Ronnie: Hi! You might be wondering what the hell you’re reading, because our coverage of Lois & Clark is well and truly over. We even did a post-mortem on the series. Consider this a bonus feature. Lois & Clark was meant to have a fifth season until ABC decided that ratings weren’t up to snuff and rescinded any promise of renewal. Now, whenever a television show is felled, another rises to take its place. Prey is that replacement. ABC was on the hook for a Warner Bros television show even if it wasn’t Lois & Clark. By all the metrics ABC cared about, Prey failed. “Last five episodes of a thirteen episode order burned off in the summer” level failed. It sure does appear a Season 5 of Lois & Clark would’ve done better, even if the showrunners intended to introduce a small alecky kid, a creative decision heavily associated with a swift and justified cancellation. That doesn’t preclude Prey from being a hidden gem, however. Plenty of shows that last one season or less wind up being cult classics. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to see if Prey deserves a reappraisal or it should be left in the dustbin of network television history.

Starring Debra Messing (Will & Grace), Prey’s logline is basically “what if serial killers were a different species?”. It’s a little more complicated than that but no less stupid. For one thing, it misinterprets “survival of the fittest” as “survival of the strongest”, as opposed to what Darwin really meant, which was that the species that adapts the best to its surroundings and circumstances flourishes. The pilot begins with the apprehension of a serial killer/rapist named Randall Lynch. Debra Messing plays Sloan Parker, an anthropologist who works under Dr. Ann Coulter. Yes, you read that correctly, and it’s not some gag on my part. Her boss is named Ann Coulter and it’s distracting and bizarre. Ann Coulter was a known quantity by 1998; High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, her first book, came out then. This leads to two possibilities: someone knew or knew of her and wanted to give her a shout out or someone knew/knew of her and wanted to depict her brutally slain by a serial killer. Spoilers.

Even if it’s the latter, that’s still odd because…why? It’s jarring. She’s portrayed as Messing’s mentor, so if it’s a Michael Critchton-esque dig that doesn’t scan. In any event it took me out of this stupid, stupid program. After Randall Lynch inevitably escapes custody and kills Ann Coulter, Debra Messing discovers that something’s off about this serial killer/rapist: he’s not human. Literally. You know how chimps are 1.1% different from humans? Well, Randall Lynch is 1.6%. Messing and her colleague, some white guy, theorize that Lynch is part of a species that is to humans what humans were to neanderthals, and that global warming triggered their arrival. Thanks a lot, global warming!

She doesn’t even resemble the Creepshow skeleton so she can’t be Ann Coulter.

It’s all pretty silly and po faced, reminiscent of The X-Files but not nearly as good. That definitely seems to be what Prey is trying to evoke. There’s even a shady informant character posing as an FBI agent who turns out to be a 1.6%er as well. But unlike Randall Lynch, “Tom Daniels” doesn’t murder and rape people. He’s trying to prevent his cohort from doing that, establishing him as One Of The Good Ones. I haven’t watched any of the other 12 episodes of this misbegotten mess but I assume there’ll be some sexual tension will they won’t they between the two. It’s got a better chance of happening than Messing shacking up with Larry Drake or Frankie Faison, both series regulars given little to nothing to do in this pilot. Before you ask, no, Larry Drake’s character is neither r-worded nor is he a Dr. Giggles. He’s not even a Durant.

I’ve blathered on long enough for now, Chris. What are your impressions of this show that treated Lois & Clark like we treated the Neanderthals? Were you intrigued or irritated?

Chris: Here’s a thing I only recently (last ten years) learned: Area 51 was an actual factual secret base until the late 1980s. Like, no one knew it even existed until a guy who worked there went public saying there were aliens and whatnot and the government had to be all “okay, yes, yes, there’s been a secret military base in Nevada for the last forty odd years, but there’s no aliens there! C’mon guys! We wouldn’t lie about something like that! Also we can’t tell you what we are doing and no you can’t look for yourself.” while nervously tugging its shirt collar. That sort of sweaty denial is pretty much guaranteed to make things worse, which is exactly what happened, and it became Patient Zero for the Weirdo Conspiracy Boom that swept the nation like a fatter, grosser, B.O. saturated Beatlemania in the 90’s. There was certain logic to the whole movement in that America and had been nursing a survivalist, wild-eyed, anti-government paranoia that started with Watergate and ran straight through the Reagan 80s. The thing was that irrational fear was supposed to be directed at the Soviet Union and their godless communist regime, or at the very least Demicrats but when the Soviet Union dissolved and Clinton rebranded the Democratic party as Diet Republican that hate and fear went schizo and focused on America’s intelligence apparatus, military industrial complex and their unexplored corridors of power. That’s why shit like JFK and the X-Files hit so hard back then, the idea that an era had ended and all the secrets and crimes covered up by Cold War national security would finally see the light of day.

“People take TOO MANY showers, Ricky.”

Which of course didn’t really happen, in part because the whole point of a conspiracy theory is you can’t really kill it as long as someone can believe that there’s something else being hidden even further down the line. So as much evidence as there was that Oswald really probably did act alone and that Area 51 was really just a regular air-force base used to detonate nuclear bombs harmlessly underground and for building and testing super secret, off the books spy planes and bombers capable of delivering extinction level payloads anywhere in the world virtually undetected in less time than it took to consider the ramifications of such an act, or that blurry bigfoot footage was just a guy in a suit, some people couldn’t let go. Like the show said, we wanted to believe. Because conspiracies are fun. They make you feel like the world is filled with codes and secrets that are all hiding in plain sight if you just learn how to spot and decode them. Which is what The X-Files was really good at there for a nice long while. It made life in the dank, grungy mid-90s seem like an adventure, dark and gloomy and a little scary sometimes, but super cool and a lot of fun.

The thing about shows like Prey is that they completely ditch the fun part of paranoia and focused more on the dark and smelly aspects and ended up with a dud that completely missed what made the thing it was aping so special. It was kind of like the TV equivalent of Bush. Remember Bush? They put out an album called Razorblade Suitcase and sang heavy, sludgy songs that sounded like Nirvana if Nirvana were comprised of guys who wrote jingles for commercials that were directed to “write something like the unintelligible depressing shit my grandkids listen to” and then given to a band comprised of graduates of the Handsome Boy Modeling School. The worst part was everyone you knew would ask you, unprompted, if you’d heard Bush yet and did you know they were actually British? That shit went on for months. Anyway, the point is, Prey has that same nonsense poseur vibe that Bush had. They’re a bunch of committee approved photogenic hacks trying to pass themselves off as genuine weirdos. Or that’s what the first episode is, maybe it gets better as shows often do, but judging by the fact that it got the hook almost immediately, that seems unlikely.

Oh, and it really wants to be Se7en, too.

Ronnie: Okay, first of all, Oswald did not act alone, you naive fool, but that’s for another time. I do think you get to the appeal behind the conspiracy genre, that it’s exciting and mysterious and rife with import, and how Prey has precisely none of that. Or at least it doesn’t yet. It’s at this juncture I disappoint the precious readers with the announcement that we’re only ever doing this one episode of Prey and any information from subsequent episodes will have been gleaned from Wikipedia, which I assume is a reliable source because what kind of sick fuck knowingly plants false information about an ABC show from 1998 nobody watched. Now that’d be a conspiracy worth unraveling…

So I guess I should talk about some background information on the series. Debra Messing was not the original Dr. Sloan Parker, for instance; they shot a whole pilot with Sherilyn Fenn in the role. When I say “they” I mean The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s and Poltergeist’s Tobe Hooper. Now by 1998 you could definitely “get” him, but it’s still a more impressive pedigree than the man who directed this pilot, Peter O’Fallon. He’s best known for a lot of forgettable TV (including that show about Vice President Sharon Stone having an on call secret assassin because of a hidden paragraph in the Constitution; stay fucking tuned for an article on that) and Suicide Kings, which may not be the worst Quentin Tarantino ripoff but still belongs in the conversation. If I had to hazard a guess I’d say the original pilot is probably a little better, if only because Tobe Hooper knows how to manage palpable dread, which I think Prey was aiming at on occasion. Zionist nut Debra Messing isn’t the problem with the show. Rather, the crucial flaw is the inherent stupidity in the premise.

Hehe, “homo”

Now, humanity being replaced either from beyond or from within is a premise ripe with possibility. V, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Grant Morrison’s New X-Men all manage to create compelling material out of that. Prey less so. See, it’s positing that the next stage of evolution is basically a race of serial killers. Serial killers are predominantly known for being selfish loners. No matter what a dipshit MAGA person will tell you, humanity’s strength does not lie in individuality but rather our capacity for cooperation. We form communities and those communities thrive and that’s how humanity went from just another terran species to the wonderful blight on the planet that we are today. Whatever social commentary Prey buries amidst the cheap thrills and bad lighting–they treat us like we treat wildlife, man!!!–doesn’t connect, at least in this pilot. It reminds me of The Predator, the Shane Black film that suggests the Yautja consider autism to be a trait worth integrating into their constantly modified DNA. What possible benefit could being a rapist that decapitates his victims have from an evolutionary standpoint?

I’m trying to say I don’t think the science checks out here, Chris. Creator/writer William Schmidt failed to carry all the 1s and “maybe global warming created a race of mass murderers” didn’t reach peer review.

Chris: While I agree that The Predator’s Super-Autism powered kid didn’t work, I appreciated it attempt to redefine what we think of as strength, away from tree-trunk hauling bodybuilders with a surprising facility for puns and towards people who can think in novel, unpredictable ways. If they’re gonna keep making Predator movies, they may as well expand their roster of worthy human appointments beyond no-nonsense tough guys and Adrien Brody after he smoked a case of Marlboros. But I digress.

A big part of my problem with the show is that I in no way shape or form buy that Debra Messing is a grubby lab scientist. Pretty much everyone who gets a lead on a network TV show is attractive, but there are certain types of attractive that make it very hard to believe that the person they’re playing isn’t somehow also attractive for a living. That doesn’t mean they can’t play a wide range of smart, interesting characters, it only means they can’t play dorks or wallflowers. Like, did you know that Robert Redford wanted to be Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate? (imagine please, the little red haired “It’s a fact” girl from Kids in the Hall running up here.) Mike Nichols said he wouldn’t be believable as a loser. Redford said he was an actor and he could play anything. So Nichols asks Redford if he’d ever struck out with a girl, and Redford had no idea what he was talking about. Pretty much speaks for itself, right?

A lot of it has to do with hair, I think. Messing has great hair (Redford too): thick, wavy, and lustrous. I have no idea how long it takes her to get her hair like that every day, but it looks like it would be a while. There’s just no world where I believe that anyone wakes up, puts that much work into their hair and goes to a job where they’re in a fucking lab coat and safety goggles. I could see her as a drug rep, or a lawyer or CEO of a hospital or lab or what have you, but she’s in a profession where it’s important that she look fancy. Now look at Gillian Anderson (easy there, pervert); her hair might take just as long as Messing’s to get ready, but it doesn’t look that way. She probably doesn’t go anywhere with Mulder without a bottle of extra-body shampoo and a sturdy hair-dryer, but that’s about it. I feel the same way about The Rachel. Aniston was, of course, an extremely attractive woman with her own stylists and make-up artists and whatever, but that hair looked just manageable enough that I believed a waitress could and would pull it off.

At least give her glasses. Jesus.

And that’s really the show in this case. There’s a boy too, who maybe is supposed to be a love interest down the line? But he’s completely forgettable. He’s played by one of those guys that I know I’ve seen on other things, but don’t even take the time to look up on my phone while the show is on in the background because honestly who cares. So many TV shows are, at their core, hangout shows. They’re about sitting with the same group of people for thirty or sixty minutes a week and watching them sitting around with each other. Or going into haunted basements without flashlights or whatever. The point is, you watch the show to see the people, and man, this show does not have interesting people.

Ronnie: I have a little bit outside information about the rest of Prey so I thought I’d share. Of the 13 episodes, only 8 aired in what’s considered the traditional television season. The rest were shunted into the summer; never a good sign. Subsequent hours of the show went all in on the world building of the new species, aka Homo Dominant. These details range from amusing to “what the fuck?”; I’ll let you the reader differentiate. Their brains are smaller but denser, making them more intelligent to the point that they manifest psychic abilities, such as Jedi Mind trick bullshit, seeing 10 seconds in the future, and radical empathy. They collect trophies like serial killers. Female HDs have four uteri (thus giving birth to quadruplets… you couldn’t give birth to more than one child with only one uterus, it’s impossible) and can give birth without complication from as early as nine years old. Whereas humans hail from Africa, Dominants trace their origin to a village in Mexico. These details, while fleshing out the antagonists into more than they are in the pilot, still do nothing to diminish the fact that the elevator pitch for the supplanting species is “what if there was a race of serial killers”, a notion so dumb Kevin Williamson would run with it in The Following.

Don’t hire the guy from Mystic Pizza to be your brooding antihero.

Lest you accuse this column of not doing due diligence, and I know you fucks are champing at the bit to do that, I went against my prior proclamation and actually checked out episode 2 in order to see how the show runs once the premise has been established. One thing I immediately noticed is the inclusion of a crawl explaining the concept, always a boon for these types of shows. The plot is fairly anodyne: the serial killer from episode 1 escapes prison whilst Debra Messing continues to investigate the new species. Larry Drake, who looks like Sam Losco from Trailer Park Boys, is shown to be ethically shady given he knocks out Lynch the serial killer to run tests on him. The tests reveal his brain is almost “pure energy”; “his brain makes a Pentium 233 look like an abacus”. Daniels shows up a couple of times to be cryptic to Messing. It’s basically The X-Files if Steven Williams and David Duchovny kinda wanted to have sex. I know I’m making Prey sound more appealing than it actually is. The episode ends with Daniels taking Debra to a cave in which there are piles of eyeglasses, shoes and purses. That’s right, the Homo Dominants are hoarders.

Here’s the $64,000 question (adjusted for inflation: $753,416.12): Is Prey better than the hypothetical fifth season of Lois & Clark? A refresher for you and the reader, Chris: the baby left on the couple’s doorstep would be a rapidly aging member of Kryptonian royalty, so we’d be staring down the barrel of Lois and Clark having to raise a surly royal teen. The plan was he’d leave at some undetermined point; I don’t know if that story arc would last the season or five episodes. All that in mind, do you think ABC made the right choice in axing that in favor of this?

Chris: So, the short answer is no, I don’t think they did. And the longer answer is noooo, I don’t think they did. For one thing, the fact that Prey was a failure pretty much from jump whereas the four seasons of L&C really are pretty respectable in longevity terms. It was never a monster but it did its job for a long while. Put in sports terms, it’s like if an NFL team ditches its mediocre but competent quarterback in favor of finding a better one in the draft, only to end up signing a guy who gets benched for the back-ups before the season is half over. I have very little understanding of the economics of television, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the fifth season of L&C would have been significantly more expensive than the first season of Prey for no other reason than I’m pretty sure you have to give everyone who works on a show a raise each season, but it’s also worth mentioning that Lois & Clark is available streaming and on DVD and shows up on cable from time to time which means it’s still making someone money, whereas the only way you can find Prey is buying VHS bootlegs from when it aired on a Bulgarian cable access channel. Or something. [Editor’s Note: Sci-Fi Channel, but close enough.]

I mean, look, there are plenty of good-to-great shows that only lasted a season for whatever reason. Sometimes they’re before their time or just too expensive to keep producing or Claire Danes wants to be in mediocre 90s dysfunctional family movies. But Prey didn’t last because it stunk. It had no identity or purpose behind it other than “uh-oh, I think there’s a programming hole in the schedule, who’s still available to throw something together”. And even that would have been okay if the shit they threw together had a little style. You can be derivative and imaginative if you’re still lively and fun. This is switching formats I know but Pitch Black didn’t have an original bone in its body and they’re putting the third sequel out later this year. Because Vin Diesel may be a megalomaniacle alleged sex creep, but he really cares about those silly ass movies. I only watched the one episode of Prey but I didn’t get any sense that anyone fit together or belonged on the kind of show they were trying to make. I have no interest in any of those CBS procedurals (well, that Matlock remake looks promising, I mean, come on, Kathy Bates?) but you can tell just by catching a random minute of an episode of any of those shows when they’re playing on one of those big TVs behind the bar at whatever restaurant you’ve ducked into to pick up your take out, that those shows are made by competent professionals. They may all be cookie cutter assembly line widgets disguised as episodic television, but by God, the machines that put them together on that assembly line were clean and properly programmed.

At the end of the day, Lois & Clark was a bad TV show, but it had a personality (even if the personality was sometimes pretty unctuous) and it usually felt like everyone in the cast and crew was on the same page. That ensemble worked. And they rarely looked detached or bored. And, I mean, come on, it’s Superman. L&C did a respectable job updating the character archetypes, but they also started with characters solid enough to have thrived for more than fifty years before the show premiered and are still going strong almost thirty years after it ended. His costume is baggier in the new movie! I think the idea is to make him look a little more human and vulnerable. It took a second for me to adjust to it, but when I saw the trailer opening with him crumpled up in the snow and whistling for Krypto to come find him it clicked for me. I don’t think they’re going for a Man-of-Steel-With-Feet-of-Clay vibe, the trailer is too bright and colorful for that. But at the same time, it seems pretty clear that this Superman is supposed to be a little more clunky and handmade than the last few iterations. I dunno if it will work, but I will certainly check it out. Because it’s Superman, and Superman is Superman, and a Superman story is, at the end of the day, infinitely more interesting than most of the shit they put on TV, and certainly more interesting than Prey. Even when it’s bad Superman. Which Lois & Clark was. The end.

Oh, see, the Homo Dominant just wanted to create their own Holocaust Museum.

Ronnie: I largely agree with you, although I have been sucked into watching the rest of Prey because I have free time and it scratches the itch of cheesy X-Files ripoff. But no, ABC definitely made a mistake cancelling a proven entity in favor of an unknown piece of shit. IMDB trivia claims NBC deliberately counter-programmed Friends against Prey so that it’d get cancelled and Debra Messing could be free to star in Will & Grace. That sounds ahistorical, because why would fucking Friends be used as a cudgel against this shit, but I want to believe, to quote Fox Mulder’s poster. It compels me to wonder “what if?”. If Debra Messing didn’t star in Will & Grace because she had to stay on with Prey, maybe Will & Grace doesn’t succeed and because of that gay acceptance in American culture doesn’t progress as quickly as it did. Folks, I’m saying that Prey getting cancelled is why we (for the moment) have marriage equality. For that I salute the ineptitude of the program, but otherwise I cannot sanction its buffoonery.

Tune in next week or so when this column has changed names to be about the wonderful syndicated television program Night Man. Our goal with the second iteration of the column is to reclaim the character such that the cultural footprint for the character is no longer solely that of being Day Man’s opponent on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.