First Thoughts: Cane

Ah. First day of school...Opening Day...Midnight Madness...and the first disappointment of the fall TV season.

I shouldn't be all that surprised, after all, that Cane was boring and unimpressive. It's a soap opera trying to be like the Sopranos, but its on network TV, so it will be lobotomized and watered down. I should have called it, but I was blinded by the residual good feelings of Jimmy Smits as Rep. Matt Santos from the West Wing.

Actually, that was part of the problem with Cane. If you're going to have a drama about a family in a cutthroat business, then you better have some characters who are cutthroat. Hector Elizando needed to wake out of his Princess Diaries stupor and grow some business sense...or at least seem like someone who would be a hardass to worth with. The only character with any sense of ferocity is the "villain"...who is so one-dimensional that he's laughable.

Milquetoast is probably the one word I'd use to describe Cane. The flashbacks, filmed in sepia tones, even, were so poorly done that I thought I'd switched channels to Lifetime. The preview for the rest of the season made Cane look even worse...why they are fixating on the murder of Quinones, the man who killed Elizondo's daughter decades earlier, is bizarre.

While some people criticized The Sopranos for rarely having corpses come back to haunt the mob family, I appreciated that you never quite knew what would happen next, and that the Mafia operated on a different level of legality than everyone else.

If the Vega/Duque family are even worth caring about, then they need to be powerful enough to be above the law. Otherwise, they're as boring as watching molasses move. I'm done with this one.