While NBC is emphasizing geek-friendly action-adventure this season, ABC has apparently decided to follow the lead of their hits Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy, by whipping up frothy melodramas set among the rich and beautiful. The network's already scored once in the genre this fall with Dirty Sexy Money, which in its pilot episode kept the quirkiness, soapiness, luxuriousness and human insight in satisfying balance.
Big Shots, on the other hand, is like the anti-DSM. Both shows even feature a subplot about an inconvenient transsexual, although on Dirty Sexy Money the situation leads to Peter Krause snapping "I'm not going to go into a hotel and give a tranny hooker a check!" to Billy Baldwin, getting humor out of the timing and delivery of the line, rather than its quippiness (which is pretty much non-existent). Big Shots though is all about the quippiness, generally delivered by Christopher Titus, who says of the tranny, "Let's just say that when it comes to sex? She's the man."
Titus also responds to Dylan McDermott's insistence that the tranny "looked like a model" by saying, "Unfortunately, she was modeling penises." This is one of about a half-dozen jokes in the Big Shots pilot that use the word "penis"–or one of its iterations–as an instant laugh-getter. While he's in couples' therapy with his wife, Joshua Molina gets a text message from his mistress that reads, simply, "I miss your penis." Molina, playing the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company, also complains about a shipment of children's vitamins that gets mixed up with a shipment of Viagra, griping, "Children across the Midwest are having spontaneous erections."
Okay, that last line is semi-funny; but that's about it for big yucks–at least of the comedic kind–in Big Shots. The show plays like a cut-rate sitcom, given a glossy drama's production values. (Even the cast of McDermott, Molina, Titus and Michael Vartan is like an all-star team of TV washouts.) The premise is that our four leading characters are all high-powered businessmen who are "great in the boardroom and troubled in the bedroom," but unlike Desperate Housewives, which in its entertaining first season used over-the-top plot twists to explore relatable suburban anxieties, Big Shots just brings the wacky, fully divorced from the real. Accidental murder, sexy misunderstandings, unexpected revelations of marital impropriety…it's all there in the pilot, and not-at-all-enhanced by the rictus grin of Titus, delivering stale puns and put-downs from the side of the screen.