Fumarama

So Standoff, Ron Livingston and a gal are hostage negotiators and also they have been sleeping together. That is the plot. To me, it actually sounds pretty promising. Sadly, the two leads have no chemistry and so it does not quite work. But who knows, maybe they will develop it in the next few episodes, and then this has the potential to be a reasonably good show. It is on the same time at Veronica Mars, so there is not a chance in hell that I will watch it, but next year if i am a clerk in Fargo, ND an I have tivo, it will totally make my list.

But here is my real problem with the show. The people who hold hostages are massively fucked up. ANd so our heroes job is to sweet talk them out of their situation by getting to whatever insecurities are driving them. So this episodes centers around the son of a senator, whose mother never loved him, so he decides to get revenge by becoming an Islamic terrorist and strapping a bomb to himself and threatening to blow up a coffee shop. The gal negotiator realizes that he is not really a murderer, he just wants to hurt his mother, so she agrees to go in unarmed to the coffee shop in return for all the hostages. She does and starts discussing his mother with him. Finally, the mother communicates that the reason she was heartless his whole life is that she never really wanted children. He breaks down in the negotiators arms and that is that. Oh, and the last scene is him being led off in hand-cuffs. But wow, this is all actually very depressing. It is the story of a 20 year old boy whose all messed up cause his mom was awful to him, and acted out in the worst possible way. He has finally found some peace, but he is going to be spending the next bunch of years in jail (I tried to use my Lexis skills to figure out how many, but the according to the Cali penal code the punishment for false imprisonment is a 1000 dollar fine and/or a year in a jail, I feel like this cannot possibly be right, and the prosecutor would figure out some way for any one in this situation to spend way more time in jail. I guess he can tack on assault, or even assualt with a deadly weapon. But what if the hostage taker took hostages but never intended to hurt them? Do he still have the intent necessary for assualt? and even so, the logest jail sentence for assault is 4 years, so that is at most only 5 years in jail, which still seems like too little. If anyone out there wants to tell me how to figure out the correct number of years this kid will likely spend in jail, I will be a better lawyer for it and my blog will be better too.) Anyway, the point is that we get to know this character, learn to feel sorry for him, our negotiator develops a "bond" with him, but at the end of the day, this person's life is completely ruined. It is actually very very depressing. And the tragedy of desperate people ruining their own lives by commiting crimes is not something I can handle thinking about week after week as a television viewer, especially not if the people helping these hostage takers then leave the hostage situation to go banter.