Fall Schedule 2010

[undeadmonkey]

yea, Out of all the shows i've seen so far, the one i'm most interested in is No Ordinary Family.

[BarcaRulz]

No Ordinary Family looks interesting. It basically looks like The Incredibles: The TV-Show.

[Shrykespeare]

WEDNESDAY

Wednesday is a bit of a mixed bag. Lots of familiar faces on new nights, and a bunch of new shows.

At 8:00, CBS is moving Survivor to Wednesday after 10 straight years on Thursday (the last seven years preceding CSI). Honestly, why? This is a formula that WORKS. Survivor's last seasons - its 20th - was very successful. Either they don't think much of the competition in this time slot, or they want to give their new Thursday sitcom $#*! My Dad Says a better shot by having it and Big Bang Theory lead into CSI, which has been a Top 20 show since Day One. (But I'll do that another night.)

Against Survivor and FOX's Lie to Me (I honestly did not expect this show to catch on the way it did... I mean, good for Tim Roth, but will it go up or down in its second year?) is a new show, NBC's Undercovers. This is a sexy new spy show stars Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Steve and Samantha Bloom, former CIA agents who are now retired and own a catering business. But when the opportunity presents itself to resume their exciting lifestyle and rekindle their marriage, they jump at the chance. Gerald McRaney plays their less-than-enthusiastic handler. Having seen the preview, it doesn't look too bad, as long as it doesn't fall into the pit that Chuck did... namely, having the characters go to such imbecilic lengths to keep their double lives a secret. And hopefully they'll be more Bond and less Q, if you get my drift. Now if only Yvonne Strahovski could switch shows... rrowrr!

ABC counters with two sitcoms, The Middle and a new show called Better Together, which centers on two sisters, Maddie (Jennifer Finnigan) and Mia (Joanna Garcia). Mia is head-over-heels for Casey (Jake Lacy), who she's known for less than two months; meanwhile, older sister Maddie has been dating Ben (Josh Cooke) for NINE YEARS, and they are so happy about it they tell everyone they know just HOW happy they are about it. Throw in the girls' long-married parents (Kurt Fuller and Debra Jo Rupp) and you have... a show I will NOT be watching, EVER.

Let's face it, these two new shows have a large hill to climb.


At 9:00 a lot of well-tenured veterans square off. You have Law & Order: SVU (NBC), which jumped from Tuesday to Wednesday last season, as well as Criminal Minds (CBS) and Hell's Kitchen (FOX), which proves that watching Gordon Ramsay scream at idiots is just too tempting to resist. ABC counters with returning sitcoms Modern Family and Cougar Town. Tough to pick a winner here.


The three ORIGINAL major networks all have brand new shows debuting in the 10:00 slot, so this could be very interesting. NBC is banking that even though the Big Apple version of Law & Order, which folded its tents after TWENTY season this past spring, will pick up its audience again with a West Coast flavor, Law & Order: Los Angeles. Sadly, neither NBC.com nor IMDb can even tell me who the cast is, and there's no preview yet, so I can't really gauge its chances. But the L&O name still means something to some people, so we'll see if it flies.

CBS counters with The Defenders, a lawyer show taking place in... Las Vegas. Holy hell, don't ENOUGH shows take place there already? It stars Jerry O'Connell and Jim Belushi as "two flashy Vegas lawyers who go to the mat for their clients". Well, I've heard enough. I'd be AMAZED if this makes it to spring.

And, not to be outdone by CBS's lawyers and NBC's cops and lawyers, ABC will premiere a show called The Whole Truth, a show... about lawyers. According to ABC, this legal drama is "unique", in that it chronicles the way a case is built from the perspective of both the defense and prosecution... Showing each side equally keeps the audience guessing, shifting allegiances and opinions on guilt or innocence until the very final scene." Yeah, we'll see. It stars Rob Morrow (wait... did Numb3rs get cancelled? I never heard definitive word on that...), Eamonn Walker (Oz), and Maura Tierney (ER). I'll give it a look, just to see if "unique" is just TV-exec-speak for "just barely tweaked from the last unique show that didn't get off the ground".

So who comes out on top here? Can't make that call, since L&O: LA hasn't shown its hand yet.


Next time: THURSDAY

[Buscemi]

I don't think people will want to watch Jim Belushi do drama (though he was decent in his cameo in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer) so that show will be gone quickly.

Better Together will most likely do fine. If people are still willing to watch Patricia Heaton (who seems to come off as a total bitch on TV and in person) then they will stick around for the show after it.

And speaking about Heaton, her show has a misleading title. The Middle is supposed to be set in the middle part of the US but Indiana is hardly the middle. Usually, Kansas City is considered "the middle". But I guess The United States Of Tara had Kansas City cornered (that show is set in Overland Park, a suburb west of Kansas City).

[becs]

Its all the midwest (aka middle) to the rest of the country dude.. be less literal.

[Shrykespeare]

Funny you should say that, becs. Some guy from Idaho on Last Coming Standing last night made a joke that most people in New York think that everything between New York and Los Angeles is "The Midwest", that the rest of the coutnry is just one conglomerate "red state". Pretty funny guy.

[becs]

I love that show, I look forward to the new episode being posted on Hulu so I can watch it.

[Shrykespeare]

On to:

THURSDAY

Thursday is an interesting mix of crusty veterans, up-and-comers and fresh-faced hopefuls.

At 8:00 pm, NBC starts off the night with surprise hit (it was a hit, right?) Community, followed by the Emmy-winning 30 Rock. CBS replaces Survivor on Thursdays with returning sitcom Big Bang Theory, which will be followed by a new comedy called $#*! My Dad Says. William Shater (late of Boston Legal) plays Ed, a retired military doc who has been divorced three times. Cranky but lonely, he invites one of his two sons, Henry (Will Sasso) to move in with him, in an attempt to spend some "quality time" with him - something he never got around to before. I'd predict failure, but sandwiched between two bonafide hits, who knows?

FOX returns with Bones, and I don't watch that show, so I don't know if it's on the way up or down. ABC offers up a new show called My Generation, which starts with a bunch of high-schoolers in 2000 being "documented" as a they prepare for graduation. Fast-forward to ten years later, when the ten-strong group return home to "revisit their old hopes for the future", hoping to "discover that, even if you don't get exactly what you thought you wanted out of life, it's not too late to get what you need." Sounds nostalgic and boring to me, but hey, I'm old. It stars Kelli Garner (Lars and the Real Girl), Jaime King (Sin City), Keir O'Donnell (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), Michael Stahl-David (The Black Donnellys), and a bunch of others. I know ABC's Thursday night lineup has Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice, but doesn't a show like this seem a little (make that a LOT) out of place?

9:00 is a TOUGH time slot, especially when it contains ratings champ CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS) and the aforementioned Grey's Anatomy (ABC). I can't help but wonder whether FOX's Fringe, which is an awesome show - and if you've never seen it, you should - would do better somewhere else. It's ratings last year were good but not great (this much I know), and this is some mighty tough competition. Thank God for DVRs.

And lest I forget, NBC seems to be able to more than keep up with The Office (how Steve Carell can do this show and still crank out 3-4 movies a year is beyond me), which will be followed by a new sitcom, Outsourced. Ben Rappaport plays Todd, an up-and-coming manager for a company that sells novelties, whose life takes a dramatic turn when he is assigned to run the company's call-center... which has just been "outsourced" to India. That sound you hear? That's cultures clashing, majorly. Hopefully the writers can extricate humor without resorting to exclusively "racially awkward" jokes. The commercials look pretty funny, though, actually.

On to 10:00, where you will find a tussle between ABC's Private Practice and CBS's The Mentalist. Hoping to avoid "distant third" is NBC's new show, Love Bites, tongue-in-cheek look at love, sex, love, sex, and love. Oh, and sex. It focuses on a group of singles and couples on various levels of commitment (or non-). It stars Becki Newton (Ugly Betty), Jordano Spiro (My Boys), Greg Grunberg (Heroes), and Brian Halisay (Privileged) are in the cast. And if this sounds like a network version of Sex and the City, well, there's a reason for that: The show was created by Cindy Chupack, SatC's creator. There may be some novelty and fun in this show, but I imagine it will wear thin very quickly.

Like I said, Thursday is a tough night to break into. Will there be any change in the status quo?


Up next: Friday

[Buscemi]

Shit My Dad Says, Outsourced and Love Bites all sound like flops. Shit My Dad Says is based on a Twitter feed so people will probably just read the original Tweets rather than watch a heavily-sanitized version for television (even with Shatner as the dad). Outsourced is based on a movie that no one saw and seeing that its a culture comedy on a television network, it will probably be full of outdated humor that's more offensive than funny. Love Bites is an anthology and I can't think of the last time that an anthology series was successful on network television (the last two, Fear Itself and Masters Of Science Fiction were dumped into the summer and died after a year).

[Geezer]

Private Practice is on ABC, not NBC

[Shrykespeare]

My bad. I corrected it.

[undeadmonkey]

meh, the only one that looks interesting is Love Bites. I haven't heard anything about it actually but I love Becki Newton, She could be one of the comic greats with the right roles. I just really hope this has nothing to do with vampires.

[Buscemi]

It doesn't. It's an anthology series that focuses on different relationships each week. Jennifer Love Hewitt has signed on for an episode.

[becs]

Personally, I am most interested in Outsourced, but I think that is probably because it hits close to home, so I may find more humor in it than most.

[Buscemi]

I saw ads for two upcoming shows tonight:

Undercovers - this show could be a hit...if it's promoted as an action series. The ad that I saw promoted it as a romance with action elements. Also, NBC didn't even bother to make it look any different from their other shows. This seems to be a problem at NBC's marketing department.

Hellcats- a Bring It On clone from television's most materialistic network. Looks like every other show. Also, The CW is rebooting La Femme Nikita as Nikita. Isn't it a little too soon for a new version of this? The original movie was made in 1990 and the first series ended in 2001 (after five seasons on TNT)! Hopefully Luc Besson gets some money for this series (seeing that it's based on his movie).