Rather than organize these by network, which would be a bit obvious and boring, how about instead I list them from least interesting (to me) to most interesting?

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The Detritus

This means that we start with the tough, three-way battle for the title of Worst New Drama. Our contestants? NBC’s Love Bites, ABC’s My Generation, and The CW’s Hellcats. Love Bites has a horrible trailer, and whoever made it really should be embarrassed, since it left me deeply confused. I get that it’s an anthology romcom that promises to demean a new group of stars each week with trite dialogue and plots, but it’s unclear whether the women we meet at the beginning are part of a continuous frame, if Greg Grunberg is either, and if so how they relate to the other stories. It just shifts gears without explaining how or why. It also has a really bad voiceover and looked more like a tampon ad than a show; indeed, if you’ve seen the playful UbyKotex attack on the obnoxiousness of tampon ads, you’ve seen an effective satire of Love Bites. Oh, okay, we’ll give it the title, shall we?

That said, in terms of paint by numbers programming and obnoxiousness, My Generation is really throwing a hail Mary pass to the end zone. The premise is that a group of people who graduated together ten years ago are now being checked up on. Filmed documentary style, yet fictional (the fiction is evident from the patent stupidity and formulaic quality), it revels in its self-importance, as if this is this is the new Up Series, telling us all about aging, dreams, potential, realization, life, plans, and The Things That Matter. As an exercise, get out a piece of paper now, write down ten of the most formulaic, trite high school characters you could imagine; then, keeping with the theme of trite, imagine where they’ll be in ten years; and I guarantee you’ve now created something on par with the writing behind this show, at least if the trailer’s to be believed.

In third place for worst show is Hellcats. The title alone bugs me. With Cougar Town already on the air, did we really need another show whose title animalizes women? Apparently so. The show also perplexes me, since it seems a very small toggle of The Beautiful Life, a show that died a remarkably quick death last year for The CW. Only it’s cheerleaders now, not models. This seems a move in the wrong direction: surely the model’s life is more aspirational than that of a cheerleader? Perhaps that’s why our central character is a street-wise, edgy blond who is forced into cheerleading to get a scholarship to become a lawyer (‘cause we all know that nothing impresses a law firm more than cheerleading on the CV!), and yet who makes lots of critical comments about cheerleaders. She’s a character that The CW is specializing in – utter insiders who think they’re outsiders. I’m inclined to bemoan the creation of a generation who think they’re facing great struggles, and who want the sympathy for it, when they’re some of the planet’s most privileged individuals, but that way lies Grumpy Old Man territory, and I need to keep faith that the audience is more complex than what’s on the screen, lest I give up all hope in life. Suffice it to say, meanwhile, that Hellcats and I will not be BFFs. It’s only third worst since I’m least in its target demo, so I’ll give it a break.

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Meh

Blue Bloods’ trailer made Tom Selleck look past his shelf-life. It also contains one of the more vapid promotional comments I’ve heard, from Selleck: “This show is very exciting. It’s got plots. It’s got action. It’s got all that stuff.” “All that stuff,” eh? Sounds like a great work of art to me! Anyways, it’s a family cop drama set in New York with an Irish family, from a pair of Sopranos scribes, and also starring Donnie Wahlberg. Magnum PI and the New Kid on the Block just ain’t doin’ it for me. It seemed a little more sophisticated than the average cop show, and I’ll leave room that it may rise to greatness, but at the moment, it’s just a big “Meh” from me.

I was disappointed by Undercovers, the new J. J. Abrams show. Maybe this is a case of the trailer hurting the show, or maybe it shows that the editor was really frisky when s/he made it, but it’s far too much sexual intrigue and not enough spy intrigue (or heck, not even enough family intrigue). I expect way more from the guy behind Alias, but when the show’s title is that cheesy, maybe my hopes are foolish. Chuck is a great, fun spy dramedy from a prominent showrunner, but it’s struggled in the ratings; I wonder how this one will do when it looks worse in almost every respect. I’m really excited to see network TV greenlight a drama with two African-Americans as the leads, but equally concerned that if it fails (because it’s not that good), some bonehead execs will see it as a sign of the unmarketability of such a casting model for a show.

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Meh Plus

Nikita is the other new spy drama, with Maggie Q showing prowess as a hunter and killer, yet struggling with the ability to keep more than lingerie or underwear on at any given time. Again, I’m happy to see a non-white lead for such a show, especially on The CW, who came a very distant fifth out of the five major networks last year in terms of non-white series regulars. It feels like Alias with more contemporary music, and also looks more action-packed and plot-driven than Undercovers’ somewhat basic premise. It’ll need more going on in it than just a scowling Shane West, and I’m not underestimating The CW’s ability to disappoint me, but for now I’ll sign up for an episode or two.

When Flash Forward concluded with another blackout, I half expected for one of them to see “the event.” Certainly, the new serial show, The Event, has a similar visual style and cryptic “what’s happening, man?” element to it. It also has a really annoying trailer, showing us various fascinating incidences, only to tell us these are not “the event.” The suggestion, I get it, is that The Event is so monumental that all these other things (like an assassination attempt on a President in the over-theatrical form of flying a jumbo jet into him) are small potatoes, but it’s a tenuous, dangerous strategy for a trailer to take to deliberately withhold telling you what it’s all about (imagine: “Grey’s Anatomy is not about lawyers freeing the wrongly accused, it’s not about a loveable old man who moves in with his son to humorous consequences, and it’s not about enjoyable television”). And when the NBC press release announces, “Their futures are on a collision course in a global conspiracy that could ultimately change the fate of mankind,” I really should be checking out by now. But it’s high concept, it’s serial, and now that Lost’s gone, what am I gonna do with myself? Okay, NBC, I’ll check it out, but if it really is the V meets Flash Forward hybrid that your trailer suggests it is, I’m gone.

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Consider Me Interested

David Lyons didn’t do much to impress me on ER, so I’m wary of The Cape, given that it’s centered on him. All the same, the Unbreakable fan in me finds it hard not to be drawn in by this tale of a man who must leave his family and assume the role of a superhero called The Cape, named after the hero in a comic he read to his son. Summer Glau also stars, which should ensure it some extra viewers, though personally I don’t know what the hoopla is all about with her. I like the world they set up – vaguely Gothamesque in its dysfunctionality and need for a hero. And thus while I’m aware it may just be a pastiche of other things that I like, and wholly unable to deliver when push comes to shove, for now I’m casually interested.

Terra Nova has no trailer, and only sketchy details, but there’s enough to hook me for now. A Steven Spielberg production, the show finds a family sent back in time as part of a mission, with others, to correct humankind due to the imminent death of the human species. If I set aside my skepticism that any well-funded entity would care enough about the species, not just their own selfish selves, to correct our course through time, this sounds kind of cool. Could be dumb, very dumb. But I’m eager to hear more.

No Ordinary Family is the second of the superhero stories to join television, and though he has experience as Ben Grimm / The Thing in the Fantastic Four movies, I’m especially fascinated by the somewhat odd casting of Michael Chiklis, and eager to see what he can do after The Shield. He’s the father of an Incredibles type family, who after exposure to something superhero-ish, all gain powers. Julie Benz (Dexter Morgan’s wife in Dexter, or Darla in Buffy, depending upon your preference) also stars. Smallville used to be interesting, before everyone started wearing PVC and Clark showed his ability to leap a shark in a single bound, and I’m hoping this could be an early season Smallville, yet with a little more adult grit, and with a family element. I’ll be watching.

And tied for most interesting-to-me is Lonestar. This show may be utter crap, but for now I pay homage to whoever made the trailer, since it really is quite excellent. We’re presented with a character who seemingly has two loving wives, each not knowing of the other’s existence. But before this seems like Big Love, we’re introduced to his nasty father who is the kingpin in a con he’s running with one or both. Except the son wants out. On paper or read on a computer screen, it sounds kind of dull, no? And yet the trailer had me really interested. He seemed like a fascinating, original character, and the trailer offered just enough pictures of the surroundings to suggest that it’ll be visually interesting too, examining the location as much as the characters, and situating one within the other. All this could be the product of very good editing, but kudos to the editor, since you got me in the door.

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And that’s it. I’ll be back to discuss scheduling all this stuff later, but I hope some of this helps you decide what to watch and what not to watch this Fall. I’ll try to watch each pilot too, and be back with more in Fall.

Note to network TV: there are already enough procedurals. CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, Criminal Minds, Law and Order: SVU, Bones, House, The Good Wife, Medium, The Mentalist, NCIS, NCIS: LA, and (debatably) Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice are enough. Really. CBS, I’m talking to you in particular.

Perhaps I should’ve sent out the note before the Upfronts, since procedurals are all the rage for next year, with 4.5 new lawyer procedurals, 5.5 new cop procedurals, and 2 new doctor procedurals.  Instead of breaking them down by network, let’s look at them in those terms:

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“I Didn’t Do It!”: Lawyer Shows

Outlaw and Harry’s Law should both be treated together, since their trailers were clearly cut from the same cloth. Both star a biggish name talent (Jimmy Smits and Kathy Bates respectively) as successful individuals who tire of their regular job and hence who change gears to help a poor, innocent African-American in their first case. Both are serious with a touch of sass, both are transformed into better humans by their experiences, and both want their own Green Mile moments. Both shows count on the talents of their stars, but Smits was unable to pull the trick with Cane, even with Nestor Carbonell at his side, and Harry’s Law risks splitting the vote with The Good Wife or losing out to it since the latter is a better show by most appearances. Consider me bored on both accounts, though with David E. Kelley behind Harry’s Law, maybe it’ll do better than I think, and become more funny and charming than it seems at present?

The Defenders’ claim that few lawyer shows depict the defense seems somewhat amusing in the context of a season with these other shows, and as much as I will always love Stand By Me, Jerry O’Connell is no Jimmy Smits or Kathy Bates, and Jim Belushi delivered his best performance in K9, which isn’t saying much. Amusingly in the trailer, after Belushi notes O’Connell’s strength as a comedian, O’Connell deadpans that he signed on largely for the experience of working with Belushi – a great joke if ever I heard one. I’d schedule the wrap party for this one early in the season, though I would’ve said the same with According to Jim, so maybe the Belushi Protection Society will keep this one on a feeding tube for a while longer. It’s unclear if it means to be funny or serious, both or neither, so it’s tonally vapid … in addition to seeming boring.

The Whole Truth promises the seemingly bold move of offering both sides of a case. But we’ve seen this before, and if the trailer’s anything to go by, this will result in head-spinning and/or gimmicky back-and-forth editing that could wear thin by the end of the second episode. Rob Morrow stars, but his former affability seems lost in an attempt to be a big boy lawyer. Once again, I’m unimpressed.

And, crossing the cop/lawer boundary is Law and Order: Los Angeles. There’s no trailer here, just a CGI teaser, so it’s hard to judge. But perhaps the tired, dead, horse-kicking series needs the jolt of a new visual style and a new location. Alternately, perhaps we’ve all seen LA in way too many crime dramas and cop shows already. I refuse to judge at this point.

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“Book ‘em, Danno!”: Cop Shows

After falling for Lost’s Jin and Sun something fierce, it’s hard not to be intrigued by Daniel Dae Kim’s latest outing, Hawaii Five-O. With Grace Park costarring, no less, it’s a perfect fan Lost/BSG collision. The trailer didn’t do much for me, and suggested little more than a regular cop show, without the CGI bells and whistles that the CSI franchise brought into the picture. But it’ll have the advantage of a great location in Hawaii, and if they use that location and film it half as well as the folks at Lost did, it might at least pull a CSI: Miami and look too beautiful to cancel. Meanwhile, I owe Daniel Dae Kim at least a couple of episodes of watching.

CBS, ever mindful of their need to program 80% procedurals, has also commissioned an as-yet-unnamed Criminal Minds spinoff, which just seems wrong. No network should be allowed more than two cop show franchises. Surely there are only so many 50 year-old guys in the country and eventually their supply as viewers will run out? No trailer, just a premise, and an uninspiring one at that.

Bound to have more edge is FOX’s Ride-Along, from The Shield’s Shawn Ryan. Set in Chicago with a distinct Southland feel to it, it might be a good test of whether NBC just flubbed the delivery with Southland or whether it was the audience’s fault all along. At the same time, ABC’s Detroit 1-8-7 tries to offer a similarly gritty, NYPD Blue meets The Wire image of Detroit, starring Michael Imperioli. Both shows clearly have pretensions of being life-like, cutting-edge, and finger-on-the-pulse, and the latter in particular has an appealing visual style. Whether network TV can pull off this level of realism remains to be seen, and I’d rather hold judgment till I’ve seen more.

Finally, Chase follows a team of US Marshals led by a tough, kickass woman. Jerry Bruckheimer produced, yet penned by Jennifer Johnson. It’s a reasonably well-edited trailer, promising intrigue, action, and tough cookies, but see the note that opens this post to see why I’m unlikely to care.

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“Ouch!”: Doctor Shows

After NBC’s Mercy and Trauma were tossed from their steeds this year, ABC is offering its own pair of medical dramas, no doubt buoyed by its success with Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, and hence sure that it can do better.

Body of Proof seems to have been made by the same team who did the Harry’s Law and Outlaw trailers, or at least written by the same machine. Many years after leaving China Beach, Dana Delany’s back headlining her own medical drama, as a neurosurgeon who has to leave her job and become a medical examiner. The former automaton now finds her humanity with corpses. If that irony sounds too heavy-handed to you, you’re not alone, so I propose that if the first four episodes repeat the irony more than twice, the show is dead to me.

Off the Map is the more intriguing offering, from ABC’s own Shonda Rhimes and co-writers, starring Wonderfalls’ Caroline Dharvernas, yet set in the South American jungle in a Medicins Sans Frontiers set-up. I repeat my interest in shows filmed and set outside the US, and hence hope that it works, but as with Outsourced, I worry about the significant potential for it to reel out stereotype after Othering after boneheaded prejudice. Let’s hope it pulls it off and avoids those ailments. It’s also interesting to see a trailer for a Rhimes production that doesn’t put the sexual intrigue first and foremost. I’m still skeptical, but at least I’m curious too.

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And those are the procedurals. For our last installment, I’ll discuss other dramas (and dramedies).

If one was inclined to read genres like tealeaves, one might find it interesting to see that 13 new sitcoms have been announced for Fall, while only 3 reality television shows are planned. Is The Age of Unscripted Television over? Granted, each network already has its tent-pole reality shows (Idol for FOX, Survivor and Amazing Race for CBS, Biggest Loser for NBC, Dancing with the Stars for ABC, and America’s Next Top Model for The CW), but it’s relevant that they’re not trying to triple up with many more.

Perhaps they’ve run out of ideas? Of course, many more objectionable, offensive, and crazy niche ideas exist for the conceiving and the making, but it may be that they’re being farmed out to the cable channels, lest ABC, for instance, need to explain how a dating show for pre-teens, or America’s Next Top Moving Company fits with its brand identity.

In the meantime, this leaves us with a small entering class.

School Pride is basically Extreme Makeover: School Edition, though the trailer made it unclear if the crew would do a different school each week or stay with the same school for a season. For the sake of seeing a wide variety of change, many viewers might hope for the former, but for the sake of dealing with due complexity and perhaps even analyzing root causes, I favor the latter. In terms of originality, the show seems uninspired, and it certainly seems to prove Laurie Ouellette and James Hay’s point in their excellent book Better Living Through Reality TV that reality TV has replaced the welfare state in our neoliberal times. But it’s hard to begrudge a program that promises to overhaul an entire school. It’s also impressive to see NBC up the ante on ABC’s EM:HE in grand style, and if ABC’s wunderkind can get the waterworks going in houses across the US, literally and figuratively, just wait to see what the School Edition can do. I’ve been very wrong before, but I can’t see this one failing.

NBC’s second newbie is America’s Next Great Restaurant. Their reality TV strategy seems quite simple: (1) Spinoff NBC’s only reality hit (hence Losing It With Jillian this summer), (2) Shamelessly copy, yet one-up, another network’s success (hence School Pride), and (3) Shamelessly copy a cable channel’s success. Here, the help comes in the form of Bobby Flay, one of the more watchable chefs on television. I have no trailer to go on, just the concept and the title. My concern is with regards location (as with School Pride, albeit to a lesser degree). Most of the other cooking shows succeed by putting the focus on the individuals, wherein place becomes unimportant. FOX’s Kitchen Nightmares roves from location to location, as does Flay’s own Throwdown. But if all the restaurant contenders are in one city, it might be hard to win the identification of viewers elsewhere, especially if that city is the big, bad New York. Personally, I’d rather watch Food Network and see the pros do it than watch NBC copy it, so consider me a skeptic.

Finally, there’s The CW’s Biggest Loser format twist, Shedding for the Wedding. Again, no trailer, just the concept – couples compete to lose weight so that they’re skinny for the wedding, and along the way they compete in challenges to win other things for the wedding (“Congratulations, you win a reprieve from having to invite all your mother’s great aunt’s bridge partners! We’re sending invitations to the wrong address for them!!” “Oh, honey, it’s just what we’ve always wanted!”). Biggest Loser already bothers me, given my suspicions that some seriously unhealthy weight loss is happening on “The Campus” (btw, isn’t that a Japanese horror film?), but once we add the fact that they’re doing it all in a manic attempt to have a “fairytale wedding” (so fairytale that nobody there will recognize them), I congratulate The CW on once again finding a show that actively encourages me to watch something else. With all that’s on television, and all that I need to catch up on, I appreciate such gestures.

What new shows lie ahead? Last week’s Upfronts gave us the answer. The allure of so many new shows is impossible for me to resist, and thus this is the first in a four part series discussing the new network shows for Fall. I’m not discussing summer additions, since most of those have already offered previews and various trailers or other promotional materials, so they’re more established, and since I have to cut it off somewhere. I’m also not discussing new cable shows, despite the cable channels being part of the Upfronts this year (as Amanda Lotz describes here), since there are so many channels that it becomes impossible to know when to stop.

Those warnings, offered, let’s begin.

And I start with the large crop of new comedies, 13 between the Big Four to be exact (The CW doesn’t believe in [intentional] comedy anymore, so it seems). This is a huge freshman class, and it suggests the degree to which all that crap about sitcoms being dead was so very wrong. Indeed, and as the third installment in this series suggests too, 2010-2011 promises to be just as full of procedurals and comedies as any point in television history.

The problem with evaluating new sitcoms is that the trailers must establish the sit(uation) in the sitcom, and to do so they nearly always create little more than archetypes and stereotypes. The challenge for any comedy is to live and breathe beyond those types, to play with and around them, and to be original in doing so, and sometimes none of that happens until the pilot is done and dusted. So I’m hesitant to crown any of these excellent at this point. But I’m more than happy to crown some of them as horrific.

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Let’s start with NBC (see their trailers here), who as Derek Kompare notes here in his post on the network’s attempts to change its brand identity as Erstwhile Loser at these Upfronts, has a lot to prove and a lot to play for.

• Friends with Benefits looks painfully bad, and if nothing is scheduled against it that you like, please take up a hobby because it could hurt you. Luckily, its title is bad enough to warn you away, I hope. It reeks of the network trying to announce that it’s cool and hip, but that hip is the broken hip on the cool cadaver of comedy. I don’t really get who they’re pitching this at: in an age of CW and Internet porn, surely anyone who wants titillation can find it elsewhere, so what’s left in this tepid looking show but a badly-executed would-be romcom? I don’t plan on finding out. Though I will give points for the Yo-Yo Ma gag.
• The Paul Reiser Show doesn’t look as puke-drenched, but it is a bit sad to see Reiser once more riding the Seinfeld coattails (Mad About You being the original Kenny Bania), this time trying to do something Curb Your Enthusiasm-like. It’s meta and it’s singlecam, and but he’s Paul Reiser, not Larry David (and as Seinfeld told us, listening to Bania is like being beaten with a bag of oranges). This is the kind of format that cable will always do way better, which makes me wonder if someone in the NBC-Universal cable division was filling in for an NBC exec the day this one got greenlit. Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine unobjectionable, blah comedy, but I’d like something more.
• Perfect Couples, which focuses on three different young couples, is only meh for me – not bad, not good. Best case scenario: it learns from How I Met Your Mother how to do funny couples humor and delivers to the same audience. Worst case scenario: it looks like a really bad hybrid of HIMYM and Friends that burns out after the he says/she says humor runs dry. The tester: if they make jokes about men and women’s different reactions to the prospect of going shopping in the first three episodes, it’s gonna be bad (‘cause they already did the “she takes all the space in the bed” joke in the trailer, so thin ice has been courted already).
• Outsourced is a clear example of what I mention above, regarding pilots and types. Set in a call center in India, this show’s potential to peddle endless Indian stereotypes uncritically and moronically is vast. But it’s also a very rare beast in being an American show (a sitcom, no less!) set outside America with predominantly non-American characters, so the upside is worth tuning in for. I’m not getting my hopes up, but it would be nice if it works.

Overall, then, I just don’t see NBC returning to greatness with these comedies, though with The Office, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, and Community, that’s not their problem, so tune in later for discussion of their dramas.

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ABC has three new comedies of its own (see all their trailers here), stoked on by the success of Modern Family and Cougar Town (and the impressiveness of The Middle, albeit to middling ratings):

• Mr. Sunshine, starring Matthew Perry as the manager of a sports arena, has me very excited. Why? Allison Janney. I looooove Allison Janney. CJ Cregg was one of the very best characters on television, and Janney is brilliant in all things. She also has history opposite Perry. This looks like it could be a smart comedy, and it’s certainly something different (a manager of a sports arena? Pa Brady never did that!), which may doom it on network TV, and maybe I’m letting my love of Janney carry this too far, but a person has to believe in something, and I believe in Allison Janney. The trailer looks like Sports Night meets The Larry Sanders Show.
• Happy Endings, however, looks to be in competition with Friends with Benefits for lamest new comedy. Elisha Cuthbert stars as … oh, I don’t care, and neither should you. She is close to a polar opposite to Janney in terms of acting skills. Trailers for comedies risk taking the only funny bits in the show, but here there are none, a sadly telling indicator of the horror that lies ahead. Don’t get me wrong – romcoms can be good, but this isn’t.
• Better Together strikes me as a very conventional sitcom. Kind of like Perfect Couples, it offers three couples, here a sister and her recent fiancé, a longtime unmarried couple, and their parents. With a fairly decent cast of sitcom-ready actors, it looks competent, if unspectacular, the kind of show I might find amusing yet not feel I need to follow. Dharma and Greg for the 2010s.

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In terms of branding, I give the gold star to FOX (see all their clips here), who are launching four new comedies, three of which are exactly the kind of comedies you’d expect from the network.

• When people said that My Name is Earl should’ve gone to FOX, where it would’ve been a better tonal fit, clearly Greg Garcia listened and took Raising Hope there. Once more offering a seriously messed up hero and supporting characters, the show follows the arrival of a new baby in the lead’s life. Suitably irreverent, edgy, and very funny, this show looks quite good, I must admit, and it will nicely fit the Earl-sized hole in my viewing schedule. Any show with a flashback scene of a baby riding down a street with his head sticking out the bottom of a car must be good, right?
• Running Wilde also brings back a great talent to the small box, in the form of Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz, with Will Arnett starring no less. Arnett is so fun to watch on screen, and the plot seems suitably ludicrous that I will definitely be watching when it starts. Offbeat, strange, and overdone in fun ways, it could be very good.
• Mixed Signals is another Friends/HIMYM-type show in a year with many of them. It seems fairly adept, perhaps the best of the bunch, yet I’m not sure the market analysis that’s told all these execs that people really, really want more of these types of shows is right, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see most fall my the wayside. Perhaps the studios are simply moving romcoms to TV and away from film since they don’t think they’ll succeed in 3D.
• Bob’s Burgers is another animated sitcom, but miraculously NOT from Seth McFarlane. The bits I saw seemed resolutely Adult Swim-y in their bit-ishness and low grade visual style. I’m guessing this is too cheap looking for network TV, and I give it a short life, especially if it’s as ho-hum as the clips suggest.

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CBS only has two new comedies (see them here):

• Shit My Dad Says promised to be amusing if only to hear how people read the title on network TV. And it stars William Shatner as an irascible, opinionated old guy. So I expected a lot more, but the trailer is resolutely unfunny. Wow, who would’ve thought that a Twitter feed wasn’t enough to build a show off? At this point, studios should be more respectful of The Shat – don’t let this be his last role, CBS!
• Mike and Molly bothers me, since it seems entirely premised on the fact that its stars are heavy (even the title graphics, at present, are of a scale). Fat jokes are fine for five minute segments in a stand-up routine (or for Twitter feeds?), but as the basis of a show, the format seems too doomed to the bi-polar swing between self-loathing and inspirational “we’re all beautiful” platitudes. I’d rather a show like Roseanne where the stars are heavy but just get on with being funny about a variety of topics. I’d hold out more hope that they move away from that premise in due time, but it’s from Chuck Lorre, so comic genius and sophistication don’t seem to be in the cards.

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And those are the comedies. Next up: reality television.

It’s really hard to know where to begin with a review of something so utterly bad. I’d been led to believe that Seinfeld would be the host, but instead he sat there at the side like a creepy guy at a public park. The actual host was about as funny as a snuff film. The crowd were laughing, but I felt for their family members, who were clearly being held under duress elsewhere on the NBC lot, with threats of them being “disappeared” if the audience didn’t laugh, damn it, laugh.

As for the other celebrities, I didn’t know whether to feel more sad for Alec Baldwin or angry at him for agreeing to do this. I hope next time he’s up for an Emmy for Best Comic Performance, they discount this against him. Say what you will about According to Jim, but at least Belushi never did something like this (did he?). I note too that nobody outside the NBC/Universal family appeared on the show; indeed, if I ran any of the other networks, I’d be begging, cajoling, and pleading with my talent to stay away.

Despite those celebs, the whole affair was low budget, not in a fun and endearing way, but in a painful, bewildering way. NBC looks so broke, so destitute with this, and not just monetarily. The couples were rude, disinteresting, and entirely unbelievable (one of them wanted a stripper pole in his room, and NBC expects us to believe he’s earnest in thinking the judges would agree with him?), living proof of why the network will need to pay for real WGA writers, not just the hacks who created these scripts. The only thing that made it compelling was seeing how much worse it could get.

So, okay, the above’s a rant. You might be reading it and wondering what made me so grumpy today. But that’s the funny part. Nothing did: Canada won gold in men’s hockey. I couldn’t be happier. I’m riding Cloud Nine. And NBC gave me the win in full HD. So if ever there was a day in which NBC might’ve convinced me that something very, very bad was actually okay, it was today. Which makes me wonder: if this is how bad it is today, how much worse will it look when it starts for real?

When longtime television shows die, they’re said to have “jumped the shark,” courtesy of Happy Days’ dark days. Franchises can now be said to have “nuked the fridge” when they turn stupid as did Indiana Jones. In years to come, we may well find ourselves explaining to students that the by-then-well-known phrase for an entire network sinking into obscurity, “becoming a marriage ref,” came from February 28, 2010, when NBC announced that they really don’t care about quality any more.

My book on paratexts is finally out: Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Paratexts. ($22, but I see Amazon’s selling it for $14.85. That’s cheaper than a season of Two and a Half Men on DVD! What are you waiting for?). I thought I’d give some tasters of it with a selection of paratexts. The cover, obviously enough is above.

The Contents

Introduction – Film, Television, and Off-Screen Studies

Chapter 1 – From Spoilers to Spinoffs: A Theory of Paratexts

Chapter 2 – Coming Soon! Hype, Intros, and Textual Beginnings

Chapter 3 – Bonus Materials: Digital Auras and Authors

Chapter 4 – Under a Long Shadow: Sequels, Prequels, Pre-Texts, and Intertexts

Chapter 5 – Spoiled and Mashed Up: Viewer-Created Paratexts

Chapter 6 – In the World, Just Off Screen: Toys and Games

Conclusion – “In the DNA”: Creating Across Paratexts

The Back Copy

It is virtually impossible to watch a movie or TV show without preconceived notions because of the hype that precedes them, while a host of media extensions guarantees them a life long past their air dates. An onslaught of information from print media, trailers, internet discussion, merchandising, podcasts, and guerilla marketing, we generally know something about upcoming movies and TV shows well before they are even released or aired. The extras, or “paratexts,” that surround viewing experiences are far from peripheral, shaping our understanding of them and informing our decisions about what to watch or not watch and even how to watch before we even sit down for a show.

Show Sold Separately gives critical attention to this ubiquitous but often overlooked phenomenon, examining paratexts like DVD bonus materials for The Lord of the Rings, spoilers for Lost, the opening credits of The Simpsons, Star Wars actions figures, press reviews for Friday Night Lights, the framing of Batman Begins, the videogame of The Thing, and the trailers for The Sweet Hereafter. Plucking these extra materials from the wings and giving them the spotlight they deserve, Jonathan Gray examines the world of film and television that exists before and after the show.

Word Clouds, courtesy of wordle.com, of Chapters 2 & 3

The Endorsements

“Show Sold Separately will rewrite the rules of what we look at when we want to understand how audiences make meaning of media franchises. Gray, who has long established himself in the top ranks of contemporary scholars of popular culture, writes with particularity about these varied media properties and their paratexts, yet also writes with a theoretical sophistication which feels effortless.”

- Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“Exploring the myriad connections and connotations of a wide array of paratextual materials ranging from movie trailers to action figures, Gray deftly challenges established conceptions of textuality, and opens up intriguing and important new dimensions in media and cultural studies. This is an invaluable contribution, and will change how we think about, and make, media.”

- Derek Kompare, author of Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television

And a bit of the Work – the first par.

A common first line for books on contemporary media, and for many a student essay on the subject, notes the saturation of everyday life with media. Certainly, my list of available cable channels seems to grow every month, while the list of movies in cinemas, on television, for rent, or available for purchase similarly grows at a precipitous rate. However, media growth and saturation can only be measured in small part by the number of films or television shows – or books, games, blogs, magazines, or songs for that matter – as each and every media text is accompanied by textual proliferation at the level of hype, synergy, promos, and peripherals. As film and television viewers, we are all part-time residents of the highly populated cities of Time Warner, DirecTV, AMC, Sky, Comcast, ABC, Odeon, and so forth, and yet not all of these cities’ architecture is televisual or cinematic by nature. Rather, these cities are also made up of all manner of ads, previews, trailers, interviews with creative personnel, Internet discussion, entertainment news, reviews, merchandising, guerrilla marketing campaigns, fan creations, posters, games, DVDs, CDs, and spinoffs. Hype and synergy abound, forming the streets, bridges, and trading routes of the media world, but also frequently forming many of its parks, beaches, and leisure sites. They tell us about the media world around us, they prepare us for that world, and they guide us between its structures, but they also fill it with meaning, take up much of our viewing and thinking time, and give us the resources with which we will both interpret and discuss that world.

Brothers

As my previous post pointed out, this got really low ratings. Which is a pity, since there are many worse shows on television than this one. Alas, for its chances, there are also many better shows.

CCH Pounder has received good press, justifiably, but the main cast is all pretty decent. Daryl Mitchell has something of an early Eddie Murphy to his quick, punchy, and aggressive-yet-not delivery, and the writing team clearly knows how to write for him. Indeed, that’s particularly evident in his mere inclusion, as a man in a wheelchair, in the show, and it’s impressive to see two characters in wheelchairs (the other being in Glee) make it onto television this year, given how disgraceful network TV’s exclusion of characters with disabilities has been overall. Michael Strahan is a bit blah, but his role doesn’t require much more.

I could see myself watching this again, though not as destination television. Apart from anything else, too much of the humor is based on people yelling at each other, and insult humor can wear off quickly. Ultimately, given its ratings, I wouldn’t recommend anyone get too attached, since I fear it’s not long for this world.

The Cleveland Show

I go back and forth on whether I like Family Guy, and if so, how much. At times, I’m in the mood for it and think it’s great. At other times, it’s tired and way too poorly written for my tastes. It relies too much on gags, without enough narrative-based humor. So I was intrigued to see that The Cleveland Show’s ads suggested a bit more narrative.

The pilot, by contrast, went back to all gags, with very little narrative-based humor. And I didn’t laugh much at all. After FG and American Dad, Seth McFarlane’s formula has become all too evident, and all too firm, so it seems, giving this show little sense of its own life. I’d expect that after its newness factor wears off, it’ll slide precipitously in the ratings, or if it doesn’t, it had timeslot and timeslot alone to thank. It’s not bad per se; it’s just really nothing more than humdrum, which for comedy is almost a worst crime than being actively bad.

Trauma

Lots of explosions and tension almost led me to think I cared more about the plot and character than ultimately I did. A medical drama, it featured the explosions and attending hoopla way more than the characters, to the point that I still don’t really know who these people are. I’m happy to see Cliff Curtis getting work, and he doesn’t disappoint, and, as said, the tension pulled me through the episode effectively enough. But a pilot that doesn’t tell me who its characters are and why I should care about them has stumbled. Maybe I’ll tune in again sometime to find more answers, and I liked this more than Mercy, so if you choose to add one new medical drama to your life, until I get to watch Three Rivers and check that one out, I’d recommend it be Trauma. That’s only if you need one, however. Trauma, sadly, doesn’t do much to make a viewer need it, becoming, for me, take it or leave it TV

Modern Family

I’m conflicted about this show, since its pilot showed ample signs of offering us a really bad “hot-blooded” Latina stereotype (Sofia Vergara, following on from her role as Latina stereotype in Knights of Prosperity), who we first meet yelling wildly at children, and of playing what we could call the Jack card (after Jack from Will and Grace, whereby a show asks for us to like a gay character, then pats itself on the back, and thinks it’s now okay to offer up continual jokes directed at him and at gay men). And stereotypes aren’t just bad because (duh) they’re bad, but also because they’re signs of laziness in a writing room. So, let my skepticism be noted.

That said, I found a lot of Modern Family really very funny, and immediately programmed a season recording into my DVR thereafter. There are hints of Arrested Development to it, in pacing and style, but also in its wonderfully wry take on family dynamics. Phil (Ty Burrell) is a highlight, and if he keeps it up could easily enter the pantheon of great comic heroes of American television. Homer meets Michael Scott. All of the children, too, are hilarious. Given my above-noted concerns, I found Phil’s side of the show much funnier, though the other sides offered some deeply funny moments too. The “Circle of Life” presentation of the new baby was especially well done.

I’m also intrigued by the concept of having three families who we needn’t watch together, but who can be matched up as the writers see fit. If used well, the concept could allow the show to last a little longer, given that the writers can stockpile material for any given family, and “their” issues, for longer.

The previews hadn’t impressed me, but I found this very funny. I just hope they move past their stereotypes with as much intelligence as the show otherwise shows itself capable of.

Cougar Town

The previews here didn’t just not impress me – they actively bugged me. I’m so sick and tired of shows that posit being single, 40-something, and a woman as some horrific, all-encompassing problem, and as comic motivation for every bloody scene. While the best comic figures are always those with some inherent lack, why is having no husband posited as such a lack? And the title? It’s so sophomor(on)ic, making me think of 30 Rock’s MILF Island. So, in case you’re keeping tabs, I wasn’t looking forward to this show. At all.

To its defense, I’ll note that Busy Philipps (from Freaks and Geeks) and Christa Miller (from Scrubs) are funny people, especially the latter. And the revelation in the pilot is Aliens in America’s Dan Byrd, who never struck me as all that special on Aliens, but who is really impressive here. Given the boy a better sitcom, will you? Miller, Philipps, and Byrd all inhabit their characters well, and bring a great deal to the screen. Courtney Cox is out of her league with such company, just managing to tread water and not look awful, but when you’re the star, you should be doing more, and I’d guess the only thing she has working for her is a generation of viewers who loved Friends and who might therefore see her as incapable of doing wrong.

Anyway, it made me laugh much more than I thought it would. But it still pisses me off. The guys all seem comfortable in their skin, from her ex, to her son, to her snarky neighbor, while she’s just kinda sad and desperate. If this is what post-feminism looks like, eesh, you ain’t come a long way, baby.

Mercy

I’ve heard this panned by some critics, and my viewing of the Upfront clips suggested it would be horrific. I suspected that the urge to play with the title of the show in my review would be too large. But it turned out to be passable, if nothing more.

It’s set in an odd gendered space that bugged me somewhat. The women are in charge and clearly we’re meant to be impressed by all this female power, yet ultimately what the women are in charge of are your traditional coded-female issues – clear communication, taking care of other’s feelings, and easing family and work tensions. While on one hand, I’m not blind to the degree to which these responsibilities are thrown onto real life women, and thus while on that hand, the show at least asks viewers to value such roles, on the other hand, it does a pretty lousy job of trying to challenge those binaries.

I do like, though, how the show’s set in a rather messy world, where not everything is cut and dry. I like how it gives Guillermo Diaz from Weeds a chance to be something other than a stereotype. Lead Taylor Schilling does an okay job, and is much more interesting (written, and acted) as the center of a medical drama than is the soggy piece of cardboard that is Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy. And there were some well done moments. So it’s alright, and those slamming it are being unfair. But it has its problems, Michelle Trachtenburg being a big one – her character is impossibly wet behind the ears, and more appropriate for Doogie Howser, MD than for this show. I also worry that in its attempt to be gritty (which at times succeeds), it threw too much at the wall in the pilot, and would’ve been better advised to pick its spots and be patient.

I don’t know if I’ll bother with another episode. It’s not DVR-able, as far as I’m concerned, but if I was channel surfing, I might watch it.

Eastwick

Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia both failed, suggesting that the Sex and the City clone idea was a failure. So instead the producers here decided to:
(a) move the scene to Stars Hollow (it’s filmed on the Gilmore Girls set);
(b) give them powers, thereby making it a grown-up Charmed; and
(c) put them in a harem

The first move’s an interesting one. For all that SatC was touted as a hip urban show, I always wondered how much popularity it gained from women definitively not in an urban environment wanting a taste of that life. Granted, to move the action to a small town necessitates somewhat less rampant consumerism … though only somewhat less, as the fetishism of Egyptian cotton sheets is hard to miss in the pilot. But the style is similar, based around girlfriends talking about “boobs” (their word), vibrators, and penises more than I’d have thought your average 14 year old boy was able to. Except now it might seem all the more identifiable to many viewers, set in a small town?

The second move is handled sloppily. In my TV Comedy class, I’ve been showing clips of older sitcoms, and I think of how poorly magic was handled in The Munsters or I Dream of Jeannie – you see it coming a mile away, it’s given too much screen time as the producers are ever so proud of themselves, and thus it interrupts pacing, and I can always think of better ways to use the powers than do the lame practitioners on screen. The episode I showed my class of Jeannie is “The Americanization of Jeannie,” one in which Jeannie reads an article on the “emancipation of the modern woman,” which turns out just to be about how to get nicer clothes and make your man treat you to dinner at fancy restaurants more often. Jeannie can do anything, yet all she wants is a nice dinner and the undying attention of her “master.” I fear that Eastwick could only be headed in that direction – like Jeannie, these women are set to inherit awesome powers, and instead of doing anything all that impressive with them, it seems as though they’ll use them to make sure the guys who were mean to them pay the price and the next guys are nicer. Pretty empty and vapid, eh?

And that “eh?” segues me to the leader of the harem, Due South’s Paul Gross. Gross is having a lot of fun in the Jack Nicholson role, and was one of the highlights of the show. Except for the fact that it’s depressing to see the women start to become his yo-yo’s on a string. Even when Rebecca Romijn’s character has a vision of her daughter being raped by a young man, when she races to the rescue, it’s Gross who has to step in and punch the little turd, when it would’ve been nice to see her ring his bell herself. Yeah, yeah, it’s a remake, but why not reenvision the harem leader in a less harem leader manner?

Thus if Mercy’s gender politics seemed a little off, Eastwick’s seem really retrograde, and highly problematic. I vote no.

The Forgotten

This show posits a quasi-underground network of people who step in to identify a dead John or Jane Doe after the police have given up, and who clearly hope to solve their murder. Right off the bat, though, the show’s way too self-serious about the network, to the point of significant comedy. For instance, there’s an exchange near the end when someone asks Christian Slater where the people who found Jane Doe are, and he says “we’re everywhere,” thereby sounding one part Verizon ad, one part Crossing Over with John Edward.

Slater takes himself too seriously too. Or maybe he’s just trying to inject some intensity into a show that is painfully lacking. Watching this was a chore, since it’s just so very boring. If the often well-written, habitually well-acted Without a Trace couldn’t survive on network TV, I can’t see how this snoozer will go far. I’m even bored writing about it, so let’s end things here.

Accidentally on Purpose

The show, about a woman in her late thirties who has a fling with a much younger guy that leads to her getting pregnant, has lackluster reviews elsewhere. The Onion made its own feelings about Jenna Elfman known when a while back they posted a piece about a herd of buffalo being startled into group suicide by word of her new sitcom. Alan Sepinwall of the New Jersey Star Ledger (and hero to Chuck fans everywhere), writes that “she’s trying way too hard to sell the jokes here – possibly because she knows no one’s going to buy them without a whole lot of help.” Even the New York Post’s review by Linda Stasi (the highest rated review of the show on Metacritic), offers mixed enthusiasm in telling readers to “Suspend all disbelief, pretend the really, really offensive laugh track doesn’t exist, disregard the giant slabs of ham offered up by Jensen and Parham, and enjoy the chemistry between Elfman and Foster.”

My own response? Meh. It’s not bad. But it’s really not all that interesting or good. I liked Elfman on Dharma and Greg, and found her erratic energy to drive that show in interesting ways. I’m also a huge fan of Ashley Jensen in Extras, as I think she regularly owns the scenes, wonderfully likeable and gifted with brilliant timing and delivery. Here, though, Elfman’s energy is often grounded by an entirely ho-hum script, while Jensen is wasted in the role as perpetually sassy/lippy best friend, and each comedienne is doing her own thing, leaving little room for chemistry. The lead guy’s ho-hum too. And so nothing really jumps off the screen. I laughed a few times, but didn’t care about the characters, didn’t really care for the story, and would feel no urge or interest to watch it again. Don’t get me wrong – it’s fair enough as background, vanilla television, and it’s okay. But, well, meh.

The Good Wife

Imagine, if you will, a world in which there are very few Law and Order style procedurals. In that world, I’d be really excited by The Good Wife. It’s pretty decent as far as legal shows go, Julianna Margulies does an excellent job, and it made me care about the characters. The central premise, of a politician’s wife who returns to work as a lawyer in her forties after her husband is thrown in jail following a sex scandal, has an interesting hook for those who might’ve wondered about poor Elizabeth Edwards, Silda Spitzer, Hillary Clinton, Jenny Sanford, et al. While I can’t see the show getting too much mileage out of that premise, since it’ll wear off, it’s a smart gimmick to get non-viewers interested, and it evokes considerable empathy.

Certainly, characterization here is quite strong. Margulies really throws herself into the character in interesting ways. She effectively manages to look shattered and resilient in variable amounts. Equally impressive is Josh Charles as Will, who plays a lone friend who is neither pitying her nor blaming her. If the show creates sexual tension between them, I’ll be very disappointed, since at the moment, it stands to be a rare instance of a caring male-female close friendship on television. Christine Baranski is a kind of fun character actress. And Archie Panjabi is good, as is her chemistry with Margulies.

But we’re not in a world devoid of procedurals. We’re in one full of them. Everywhere. Granted, a bunch of them are pitched at guys, whereas this is immediately more female friendly. But SVU, Medium, and Saving Grace, amongst others, have their feet on base for that demo and for the Emmy nominations for Best Actress. So I worry about its chances in such a law-and-order saturated environment. I think it’s worth it, and hope it lives, and I’ll be watching it, if not religiously, and perhaps only for a while. But it hasn’t done quite enough to distinguish itself and to step well above the competition. Maybe that’s the magic of legal procedurals – that they only need to be okay to survive. So maybe it’s already free and clear. However, I feel that it needs to do a bit more to move out of meh and into excellence to be definitively safe.

NCIS: LA

At first, I found it hard to get over one salient fact while watching this: Chris O’Donnell is not cool, even though he really thinks he is. He’s got the squint, the slight hunching of the shoulders, the swagger, and he’s rasping his voice a bit at times. He’s even got the name: “G,” they call him. But he’s one of the most vanilla actors around.

But the more I watched, the more I realized that this is CSI: Miami, and thus he’s David Caruso. Like CSI: Miami, this is the second in the series, and it’s trying to distinguish itself by being a little sexier, high-concept, filmed with starker colors, and more glossy. The bad guy lives in a spectacular home with a great view, the central set of the NCIS base is lush and pretty, and it clearly wants to have a little more edge (and a more hip and racially inclusive cast) than the first in the series. And O’Donnell is Caruso – not a good actor, but someone who takes himself so seriously that you’ll either yield as a viewer and do likewise for the sake of the story, or you could enjoy the camp element (this is Robin from Batman and Robin, after all). Get him some sunglasses and some supposedly threatening cheesy lines, underscore those lines with a musical flourish before each ad break, and the show’s path to CSI: Miami will be complete.

And as with CSI: Miami, it’s okay viewing. It will never win acting awards, writing awards, and few will argue that it was overlooked. But it can be fun and engaging, and I’d imagine it will do very well. Indeed, so far, of all the shows I’ve seen, if I had to bet on one succeeding, it’d be this. Just as CSI: Miami has absolutely cleaned up in international viewing, this one could sail along merrily thanks to its gloss and its pacing (it has a pseudo-videogame beat in the background that carries the action along). I can’t really recommend it, just as I couldn’t recommend CSI: Miami per se, but both are passable television that will entertain reliably enough.