Fall TV: New series impressions

I've tried out a few new shows in the fall lineup, with mixed results. See how they stack up below.


1) The Vampire Diaries (Thurs, CW): I kind of get the feeling that The Vampire Diaries is Twilight for people who thought there wasn't enough obsessive stalking in Stephenie Meyer's work. You've got the mysterious, brooding, self-hating vampire, Edward Stefan, and the brunette-for-TV (but blonde in the books, Wiki tells me) heroine, Bella Elena, in a small town. There's a Bad Vamp running around (HI BOONE IAN SOMERHALDER!) and the vamps can go out during the day without a) burning to a crisp a la True Blood or b) hilariously roasting a la Buffy (I distinctly remember Spike coming into the Summers' kitchen with a cloud of smoke surrounding him...and laughing hysterically). Only here, the whole reason Stefan's back in Mystic Falls (MYSTIC FALLS? REALLY?) is that Elena looks like his old flame, Katherine, from back in the Civil War era. Bella just waltzed into Edward's life, no fault of his (and he tried to run away, as I recall), but Elena is the entire reason Stefan came back, apparently at great risk to himself and his nephew/"uncle" with whom he lives. It's on the CW, so the mediocre writing and acting is par for the course, but I do genuinely enjoy Ian Somerhalder as Damon the Bad Vamp, who's clearly having a fabulous time being the oldest member of the cast and the villain to boot. It's like Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, but on a much, much, much smaller scale. There are some fun moments, like heavy mist creeping over the ground and crows smashing into windshields whenever Damon rolls in (or, as TV Guide puts it, "[the show] also features a special guest appearance by massive amounts of fog"), and Stefan just awkwardly hangin' at the doorjamb because Elena didn't specifically invite him in, but on the whole, I'll restrict my vampire TV to True Blood. I like my undead with a dash of humor, which VD is lacking. (And besides, my Thursday nights are kind of packed already.)

2) Community (Thurs, NBC): I'm a new member in the Joel McHale fanclub, having only seen The Soup a couple times, but he's really the main reason I decided to give Community a try. Yes, the commercial they ran all summer was funny (you can find a version is here), and I laughed every time Joel/Jeff rattled off his real/fake Spanish, but really? I tuned in because he's a tall, slim, good-looking man. So sue me. Joel plays Jeff Winger, a lawyer whose law license has been suspended because he has a less-than-legitimate undergrad degree from Colombia. That's Colombia, not Columbia. So now, enrolled at Greendale Community College, Jeff is completely uninterested in anything but getting his bachelor's degree with as little effor as possible, and as a result, is a total jerk in the way that most protagonists are. He invites Britta, the attractive blonde from his Spanish class, to a "study group" AKA one-on-one time in the library. Except Britta invites Abed, the awkward kid with Asperger syndrome. And then Shirley, Annie, Troy, and Pierce show up and all of a sudden, it's a real study group. Their antics and Jeff's determined efforts to get into Britta's pants are amusing enough that I'm planning to add it to my TV schedule, in the spot vacated by The Office. Plus, it's got Ken Jeong (AKA the Asian doctor from Knocked Up and the king from the LARP in Role Models) as Señor Chang, the Spanish teacher. There are some painfully awkward moments, but nothing as bad as what we've seen on The Office. I'd recommend watching the pilot, which you can find on CommunityHulu.

3) Eastwick (Wed, ABC): Hoo, boy. So, I saw that Eastwick was available on Hulu, and figured, "Why not?" The series is (I suspect very loosely) based on the John Updike novel The Witches of Eastwick, later adapted into a film starring Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Rebecca Romijn, Lindsay Price, and some other woman I've never seen before are the sekrit underground witches (who aren't aware they're witches, by the by) in this updated version. Romijn is Roxie, the boho artist sleeping with a younger man (who, incidentally, does have a belly button); Price is Johanna, the uptight journalist (glasses, hair in a bun, etc.) pining after the hot photographer coworker; whats-her-face is Kat, the nurse/mother of five with a loser husband. SO they all wish for big changes in their lives and then some super-rich dude rolls in and basically makes everything they wish for come true. Roxie dreams the future, Johanna can make men do whatever she wants, and Kat is Natural Disaster Girl (earthquakes, lightning strikes, etc.). Now that I think about it, not much happened in the pilot...huh. Anyway, the acting's not as horrible as I expected and they seem to be aware of how ridiculous the show is -- and they're having fun with it. Plus, the super-rich, possibly evil dude, Daryl (the Mountie from Due South, if anybody else watched that), is hilarious. I might watch it again if I've got more knitting to do -- it's a good halfway-paying-attention kind of show.

4) FlashForward (Thurs, ABC): Oh, man. Provided it survives its first season, I think FlashForward has the potential to become my new Lost. That might be jinxing it, but I really liked the first episode. There are more British actors than you can shake a stick at (Joseph Fiennes, Sonia Walger [AKA Penny Widmore/Hume of Lost], Alex Kingston [AKA Professor River Song of Doctor Who, and Jack Davenport [Commodore Norrington!], plus I hear Dominic Monaghan is supposed to show up, too), but the American talent is what pulled me in: John Cho, who I loved in a completely un-platonic way as Sulu in Star Trek this summer, and Courtney B. Vance, who I still miss as ADA Ron Carver on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, were the familiar faces in the commercial that made me seek out the premiere. What I was completely unprepared to see was Seth MacFarlane (yes, Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy), in a totally un-comedic role as one of the FBI agents (I may have had an outburst on Twitter when he showed up on screen). I also recognized Gabrielle Cortese, late of Supernatural, but she was so awful in an already mediocre show that I'm glad her character is supposedly dead at the beginning of the show. Whether or not she's actually dead is of little consequence when you're faced with FBI AGENT JOHN CHO, GUYS. Seriously, he spends most of the episode in a flak jacket and bloody with his gun drawn, menacing a suspected (female) terrorist. Dear ABC: You know what you're doing, don't you? The premise of the show is this: everyone on the planet blacked out for the same two minutes and fourteen seconds, simultaneously, and for those two minutes and change, their consciousnesses jumped forward six months to April 2010 and they had a flash of their lives in the future. Well, everyone but poor Agent Demetri Noh (John Cho), who didn't see anything, and is afraid it's because he'll be dead in six months. FBI Agent Mark Benford (Fiennes), a recovering alcoholic, sees himself investigating the flashforward and drinking again. His wife, Olivia (Walger), an ER doctor, sees herself with another man (Jack Davenport), who is apparently the father of a little boy she saves during the first episode. My favorite of the flashes was Stan Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance), the FBI boss who tells Benford and Noh that he saw himself "in a meeting," which is apparently code for "taking a dump while reading the newspaper." The cause of the blackouts is a mystery, as is the lone OMGWTFPOLARBEAR kangaroo hopping down the streets of Los Angeles immediately after the blackouts, but the FBI, while looking through security camera footage from around the world, finds one man in a baseball stadium who was awake for those two minutes -- apparently the only person in the world who didn't lose consciousness. I'm super-intrigued by the whole premise of the show; it reminds me a lot of the first season of Lost, when we were still discovering the mysteries and mythology, and the questions were still relatively simple. I have a good feeling about this show, in part because the creators are David S. Goyer (who co-wrote the story for The Dark Knight) and Brannon Braga (of Star Trek: The Next Generation), but also because they've got a good cast and the strength of the story itself (based on a 1999 novel by Robert J. Sawyer) driving it. The script was good, the acting was good, and the action was well-executed and pushed from beginning to end. They even managed to introduce what I suspect will become the central theme of the show: are these flashforwards glimpses of the inevitable, or can these characters change the futures they saw? It should be interesting to see how the story unfolds and how the show's 13 episodes will be structured in terms of reaching the April 2010 date seen in the flashes. I'm putting it in the rotation of my regular shows.

Other series I'll probably give a chance are The Good Wife (Tues, CBS), Trauma (Mon 9/28, NBC) and V (Tues 11/3, ABC) -- the latter mostly because of Elizabeth Mitchell, who will always be HBIC Juliet Burke to me, but also for Morena Baccarin, AKA Firefly's Inara.



Don't touch that remote--I'll talk about some returning series after this commercial break.