Film Review: The TV Set

Writer & Director Jake Kasdan's The TV Set is this year's Thank You For Smoking as this film tries to demystify the political world of television by telling the trials and tribulations of how a single pilot episode of a television show can become a series.

Mike Klein (David Duchovny) is a television writer whose emotional and edgy script has just been greenlit for production. The only problem is that the studio executive who can make or break his pilot Lenny (Sigourney Weaver) doesn't like Mike's choice for a lead and thinks that the main character's brother should not commit suicide because it's "depressing to 82 percent of television audiences." Instead, Lenny wants to alter the show into a light-hearted comedy, the opposite of what Mike created. The story is personal for Mike in that his own brother committed suicide (thus it plays an intricate plot in the series) and that he has already had one project tampered with by executives.

Mike has an ally in Richard McAllister (Ioan Gruffudd) who is in charge of Prime Time Programming and who has just moved to America from a prestigious job with the BBC, where his opinion was respected. Richard believes in the merits of Mike's show claiming that he is trying to bring real stories to American television. But even Richard can't fight the American studio system as Mike is forced to miscast Zach Harper (Fran Kranz) as his male lead. He's also given the ultimatum of changing the brother's suicide to a mother's death and even the title of the show changes. Mike is so overcome with the studio's interference that he is hospitalized and his show ultimately morphs into something he no longer recognizes but must endure because he has a new child on the way and this show could mean a comeback for his career.