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Issue #76: Fall TV 2007 So Far...
The 2007 fall TV season is off and running, with returning shows, well, returning, and several new shows across many different networks attempting to find an audience. Since I watch lots and lots of television (probably not as much as 411's own Al Norton, but it's probably right up there) I've made it a point this new fall season to catch as many new shows as possible. I've got the good, old DVR going, plus two VCRs taping the stuff I can't record on the DVR (why can't the cable companies invent a DVR that can record like fifteen shows at the same time and not require you to watch one of those shows while you're recording it?
). I'm currently watching thirty-three shows (thirty-four if you count "Monday Night Raw"), with ten of them "new" shows. Once the season gets a few weeks old, some of the new shows will likely get the heave ho (that always happens), so that number will probably go down a bit.
Until the networks decide to add even more new shows, or bump up mid-season replacements to plug in schedule holes (because, really, how many times a week can CBS run "CSI: New York"?). So, without further ado, here are my thoughts on the new shows that debuted the last two weeks or so.
Now, I tend to have a rule that a show has three weeks to "impress" me, and if by the end of those three weeks I'm still not all that interested I'm going to stop watching. I'm sort of breaking the rules here with this column, as most of these shows have only been on a week ("K-Ville" has been on two) and it's always difficult to judge a show solely on its pilot. But I'm going to do it anyway (Hey, you try coming up with ideas for columns every week, buddy).
So here I go, breaking my own rules. Enjoy. -"The Big Bang Theory" (CBS): It's on after the great "How I Met Your Mother.
" It's a show about two nerds (Johnny Galecki, David from "Roseanne," and Jim Parsons) named Leonard and Sheldon. They're roommates in an apartment building in New York City (at least I think it's NYC). They live a somewhat sheltered typical nerd life: they're engineers that love all form of science fiction bulldinky.
One day, a hot blonde chick named Penny (Kaley Cuoco) moves in across the hallway. Leonard and Sheldon meet her, and the "sexual tension tango" begins. Leonard oh so wants Penny, but Penny really isn't aware of Leonard's feelings.
And Sheldon is in the background telling Leonard that he has no chance of making it with Penny because he's a nerd. And that's pretty much the show so far. I'd imagine that they're going to have to expand the show's scope and delve into Leonard's family life, Sheldon's family life, and Penny's outside life, because if it's just going to be Leonard acting awkward around Penny for twenty-two minutes every week the show is going to get old fast.
Really, really fast. I do like the supporting nerd characters that apparently show up at Leonard's and Sheldon's place. The best is Wolowitz (Simon Helberg), who is a sort of supremely confident nerd that isn't afraid to get in Penny's face despite being a nerd.
I think a show that focusses on Wolowitz would be a hit, but then I'm not in charge at CBS. I think the show will last at least until midseason, as it's inbetween "HIMYM" and the Monday night ratings juggernaut "Two and a Half Men." - "Chuck" (NBC): It's a show about a nerd named Chuck (Zachary Levi) working at a Best Buy type computer trouble shooting place who one day finds out that his brain is chock full of ultra secret government information (his former college friend, who ended up becoming a super spy, sent Chuck an e-mail before being killed with all of the secret information that somehow got "downloaded" into Chuck's brain).
With that information in his head, Chuck quickly becomes a marked man. He eventually comes under the protection of Adam Baldwin and some blonde woman super secret agent. Baldwin and the chick protect Chuck, and Chuck gets to both live and help them out when they need him to.
This show is stupid. The hour long pilot was way too uneven, jumping back and forth between decent enough TV action and lame, awkward ironic TV acting. I suppose that's going to appeal to a certain young, hip and edgy audience (and there are likely legions of nerds out there living vicariously through Chuck every time he's on screen with the blonde), but I can't really see this show lasting past a season unless it picks up the pace.
I'd suggest that NBC make the show a half-hour sitcom type show, sort of riff off of the great Andy Richter show "Andy Barker, P.I." "Chuck" has some good performances, sure, and a decent enough cast (Tony Todd always rocks), but the show itself is bad.
Just like USA's "Psych," "Chuck" would be better as a half-hour show. - "K-Ville" (Fox): Oh, yeah, I love this show. Anthony Anderson and Cole Hauser as tough as nails scumbum cops in New Orleans after the catastrophic Katrina floods, dealing with crime and keeping what's left of the city together.
It's a great throw back cop show that's about cops running around, tracking down bad guys and shooting them. I'd personally cut back on the hip and edgy quick cutting and constant moving camera hooha, but overall it's a great show. It's also great to see John Carroll Lynch back on TV after being dumped by the now cancelled "Close to Home" last year.
I hope the show gets a second season. It probably won't, though. I hope it lasts longer than the serial show that got canned way too fast last year on Fox, "Vanished.
" -"Cane" (CBS): This show, which chronicles the Duque family and its sugar cane business and stars Jimmy Smits and Hector Elizondo needs to pick up the pace fast. It needs to start making some semblence of sense and it needs to start making the audience care about the Duque family and its apparent plight. Apparently the sugar cane business is quite the cutthroat enterprise, something resembling the mafia.
I'd love to know why that is. So far I don't. It also would have been nice to spend a little more time with the actual Duque family, getting to know who they are and what they're all about, but we're thrown right into the middle of a huge family crisis involving the upcoming death of Elizondo's character and his leaving the family business to Smits, who is a family member by marriage (and there's some kind of lame adoption angle involved there or something).
This whole "Dad has cancer and is going to die" thing should have been saved for like the middle of the season, when it would have mattered more. Now, it's just something that happened. While both Smits and Elizondo are great actors and interesting, it'd be great if they both had a better show to work on.
Again, the second episode is really going to have to slow it down and allow us to see the family dynamic in clearer terms. We're going to have to care about these people in some fashion eventually if the show is going to succeed. I'll bet that the show gets cancelled quickly.
Tuesday night at 10 on CBS is a ratings vacuum. -"Back to You" (Fox): This Kelsey Grammer/Patricia Heaton starring sitcom about the goings on behind the scenes at a local Pittsburgh TV news show came in with serious buzz. Both Grammer and Heaton are sitcom vets, with "Fraisier" and "Everybody Love's Raymond" behind them, and because of their reputations and considerable fanbases, this show seems like a major slam dunk.
It's one of the better sitcoms on TV right now. Grammer is hilarious as Chuck Darling (a total scumbag to be sure), and Heaton is funny as Kelly Carr, the woman Darling left behind to go on to bigger and better things, only to have to come back and steal her thunder. The show is just pure sleaze, as both Grammer and Fred Willard's Marsh McGinley provide most of the sicko sex bullstuff (all of which is fun).
I'd suspect that this show has a better chance than most to last a full season. I'm kind of surprised that both Grammer and Heaton even wanted to do another sitcom. I figured that Grammer would continue to be the voice of Disney and do some Broadway stuff, and I figured that Heaton was setting herself up for a lucrative career of going on talk shows to whine about how Republicans aren't well liked in Hollywood (and she has that Christian stand-up comedy DVD thing going for her, too).
But I guess they both somehow figured out a way to beat back the liberal elites and get on TV (as they're both staunch Republicans, and, like I said, as they say, they're not allowed to appear on television). Right. -"Private Practice" (ABC): Ah, yes, the big butt "Grey's Anatomy" spin off that has "instant hit" written all over it, or so the advertising claims.
The show, which features Addison Shepard (Kate Walsh) moving from a big hospital in Seattle to Los Angeles and to some kind of hippie wellness center/clinic place, had a two hour "back door" pilot during the third season of "Grey's," which featured Tim Daly, Taye Diggs, Amy Brenneman, Paul Adelstein, Chris Lowell, and Merrin Dungey as members of the wellness center. It was okay. For the actual series, Shonda Rhimes replaced Dungey with Audra McDonald.
It's a bad change. Dungey's Naomi Bennett is Walsh's Shepard's best friend and one of the main reasons she moved to LA, and Dungey had much better chemistry with Walsh than does McDonald. McDonald is terrible here.
And the other big problem with the show is Amy Brenneman, who now gets to continue her whining ways after being dumped after six seasons of "Judging Amy." Brenneman is certainly attractive and can be quite funny at times, but you can really only deal with her in small doses. Her whining character will eventually take over the show and drag things down into "God awful pretentious" territory, which will be a shame because Walsh has worked very hard to get her own show.
And I'm sure that at some point there will be an entire episode about Brenneman's feet, because at some point all whining female shows have an episode about someone's feet. I'm sure the show will last the whole season. Beyond that is anyone's guess.
- "Dirty Sexy Money" (ABC): This is a great, funny, sleazy show. Donald Sutherland, as the scumbag patriarch of the Darling family, is a hoot, as is William Baldwin as Patrick Darling, an ambitious potential Senator with a prostitute problem. And Peter Krause, as the second generation family lawyer who has to deal with all of the Draling's crapola, is outstanding because you really get a sense of how he really doesn't want to be the Darling family lawyer but does it anyway out of a sense of obligation.
And it pays well, too. I can't wait to see what exactly this family is going to get into and what kind of old messes Krause's Nick George is going to have to somehow clean up. It's great to see Sutherland back on TV.
I really wanted to see him run a full on campaign for President on "Commander-in-Chief." Now we get to see him be a different kind of total scumbag. I hope this show lasts at least a season.
I figure that its best bet for staying on the air is if "Private Practice" hits it big and "DSM" can use "PP" as a killer lead in. Again, I hope the Darling family sticks around. - "Bionic Woman" (NBC): I haven't watched this yet.
It's the one new show I didn't watch. I understand that it got a huge first week rating, which means it'll be doubly interesting to see what the second week rating is. - "Life" (NBC): I have no idea what exactly the point of this show is supposed to be.
Much like "Chuck," this show, about a cop who spent thirteen years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, got out, got a huge settlement from the police and city (LA), and then became a police detective, is way too uneven. It constantly moves back and forth between series star Damian Lewis as Charlie Crews in prison, and then to the present day, where he's an unorthodox detective annoying his new partner Dani Reese (Sarah Shahi). I guess they're going for a more proactive, sort of Buddhist version of Monk, but so far it just doesn't work.
There are moments of humor involved, but they appear too infrequently to matter. I think, besides "Chuck," this is one of the most boring pilots of the season. It would have been better if the show just started with Crews as a cop, and as the first episode went on we'd learn about his prison term and all that.
And it would happen through dialogue, not through lame flashbacks. This should be a "murder of the week" kind of show. Just like "Monk.
" It's kind of hard for me to believe that NBC picked up this show and decided to cancel "Raines," the Jeff Goldblum show that aired last spring. I would have loved to have seen a second season of that show. -"Big Shots" (ABC): A show about four super rich guys discussing their life issues amongst themselves.
Please excuse me if I say that I don't really give a flying crap about their problems. "Big Shots" has been described as a male version of "Sex and the City," which it sort of is, which is one of the reasons I don't like this show. Both Dylan McDermott and Christopher Titus (man, I miss his sitcom) do fine jobs, but the rest of the cast is terrible.
Michael Vartan is boring, and Joshua Malina is painful. I don't understand how he keeps getting work. I don't have much hope for this show.
It finished second behind "Without a Trace" on Thursday, so its best hope is to continue to beat "ER" on NBC. And that's about it for new shows. I plan on catching "Bionic Woman" at some point this week.
And I can't wait to see both "Cavemen" and "Carpoolers," just to see what they're like. And I have absolutely zero interest in "Moonlight," the CBS show on Friday night, so I'm not going to bother watching that one. Maybe next week I'll go into the other, older shows I'm in the middle of watching.
Maybe. It depends on how the week goes.
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