F
FiveByFiveB
Guest
I really should have posted this earlier like I was going to do. I hope most of you already know that this is on tonight and Christian Kane is playing the main character. I think it's only airing in the U.S. (probably), but it's on tonight at 9pm, so everybody watch it! It looks good, and of course C.K. looks hot. Here's an article from tvguide.com:
RISKY BUSINESS
The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron
(9 pm/ET, CBS)
I think I speak for a majority of people without MBAs, and maybe some who have 'em, when I say that the finer points of the Enron debacle are lost on me. Besides the fact that 10,000 lost their jobs, a whole lot more lost their life savings, and a corrupt few made millions, the why and how remain almost as convoluted as Kenneth Lay and friends intended. Even the star of The Crooked E spends the better part of two hours trying to figure it all out.
Based on the memoir of former Enron employee Brian Cruver (Christian Kane), this should be a story of inherent drama and intrigue: An eager 29-year-old joins the company in April 2001, just in time to ride the roller coaster for a few months and lose all his money by the time the big E declares bankruptcy in November. It's too bad the drama is lost in oversimplification.
From his first day of orientation, Cruver is lured in and pumped up by cheery world-domination speeches. His eyes sparkle as co-workers tell him how rich they'll all be, though he still doesn't quite understand what his job is. Ironically, he's supposed to sell bankruptcy insurance. Every once in a while, people use phrases like "virtual assets" and "future profits" that make him furrow his brow adorably as if to say, "They never taught me that in B-school."
Cruver's best friend acts, literally, like a cartoon angel on his shoulder, calling from Wall Street to warn him that things aren't as sunny as they seem. But on the other shoulder stands Mr. Blue (Brian Dennehy), Enron exec and former acquaintance of Brian's father, who tells the impressionable young buck that the world is his to conquer. (That's in between calls to congressmen and presidents of third-world countries, no less.) Brian takes this and the many pep rallies/earnings reports given by Lay (Mike Farrell) as cues to buy as much company stock as possible and to max out his credit cards on luxury items. Meanwhile, every day is punctuated by a subtitle with the date and Enron's stock price, so we can laugh or cry in the safety of living-room hindsight.
Since we all know how the story ends, it would be nice to have a few more details to make this worth our time. Instead, we get a sappy subplot about Cruver's fiancée Courtney (Shannon Elizabeth at her vacant best), who clearly wants no part in the upwardly mobile lifestyle "” particularly not the 400-guest deluxe wedding "” Brian thinks is necessary to show the bosses he's one of them.
By the end of this "story of a young knight seduced to the dark side, but [who] was lucky enough to be seduced back" "” no kidding, he utters that phrase with a straight face "” you will actually understand what Lay and his buddies did to get rich and lose $25 billion of other people's money. Unfortunately, by that point, you will no longer care about Cruver and his two-dimensional co-workers. Don't be fooled by the intro promising the story of the little people who lost their livelihoods; you're really getting a digested accounting lesson with a few pretty faces attached. "” Sabrina Rojas Weiss
----- http://tvguide.com/tv/review/
RISKY BUSINESS
The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron
(9 pm/ET, CBS)
I think I speak for a majority of people without MBAs, and maybe some who have 'em, when I say that the finer points of the Enron debacle are lost on me. Besides the fact that 10,000 lost their jobs, a whole lot more lost their life savings, and a corrupt few made millions, the why and how remain almost as convoluted as Kenneth Lay and friends intended. Even the star of The Crooked E spends the better part of two hours trying to figure it all out.
Based on the memoir of former Enron employee Brian Cruver (Christian Kane), this should be a story of inherent drama and intrigue: An eager 29-year-old joins the company in April 2001, just in time to ride the roller coaster for a few months and lose all his money by the time the big E declares bankruptcy in November. It's too bad the drama is lost in oversimplification.
From his first day of orientation, Cruver is lured in and pumped up by cheery world-domination speeches. His eyes sparkle as co-workers tell him how rich they'll all be, though he still doesn't quite understand what his job is. Ironically, he's supposed to sell bankruptcy insurance. Every once in a while, people use phrases like "virtual assets" and "future profits" that make him furrow his brow adorably as if to say, "They never taught me that in B-school."
Cruver's best friend acts, literally, like a cartoon angel on his shoulder, calling from Wall Street to warn him that things aren't as sunny as they seem. But on the other shoulder stands Mr. Blue (Brian Dennehy), Enron exec and former acquaintance of Brian's father, who tells the impressionable young buck that the world is his to conquer. (That's in between calls to congressmen and presidents of third-world countries, no less.) Brian takes this and the many pep rallies/earnings reports given by Lay (Mike Farrell) as cues to buy as much company stock as possible and to max out his credit cards on luxury items. Meanwhile, every day is punctuated by a subtitle with the date and Enron's stock price, so we can laugh or cry in the safety of living-room hindsight.
Since we all know how the story ends, it would be nice to have a few more details to make this worth our time. Instead, we get a sappy subplot about Cruver's fiancée Courtney (Shannon Elizabeth at her vacant best), who clearly wants no part in the upwardly mobile lifestyle "” particularly not the 400-guest deluxe wedding "” Brian thinks is necessary to show the bosses he's one of them.
By the end of this "story of a young knight seduced to the dark side, but [who] was lucky enough to be seduced back" "” no kidding, he utters that phrase with a straight face "” you will actually understand what Lay and his buddies did to get rich and lose $25 billion of other people's money. Unfortunately, by that point, you will no longer care about Cruver and his two-dimensional co-workers. Don't be fooled by the intro promising the story of the little people who lost their livelihoods; you're really getting a digested accounting lesson with a few pretty faces attached. "” Sabrina Rojas Weiss
----- http://tvguide.com/tv/review/