It began with a trickle, but last week the new US TV season picking up the pace with a flood of new and returning shows, several of which I managed to fit into my busy schedule of looking for work and trying to avoid spending money. I'll cover the returning shows in another post, but here's what I though of the new ones...
FlashForward
The big launch of the week, at least from the point of view of a genre geek (ie me), was ABC's FlashForward. Based on Robert J Sawyer's novel of the same name, the show has already garnered a fair amount of media attention, thanks largely to the perception that it's intended as a replacement for the soon-to-enter-its-final-season Lost.
FlashForward begins with everyone on Earth blacking out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. As the survivors struggle to deal with the chaos the ensues (massive pileups on every road in the world, aircraft going out of control, people dying in operating theatres when their doctors collapse, and so on) it becomes clear that the vast majority of them experienced some form of vision during the 'blackout' - a vision that appears to be of of their future, six months from now.
It's an intriguing premise, offering the potential to explore concepts such as fate, free will and the power of prophecy, as well as the central 'what the hell just happened and what does it mean' mystery of the 'flashforward' phenomenon itself. The pilot episode, written and directed by co-creator David Goyer, gets the ball rolling in the right direction and with impressive scale for a TV show (even if the budgetary seams bulge a little in a couple of places), and the ensemble cast (featuring Jospeh Fiennes, John Cho and Jack Davenport, among others) is strong. In short, all the ingredients are there - but everything will depend on where the show goes from here. For now, though, it definitely goes onto my 'worth watching' list.
Sitcoms without much 'com'
Unfortunately, the other new shows I watched this week were more of a mixed bag. Accidentally On Purpose, Bored To Death, Cougar Town and Community (which actually premièred the week before last but I didn't get around to watching until this week) are all sitcoms of one form or another.
I'm unlikely to stick with Community, in which an ethically challenged lawyer is forced to attend community college, as the only character who appears to be remotely human is the love interest, while the rest are little more than thumbnail sketches - and not particularly amusing or even likeable ones.
Accidentally On Purpose and Cougar Town both appear to be vehicles for their stars (Jenna Elfman of Dharma & Greg and Courteney Cox of Friends, respectively), but were at least smile-worthy in places. I'll probably stick with them for a few more episodes and see how they go.
I wanted to enjoy Bored To Death, in which a writer avoids dealing with the breakup of his relationship by becoming a rather inept private detective, a lot more than I actually did, but many early reviews suggest that it gets much better from the second episode, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now.
The Forgotten
I'd have thought that if you were going to call your new TV show The Forgotten, you'd know that you better make damn sure it's anything but forgettable, but sadly this doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone involved in this predictable and shamelessly manipulative procedural drama about a group of civilian volunteers who try to discover the identity of murder victims after the police give up.
Given the US audience's seemingly unslakable thirst for this kind of by-the-numbers crime show where everything is tied up in a nice little bow by the end of the episode, it'll probably be a hit, but then so is CSI: Yet Another City.
Eastwick
Eastwick is an adaptation of John Updike's The Witches Of Eastwick, although the influence of George Miller's 1987 film version isn't hard to spot, and neither is that of Desperate Housewives. It's actually the third attempt to bring Updike's novel to the small screen, but the first to actually be broadcast (the 1992 NBC and 2002 Fox pilots for were never aired), and it wasn't bad. The three leads - Rebecca Romjin, Lindsay Price and Jaime Ray Newman - were engaging and Paul Gross was charming as Darryl Van Horne. I don't know if he's going to be as effective at portraying Van Horne's darker nature (assuming this version of the character actually has one), but I've always had a soft spot for Due South, so for now I'll just give him marks for having the guts and/or insanity to take on Nicholson's awesome performance in the movie and see how things develop.
The Good Wife
I am, for reasons that remain unclear to me, a bit of a sucker for legal dramas. I also used to love ER, up until the departures of George Clooney, then Julianna Margulies and, finally, Anthony Edwards, which was the last nail in the coffin for me.
The combination of these two fascinating insights into my viewing tastes perhaps goes some way to explaining why I enjoyed The Good Wife, even though I'm not sure I'd actually recommend it very strongly. Margulies stars as the wife of a politician who's been jailed in a sec and corruption scandal, forcing her to return to her previous career as a defence attorney. It's very slick and glossy (the influence, no doubt, of exec producers Ridley and Tony Scott), has a strong cast (including Christine Baranski, Chris Noth, Josh Charles and Archie Panjabi), a slightly more interesting setup than most similar shows, and the partnership of Margulies and Panjabi as her feisty investigator shows some promise. The pilot doesn't amount to much more than brain candy, but everyone needs some brain candy now and then.
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