Techtite's TV Reviews!

"Never before has a series so tortuously snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with a second season so horrible, it makes one wonder if this series deserved any season at all."

---from the review

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Annie, Annie, Annie... Which character single-handedly ruined the whole season? Annie. First she cuts her hair, supposedly to look like Sandy Duncan. All the while; everyone under the age of 50 is asking: "WHO?" Seriously; that alone should've told the scriptwriters how totally boneheaded this story arc was. Then she falls for a hockey player, and by "fall" I mean: she forgoes any desire for romance and love and wishing to know more about someone before getting serious, and has a hot steamy sex session with her new boy toy. Then her true love comes back into town and she's "over" him. Wow. What a wonderful way to end the series....if you're cold as ice...and drunk...and stoned on so many drugs that the equivalent prescription would tranquilize a water buffalo. Which is to say, in case I'm being too subtle: WORST. STORYLINE. EVER. Period.

Men In Trees: Season Two

A Techtite Review

Sometimes "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" is putting it mildly. What happened here? The first season of this series was so fun, people actually tried and find the town of "Elmo" while vacationing in Alaska. Sadly, the town of Elmo doesn't exist. Even more sadly; thanks to this horrible second season, fewer people might regret that.

Let's cover some of the reasons the first season was so much fun, even to a guy like me, whose fellow female couch potato wanted him to watch a "chick show" once in awhile. Yet for the first season of Men in Trees, being "forced" to watch this series was a guilty pleasure. It was a tale of city slicker Marin (Anne Heche), who at first looked at Elmo as a harmless place to escape and work on her book, only to fall in love with not only the town, though also her newly found soul mate,  Jack (James Tupper). Sure it was the old story of the city girl and the country boy, though Men in Trees gave it a charm all its own...in season one, anyway.

True, the same supporting cast for season one returns for season two, though what happened to them? Their first season counterparts were so much more interesting! There was Marin's fellow city slicker, Annie (Emily Bergl), a diehard fan of Marin's novels who follows her to Elmo, only to fall for one of the local boys there; a naive, lovable young man named Patrick (Derek Richardson). Patrick's mom is a Sherriff not unlike Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show, as the seemingly sole police officer needed in this sleepy little town. Patrick's biological father is the good natured Buzz (John Amos), whose wife, Mai (Lauren Tom) was originally found via an overseas buy-a-bride style marriage service of sorts, yet now they seem like the most solid married couple in town. Each character was quirky and lovable, with the stories they were involved in filled with imaginative plots, witty dialog, engaging comedy and well written drama, throughout.

As you might've expected already: forget all that for season two! The first mistake was the "new Patrick." In one of many boneheaded story arcs, Patrick is struck by lightning and forgets who he is. He suddenly wants to be a rough and tough guy, totally alienating Annie in the process...and the viewing audience, since Patrick and Annie's love story was half of the reason anybody watched this show! As for the "other" half ---Marin and Jack--- their ups and downs became so bizarre, it became less important to most viewers if they stayed together or not. The plot twist where Jack was lost at sea was quite poorly handled, since Jack never seems terribly afraid of being on an inflatable raft in the middle of the ocean(!), Marin never seems particularly concerned that he's missing(!!), and guest star Kelli Williams (The Practice) never seems to provide any believable emotional resonance in the supposed love triangle she was intended to create, as the woman "lost at sea with Jack."

Such was the hackneyed formula of season two. Sure, it's a chick flick series, and that means emotional angst. Though if you're going to have couples break up, have their break ups make sense. Every couple in the series broke up for reasons so inane, it was impossible to keep track of who did what to whom, presuming you bothered to try. Why did Mai move out of Buzz's house? It's best not to ask. Not even the "previously on Men in Trees" prologues bothered to make any sense of it all.

All this would mean little, as long as the series ended on a high note for its fans. While the season two finale wasn't intended as a series finale, you would hope that the writers of the series would have the foresight to provide a season finale that ended the season with some sense of intrigue. You need to end a season with something that makes the audience want to come back for more next season, or else nobody's going to care when the series is cancelled. Yet not only did the series finale not end any stories; its bitterness was like fans of the series were told "Thanks to you the ratings weren't good enough so we're annoying you intentionally. Ha!"

Let's cover this with the simplest way to end the series happily: Jack and Marin happily together. Nope...or at least, not exactly. A stupid story arc has Marin try to renovate Jack's home for some arbitrary reason, which leads to a quasi-sexist story arc where Jack is the bad guy for not letting Marin renovate Jack's home, even though they are not married, not engaged, and if he did the same thing to Marin's home, she'd be understandably livid, and wouldn't speak to him for days afterward.

Then there's Annie and Patrick. At the eleventh hour, Patrick gets his memory back after that ridiculous "I was struck by lightning and now I'm a nutcase" story arc. So he goes running to Annie, who to put it as mildly as possible, has gone completely Coo-coo for Co-co Puffs. A guy she barely knows asks her to cut her hair really short like an old Sandy Duncan movie...and she does. Time out please: how many straight men look at a girl in 2008 and say, "Hey; you know what that girl needs? A homoerotic 1970's hairstyle worn by a totally forgotten B-movie actress! Yeah!" So now Andy...oops, my bad: "Annie"...is sleeping with a local hockey star, who she knows nothing about except that...well, he's a hockey star, and she's now the town slut. When Patrick tries to "woo" her back with a poem he reads in public, during a wedding proposal, she ditches him cold...and I mean cold...only to leave the viewers with a bitter taste in their mouths and an even more bitter feeling that the series just flipped them off. Why? Because that's how the series ends. Annie humiliates her true love because kinky sex with the hockey star is so much fun. The end. "Thanks" for watching the series...except, not.

So ends what began as one of the most amusing chick dramas on TV. It's first season seemingly did the impossible: make a woman-centric series that appealed to men and women alike. Yet by this gratefully final season, they seemingly did something just as impossible: taking an enjoyable series and turn it into a bitter mess, in just under one year. There are times when I've regretted conceding to watch various chick flicks and whatnot, though I was able to shrug off how boring they were to me, "because I was a guy." This series was different. I feel cheated, betrayed, and perhaps even a bit insulted, by the writers of this season. Sadly; my fellow female TV critic feels the same way. Goodbye, Elmo!

---Techtite

	Final Rating : Burnout. Never before has a series so tortuously snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with a second season so horrible, it makes one wonder if this series deserved any season at all.
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