Eli Stone

Sepinwall reviews Eli Stone. A quirky legal drama in the vein of David E. Kelley - even it's actually produced by the much more reliable and tasteful Greg Berlanti - doesn't sound like my cup of tea. Visions of George Michael? Only if he's going to tell Eli how perfectly round his butt is. How scientists use it to calibrate their instruments.

That said, I may have to watch a few. Victor Garber plays one of the partners at the firm. And there are a lot of musical fantasies.

On "Ally McBeal," Ally's fantasies were treated as comic relief, a symbol of her neuroses. "Eli Stone," on the other hand, wants to find gravity and meaning in the music in Eli's mind (Broadway vet Garber gets to sing Michael's "Freedom" in a later episode), but the show isn't any more committed to the weight of these fantasies than Eli himself is. Miller reacts to each fantasy with such wide-eyed mugging, and the scenes are often underscored with such a cutesie-poo musical score, that the show is inviting you not to take any of it seriously. "Don't worry," the presentation seems to say, "this guy isn't really crazy! Just have fun and dance to the guy from Wham!"

So the show may be meh, but other than cast recordings, how often do we get to hear Victor sing anymore?