I've always rooted for the underdog, so my new premium channel darling is Starz, that network that got added to your cable package by force, not choice. Sure, said Comcast... you want HBO and TCM? That'll be $190 and several dozen shitty throw-ins. Then something strange happened: Starz didn't suck.
Starz used to be "Starz!" and was the place to be at 3 a.m. when you were stoned out of your mind and in need of a Fat Boys movie marathon (yes, they appeared in more than just Disorderlies). Now it has dropped the exclamation point and added original programming and brought in former HBO honcho Chris Albrecht to oversee it all. And talk about underdogs: Albrecht is the Ray Rice of entertainment conglomerates. He was arrested in '07 at the height of his HBO reign for assaulting a woman in a Las Vegas parking lot. According to the Los Angeles Times, the network had already paid a subordinate of Albrecht's at least $400,000 in '91 after she accused him of choking her in her office. Albrecht bowed out just as The Sopranos was reaching its end, and his and HBO's statement to the press reads like a fax from the Bada Bing after Artie Bucco is made an offer he can't refuse. "I take this step for the benefit of my Home Box Office colleagues, recognizing that I cannot allow my personal circumstances to distract them from the business," said Albrecht.
"[This is] the right decision for the company," added Time Warner CEO Richard D. Parsons. Bidness is bidness.
Starz original programming is hit-and-miss, but the hits are enough to garner the Li'l Network That Could attention from highly influential TV critics such as myself. Principally, the show that has put them on the map is Outlander, a time-travel tale that takes place in Scotland. Based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, the show centers on a World War II nurse who touches a druid stone and is transported back to the 1740s.
The pacing is just slow enough that I first thought it had to have been plucked from the BBC — shows across the pond can have the same cinematic air and attention to subtlety. What's most impressive about the show is that things happen that would actually happen if you had, say, been transported back to the 18th century. The only thing otherworldly about it is the time travel aspect; everything else makes sense. As a nurse with 20th century information, the main character has a lot to bring to the 1700s, including knowledge about how various battles will play out. (Though this is Scotland, so the answer is, "Nae so well, wee baerns!" My mother and I traveled through Scotland a few years ago and I cracked up at all the monuments to lost skirmishes that speckled the landscape. On this site in 1296, our brothers had their arses handed to them by the English... ).
The fact that the heroine can heal people and also seems to have military knowledge quickly makes her a target from the "burn, witch!" crowd. Tension arises from her desire to return to the 20th century (just tap your heels together, duh) and her equal desire to not be drawn and quartered. Throw in a hot guy in a kilt who wants to protect her and you have the makings of a quality series for us lonely housewives.
Starz knows it has the closest thing to a hit it has ever had, unless you want to count the sleeper success of Party Down from its subsequent runs on Hulu and Netflix. Simply Google the network and Outlander is the first thing that comes up. Go to the Starz website and it's mostly devoted to the show. If you dig you can also find some other shows that haven't fared as well (Da Vinci's Demons, Power). In November the network will unveil The Missing, a highly stylized limited series about a father searching for his young son. It too has a European production and feels like a sleepy Scandinavian thriller. Reality show The Chair is also garnering mostly positive reviews. It features two filmmakers working off the same script. At the end of the run, viewers will vote for their favorite treatment.
The only loose end at Starz is still of course Albrecht himself, but it's nothing a good PR campaign can't fix. This week The Hollywood Reporter is running a feel-good story about the CEO's million dollar donation several years ago to Children's Hospital L.A., after a doctor there helped his daughter recover from a bad car accident. "It's not always the easiest thing to raise money for sick children," he told THR. "But you can't have a world-class city without a world-class pediatric facility." Hopefully it'll buy him enough goodwill to keep him from once again going the way of Big Pussy.
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