The Chronicle
Saturday at 9 p.m. on Sci Fi
SCI Fi has done once more what the networks seem very often to have forgotten how to do: make watching TV really, really fun again.
Tomorrow night, Sci Fi’s newest crazy show is “The Chronicle,” about a supermarket tabloid with screaming headlines like “I was probed by aliens.” But the victims really were. Probed by aliens I mean.
And that’s the whole premise of the show: What if the tabs really did tell the truth – and no one believed them? According to “The Chronicle,” that’s a good thing.
Much better that they don’t have to compete for stories with legit papers.
See, “The Chronicle” has circulation numbers that most legit papers would sell their souls for – if they believed one could make a pact with the devil that is – which “The Chronicle” clearly not only believes, but would turn into a front page story given the opportunity.
Like most good TV, this show has no problem poking fun at itself, so you get a combination that is not only funny, but a little scary, too. It’s fun in the way that “Ghostbusters” was fun – funny, silly, scary.
Who works at the paper? Lots of interesting characters.
There’s Tucker Burns, (Chad Willett), a Columbia School of Journalism graduate, who won a student Pulitzer for a story which turned out to be totally false. He was duped and now he’s out of work and out of prospects. So what’s a guy to do? Work for a crazy tab, that’s what.
Then there’s editor Donald Stern (Jon Polito), who treats abductions, probings, and Elvis sightings as everyday news.
Now here’s something stranger than a tabloid story about Jim Morrison’s alien love baby: The other two stars of the show have almost the same strange name in real life: Reno and Rena. How spooky is that?
Photog Wes Freewald is played hilariously by Reno Wilson and former abductee/current reporter Grace Hall is played by Rena Sofer.
The rest of the cast including the pig man, the psychic, the fatso receptionist are all great, too.
Wes and Tucker go hunting for a big blood sucker from outer space on the premiere and it’s a howler.
Which brings up the most important part of a show like this: the monsters. Outside the Sci Fi Channel, good monsters are pretty hard to come by on TV these days.
This show, I’m happy to report, has great monsters – not your cheesy run-of-the-mill guys with scales and women with weird foreheads. But big, ugly monsters with bad breath.
The paper itself is housed in a decrepit old building in New York that looks like it’s falling apart. Of course, once inside it’s state of the art everything – including a basement (which you get to by going in a mega-G-force elevator) with hundreds of their former “headlines” in jars. They’ve got everything down there from monster babies to a pig man who is the paper’s chief librarian and researcher.
All in all, this show’s a keeper.
Why don’t the networks make shows like this? Because they have too many suits who do nothing, it seems, but take meetings and make decisions based on market research.
Hey, take some chances once in a while and maybe you’ll get fun shows like this.