American television is a strange beast. There’s a more naked, pronounced competitive edge between the networks than there is on this side of the Atlantic. No more so is this evident than at the start of a new season. In the lead-up to a new season’s beginning, the likes of Fox, CBS, NBC etc. are readying and gussying up their newest shows. Buzz grows louder for some, while others are proclaimed the worst thing to be screened on television since that video that kills people in The Ring.
And then in the first week of the season, regardless of how ready they are for human consumption, the pilots for all the latest and hopefully greatest new shows are prodded from the traps, unsteadily blinking onto the course for the ratings race that is premiere week.
With hindsight, once a show has run its course, the pilot episode almost always feels uneven and sore thumb-ish, but shows often live or die by their pilot episode. Whether it’s good or not, however, it has to pull in an audience or it gets laughed out of town on the back of the next turnip truck. Most of the networks are ruthless when it comes to binning shows that don’t perform right out the box, so you gotta get that pilot right.
So what of the new ‘Fall’ season (from this point forward, we will refer to it as autumn, like it’s supposed to be)? What’s shaking on the networks and the pay cable channels this September. Well, as is usually the case there’s a whole raft of comedies, dramas and – ugh – dramedies all vying for attention every night of the week, so we decided to take a look at all of them (minus one, which we’ll get to later), playing the long odds in the hope of finding a new Mad Men, Lost or The Big Bang Theory – oh sweet lord, let’s hope there’s not a new Big Bang Theory – and losing a ton of sleep and braincells in the process.
Let’s start with the ‘comedies’, shall we? With nary a joke between them, this season’s slate of comedies are a grim bunch. Running Wilde (Fox) is the latest not-as-good-as-Arrested Development sitcom from Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz. Following on from the laugh-free Sit Down, Stand Up, Wilde is at least an improvement. Will Arnett is a cosseted property heir, lured out of his bubble by old flame, Keri Russell. Hilarity ensues, or at least it should with that pedigree. Running Wilde spends too much of its pilot setting up jokes that, we hope, will pay off further down the line. It’s probably wrong to expect too much from a pilot, especially a comedy, but Arrested Development hit the ground running, so it’s all-too-easy to label Running Wilde a failure before it’s even had chance to become a success. At least there’s potential.
Which is more than can be said for the rest of the big networks’ comedies. Doubling up with Running Wilde on Fox is Greg Garcia of My Name Is Earl fame’s new half-hour hickcom, Raising Hope. It’s the story of a shiftless prick being tasked with raising his daughter after her psychopath mother is given the death penalty for killing a spate of boyfriends. Raising Hope is vile and mean-spirited where Earl was gentle and likeable. Garcia seems to think that people from America’s Deep South are mentally-disadvantaged lunks to have the piss taken out of them and he also seems to be labouring under the impression that baby-endangerment is the funniest thing on Earth. “Ha! That baby just nearly died”, that kind of thing.
Raising Hope‘s worst crime is the sheer waste of talent involved. Garrett Dillahunt, Martha Plimpton, Bijou Phillips and Cloris Leachman should all be having a stern word with their agents right about now. That said, it’ll probably be a hit. Baby-endangerment videos are all the rage on YouTube right now.
Elsewhere, CBS’ $#*! My Dad Says – or Shit My Dad Says, as we like to call it, as we’re all fucking adults who aren’t offended by the word ‘shit’ – starring William Shatner and based on Justin Halpern’s popular, ‘hilarious’ Twitter feed is seemingly beamed back from a stark dystopian future when vapid, unfunny sitcoms, starring William Shatner based on popular Twitter feeds are a viable concern. We can’t help but wish that the ‘based on Twitter’ concept would have been extended to other aspects of the production, like having the characters speak in bursts of 140 characters or less, or having the erstwhile Capt. Kirk turn into a whale and proclaim “Shatner is Over Capacity”, but that would have been too funny.
Amongst the other LOLocausts out there this autumn are Outsourced (NBC) (practically Mind Your Language 2k10, a tasteless “aren’t Indian people hilarious but also just like us” yukfest which derives way too many gags from a character named Manmeet (Haha! Man meat!)), Mike & Molly (CBS) (Chuck Lorre’s new one about two overeaters falling in love which starts out all gentle then makes with the fat people doing funny things like falling over and breaking their fingers in hilariously gross fashion) and Better With You (ABC) (like Friends, only with more and more intense layers of ‘meh’), which makes you wonder why the networks bothered to even produce any sitcoms at all this season.
Which is why we should all give thanks and praise for The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret (IFC). Starring David Cross as a typically American loser trying to commercially break an energy drink in the UK and failing with gut-busting results! That just sounds sarcastic. It’s actually very funny and easily the best comedy pilot of the season, only it’s had a longer gestation than that suggests. The pilot for this aired on Channel 4’s Comedy Showcase late last year and was so good that it got a six-episode run on a pay cable channel no-one watches. But hey, it’s coming to More4 as soon as you can say LMFAO (ie: late-October).
After all those tragic comedies we could do with a laugh and there are certainly a few to be had with this season’s new dramas. There are too many to cover each one in depth (although we have watched them all. Trust us. You’d believe us if you could see us. It’s in our thousand yard stares), so let’s concentrate mainly on the really noteworthy ones, be they good or bad.
My Generation (ABC) is a whole heap of well-meaning, well-acted dross. The central concept – let’s catch up with a selection of school stereotypes (the brain, the jock, the nerd, the wallflower, etc.) ten years down the line once LIFE has done a number on them – is a semi-intriguing one that could, in the right hands, actually say something about, say, the way America drastically changed overnight on 11.9.01. and how this distorted and manipulated the standard set of All-American archetypes. But no, show creator Noah Hawley seems intent on just having his characters speak in distractingly banal cliches. Thankfully the American public decided this wasn’t anything like Their Generation and voted with their Neilsen boxes. My Generation was cancelled after just two episodes. Chalk that one up as a win.
Jerry Bruckheimer’s making a play at becoming a feminist hero with his new series Chase (NBC), which stars Kelli Giddish (who?) as a sassy lady US Marshal, who’s all about kicking arse and taking names. She’s also all about ‘getting inside a perp’s head’ by pretending to be them in role plays and talking through what she thinks they’re thinking. This leads to unintentionally funny scenes where Giddish (again, who?) says things like “I’m a tough, ass-kickin’ badass, but my momma never loved me, so I got a messed-up view on women”. She really does this. Also, Cole Hauser plays her sideman and spends most of the pilot trying not to drool over her. Every time he opens his mouth to speak, you half expect “I seriously want to fuck you ’til you can’t walk, lady Marshal that I work with” to come dribbling out. So yeah, yay for women!
The two shows that everyone seems to be talking about both can’t help but draw comparisons with two other successful recent television phenomenons. ABC’s No Ordinary Family and NBC’s The Event are respectively a more promising Heroes and a less-enticing Lost. No Ordinary Family stars Michael Chiklis (The Shield) and Julie Benz (Dexter) as the heads of a nuclear family who develop superhero powers after surviving a plane crash in Brazil. Unlike Heroes the tone isn’t set to laughably sombre, so No Ordinary Family has the jump on that show in that respect. Also, in Chiklis and Benz it has two of America’s better TV actors. Throw in Weeds’ Romany Malco as Chiklis’? best friend and comic relief and you’re halfway to a hit.
The Event looks like it’s going to be one of those mystery shows that string you along for season after season (if it’s lucky) before throwing you anything even resembling a bone. At the moment, it’s about aliens and strange disappearances and other such Twilight Zone-lite shit, but really who even cares? Yes, there’s a place on TV for serialised mystery shows but so soon after Lost left the air, well, we’re a little burnt out on them to be honest.
In the pleasant surprises pile is Hawaii Five-0, which in the not-so-grand tradition of reimaginings doesn’t quite rank alongside Battlestar Galactica, but it isn’t half bad. Alex O’Loughlin (Moonlight) takes the Jack Lord role as Steve McGarrett, while Scott (son of James – the Godfather one, not the guy off Dragons’ Den) Caan is Danno. O’ Loughlin’s a complete charisma void but Caan buoys the whole endeavour along with genuine likeability. It’s not reinventing the wheel but we watched the episode twice – we had to make sure we weren’t just really tired when we enjoyed it the first time around – and enjoyed it just fine both times, so whaddya know, awful ideas don’t always have to lead to awful product.
Powder-puff network The CW, home to Gossip Girl, 90210 and The Vampire Diaries have coughed up two hugely entertaining new series also. In Hellcats, they have a daffy, dumb but largely fun bitchfest revolving around a college football cheerleading troupe and with Nikita, they have a series based on an existing property (the Luc Besson film of the same name, also previously spun off into both an American remake AND a television series) that actually breathes new life into something that should, by rights, have been staler than that sandwich Mama Cass choked on.
Both shows do different things very well. Hellcats understands the audience’s capacity to stoop to meet the low aims of trashy television and delivers cheap thrills in spades, while Nikita doesn’t hold its audience’s hand, delivering a circuitous pilot that revels in a tricksy structure (we’ve seen later episodes too and it keeps this gambit up).
The best non-cable network pilot of the new season belongs to Lone Star (Fox); a soapy, but superbly-acted and constructed introduction to Bob Allen (James Wolk), a reluctant grifter trying to hold up two long cons at the same time and claiming an emotional attachment to each in the shape of two different women, both of whom Allen says he loves. It seems almost pointless talking about the brilliance of Lone Star, however, as Fox pulled the plug after the first two episode posted terrible ratings, meaning that we’ll most likely never get to experience Allen spinning plates on two big scams over the course of season after season. Shame. Still, it’s left a damned good-looking corpse.
By far the most critically-garlanded new show of the autumn has to be HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which, yes, is ridiculously good, but with that cast (Steve Buscemi, Michael Pitt, Michael Shannon, Kelly MacDonald, Dabney fuckin’ Coleman!), that writer (The Sopranos’ Terence Winter), that director (Martin Scorsese) and those production values (1920s Atlantic City looking fantastic) it was never going to be anything else. In fact, and much like HBO’s recent big critic’s fave, Treme, it’s almost boringly good. When you stack the deck this much in your favour, the risk diminishes. Sure, a lot of money’s been spent on this show, so there’s that risk at least, but making this show and putting it on HBO is like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s an in-built audience for this and the calculated, can’t-lose brilliance of Boardwalk Empire ends up feeling a little choked and airless as a result.
Therefore, the award for the absolute best pilot in show of the autumn (there is no award, by the way) has to go to a plucky little shaggy dog called Terriers (FX). Okay, so its pedigree (I’ll stop with the dog puns now) isn’t to be sniffed at – it’s created by Ted Griffin (screenwriter, Ocean’s 11) and Exec. Produced by Shawn Ryan (The Shield) – but no-one really saw this one coming. The credentials hinted at its possible pleasures but by Christ, is it good. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James play unlicenced private detectives charged with investigating the smallest, pettiest crimes and misdemeanours they can find, for varying rates of pay (free dry-cleaning in the pilot). There’s a winning charm to the show and Raymond-James and Logue, especially are excellent. Expect this one to be cropping up on our FX over here pretty sharpish.
And that’s about it. That’s the autumn season of American TV pilots in a big nutshell. At least until The Walking Dead (AMC) arrives at the end of October and becomes everyone’s favourite new show. A season that takes in zombies, private dicks, Jim Belushi & Jerry O’ Connell as defence attorneys (The Defenders), Tom Selleck’s moustache as a police chief (Blue Bloods) and Steve Buscemi saying “twat”.
And what do we get? Downton Abbey and Stephen Tompkinson playing it ‘dark’ as a troubled detective. Nice one.