The New Fall Season Week One Recap

Having already talked about FOX's Sunday night lineup, FOX's Tuesday night lineup, Prison Break, Reunion, Threshold and Head Cases, it's time to move on to stuff from this past week.

Arrested Development returns for a third season and right out of the gate reminds us why it is one of the best (if not THE best) comedies currently on TV (epsecially since no one is watching). I'm glad we got one last glimpse of Henry Winkler's character lawyer Barry Zuckerkorn before the actor moves on to his own show on CBS (only to be replaced here by Scott Baio as the new family lawyer).

Kitchen Confidential is a very good pairing for Arrested Development. Loosely based on the biographical book by chef Anthony Bourdain, this show stars Bradley Cooper (of Alias and Jack & Bobby) as a once famous chef who has hit rock bottom but is given another chance at an upscale restaurant. He puts together his crack team that includes Nicholas Brendan, John F. Daley, John Cho and Owain Yoeman. He also gets a foil in the boss' daughter (Bonnie Sommerville) who wants to run the restuarant her way (the boss is played by Frank Langella and hopefully we'll see more of him). The pilot sets everything up nicely (Daley's character is just off the boat from some mid-Western state and is the butt of everyone's jokes) and has some funny moments (scrambling to find someone's finger that got cut off). We'll see where the show goes but it's got a full season from me based on this episode alone.

My Name Is Earl is hands down the best new comedy of the season. Unfortunately it is paired with the wrong show as I find The Office to have lost any momentum it had. THis show would work perfectly with Scrubs as they both have a similar feel. Earl is Jason Lee (of Kvin Smith movies among other things) and he's a down on his luck redneck who wins $100,000 in a lottery and is immediately hit by a car. While in the hospital he discovers the concept of karma (courtesy of Carson Daly) and realizes that if he wants good things to happen to him he's going to have to do good things. He makes a list of all the bad he's done over the years and sets out to right the wrongs, starting with doing something good for a kid he picked on in school as a youngster. The show is stocked with a bunch of bizarre supporting characters including Earl's lazy brother Randy (Ethan Suplee), Randy's new girlfriend and their motel maid Catalina (Nadine Velazquez) and Earl's ex-wife and her new husband (Jamie Pressly & Eddie Steeples). If the rest of the show is as funny and, yes, touching as the pilot, we're in for a great run...as long as NBC doesn't treat the show like Scrubs.

Lost returns for a second season and picks up exactly where last season left off...the opening of the hatch. This will be a very important season for this show because the slow and maddening pace of the "mystery" of the show may start to turn off viewers very quickly (anyone remember who killed Laura Palmer?). At least we finally find out what's in the hatch (not that it makes any sense as to what is down there and why). One question answered, fourty new ones posed. But I'm still enjoying it and look forward to seeing where it goes.

Invasion may actually turn out to be a great companion piece for Lost. First, kudos to ABC for not pulling the show altogether in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This show about an alien invasion of a small Florida town in the wake of a hurricane really seems to be just a retelling of Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a TV series, but the strength is in the writing and the acting and there's just enough different from that classic tale for this to be something else entirely. Hopefully this show will unfold at a bit of a faster pace than others (the pilot had a very slow pace that worked in its favor, but I can't see that working for a whole season).

Head Cases becomes an entirely different show with its second episode. They've added Richard Kind to the cast as a former civil liberties lawyer who has spent time in jail for bank robbery and is now Adam Goldberg's law clerk. Chris O'Donnell also hires his own assistant and it's his former one from the big firm. With these two new characters in place the show gets a much better "wacky lawyer show" vibe than the pilot did. The problem is that there may not be enough room on TV for two "wacky lawyer shows" (Boston Legal) being the other. And the timeslot which pits this show against Lost, E-Ring, Vernoica Mars, Criminal Minds and whatever's now on The WB (thankfully not Smallville) pretty much assures this an early death (and the quickly diminishing ratings probably won't help). I'm trying to figure out how to give this one more episode without having to get a second Tivo. I may have to break out a VCR...heaven forfend.

The Apprentice: Martha Stewart -- Dear Martha...While many think you deserved to go to jail for what you did, many more think you don't deserve to have a reality show like this one. I'm not sure what you are like in real life, but the fact that you write letters after "firing" someone because they "don't fit in" is just lame and doesn't fit the concept of what should be a cut throat reality show. It was morbid curiosity that got me to watch one time. You don't have enough balls to keep me around any further. Sorry. Yours truly.

Law & Order is back for its 16th Season and I'm finding it very hard to care at this point. Don't get me wrong...I like the cast (big Dennis Farina fan), but the season premiere gave me a big case of "eh". Maybe it's because if you combine all the parts of this franchise you realize that there can't be that many "ripped from the headlines" stories we haven't already seen. I'm banishing this show from the bedroom (I'll explain that later).

Joey returns with what has to be the wackiest concept ever. If the time difference between last season's finale and this season's premiere was overnight, I want to know who the contractor who redid his entire kitchen was (did the producers think no one would notice a missing island?). This is akin to the Scheffields on The Nanny who apparently reversed their entire house's layout between the pilot and the first episode (at least they had an excuse cause pilot's are shot months before a series). Beyond that we get a new wacky friend and Gina goes to work for Bobbi...at least we'll get more Bobbi...but I don't see this show getting any better.

The Apprentice is back and I'm not sure why we're still watching. If I figure it out or stop, I'll let you know.

Criminal Minds is essentially Red Dragon: The TV Series with Mandy Patinkin in the role of Will Graham. While there's nothing new in this show about FBI profilers (even the look of the show feels like every other procedural program), the real thrust is watching Patinkin stare into the camera and quote Nietzsche while he gets into the mind of the criminals (hence the title). There are really only two reasons to keep wtahcing. The first is Patinkin as he's always worth watching. The seond is to find out how the hell they get from the end of episode one where Patinkin has a gun trained on his back by a gas station attendant (who may be a serial killer) to episode two (which from the previews seems to be about an arsonist). It gets three episodes from us for now.

So...with the advent of the DVR...my wife and I have decided that the shows we want to watch ASAP while relaxing in bed at night get priority...so when I say I've banished Law & Order from the bedroom it means it's been relegated to the Cablevision DVR in the den for viewing at some later date (for example, I've got a few episodes of Rome waiting to be watched or erased because I just don't care anymore). Late next week as almost everything will have premiered, I'll let you know what shows are where and why and you'll get a complete look at our insane viewing habits.

Be seeing you.

The Season So Far

Okay...let's get the admission out of the way first.

I have officially ended my boycott of CBS. I'm slowly adding new shows into my viewing patterns (so don't expect me to pick up on watching anything other than stuff entering it's 1st season...and even there it's going to be very few shows that I even have an interest in). But you'll have to wait until later in this piece to read the actual review...

So...after the premiere of Prison Break, a week later we got Reunion. This show's novelty is that each episode over the course of the season represents one year in the lives of a group of friends. We get to know them through flashbacks as a present day mystery involving the death of one of them is being looked into (and no we don't know who's dead after the first episode). It's interesting, but a bit on the bland side. The concept is what gets a three episode tryout before re-evaluation.

FOX's Sunday night lineup has been infilitrated by a live sitcom entitled The War At Home. This show stars Michael Rapaport and is at best a low rent and unfunny version of Married With Children. It doesn't deserve the slot and ruins what could have been a perfect lineup (Malcolm In The Middle being moved back to Sundays would fix this). The old shows are back and both The Simpsons and American Dad seem to be showing improvement (the former seems to have found itself again and the latter seems to have found itself after a wobbly start).

FOX's Tuesday night lineup may be the perfect pairing of shows. New show Bones stars David Boreanaz and Emily Deschannel in what is essentially something of a mix between CSI and The X-Files minus the supernatural. While that may sound derivative, it is the chemistry between the leads that keeps the energy flowing...which makes it a natural pairing with House M.D. which returns for a second season. This is a wonderfully witty show that crackles mostly because of Hugh Laurie's performance, but his interaction with his co-stars helps amp things up.

Then we come to Head Cases. I'm not sure what to make of this show. It was kind of blah. The only thing right now that gives it a second episode is the appearance of Richard Kind in episode two (plus the premiere of Criminal Minds is actually on a Thursday and Vernoica Mars has an extra week before season two starts). So right now this bizarre show starring Chris O'Donnell and Adam Goldberg as crazy lawyers is getting watched on an episode by episode basis.

Which finally brings us to CBS and Threshold. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this show until the day it aired, but the cast (Carla Gugino, Peter Dinklage, Charles S. Dutton and Brent Spiner), creators (David Goyer and Brannon Braga) and concept (special team investigating possible first contact with aliens on massive scale) intrigued me. The two hour premiere had a more interesting alien conspiracy arc than all nine seasons of The X-Files combined and I can't wait to see where this goes.

So as it stands right now on new shows:

I'm officially in for all of Prison Break and Threshold.

Reunion and Bones are on a three episode tryout.

Head Cases is hanging in for one more episode, but I don't expect anything beyond that.

The War At Home is over for me.

This week is essentially the official premiere week, so expect more reviews of new shows throughout the week. By month's end I should know exactly what I'm watching for the season.

Meanwhile, off network...

HBO's Rome bored me until the last 5 minutes of episode one and then it got really interesting...but I expect my interest to die off as it seems to have on almost every other HBO series except The Sopranos (and even that has been gone so long I don't know what I'll do when it starts up again).

The Sci-Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica remains the best show on that channel hands down and there's only one more episode before it retires until early next year. The cool thing is that they keep imagining storylines from the classic series that just rock (the Kobol story and it seems like the next episode involves the return of the Pegasus).

And Cartoon Network has just started it's 3rd season of Justice League Unlimited (or 5th season of Justice League depending on how you want to look at it). With the last two seasons seeing major numbers of heroes joining the League, it was only a matter of time before the villains formed their own group to protect themselves. The premiere (which saw a now schizophrenic Lex Luthor being busted out of jail by Gorilla Grodd and forced to join the Legion of Doom against his will) showed promise but ultimately didn't quite deliver (Luthor being sent with Doctor Polaris and The Key to retrieve the Spear of Destiny from Blackhawk Island just didn't feel epic enough...and the hero team of Flash, Hawkgirl, Fire and the last surviving Blackhawk didn't help). The second episode (since they're airing two episodes back to back) was much better as we finally got an animated version of Hawkman (with a coherent background that makes perfect sense...unlike any of his comic counterparts right now). Hopefully we'll see him again. Two more episodes air before the show disappears until 2006. Luckily, Teen Titans kicks off it's 5th Season next week with a two parter featuring The Doom Patrol and will continue to run new episodes for at least a month.

I'll be back in a day or two with more TV reviews and maybe a movie review or two.

Be seeing you.