Eli Stone - is this Ally McBeal with a penis?
I should probably be a big fan of Jonny Lee Miller. He supports Chelsea Football Club in the English Premier League. He used to bang Angelina Jolie (they met on the set of 1995 “Hackers” and got married in 1996, divorced in 1999.)
Jonny Lee Miller is a near-master with accents. He hails from posh Surrey, just south of London yet started his career with a cockney accent on long-running BBC series “East Enders.” Miller’s Glaswegian-Scottish accent for Danny Boyle’s iconic “Trainspotting” was near-perfect. However in the new series Thursday nights on ABC “Eli Stone” Jonny Lee has to use an American accent. Although its pretty good, over time, as I watch him more and more I think its one of the main things that throws me off.
The first two episodes of “Eli Stone” which teams Miller with Natasha Henstridge (”Species“), Victor Garber (”Alias“) and Loretta Divine (”Grey’s Anatomy“) have convinced me that the show is simply a re-hashed “Ally McBeal’ with a male lead. Only Miller doesn’t have the comic likability that Calista Flockhart embodied and the creators of this show don’t have David E. Kelly’s comic touch either.
Sure, the production values are good, and the court-room social-issues scenes work well in a tightly conceived episode formula. But, there’s an overall “edge” missing to give this show main-stream credibility or enough likability or chemistry between the cast members. Henstridge is perhaps the worst well-known comedy actress of her age and Miller is stretching too far from his roots physically with this quirky American character. I think Miller would be better suited in roles that a young Bruce Willis could do. Instead he appears as ‘Eli Stone’, a lawyer who thinks he might be a prophet.
The ’Stone’ character learns that he might be a prophet from asian actor James Saito, who actually might be a revalation in an otherwise forgettable show thus far. Saito is Dr. Chen , a real alternative healer, but a fake-accented Chinese immigrant. Dr. Chen argues that ‘Stone’ - who is diagnosed with a brain tumor- might be seeing visions as prophecies. Problem is, the debate that the creators of the show hope will exist in the mind of viewers is completely dissapated after two episodes. It just doesn’t matter if ‘Stone’ is crazy, dying or a modern-day prophet, I think his fate is sealed. No renewal for next season.
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