To The Starter Wife: I Am Miffed

Thanks to the magic of teh interwebs, I now watch a lot of TV from my computer via Hulu. I watched season 1 of USA's The Starter Wife this weekend. It's about the wife of a Hollywood studio exec who gets dumped and blah blah blah drama-cakes. It stars Debra Messing, and I like seeing her in anything except Will and Grace, where she was a little annoying, but anytime she gets to act like a normal person and isn't constantly yelping and mugging, I think she's fun to watch.



The upside of hulu tv watching is you can watch an entire season quickly. The downside is you can see the creators making sudden changes. It seems like they started making one show and then quickly retooled it all midstream. Around episode three, for example, Debra Messing starts to have vivid dream sequences based on well-known movie scenes. Eh, whatevs, it didn't bother me that much, although it wasn't exactly original or funny. (The show is on USA. Do they really have enough viewers to care enough to change the series? It's not like Lifetime does that...)



So, I got into it, I got into the characters a bit, and I like a couple of the actors a bunch. Specifically, Stephen Moyer, who plays the hot homeless beach bum that Debra Messing falls in love with. He's now the head hot vampire on True Blood, and he's a way better sexy vampire than sexy homeless guy, but you know, I'll watch him in whatever, I don't care.



I also really liked Peter Jacobson as the smarmy studio exec who dumps Debra Messing. I wish I had the skillz to hyperlink his name to his imdb page, cuz you probably don't know him by name, but you'd recognize him. Oh, and he's on House, I forgot about that. Anyways, he takes a role that could be very one-note and makes him, you know, many notes. As he's dumping Debra you look at him and you see that he really thinks this is the right choice for him, and you really think he believes his ex-wife will be ok with it, because she should only want what's best for him. He's awesome, basically.

Some not so great kid actor plays Debra Messing's daughter, and yeah, she's not so great, but never the less it was TOTALLY JARRING to move on to season 2 and see that they had replaced her with some other kid who a) looked nothing like the first kid, b) was way older than the first kid, and therefore not in keeping with the time frames set by the show, and c) was definitely NOT a better actor than the first kid. What the effing eff?

Even worse though, they replaced Peter Jacobson! What? Come on now! Ok, so maybe it was his choice to leave so he could be on a Fox show instead of a USA show, but still. It sucks. The two casting changes coupled with the heavy-handed stylistic changes make it impossible for me to watch now. My bar for tv watching is set pretty low, so, I think that's saying something.

Hmph. Pout.