TV, including the pair of episodes with which NBC reintroduced Law & Order L.A., billing it, strangely, as a two-hour "premiere." Among those who noticed it was gone, did anyone actually miss it?

At this point I don't think there's any risk of spoilage, but if you haven't watched the first new . . . er, premiere episode yet and still plan to, be warned. Skeeter Ulrich is gone from the role of the "good-looking cop," and it's hard to mourn, because he was terrible. NYT dolt Alessandra Staley seems to regret his departure, though that may have been nothing more than the opportunity to make one or two bad jokes. (Ohmygod, it just occurred to me that I must have wasted one of my precious NYT "hits" on her review!)

The thing is, I don't see how you can single poor Skeeter out, when everyone was terrible -- even the previously always-reliable Alfred Molina as ADA Ricardo Morales. On the pretext that his character came to the DA's office from the police force and is now so disgruntled with political meddling in the DA's office (where, come to think of it, the usually reliable Peter Coyote, in the recurring role of the DA, was also pretty terrible), he has been "returned" to his old job as a detective, pairing neatly with the surviving detective, shaved-headed TJ (Corey Stoll), and slotted into the ADA role is none other than our old Law & Order pal Alana de la Garza as Connie Rubirosa, transplanted cross-country.

I spent most of that first new episode trying to puzzle out, "What's wrong with Law & Order L.A.?" A good measure of my problems with it is that it leaves me so much time to wonder about things like this. Curiously, in all the time I've spent pondering it, I'm not inclined to put the blame on the writing. In fact, I think it must have been workable enough to account for my continuing to watch the show, even though I thought it was pretty lame.

The best I could come up with is that somewhere along the line, or perhaps all along the line, the show came to be populated by "ideas" of characters instead of actual characters. And since the actors weren't by and large incompetent, though the acting by and large was, there seemed to be something hanging over all of them making it difficult if not impossible to make the situations and characters either believable or interesting. Naturally you have to wonder about direction, which is always so hard to see let alone evaluate in television. Or maybe it's just an overall attitude, possibly related to the final demise this past season of the original Law & Order, which had unquestionably grown tired after those 67 seasons, but certainly never as lifeless as the new spinoff.

Is it possible that the creative team was so concerned about falling into the tired "oldness" of the old show that it actively encouraged the creation of characters no one could possibly care about? I can't point to any element of the show that has been tangibly "the problem," not even the music, which is certainly terrible and intrusive -- a problem I noticed in a somewhat different way in the new Upstairs Downstairs. (More about that below.) Is there a fashionable school of TV production that now insists viewers need music to tell them what to feel? Or maybe just to keep them occupied when the shows don't? But I know that the music hasn't been "the" problem with L&O L.A., because I kept noticing that at those blessed times when it stopped, the show was just as uninteresting.

Curiously, in the second new episode, where the cast reshuffle was in place (though there wasn't much for Rubirosa to do -- was she squeezed into the script at a late stage?), I thought the whole atmosphere was a shade more believable. Instead of spending my spare time while viewing to trying to figure out what's wrong with the show, I started to wonder if maybe it's been turned around.

We shall see. Meanwhile, for stark contrast compare the episodes of Law & Order U.K. being shown on BBC America. True, the producers there start with the advantage of a blank slate, the U.K. airwaves not having been saturated with L&O programming, and they're even able to recycle sturdy old U.S. L&O scripts. But they have, presumably successfully, Britishized the show, and they have unquestionably done a bang-up job of casting all six "standard" L&O roles: Jamie Bember and Bradley Walsh as, respectively, the "good-looking" and "wizened veteran" cops (Bember as good in the "good-looking cop" role as Skeeter Ulrich was impenetrable in L&O L.A.), Harriet Walter as the detective overseer, Ben Daniels and Freema Agyeman as the senior and junior prosecutors, and the always-splendid Bill Paterson as their Crown Prosecution Service boss.

Maybe there are other ways of making a successful TV series than creating interesting, believable, and involving characters, but it was a stark contrast when I finally got around to watching last Sunday's new episode of Army Wives, which after all this time I still love. That show's producers have been fanatical about guarding the believability and involvability of their characters, and the run of episodes in the aftermath of the death in Afghanistan of young Jeremy Sherwood have seemed to me incredibly powerful, even as other characters' plot lines have continued to develop very nicely.

Which brings us back to the reincarnation of Upstairs Downstairs in a three-part series set in 1936, with an upscale young couple reoccupying the long-closed house at 165 Eaton Place. That other TV dingbat Nancy Franklin natters on in this week's New Yorker (mercifully not available online except via the digital edition or the iPad app), and does mention the intrusiveness of the music, though I don't think she gets what makes it so intrusive, and makes obligatory but rather pointless comparisons with Downton Abbey (which I thought wasn't bad -- certainly worlds better than this) and never gets around to noticing that the characters are incredibly uninteresting, barely reaching two dimensions.

That, after all, is what kept us coming back to the original Upstairs Downstairs -- all those brilliantly conceived and sustained characters, both upstairs and down, who gave us a reason to come back each week. Original series co-creator Jean Marsh is back as Rose, now running a down-at-the-heels agency that supplies staff for discerning households, and is engaged by the new occupants to staff 165 Eaton Place! But while there are some characters I mind less than others, so far there isn't anyone I'm actually looking forward to spend more time with

I loved Keeley Hawes as Zoe in MI5 (Spooks to U.K. viewers) and rather enjoyed her in Ashes to Ashes, and while her haughty but majorly-clueless-about-reality young aristocrat's wife may be believable, why would we want to spend any time in her presence? Jean Marsh is back as Rose, returning to good old 165 Eaton Place. (Am I the only one who found the only involving moments those when the original series was invoked? As when Rose, or rather Miss Buck, as she's called throughout the first episode, stands in front of the front door of the old house for the first time since her departure from it.) Lady Agnes's husband, Sir Hallam Holland (Ed Stoppard) is more or less a cypher trying to live up to the legacy of his lamented father, while his unlamentable mother is all too present, in the person of original-series co-creator Eileen Atkins.

Meanwhile downstairs we've got, much as in L&O L.A. a collection of types rather than actual characters. For example, there's nothing implausible about the idea of a quickly developing flirtation between the rambunctious young maid Ivy (Ellie Kendrick) and the provincial-rube footman-in-training Johnny (Nico Mirallegro), but when the characters barely attain two dimensions, how are we supposed to care?

I had half-watched the episode earlier in the week, while recording it, and then faced the tough decision whether it was worth the time to rewatch more attentively. I'm glad I did. I liked it a little better, but not much. And I'm thinking that in a series that has only three parts, if by the end of the first the makers haven't gotten you much farther than a grudging acknowledgment that the thing might not be totally unwatchable, they're way behind schedule, with hardly any time left to catch up.

That said, I'm committed to taking in the second episode. About the third, we'll wait and see.

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