How TV Shows Get Ruined: 'Human Target'

At the urging of a friend, I recently plowed through all twelve episodes of the first season of the Fox action/adventure series Human Target (2010) on DVD. He thought I’d like it, and he was right. Loosely based off of a DC comic book character, it’s a story about a trio of badasses (a reformed assassin, a former cop, and a torture-happy, jack-of-many-trades mercenary) now running a company set on protecting innocent clients against the evildoers looking to harm them. The plots were peppered with hefty amounts of first-rate stuntwork, exciting gunplay, MacGyver-like ingenuity, and some memorably feminine (in all the best ways) supporting players.

The music by Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead) evoked a cinematic air in the James Bond/Indiana Jones mold, but with an underlying somberness that lent a pleasing heft to the proceedings:

[youtube MCkHqoEzoMc — click here to watch in full-screen]

Actors Mark Valley, Chi McBride, and Jackie Earle Haley all shine in their roles for various reasons — especially Haley, whose delicious politically incorrect performance as Guerrero is the most consistently entertaining tough guy I’ve seen on TV since Michael K. Williams’ Robin Hood-of-the-ghetto Omar in HBO’s The Wire (a show that ended up ruined by its nihilistic writers, but that’s a topic for another post).

But later, settling in to begin watching Season 2 of Human Target on my computer, I wondered if Fox could bring a fledgling action/adventure series into its sophomore year without their usual pattern of first screwing it up and then unceremoniously canceling it. The sad spectacle of Big Hollywood regular Adam Baldwin’s Firefly getting canned before it even had a chance to get started was the most lamentable flameout of many at that often hapless network. Sure, they gave us The X-Files, but that was a looooong time ago. They also gave us 24, but I go against the usual conservative meme by thinking the show terrible. Human Target, on the other hand, held a lot of promise — but would they be able to capitalize on it?

At first, things looked good. The opening episode of Season 2 rocked, most memorably in the startling scene when Jackie Earle Haley cold-cocks a skinny little waif in a thunderous recapitulation of his character’s essential Sam Spade ethic of never playing the sap for anybody. But by the end of the hour, it became clear that some horrendous changes were in the making. Not one but two ladies were added to the permanent weekly roster alongside the three guys — and as the second episode progressed it became clear that both were firmly stuck in the sad realm of hoary Hollywood feminist cliché. In scene after tiresome scene, both characters repeatedly dissipated every attempt at recapturing the sleek, blistering, cat-and-mouse action of the first season.

Now, whenever Jackie Earle Haley begins to quietly infuse a scene with menace, threatening to put some industrial-grade hurt on the bad guys, the same skinny little waif he cold-cocked earlier leaps in uninvited, ruins his plans, and (totally out of character for Haley’s Guerrero) is allowed to skip away without repercussion. And now, whenever the formidable assassin/cop tandem of Mark Valley and Chi McBride put one of their brutal but effective tough-love plans into motion to help a client, the other new woman (who has become the team’s boss in another of Hollywood’s painfully tired and overused feminist-fantasy plot twists) incessantly questions the heroes’ motives and actions like a harried mother chastising her bratty kids.

What a disaster. In place of the excellent female characters that wove their way in and out of the first season — Emmanuelle Vaugier’s game FBI agent, Kristin Lehman’s mobster’s daughter turned district attorney, Autumn Reeser’s spunky computer hacker, Leonor Varela’s South American guerrilla spitfire, Grace Park’s icy oddsmaker, Moon Bloodgood’s Alaskan doctor — we now have two regulars who offer nothing to the existing team except whining, complaining, nagging, bitching, moaning, and (in the case of the new boss) passive-aggressively yapping out crisp, rude orders in between bouts of mewling “Maybe I can’t handle this.”

You would think that in this day and age, hip Hollywood writers would avoid that most catastrophic of clichés, the hectoring female sidekick. The difference between Season 1 and Season 2 of Human Target is like the difference between Raiders of the Lost Ark‘s Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom‘s Willie Scott. As scene after mind-numbing scene degenerates into domesticated, needy, hyper-emotional neuroticism, what used to be a blissful escape from reality now feels like just another hour at work, class, or home.

Another demerit against the second season is the absence of composer Bear McCreary, whose cinematic orchestral effusions have been replaced by a techno score (punctuated by the use of contemporary pop tunes like Outkast’s “Hey Ya!”) indistinguishable from any number of other insipid modern television series. They didn’t even keep the show’s main theme, choosing instead a faux rock style for the opening credits:

[youtube Tol5333xgUs — click here to watch in full-screen]

Doing some research, I discovered that Human Target‘s showrunner, Jonathan E. Steinberg, was dumped after Season 1 and replaced by Matt Miller. Miller hails from NBC’s Chuck, another show that started out with lots of promise before largely degenerating into a series of exhausted “will she?/won’t he?” scenes of manufactured romantic drama unworthy of a soap opera, much less a pleasantly goofy spy satire. I note that Chuck also features a harridan-as-boss dictatorially snapping out rude orders from her booster chair in the Pentagon (actress Bonita Friedericy is 5’3”).

ZAP2It’s “TV By the Numbers” blog reports that, given the declining ratings ever since these terrible moves were made, Human Target is now “certain to be cancelled.” If so, it will be a mercy killing. I fear that conservatives won’t get the TV shows they want until technology allows for Hollywood-quality programming to be made and streamed online completely independent of the big studios and their advertisers. It is then that we’ll see shows like Human Target continue on in their original alluring vein rather than succumb to death by a thousand perfume inhalations.