House Of Lies Showtime

House Of Lies Showtime, The new Showtime comedy that premiered Sunday night, could have been so much better than it is. It stars Don Cheadle, Craig Ferguson’s Paris trip amie Kristen Bell, Parks and Recreation‘s Ben Schwartz, and others as management consultants forever on the move, on the make, making monkeys out of greed-heads while being mighty greedy themselves.

All of which sounds terrific in concept. Cheadle and Bell are each in their own way exceedingly charming performers with a devilish aspect to their images. And at this time in history, who doesn’t want to see undeservingly wealthy people get fleeced, or at least brought low by their avarice? In practice, however, House of Lies becomes a zero-sum game: Creeps conning creeps, and the creeps we’re supposed to root for — Cheadle’s gang at Galweather & Stearn, led by their boss, The West Wing‘s Richard Schiff — don’t seem all that much more interesting than the clients they’re gouging.

Creator Matthew Carnahan was also the guy behind another smart-aleck, would-be insidery show, the 2006 Courtney Cox flop Dirt, and he loads his new show with lines that sound borrowed from Glengarry Glen Ross (“Closing is what I do!”). The series’ visual gimmick is to periodically freeze all the action in a frame except for one figure, usually Cheadle, who uses the pause to explain some inside-biz term or motive for the business move we’re about to see transacted.

Most of the time, House of Lies plays like one of those glossy, empty USA Network shows like White Collar or Psych, but with a butt-load of the sort of S-EX-ual activity one can get away with on pay-cable. That means both ends of this creature, so to speak, aren’t all that interesting. People talk fast on Psych because the folks making it think you’ll mistake that for snappy p****r; people have grunting quickies in semi-public places on cable TV because they think it’ll turn us on. But there’s no novelty or freshness in House of Lies‘ p****r or its p*ni*-placement.

The show’s crucial weakness is its dead language: The lines have no comic lilt; no exchange between any two characters gives off sparks. When you have an actor with a tongue as adroit as Cheadle, this seems nearly cruel.

The S-EX- is brutish and quick, laced with hostility — orgasm as inflicted punishment. In the second episode, the promise of lively flirtation is proffered the moment the bright-eyed Cat Deeley shows up in an airport cameo. But the show’s writers use her the way they use everyone else here — Deeley ends up looking foolish for being friendly to one of Cheadle’s team, even having to stoop to mop up coffee spilled on a man’s crotch. (Coffee she didn’t even spill herself.)

_________________________________________
Please feel free to send if you have any questions regarding this post , you can contact on

APUSA24@gmail.com