It’s not as thought any of them are actively obscuring their origins. The trailer for Free Agents at YouTube, uploaded by NBC, explains below that it’s based off the “cult UK series,” for instance. But none of the three shows’ webpages advertise the fact, nor do any of the trailers themselves. The Brits, in other words, are good enough to copy from, but clearly FOX and NBC don’t feel it’s wise to build the success of the British originals into the promotions for the American shows.

Part of this weird act of hide-and-seek might seem to be motivated by a desire to make their shows look newer and fresher than they are. They may simply not want to look like copies, in other words.

But it also offers messages about Hollywood’s odd relationship with UK TV, and about its perception of its audience’s odd relationship with UK TV. Perhaps there isn’t the faith that enough people would know the originals, granted, but one might think that an audience would be reassured by the shows’ success in their British iterations. They are proven entities that aren’t being sold as such. Is the concern, therefore, that American audiences will see success in England (or anywhere else) as a bad thing? If so, why?

These questions only multiply for me with Prime Suspect, since of the three, it seems the least like its original. Word is that it’s a procedural, not a serial. And with Maria Bello, and with the overplay of her stupid hat in endless promos, NBC’s clearly trying to make Jane Tennison slightly younger and significantly hipper. (The hat does look a bit like a female cop’s hat in the UK, but in the US it reads as a wannabe-hip hat). There’s also that annoying line in the ads, “Cop. An Attitude” that puts the attitude before the performance, rather than letting it come from within the performance, as with Helen Mirren. All that we seem to have remaining from the British show, therefore, is the notion of a woman called Jane trying to get by in “a man’s job.” Did that really require licensing, though?? One would think that the American adaptation would either stick closely to its Brit original since that original did well, or tout the fact that they’re adapting the cult British hit for an American audience and thereby still cash in on the power of the intertext, or not bother and just make a different show about a woman surrounded by men, one that doesn’t require licensing fees. I’m confused by NBC’s fourth option, to buy the rights, keep the name “Jane” and do little else. Mind you, I learned in the Leno years not to seek sense in some of NBC’s decisions.

Clearly, I need to understand what Hollywood thinks of the Brits better, so I’m off to read my colleague Michele Hilmes’ great new book, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting. Perhaps there’s a chapter on Maria Bello’s hat.

Four of the new shows’ advertising, promos, and paratexts have been pretty much dedicated to a simple message: our show stars this one person. It’s a risky move, since you’re banking on the audience caring about that star, and you’re going all-in on the hope that he or she is enough enticement for enough people to watch the show. Compare, for instance, with Person of Interest, which mixes Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson, which is a pretty decent pairing – Christ and Ben Linus! – but its publicity has been quite keen to let us know its creator, too, namely Dark Knight’s Jonathan Nolan.

So which are these shows that think they only need the one star, and what can we say about their chances?

Neatly, they divide into two groups of two: the two that are bringing back television stars of yesteryear (even if that yesteryear is just 8 years ago) – Last Man Standing and Ringer – and the two that are working with relatively new talents – The New Girl and Whitney.

Ringer is perhaps the most overloaded in terms of its star, if for no other reason than Sarah Michele Gellar plays TWO characters. Three of the four posters therefore show not one but two images of Gellar, with two showing little more than the Chrysler or Empire State Building as accompaniment.

The buildings suggest power (phallic, and of New York), as does her dress, and the night-time setting suggest intrigue, mystery, or such, but otherwise we know little more than that Sarah Michelle Gellar is in the show. Watch the trailer, too, and note how prominent images of Gellar are, especially in the earlygoing (the scene with two Gellars in a hall of mirrors is especially amusing, as if two weren’t enough for the producers and assumed fans).

The trailer’s also interesting for an early snippet of dialogue exchanged between Gellar’s two characters:

“I was wondering how you’d look after six years”

“Not nearly as good as you”

Granted, Gellar’s actually been off-television for eight years (Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended in 2003), but she’s been absent to the world for about six. The line’s amusing, therefore, since it sees Gellar comment on her own absence from television, while reassuring both herself and us that she still looks good.

And if Ringer’s taking a “she’s back” strategy, it’s certainly worked inasmuch as the press have picked up on this and run with it. Gellar’s face adorned Entertainment Weekly recently, with a feature article about her return and comments from her that suggest her sisters are like her characters from Buffy and Cruel Intentions, and almost all reviews I’ve seen have focused entirely on Gellar being back on television (even when the show also brings back Lost’s Nestor Carbonell.

This seems an especially risky move for The CW, though. Gellar’s return may well be hotly anticipated, but many of these articles have been written by writers in their thirties and forties. The CW has only just eeked out a living in the last couple of years, relying on anemic ratings that stitch together teen girls and slightly older women enjoying teen(ish) fare. That second group might be attracted to Ringer, but Gellar’s star likely means nothing to the average teen. Heck, most of my students don’t know Buffy, and it hasn’t had great play in syndication in the US, so I don’t imagine their younger sisters will. Hence Ringer’s pitch of “she’s back” risks being foolishly broadcast to many audiences who don’t know or care about her in the first place. Put simply, I don’t think that a network whose key audience is this young can wisely afford to use the “s/he’s back” strategy, unless the s/he in question would have been popular with ten year-olds eight years ago.

Contrast with the other returning star, Tim Allen, who stars in Last Man Standing, and we have an entirely different situation. Allen’s returning to a big(ger) tent network after having been on one, and is returning to a sitcom that’s clearly aimed at an older audience anyways. Add some possible post-Home Improvement family fame garnered as Buzz Lightyear, and I don’t worry anywhere near as much about his ability to sell this show. By most accounts, the script is lame, so Ringer may well defeat it in the end, but Ringer’s going to have to move uphill all the way, whereas ABC isn’t stuck with such a young generational cohort as its intended audience, and thus would seem to be on safer ground by using the “he’s back” promotional strategy.

Turning to the shows heralding new-ish stars, Whitney and The New Girl, once again we have an interesting tale of contrasts. Perhaps it’s just that I and everyone I know is dreadfully out of touch, but I’ve yet to hear almost anyone who knows who the heck Whitney Cummings really is. We’re all supposed to know her, so suggest the ads, and their reliance on plastering her and rather tepid one-liners posit her as some comic genius (while proving she isn’t), but I don’t believe many people really do know who she is.

The New Girl plays it safer. On one hand, Zooey Deschanel is likely much better known. She’s been in Weeds, is the sister of Bones’ Emily Deschanel, is in the Cotton ads, starred in the critically successful (500) Days of Summer, played Dorothy in Tin Man, the odd Syfy remake of Wizard of Oz last year, and has been in other films including Yes Man, Elf, and the recent Our Idiot Brother. She’s also got a cool name, let’s face it, and the kind of one you remember.

On the other hand, though, and even if you have no idea who she is, the title of her new show covers its ass here. She’s not just “the new girl” in the apartment on the show, but is also being put forward as the new star for television. And if USA Today is anything to go by, at least some are eating this up. They write:

Let’s hear it for the girl. If New Girl is the season’s most promising new show – and boy, is it – much of the credit goes to the almost irresistibly adorable lady in question, Zooey Deschanel. [….] she’s poised to become something she hasn’t been before: a big, new TV star.

There’s also the issue of how the two shows’ promos are selling Cummings and Deschanel, and to whom. Deschanel is very much being marketed as cute, adorable, and vulnerable. The relationship between her and her three male minders suggests that, yes, she is the new girl, as the promos make an obvious pitch for male protection … while still trying to hold onto her as identificatory character for women and throwing in several, “oh, men!”-style jokes in the trailer. Turning to Whitney, though the promos certainly sexualize Cummings, they also sell her as loud, abrasive, and in charge. She is the new woman therefore, and she’s being sold to women more than men, with almost all of the humor in the trailer being of the “girlfriend, am I right or am I right?” variety. FOX is hedging its bets, in other words, going for men and women. NBC is going mostly for women, all-in on the one star and all-in on one gender as audience.

As with all of the above shows, the script will matter a lot. But at this point, the four shows are making it all about the star. So place your bets on who is more loved – Deschanel, Allen, Cummings, or Gellar, and, especially in the case of the latter two, who knows where to find them on struggling networks. But that’s the other part of the networks going all-in on the star – if any of these shows dies before it hits five episodes, that’s a huge grenade in the star image of the actor or actress in question. Let’s see who is left standing.

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.

HuffPo notes, “it sets you up to think you’re going to watch a teen film about dancing your way through the loss of a parent, but then it calls you a sucker and whips out some demons,” but the trailer doesn’t so much change directions as much as it adds a whole new layer. The result is a seemingly hilarious (and hilariously badly acted) genre hybrid of inspirational dance film and horror. The demons don’t interrupt the protagonist’s therapeutic dance, after all; they give it new (cosmic/spiritual) meaning.

I still don’t know why the title insists on spelling “see” with a “c”, either, though I’m wondering if they were paying whoever did the title card by the letter. Or maybe the film was pitched via text message. So gloriously bad, I’m almost inclined to watch it.

In no particular order, here are 14 of my top 20. I’m banking on having forgotten some biggies, so I’m hoping my readers will jolt my memory, and I’ll fill in the remaining 6 based on those. After the fold …

1. The Lord of the Rings Platinum Series Special Extended Edition DVDs

These are still the gold (platinum?) standard for DVDs, with an hour or more of extra footage per film, completely woven into the film with full post-production goodies, endless design stills, four commentary tracks, and so forth. They really laid down the gauntlet for what counts as a truly great DVD, and they made bonus materials de rigueur, changing the filmic text in the process.

2. The Disney Princess Line

In the 00s, Disney created its own All-Star team, not of basketball or hockey players, and not for Olympic glory, but of “princesses” for mass profit. It’s an intriguing idea: can you imagine if, for instance, Indiana Jones, John McClane, Dirty Harry, the Terminator, and Jackie Chan all teamed up in one product line? Why limit your extratextuals to one show or one character, in other words? And as anyone with a young girl, a friend or family member with a young girl, or any awareness of pop culture, for that matter, knows, the Disney Princesses have been remarkably successful, uniting from their landmark movies to have all sorts of other adventures in other platforms.

3. Where the Wild Things Are’s entire advertising campaign

Many remember the Arcade Fire song from the trailer, but the rest of the trailer was fantastic, as were the posters, all of which wonderfully captured the other-worldly character of the film. In the process, they helped send a swarm of adults to the film.

4. The Beast – The A. I. ARG

Alternate reality games hardly existed as a form before The Beast. But this wasn’t just one of the first; it was particularly impressive.

5. The Martha Stewart Empire

The post-Star Wars Eighties of host-selling televisions shows such as My Little Pony, Transformers, and GI Joe helped to destabilize notions of what the central product in a textual entourage actually was. But this was all for kids. Martha’s legion of craft and cook books, magazines, linens, utensils, and so forth has shown how lucrative an “after-market” merchandise can prove for adults, too. Transmedia is often seen as an older fanboy or younger fangirl domain, but Martha’s supreme success challenges this.

6. The Iron Man trailer

With multiple million views online, this really is a superb trailer, and is surely responsible for a significant portion of the box office draw by this film of what is otherwise a rather B grade Marvel hero played by a star with a rough past (don’t get me wrong: I really like the film, but I think the trailer played a huge role in getting many other viewers and I into the cinema). The proof is in the pudding of The Onion’s clip here.

7. Lord of the Rings’s Requiem for a Dream song (“Lux Aeterna” / “Requiem for a Tower”)

This piece of music didn’t appear in the trilogy, and its natural context was in a film about strung-out people fucking up their lives in all sorts of nasty, disturbing ways … but it became the theme song for the highest yielding trilogy of the decade, and indeed of film history. It’s also appeared in trailers for Avatar, I Am Legend, Assassin’s Creed, and Lost, and in several ads, the NHL All-Stars skill competition, Sky Sports, numerous mashups, and the Moscow State Circus, amongst many other things.

8. Lost’s transmedia

When a representative of a make-believe company in your television show appears on a talk show to respond to the accusations against said company made by a tell-all novel by a fictional character, you’ve got a pretty elaborate storyworld on your hands. When a billboard for a make-believe airline in that show appears in another show (Flash Forward), when fans can take recruiting exams to join a foundation in that show over the summer, and when your reruns appear with pop-up descriptions of past events, you’re doing even more impressive stuff. In its wake, Heroes learned a lot, as did many other fanboy shows.

9. LiveJournal

A key site for lots and lots of fandom. There’ve been complaints aplenty, power struggles, massive missteps in terms of the site’s policies and running, and its history hasn’t been a peaceful one, but so very much discussion of popular media occurs on LiveJournal.

10. Star Wars Videogames

According to the list in Wikipedia, approximately 60 Star Wars games hit the shelves in the last decade, quite a monumental achievement, and a sign of why that galaxy is never really much further away than the local Game Stop. Moreover, the games range in genre from MMORPGs to educational titles to first person shooters to flying games and so on. To understand Star Wars as a film franchise alone is to sorely underestimate the power of the trilogies’ extratextual Force.

11. Enter the Matrix

When the Wachowski Brothers decided to write their Matrix sequels across media, they created a licensed game that wasn’t simply a run-of-the-mill game with character and place names from an established franchise plastered on them. The game became an active site for the storytelling, with original scenes with the film’s cast members, and with references to the action of the game in the Matrix sequels. It was also a relatively fun game

12. The Family Guy DVDs

The successful sale of these DVDs brought the show back from the dead. Now, in the show’s eighth season, and with it regularly rating extremely well in the Nielsen rankings, it may be hard to remember that once upon a time, FOX canceled it. The heft of those DVD sales forced many to reconsider exactly what counts as meaningful sources of revenue for television, and helped in its small way to decenter ratings as the all and end all.

13. American Idol’s Deal with AT & T

How awesome a deal does AT & T have, when every person who wants to vote for American Idol does so by spending money for them. Evil genius. And while I was about to say that the text messages hardly create meaning for the show, thereby falling short of counting as true extraTEXTuals, in truth I’m sure that they help to personalize the show and one’s control over it, amplifying its pitch at being intimately related to all its fans.

14. The Miley Cyrus / Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds Tour

There’s devious brilliance in how Disney have seemingly learned to control every aspect of their properties, even the living ones. Hannah Montana is case in point, and the concert tour of Miley Cyrus both in and out of Hannah character (though perhaps not out of Miley character? Or is there even a there there to go in and out of?) blazes a path for their future work (witness the Jonas Bros), and helped to affirm the spinoff concert tour as much more than just an oddity.

I think all of us (and I’m talking about everyone- not just cast) are sad that something we invested our time, effort and talent into was thrown away so abruptly by the network but the reality is the ratings were VERY low. Nobody knew this show was even on. The advertising campaign for TBL was small to non existent.

We were the last pick up of the season and that’s just the way it goes sometimes. The CW had Melrose Place and Vampire Diaries and had already allocated the publicity budget to those shows. We were on after Top Model and we had the draw of Mischa. They never had any plans to advertise us. I guess we were an experiment to see if ratings can fall out of the air…… um, they cant.

Okay, first off, based on what I saw I’m not ready to defend the show. But I agree with her in blaming the hype, or lack thereof. After all, let’s be clear about something: if a show is cancelled after one or two episodes, it cannot be because it’s bad (even if it is bad); it can only be because the ads were bad or insufficient. Its cancellation is a sign of poor marketing. It’s a massive fallacy of stat analysis in film and TV that poor opening numbers equate to a poor product. If, as with TBL, only one million people tune in to see a show, we’d be foolish to think that all the others didn’t because they know it’s bad. How do they know? They haven’t seen it, and let’s not flatter the TV critics too much to suggest that all of America is waiting to hear what they think, so as much as reviews matter, they can’t be the all and end all. Rather, viewers who aren’t watching haven’t been given a good reason to do so, and/or have been given reasons not to do so. At this early point in a show’s life, they’re responding to the advertising.

Admittedly, a really bad film or TV show will make the trailer or preview maker’s job all the harder, and I don’t mean to suggest that all shows should open with good numbers. And maybe we could be kind to CW and say they’d seen further episodes and knew how truly horrific the show was becoming, hence the early cancellation. But if we’re analyzing the stats, Medekwe’s right.

Which brings us to Brothers, which also experienced rather anemic ratings, especially for FOX. Last Friday, it received 2.82 million viewers with an 18-49 demo ratings/share of 1.0/4. When it replayed on Sunday, it received 3.73 million viewers with a 1.7/5 in the demo. When you consider that first week hits Flash Forward, Modern Family, and Cougar Town all enjoyed solid yet still much lower numbers for their replays, Brothers’ ability to garner better ratings in the second week is impressive. But it also tells me simply that the show had insufficient advertising and/or a crappy timeslot. FOX hurt its chances, in other words. When given a better slot, and perhaps the benefit of some word of mouth, Brothers did better on Sunday. Once more, so much is about the extratextuals – hype and timeslot.

A month from now, I’ll feel better evaluating shows’ life or death based on ratings. And it does give me faith in the human race to see that Melrose Place is getting shamefully low ratings despite an ad blitz. For now, though, and after only 1-3 eps., if a show’s ratings are poor, we really have to blame the nets for doing a bad job at advertising them, and/or at placing them. An ad campaign may capture a show’s essence perfectly (as did MP’s with its trashy feel), but it’s still the ad campaign that’s being reacted to more than the show itself at such an early date.