Ten O'Clock Smackdown: 'Harper's Island' And 'Southland'

Is Uncle Marty A Pet Or Meat?: He's Uncle Marty, and he's...The Uncle. It's pretty funny, really. CBS

 

by Linda Holmes

As you may have heard, the series finale of ER was last week, meaning that the Thursday night 10 p.m. slot is free at NBC for the first time in 15 years. Not only is NBC putting up a new drama, Southland, in that slot -- temporarily, of course, since it goes to Jay Leno in the fall -- but CBS has a new show, Harper's Island, premiering tonight at the same time.

Southland is a pretty conventional network cop show, created by John Wells -- who created ER but arguably bungled the post-Aaron-Sorkin seasons of The West Wing.

The decision to center the show on Benjamin McKenzie, most famous for The O.C., is a tricky one. In the pilot, he's doing a pretty standard "rookie's first day on the job, deer in the headlights" thing, and the cast is big enough that it's hard to know the characters yet. If you favor prestige network drama, it's certainly worth watching once or twice to see how it develops -- and the premiere is already available in full on Hulu or NBC.com, and has been for a week.

Harper's Island, on the other hand, is much stranger. It's billed as a mystery, and the hook is that it ends after 13 episodes, so you don't have to worry that you will be denied resolution for season after season. There's a murderer knocking people off, one per episode, and at the end of the 13th episode, they'll tell you who it is.

The resurrection of one of my favorite film-watching games, after the jump...

But Harper's is profoundly campy -- the kind of show where ominous phone calls will inevitably come from someone named Hunter Jennings (DUN DUN DUUUUN!), and exposition will involve a gossipy group of girls sitting around saying things like, "I can't believe you don't know about the murders that happened in town seven years ago!"

There's a game I like to play with movies that's based on a scene in Michael Moore's Roger & Me, where he meets the woman with the sign that says she's selling "Rabbits Or Bunnies: Pets Or Meat." The game of Pets Or Meat involves watching a scary movie or show with a big cast and figuring out which characters you're meant to get attached to (the Pets), and which characters are just there to get killed (the Meat).

Harper's has a cast of 25 characters. Its Wikipedia page already has a handy chart to track who gets knocked off in each episode. It's about half Pets and half Meat. But which is which?

I had a reaction to Harper's that was similar to that of Dan Fienberg at Hitfix. If I can think of it as winking at itself, it's sort of a hoot. But should it attempt to be serious, it will be a trainwreck of epic proportions. It is, as Feinberg notes, a cleaned-up slasher movie, and right now, it is exactly 50 percent funny and 50 percent terrible.

Future episodes will tell the tale, but if I'm being honest, I'm likely to tune in at least once more to find out.