After 16 of the new shows have premiered, I thought I’d stop and take count on what if any relationship they have to my DVR.

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Season Recording Set

I should note that I’m open and perhaps likely to cut some of these as time goes on, but for now:

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Free Agents (NBC) has the air of something that will disappear in time, whether due to lousy ratings (1.3/4 for its second week) or disinterest. Mrs. Extratextuals isn’t amused, and even I am probably hanging on more because I like Hank Azaria and have wished him a good leading turn since Huff went under than due to excellence. It’s funny but not greatly so, it risks being 90% jokes about sex and I’m no longer 15 so its appeal will wear out soon if that ratio keeps up, and it seems a little too rudderless. But Azaria and Kathryn Hahn are extremely likeable, Anthony Head is having a lot of fun with his character, and it seems ideally suited to fill the “time for one more thing to watch before I go to sleep, and I might prefer a drama, but I don’t have 45 minutes to invest” slot in my DVR viewing.

The New Girl (FOX) will likely decrease in my estimation the more that it is described as a “breakout” hit. Right now, after all, it’s just passable. I think Zooey Deschanel has a lot of talent, but it also makes me uncomfortable, since, as Alyx Vesey aptly notes in her review of it, it “perpetuates the idea that young women are infantile co-dependents who need nerd glasses, insipid affectations, and male mentors to fashion an identity built entirely around men.” If she doesn’t cease to be painted as pathetic soon, I’m outta here. Also, a little less singing would make me happier with it. It’s okay funny, but really middle of the road. I could see it hanging around the DVR till it’s either that or watching Toddlers and Tiaras live off television.

Person of Interest (CBS) entertained me. It’s definitely guy TV, with lots of ass-kicking, surveillance, espionage, and plots to take people down. But it does it well, with good pacing, strong performances from Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson (I’d expect nothing less, Mr. Linus!), and the prospect for some serial-ish development in interesting ways to complement its reliable CBS meat-and-potatoes procedural elements. Mary Beltrán nails it in her review when she notes that the two lead characters need backstory and quickly if we’re actually meant to care much about them, so JJ Abrams better remember how to do flashbacks or it might wallow in “meh”-ishness. But I began the season hoping for good (if not great) things from this, and I still have those hopes.

Revenge (ABC) is very well done – well-filmed, well-pitched, and well-set up. I don’t know if I’ll actually watch it (it’s on the DVR since Mrs. E had a little more interest in watching it regularly than do I), but I don’t begrudge its existence, and it seems to deserve an audience. Certainly, a lot of more work and effort seemed to go into this than into a lot of the new shows. And it strikes just the right mixture between camp and seriousness.

Ringer (CW) ain’t great TV, but it’s interesting enough for me to keep it around for now. Gellar does a decent enough job, the plot is twisty and unpredictable enough, and though they’ve proven they can never, ever do another scene “on the ocean,” after the horrible green screen mess of the pilot, otherwise it’s realized well enough. So it’s enough. For now.

Up All Night (NBC) is still not as good as I had hoped. It’s kind of meandering around, alas, as though the writers haven’t yet found what they really want to do. I still don’t know enough about the two leads, and without that knowledge, it’s hard to care about them. Yet more confusing is Maya Rudolph upstaging most of their scenes together, forcing me to ask if it even is Arnett and Applegate’s show. But it makes me laugh here and there, and I want to be supportive of a sitcom about new parents, especially since it’s not a saccharine version of that tale. So I’ll keep watching.

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Not on the DVR, but might get watched occasionally

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Secret Circle (CW) would likely have made it onto the DVR, at Mrs. E’s request, because it seems Vampire Diaries-like enough to be fun, if not for the fact that our DVR can only record two things at once, and it’s up against Person of Interest and The Office. Campy, a bit fun, a bit not, it’s just “meh” for me. I’d rather read Facebook feeds, I guess.

Two Broke Girls (CBS) had a disappointing pilot, as noted by Erin Copple Smith in her review. The supporting characters are as trite and talentless as they come (with badge of honor going to the short order cook), but most surprisingly was Kat Dennings’ inability to introduce any flow to her performance: it just feels like she’s reading one-liners. Her co-star’s better, though still no great revelation. So why isn’t it in the below category? I’ve liked Dennings before, so I may give her one more shot, and hey, with the plum spot between HIMYM and Two and a Half Men, it’s likely not going anywhere for a while, blessed by artificially inflated ratings, so I’ll have plenty of chances to check it out again.

X Factor (FOX) right now is just American Idol with LA Reid and Nicole Scherzinger as guest judges. So it feels weird to be reviewing it as anything new. Later on, the new rules will kick in. For now, it’s just more of the same, which for me means it’s “watch if I’m bored and there’s nothing else on” kind of television.

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Quarantined from my DVR for the latter’s health

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Charlie’s Angels (ABC) is laughably bad. To the point that it could be fun to watch occasionally, I’ll admit. But sadly it doesn’t even know it’s bad, and has no tongue in cheek, even though shlock of this level has no business being anything other than camp. The acting is tortuous (the only range in the Angels’ performance being shown by the wide variety of leather they can wear), made worse by a horrible script. With all the talented people who want to break into Hollywood, what gives, when shows like this seem to be stocked with hacks?

A Gifted Man (CBS) isn’t bad, to be fair. It’s just not my thing. The white crusader myth that it seems keen to run with is regrettable, but mostly it’s just boring. Good enough performances, but when I’ve had a long day, I don’t really come home thinking, “man, I want to see a show about a guy who gives MRIs to tennis players and has a dead ex-wife helping him hack her computer.”

H8R (CW), on the other hand, is bad. For our souls. See my pre-hate here.

Playboy Club (NBC), along with Charlie’s Angels, proves that sexism in 2011 isn’t controversial as much as it’s simply boring. My review of it is here, though don’t feel compelled to follow that link: the less time spent thinking about this show, the better.

Prime Suspect (NBC) is also not horrible TV, though as my review here suggests, its racial depictions are pretty crappy. It’s just yet another cop show in a network television lineup of countless cop shows, and since it doesn’t do anything exciting enough to separate itself from the pack, I have no urge to watch it again.

Unforgettable (CBS) works in the same way, offering little more than yet another wholly mediocre, uninspired, middle-of-the-road show about a super smart cop. If there weren’t two to eight hours of primetime television each night devoted to the same story, I might care more. It’s not bad, it’s just there.

Whitney (NBC) is clearly by the same writer as Two Broke Girls inasmuch as both are written as a series of jokes, not as flowing plot. Both also tried too hard to be risqué in their pilots, Two Broke Girls with jokes about cum on uniforms and an opening joke about Kat Dennings’ breasts, Whitney with drawn out scenes in which Cummings is wearing a sexy nurse’s outfit. I simply didn’t care about the characters, and was too often too aware of how constructed the show was. It’s easily the worst of the new comedies (unless we count Charlie’s Angels as a comedy, in which case there’s a battle).

The premise appears simple – find someone who “hates on” a celebrity, send Mario Lopez to get the celebrity, then let the celeb confront the “hater” and win them over. See below for a clip, though if you have some of yesterday’s dinner in your mouth when you’re done, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Why my hate about H8R? Well, I thought the show was harmlessly stupid enough till I got to the part of this clip where Kim Kardashian explains that she went to New Orleans and helped people. Just in case Star magazine’s latest fifteen page photo essay on Kardashian getting a latte from Starbucks convinced you that she really is just like us, you’re wrong. Apparently, she’s better than us. She’s a saint. I’m so utterly happy that there is now another television show to let me know such things, because I really don’t think I could forgive myself if I knew that a poor multi-millionaire was out there facing the slings and arrows of a random member of the public unfairly. How could we be so mean when they’re just struggling to get a fifth sports car like the rest of us? Mario Lopez is like the Sister Mary Prejean of The CW, bless him.

By comparison, let’s consider the somewhat similar CBS’s Undercover Boss (the one in which a CEO spends a few days in the life of some of their workers, then plays Santa Claus and gives the 3 or so staff members lucky enough to be featured a raise or money for college or so forth, while their colleagues get little more than a televised promise that things are gonna change ‘round here). In a time of layoffs and corporate evil run rampant, it’s galling that CBS feels the need to have a show whose closing moral is usually that CEOs are actually supremely awesome, caring, brilliant humans who really, really want to do what’s best for each and every one of their BFF workers. It’s not that I want continuous messages to the contrary, with cackling, maniacal Al-Pacino-in-The-Devil’s-Advocate caricatures, but does CBS really need to recuperate the images of CEOs, and is that the best way it can service the public? Apparently so. And yet, to be fair to the show and network, before we get to the moral in Undercover Boss, at least we need to wade through images of unfair work practices and tough working conditions that might encourage us to give a damn about labor. Might. And at least the workers’ complaints and concerns are usually taken seriously, or even accompanied with sad music to boot.

With H8R, The CW is similarly setting its sights on the important tasks of the day, ensuring that no celebrity’s inner awesomeness goes unseen. ‘Cause if one of them has their trip to a private island just off Turks and Caicos ruined because Random Dude in Connecticut thinks they’re lame, wouldn’t we all just feel mortified? What’s different from Undercover Boss, and what’s altogether worse, however, is that H8R seems driven by the need to make the regular people wrong, and to dismiss them as “haters.” Its basic impulse, therefore, appears to be one of berating a regular schmo – and by extension, the rest of us “haters” out here. It’s akin to what I’d expect if Scott Walker took over Undercover Boss and took to telling government workers that they’re whining little turds.

The title’s highly relevant here, too, as “hater” is most commonly used to dismiss people who jealously criticize instead of do. “Haters gonna hate,” goes the phrase, implying that this is all haters do when they fall flat of the mark themselves. The title suggests, in other words, that the celebs are the doers, and we’re the sniveling, whining, annoying do-nothing losers who should just shut the fuck up. I wonder if the producers were debating between this title and calling it You Suck (which would at least be a little more playful).

Don’t get me wrong – I have no inner hatred of celebrities as a whole that leads me to wish for a show that gives them public lashings. But do they really need yet another site that aims to stroke their egos? Isn’t it time … wait, I hear a knocking on my door …

Mario Lopez: Hi Jonathan, I hear that you don’t like my new show.

Me: It looks more painful than sitting in an iron maiden with a full stomach, Mario.

Mario: But you haven’t even seen it. You’re saying this based on a trailer alone. I think you’re a H8R.

Me: Yes, my hate is to the power of eight. I will watch an episode, I think, but I fully expect that I will never have felt as much like watching television was a job, and something I had to do, rather than something I like doing as well, as when I watch it.

Mario: Well, we’d like to give you more than an hour. We’d like to send you to Warner Bros Amusement Park with a new DVD player with all the episodes we’ve filmed so that you can get to know it better. Did you know, for instance, that this show has promised to donate 100% of its profits to orphanages for Shaker children?

Me: Wait, they don’t ex…

Mario: … and that we honored the victims of Hurrican Irene in Vermont by putting maple syrup on our waffles on the catering cart? We’re also selling this show to Israel, Sudan, China, and British Columbia with full confidence that it will pattern better behaviors and solve international crises. Now that you know this, do you still hate us?

Yes, I do still hate the show. Because I’m betting that the “h8rs” always need quotation marks around them not just because it’s a silly spelling, but because you’re going to keep the kiddie gloves on all the time. Find me a highly intelligent hater who you will give adequate time to really set out the case against not only the celeb, but also their promoters and network backers, introduce some political economy, and have substance behind the dislike – not just “she thinks this is what a butt looks like. I’ll show her what a real butt looks like” or “she’s not really Italian” – and maybe we’ll talk. Take anti-fandom seriously, in other words, and take the exclusions, alienations, and legitimate political complaints behind some forms of anti-fandom seriously, and we’ll talk.

Or you can just do an episode about someone who thinks Rihanna is “soooo last year” and work up to the exciting revelation that Rihanna once gave a homeless guy one. whole. dollar. note. ‘Cause the latter sounds like great television.

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Outsourced

I expected to hate this. The clips looked awful, and the concept sounded like yet another opportunity to make fun of Indians. And yet after watching the first two episodes, I’m somewhat intrigued.

Yes, there are definitely some nasty stereotypes. Witness, for instance, how quickly both the Indian and Aussie women fall for Ben Rappaport’s Todd Dempsey, ‘cause we all know how much the rest of the world’s women are just aching for an American man, right? And Manmeet’s (insert shudder at the cheap joke in his name here) reverence for all things American further ups the national chauvinist ante. The dark, brooding, silent Sikh is hardly likely to win the writers an “excellence in diverse and enlightening depictions award” any day soon. And much more.

But there’s also quite a lot of humor that’s directed at America and American culture, represented most clearly in the show by a slew of pointless, gaudy, kitsch novelty items for sale by the team. Dempsey, moreover, is an interesting mix of cultural presumptions and earnest interest in negotiating difference, while Diedrich Bader’s Charlie Davies serves as comic fodder for being less willing to budge culturally, his resulting isolation rendered in the clearest of high-school terms by occupying his own table in the cafeteria.

The show could still be a lot better, but it’s already much better than I expected. It stumbles over itself at times, but at least it’s trying. For a business that makes so much money from the rest of the world, American television has often been so painfully unconcerned with anyone who isn’t American, and so happy to ignore the rest of the world. Outsourced is by no means a stunning postcolonial, politically savvy text, but it’s doing a lot more than do most shows. And it’s actually quite funny, if you can put up with the awkward moments when its chauvinism crashes back on itself. I’ll continue to watch, if only because of its potential, and because I don’t think it’s yet suggested that said potential is dead.

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Blue Bloods

Whose dumb idea was it to cast Donnie Wahlberg in this show? Tom Selleck’s a charismatic guy, Bridget Moynihan is no Connie Britton but she can hold her own, and Will Estes seems likable enough. Then there’s Wahlberg, as drab a detective as one can imagine, boring even when torturing a suspect, and expressing anger with one eyebrow, happiness with the other. But for him, the cast has quite a lot going for it, and then in he comes and the scene flattens.

More broadly, I found the show passable, but little more. The idea to mix family drama and procedural is handled awkwardly at times, but at other times distinguishes the show from the other 156 procedurals on primetime network television in a healthy, even occasionally interesting way. Yet – and it’s a big yet – the whacky introduction of the “Blue Templar,” a secret society operating within the police, and the suggestion that their activities will loom large for the show, did reek somewhat of a shark being placed under the water-ski ramp in the pilot.

I’m not much of a procedural fan anyways, so I set the bar much higher for what will bring me back, and while I could see the show being decent enough for those who like the genre, I won’t be returning.

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Shit My Dad Says

Okay, I must admit that the title of this show alone bugs me. It highlights how remarkably juvenile and immature American censorship can be. The fact that CBS would commission a show called SHIT My Dad Says, and then refuse to use that title itself, insisting instead on calling it Bleep My Dad Says, makes me laugh and cry at the same time. The other pilots have showed a child being abducted, a woman brutally beaten by a burglar, and have found endless humor in joking about sex … yet we can’t say the word “Shit”?!! Clay Davis, where are you when we need you, my friend?

Moving beyond the title, though, this is not a good sitcom. The production of jokes and one-liners is telegraphed well in advance, to the point that they might as well add a countdown in the top left corner of the screen. Overall, it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the writing team really wanted to be on this team, other than because they needed a job – there’s no great vision, nothing that’s all that exciting, and little to keep either their own or the audience’s attention.

Except for Shatner. I feel sorry seeing him stranded in this mess, but credit where credit is due, he largely makes the thing watchable all by himself. Shatner is a wonderfully talented comic actor, and even when fighting a rather mediocre script and co-stars, he often made me laugh and occasionally made it work. This and this alone could well keep the show alive, long past its time. With apologies to the Shat, though, I’ll be elsewhere.

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No Ordinary Family

I need a few more episodes to judge this show better, especially since the pilot is so densely laden with set-up. Besides, as endless superhero movies have proven, scenes in which superheroes realize they have powers are the easy ones to write, whereas the real test of a writer’s abilities come after the realization, when we see what the heroes do with those powers, and how the metaphor of having powers (since it’s always a metaphor for something) maintains itself.

But I’m interested enough to invest in seeing several episodes. Michael Chiklis delivered a good performance, Julie Benz has never been my cup of tea but she always manages to do an okay job in otherwise excellent shows, and I have a real weak spot for Romany Malko, who made both Weeds and Forty Year-Old Virgin so much better with his comic presence, and who once again makes his scenes fun and funny here. The daughter is shrill and very annoying at present, but that could hopefully resolve itself once she finds reason to do something other than talk down to everyone else on screen.

The show struggles a bit at making the family drama fit into the superhero show, and its continued success or eventual failure will likely rely heavily on how well it manages to balance these elements in the future. For now, it’s fun, and it’s especially refreshing to see a superhero show that doesn’t take itself so darn seriously.

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Law and Order: Los Angeles

I foresee problems for the latest in this franchise, and I blame the casting. It’s simply too back-end heavy. Alfred Molina is a good actor, and though Terence Howard doesn’t appear in the pilot, the idea of the two of them swapping out the DA role in the show is tantalizing, as both men really know how to command a camera’s and audience’s attention and interest. But the detectives are boring, and thus I can’t see myself being willing to sit through half an hour of hum drum, poorly paced, monotonous delivery until we get to the good part. This seems a violation of the franchise recipe, too: consider SVU, in which Christopher Meloni, Emmy winner Mariska Hargitay, Ice T, and Richard Belzer provide a wonderfully quirky and interesting detective team. Or think of many of the other strong character actors like Jerry Orbach who have anchored the first half-hour of others in the franchise. And then we get Skeet Ulrich, fresh from the Keanu Reeves Don’t Move Your Face School of Acting, and Corey Stoll, who might be okay, but has nothing much to work with.

Moving the franchise to LA was no doubt meant to make it sexy. At least, the pilot wants to promise as much, with LA night clubs, reality television stars, young starlets, multi-million dollar houses perched on the hills overlooking the city, and so forth. And yet despite all that, it began as remarkably boring, with the pacing all wrong. Dialogue seemed to sit in the air, scenes dragged on, and even the night club scene seemed fuelled more by downers than uppers. Oddly, too, as though composing a four hour-long French film, the director often paused on wistful looks into the distance for no particular reason. Molina rescued the affair, sped it up, added acting heft, and got the story back on track. Once in the courts, no less, the plot settled into a more familiar Law and Order style, complete with twists, rebuttals, and tension. But when I’m already not enough of a fan of the franchise to watch its other incarnations, I can’t see why I’d want to watch this one, unless it’s the second half, once Ulrich is out and Molina or Howard is in.

My chapter, “The Reviews Are In: TV Critics and the (Pre)Creation of Meaning” takes the press reviews for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Heroes, and Friday Night Lights, and looks at how they attempted to pre-decode the shows. While of course other paratexts played an important role in creating the texts of each show, I became fascinated when reading through the reviews for all three shows by how much they tried to funnel readers into a rather narrow set of interpretations. So, for instance, and as discussed in Show Sold Separately too, Friday Night Lights‘ reviewers overwhelmingly tried to insist on it not being a football show and not being a high school drama; in the process, they may have killed the show’s chances at tapping into two other huge audience segments.

Anyways, I’d highly recommend the book, not because I’m in it, along with my embarrassingly large bio (you even find out where I did my BA. tmi indeed), but because it’s full of wonderful work from wonderful scholars. Thanks to the editors for wrestling the beast to the ground and getting it out.

If Lost had been written by My Generation’s staff, the pilot might’ve contained dialogue like this:

Sun: “Jin, I never told you I can speak English, but I can.”

Jin: “That’s alright. I know I’ve been bad, but I’ve been struggling to be a better person, and to be worthy of you. I love you deeply.”

Sayid: “What a coincidence, since sometimes I also try to be better to prove to myself I might’ve been worthy of the woman I love”

[Jacob appears]

Sawyer: “Who are you, Goldilocks?”

Jacob: “I’m the guardian of the island.”

Hurley: “What an awesome-sound job. I think I’d like to do that one day. But who would be my deputy? I have no idea. Oh well, maybe someone will fall from the sky or something like that.”

… and so forth.

My Generation has no art to its exposition, only the painfully predictable (e.g: character who says he wants a large family + same character going to become a sperm donor = character who finds out he’s infertile) and annoying stereotypes. First, each character is subtitled as “The Brain,” “The Jock,” or so forth, as if the audience is too stupid to remember eight or nine names. Then the stereotypes take a racial tinge, as The Jock just happens to be the black guy and The Wallflower just happens to be the Asian woman. And that’s just the beginning of the clichés. I’d list a few more, but it’s actually quite hard to pull one out from the densely intricate network of clichés into which each is placed: the show is like a huge Jenga structure of clichés.

I’ve heard people refer to My Generation as a soap, but soaps often pay quite careful attention to slow exposition and to taking time to do things. By contrast, even My Generation’s sense of character history betrays its inability to be patient: we’re told that the day after the Supreme Court victory that gave Bush the presidency, The Brain changed her major from something scientific to Pre-Law. Next, we hear that the day after 9/11, The Jock signed up to go to Iraq. And for a perfect three, the day after one character’s father was sentenced to jail as part of the Enron scandal, another’s father killed himself. What’s the freakin’ rush? Couldn’t one of them have at least spent a week to consider something?

I’ve also heard it referred to as a fictionalized Seven Up series, which is horribly insulting to a documentary that is profound, beautiful, often surprising, and one of the better things offered by television. When, in Seven Up, we see a young Neil giddy with excitement as he explains his play, we don’t see his heart-wrenching depression on the horizon; if it was My Generation, Neil would be seen sitting in a corner of the school yard, head in hands, staring blankly into the distance. And then in the midst of his eventual depression, we’d hear him note that the city council was messed up and that “someone ought to do something about it.” Then the day after, he’d quit homelessness, move to Austin for some spurious reason, and become a city council member.

Not all of the performances are bad, though there’s so little room to move with this script. Wooden interactions are the norm, like an amateur play in which the actors are struggling to remember their lines and thus always deliver them a little late and a lot flat. Michael Stahl-David as Steven Foster is alright, I suppose. Daniella Alonso as Brenda Serrano is okay. Anne Son as Caroline Chung is actually quite awesome.

But do yourself a favor and don’t watch it.

Finally, can I just say that any guy who spends his evenings sitting around watching videos of himself getting crowned Prom King ten years earlier is a MAJOR LOSER.

I don’t have too much to say about Undercovers – it was kind of fun, the leads were relatively good, the script was okay, and so all in all it was good. ish. I just can’t get too excited about it. I wanted to – I like J. J. Abrams’ stuff, and I’m happy to see a show with two black leads, especially when they get to be both action heroes and romantic leads. I will probably watch again, and not even begrudgingly. But right now it’s just so-so.

The Defenders, though, surprised me. You see, I expected to dislike it, ‘cause, well, Jim Belushi’s not my favorite actor, and I didn’t have much faith in his ability to carry a show. But to be fair to Belushi, the show was already awful before his character was even introduced about five minutes in. Jerry O’Connell’s character did all the work of making it crap himself. Oh Vern Tessio, my old friend, what’s happened to you?

It spurts and jars between wanting to be sincere and wanting to be playful, between aspiring to be Law and Order: Las Vegas and aspiring to be Boston Legal. But it fails abysmally at each end of the spectrum. On one hand, Belushi’s over-acting — underscored by music that clearly feels it needs to improve his performance but that makes it even worse — is laughable and aggressively bad. O’Connell’s annoying playboy character flicked my anti-fan switch, and several times came back to make sure it was still on, but Belushi added the wattage and sent jolts of revulsion through the television screen. On the other hand, the comedy, gimmicks, courtroom stunts, and playfulness are juvenile. One eyebrow raise of Shatner, Spader, Bergen, Valley, Bowen, Clemenson, or pretty much any walk-on in Boston Legal was more amusing.

I’m kind of happy, though. None of the new shows have really excited me so far; some have interested me; some seem wholly meh; and Hellcats really tried to be bad. But I haven’t been able to really throw my weight behind my dislike of any of the new shows. We now have a winner. CBS even taunted me with its supreme skill at creating crap legal drama by cutting from the end of the show to a bumper for Justin Beiber guest-starring on CSI.

The Whole Truth

Law and Order constructs the district attorneys as wonderful crusaders for justice, putting evildoers behind bars. Granted, the DAs occasionally get it wrong, and go after an innocent man or woman, but these are posed as rare instances. And their opposing council are nearly always turds, bleeding heart liberal annoyances, and/or cynical amoral individuals out for a quick buck or fame. Outlaw, on the other hand, will frame Jimmy Smit’s Cyrus Garza as a protector of the maligned and as someone who makes the plotting cruel system accountable by giving them a voice and hence frustrating The Man’s oppression of the little guy. Again, occasionally he’ll defend a guilty party, but his basic moral mission will remain intact. And along the way, he’ll face down prosecutors who want the whole world behind bars, who don’t realize racism when they see it, and so forth.

What The Whole Truth wants, though, is for us to identify with both lawyers in every case. They obviously can’t both be right. So instead, each week, one of our two leads is going to be backing the wrong horse. For a few episodes, I could see this working alright, as we allow that they’re just duped occasionally, but once we realize that Maura Tierney is on a rampage through innocent victims of the system, and Rob Morrow is regularly defending murderers, rapists, and so forth, and that they do so continually, what will become of audience identification with them? The casting is wise in this respect, as they’re both likable actors: what’s not to like about Abi from ER and Dr. Joel Fleischman from Northern Exposure? They come to us intertextually built for identification.

But surely it’ll be hard to continue feeling for either of them when we see Tierney ask for hate crime status erroneously, as in this episode, or when we see Morrow try every little trick to get the kind of guy who sleeps with prostitutes and goes after his students when his wife is dying of cancer, as in this episode. Especially if each episode (or even just some of them) end as does the pilot, with the two chatting about watching Chinatown over a drink, oblivious to the fact that someone Morrow thought was innocent could be in jail for life, or no doubt in future weeks, to the fact that Tierney’s just let a killer go loose. While I want to celebrate a show that doesn’t reduce everything to the simple “right vs. wrong,” “two sides of every story” binaristic view of the world, and while I’d love if the show could really challenge the morals and ethics of the business, ultimately it seems to be bucking a golden rule of lawyer dramas, which is that we need to be able to root for good guys going after bad guys, and doing so without enough sign that it will actually embrace moral ambiguity (if for no other reason than the show’s set-up seems to promise a “right” and “wrong” side to each case each week).

Add to this a rather poorly filmed show (too many quick edits, insulting flashbacks to earlier testimony in the closing arguments [do they honestly think I forgot what happened five minutes ago on screen?]), and I have little faith in this show either doing well in the long run with a wide audience, or in it giving me much either. So I think I’ll pass. Sorry Abi and Joel.

My Name is Earl and I were good friends. It gave television comedy one of its best characters in Randy Hickey, and often made me laugh. Then NBC axed it to create room for, what, Jay Leno and Outsourced? The buzz for a while was that FOX might pick it up, given that it always was more of a FOX-style sitcom, and while, alas, that didn’t happen, Greg Garcia and FOX did hook up for Raising Hope. I’ve been looking forward to this as a result.

It had far fewer laugh out loud moments than Earl often gave me, and its pacing was a little awkward (evidence either of a show that’s finding its legs, whose legs are pulled in different directions by the creative and economic team behind it, or simply of something that’s not all that good). The lead character, played by Lucas Neff, is likeable, if a little too comfortable with letting those around him provide most of the comedy instead of taking the job upon himself. The supporting cast is good, full of many Earl refugees or bit-part-ers (is that Kenny running the supermarket?), and of course Chloris Leachman. I feel like I’ve seen a bunch of this before, and the payoff from the pilot wasn’t huge, though I was amused at some parts (even if the clips spoiled the best jokes). So for now, I guess I’m just along for the ride because I want it to be good, and because it still could be.

I also need to remind myself that sitcom pilots are rarely good – they just kind of stumble out of the block, rolled up in character types and already-familiar scenarios, and/or trying way too hard to use a scant 22 minutes to set up everything. I’ve rarely fallen for a sitcom at the pilot stage. Or am I just creating excuses for the show already?

The other two shows after the fold…

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Running Wilde

Raising Hope’s partner in crime is quite a lovely tonal partner for it. Both take a suitably FOX-ish approach to social class, going to hyper-stereotyped extremes that are too obviously caricaturized to hold much representational power (I’d hope), but instead drawing lots of humor out of that excess. Raising Hope goes working class, Running Wilde – like Arrested Development before it – goes upper class. So part of me feels that the two need to be watched together.

That said, Running Wilde was only so-so. A similar story for me – penned by Mitch Hurwitz, He of Arrested Development, the show was always going to be of interest to me. Add Will Arnett and a small role from David Cross and I wanted a lot from this one. I worry, though, that what we see is Hurwitz trying to create a show that will stay on the air, rather than just doing his thing. Perhaps Arrested’s hard life taught him several lessons, but I don’t like many of them. The kid is just annoying, and needs way more sarcasm and edge. It’s as though someone airlifted a kid from Growing Pains into the Bluth family. Keri Russell is trying to be funny, but it doesn’t seem to come all that naturally. Which leaves Arnett, the supporting cast, and the script to do all the work. It has Arrested’s pace, which is good. It has its off-the-wall-ness and enjoyable quirkiness, and once again makes me ask incredulously of the writers, as should all good comedy, “who thinks like this?” It’s playful, doesn’t take itself seriously, and is fun. I’ll watch again. But we’re off to a bad start when I think two of the three main characters aren’t interesting, either through acting or writing, and so its days may be numbered on my DVR.

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Detroit 1-8-7

Whoever shackled this series with the promise of being like The Wire was doing the show no favors. To have to live up to My Name is Earl or Arrested Development is one thing, but to have to live up to The Wire is cruel. Detroit 1-8-7 is not The Wire, and although it participates in the attempt to look similar, we should give the thing a chance by freeing it from that requirement.

That said, I enjoyed it. I watch a lot of police procedurals, since they’re often on in my home, but I dislike most of them, or find them background television that rarely inspires in me more than a yawn. I liked this one, however. The pop-ups telling me which case was being worked and introducing me to different characters belittle my intelligence and are lazy devices; there are still a lot of cop clichés; and the dialogue is not as sharp as it could be. But the characters were interesting. I’m really impressed by the diverse cast, and they’re almost all doing good things with their roles. And while I never drank from the Michael Imperioli Kool-Aid prior to watching this, I thought he was excellent here, especially since he’s not overacting (as he and many of the cast of The Sopranos often seemed to be doing). In this one hour, I met more interesting characters than I have met in most of the other premieres combined. The city of Detroit is for now taking a backseat, but it’s only the pilot, and there’s time to do and say more. I’ll be around, at least for a while, to see what happens. And next time I want to tell a co-worker they’re a jerk, I plan to use Imperioli’s technique, calling them while I’m in the room.

My mini-reviews of Chase and Mike and Molly will appear over at Antenna, along with other thoughts on all the new shows from a neat group of people, so I’d point you all there.

As for my Monday, that leaves me with Hawaii 5-0, Lone Star, and The Event. All after the fold …

Hawaii Five-O deserves the award for best opening. Things began explosively, with helicopters, fathers and brothers at gun point, Irish accents, machine guns, terrorist bad guys, a cameo from the valley that appeared in most episodes of Lost, and James Marsters (Spike!). And the cut to the theme song was great, as was, indeed, the opening credit sequence:

Hawaii Five-0 was my first pick in my recent new network show television draft, so I proudly looked to my wife and exclaimed that this show was definitely getting renewed. Action, beaches, military intrigue, lots of stuff on the screen: how could a viewing audience not love this?

Well, the rest of the episode dampened my enthusiasm somewhat. I still think it’s safe for a while: the beaches, the women in bikinis, Grace Park showing her mad Cylon fighting skills, lots of guns, and a setting that could – and certainly should – be its own character, all add up to offer a fair bit. But the leads are kind of boring. O’Laughlin suffers from a lack of facial movement, while Scott Caan mostly just scrunches his face up, as neither managed to reel me in and make me care about them. Granted, this is CBS, where wooden acting has served action leads well, from David Caruso to Chris O’Donnell, so the show’s not necessarily in trouble, but it makes it hard for me to commit.

It’s also just a little too drenched in testosterone. The bromance could make for some serious slash vid fun, but I’m not sure the show will give vidders enough camp or awesomeness to make them want to bother dust off Final Cut Pro for the Fall season. As for me, I expect, as with CSI: Miami, I’ll watch it if it’s on and I want to watch something, but it won’t be destination television.

~ ~ ~

Lone Star intrigues me. I’m sure I’m the 407^th person to write a post on this show that expresses some skepticism about the show’s ability to keep going. I don’t just mean ratings-wise, though it’s anemic debut may put it on the block quickly. Rather, its premise poses a challenge of what could possibly come next. We meet a conman with a girlfriend in one town, a wife in another, yet scams everywhere. But he wants out, guided by little more than his love of both women and his resentment of his father directing him to this life. He resolves to go straight in terms of the con … though clearly wants to keep the women.

So where will this go? While this question may make us worry about the show, it also intrigues me. I love that I just watched a pilot for a show that gives me few clues as to what comes next. I feel that I could describe an average episode of almost every other new show to you right now, even those I haven’t seen yet, but Lone Star has a refreshing streak of originality. It’s also filmed quite beautifully, whoever does the music for it has done a wonderful job, and I appreciated its slow pace – it exuded a confidence that it knew where it was going. I enjoyed watching it, in short. So I’ll sign up for the ride.

That said, I’ll admit to no small discomfort with its current sexual politics. The fact that one woman is a blond, the other a brunette, especially when the former is the honest-to-goodness lower middle class “girl” and the latter is the rich daughter of a tycoon, already starts us off with a bit of a Dear-Penthouse-by-way-of-Archie-comics fetish. This is made worse when we don’t really see how he loves either of them. They’re presented as fairly one-dimensional, and though he claims to love them, this is illustrated solely through him sleeping with both of them and wanting to call them at the end of the day. So if this show’s going to go anywhere and take me with it, it’ll need to make these two women less like Sexy Blond Wife and Sexy Brunette Wife, and a lot more interesting and multi-faceted, and it’ll need to make his relationship with them a lot more nuanced. I’m cautiously optimistic about the former, if only because Adrianne Palicki – one of the better things about Friday Night Lights – plays the brunette, so surely she’ll bring something more to the role?

James Wolk also impressed me as the lead, giving me some faith that he can hold this all together. Assuming the show isn’t canceled, consider me interested.

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The Event has been bugging me for a while, since its asinine ads (“this is not The Event”) work with a pitch that I’ve never liked: the ol’ “don’t press the red button” technique just makes me not want to press the red button, rather than make me eager to press it. So I was predisposed to dislike it.

And yet it began somewhat interestingly. High production values always help. Poor Scott Patterson needs a good show that won’t get canceled straight away on him, so he won a bit of my attention. I’ll admit to being intrigued, even in spite of myself.

Then there were the last few minutes. Let me get this straight: it’s a serial drama that begins with a plane crash (or something close to it), a time or space warp, and a mysterious group of others? Could they at least try a little harder to mask the obvious Lost wannabeness? I say this, and yet ultimately its problem seems to be less that it’s too much like Lost and more that it seems too much like Heroes or V (the new, bad one) – beings with special powers, governmental persecution and containment, large conspiracies, bla bla bla. Maybe I’m just not American enough yet to stomach so many government conspiracy dramas back to back? Heroes was one of the first that I tried since X-Files, and even that wore off on me reasonably quickly.

So, yes, the production values are high. And I might take a quick peek at future episodes, just because I do study and teach serial drama. But I’m unlikely to be a loyal viewer, and it has plenty of signs of boring me quickly. It’s too obvious a pastiche of other successful (and not-so-successful) serial dramas, as though someone was writing with a magic 8 ball made from plots from Heroes, X-Files, The 4400, V, Lost, 24, and so forth.

I suspect Outlaw is not long for this world. And clearly the writers shared this concern, since it’s written all over their show. Consider:

• Early on, Jimmy Smits is threatened by a senator who tells him he’ll crush him.
• Later, Smits is told he has “3 months, best scenario.”
• And a mysterious man (Jeff Zucker’s axeman?) is following him around throughout the latter part of the episode.

The premise: Jimmy Smits plays Cyrus Garza, a Supreme Court judge who wants to fight cases, so he resigns and leads a supposedly crack team of his own choosing into the trenches of defending the innocent.

The script could be a spec script for any number of lawyer shows, it’s that uneventful. The music cues are poor and only hurt that script. Garza’s saucy PI Lucinda is all sorts of annoying, clearly trying to be like Angela from Bones and failing miserably. His other team members are simply boring. And the case seems almost laughably easy – if getting people off the death penalty after years of presumed guilt is this easy, we could (and perhaps should) all be lawyers. Indeed, I imagine lawyers will hate this show almost as much as I hate television’s insistence that all professors are remarkably inspiring leaders and/or sleeping with their students.

The politics in it are also remarkably crude. From Garza’s first scoff at a stereotyped ACLU member, to the subsequent charge, from the grave, that he is a conservative who knows he’s wrong deep in his heart, and to the nefarious Republican senator who threatens his career as Supreme Court Judge, it’s all good guys and bad guys. The starkness of this binaristic framework is all the more jarring when it surrounds Smits, whose most recent turn on television saw him navigate the murky moral waters of Dexter, and who a few years earlier, closed out The West Wing in a season that was willing to offer nuance to both liberals and conservatives. Yet here, I half expect the Republicans to wear black eye patches, such is the writing.

But truth be told, it’s not superbad, and I’m just picking on the more egregious things above. Rather, it’s just wholly uninspiring and thoroughly meh. It putters along without really dazzling or doing much of note. There are way better shows, but also way worse ones. David Ramsey (who you may know as Anton from Dexter), for instance, is solid and likeable. Smits is reliably strong, yet as with Cane, he’s once more jumped aboard a bland show that doesn’t promise to jump out in any real way.

So, I echo Garza’s bookie: “3 months, best scenario”