The Mu

Here is my take on currently airing dramas, using a simple five-star rating system.  This sometimes indicates only my preference, not the quality of the show (for example, Parenthood is an excellent show but I found it too deep and real for my taste; conversely, the new shows Terra Nova and Person of Interest have my attention but could easily lose it again once the novelty wears off).

If you’re in the USA (because some cable channels are not available in Canada), I have discovered two new shows that the adults in my family are really enjoying: The Walking Dead on AMC and Terriers on FX.  I am gripped by both of these shows.  From the descriptions and the early buzz, I actually had given them a pass.  But the positive comments from the twitter-sphere were too overwhelming to ignore.  And, as usual, tweeters are right.  These shows are awesome.

As I hinted above, these are cable shows for adults, so they are not for everyone.  In fact, one of the frequent comments about The Walking Dead is that it does a masterful job of melding the gore and horror elements together with the character arcs and the plot development.  But the gore is utterly over the top: the episode called “Guts” was aptly named on a number of levels.

Terriers is brilliant because it is funny and heartbreaking at the same time.  Since I was turned off by every description of the show I read before I watched it (“losers as private investigators”), I can only advise you to try it out and see for yourself what all the buzz is about.

The 2010 Fall television season is in full swing.  There are some shows still to premiere, but for the most part the broadcast and cable networks have revealed all that they had to wow us with this autumn. (As many of you know, I watch way too much TV but I do my best to limit it by only watching recorded shows and sticking to dramas.  I’m sure there are some great comedies and I know I love The Big Bang Theory and Modern Family when I watch with my own family.  However, this post only covers dramas.)

Already some shows have been given the axe: Lone Star and Outlaw are two notable dramas that fell very early on.  I didn’t watch Lone Star because it sounded like a remake of Dallas. I gave Jimmy Smits a chance in Outlaw, but it was hampered by lame writing and I’m not surprised it didn’t last.

The winners for this season are The Event, Blue Bloods, and The Defenders. All shows are doing well in the ratings and NBC ordered a full season (22 episodes) of The Event on 18 October 2010.  All three shows are worth watching if you enjoy drama.  On cable, if you can stand its graphic nature, Boardwalk Empire is also a fantastic one to catch (it has already been renewed for a second season and is one of HBO’s most successful shows in years).

The Event is adrenaline-fueled like 24 was; I love the show for a strange reason: it is written the way I would write it if I were talented enough to write for TV.  There is none of that frustration I feel on other shows where the protagonist (and often the antagonist) do things and you think: “people would never do that!”  Sure the situations are implausible, but they are logically consistent — and satisfying.

Blue Bloods is just plain good.  With Martin Scorcese and Mark Wahlberg at the helm, it smacks of quality from top to bottom.  It is great to see Tom Selleck back on television as the patriarch of (and mediating influence behind) a family of cops and lawyers.  The family’s Sunday dinners are a microcosm of the wider debate about justice issues facing society.

The Defenders is a guilty pleasure for me.  It’s a drama with Jim Belushi and Jerry O’Connell (two of my favorite comedic actors) cast as defense attorneys in a Las Vegas law firm.

Meanwhile, I am still rooting for the Canadian productions of Flashpoint and Rookie Blue. Flashpoint completed its third season, with renewal or cancellation still to be decided by CBS.  Rookie Blue did very well in its rookie season; in July it was renewed by ABC for a second season and stars one of my favorite actresses, Missy Peregrym.

In what has become something of a tradition, I have talked with friends and family about what’s coming up on television in the new Fall season.  The media landscape is under radical change but the television networks still hold big preview presentations for their deep-pocketed advertisers. These tend to happen in May or June.  At that time, for viewers, we still don’t know which of our favorite shows have been canceled.

By the middle of August, everything is pretty solid and we know what’s coming.  In the past, the best shows would return or premiere sometime in September or October.  Anything else was a “mid-season replacement” which was a euphemism for “second-rate”.  Now, throughout the year, you can hear stories and rumors about really good shows.  I feel that this time of year remains the time when the networks are willing to confirm or deny many of these rumors because they are making promises to their advertisers.

So here’s a rundown of some promising escapist fare that I intend to watch when it airs:

• Dollhouse (25 September 2009 on Fox) – survived for a second season by the skin of its teeth but this is the brainchild of Joss Whedon of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame.
• Flash Forward (24 September 2009 on ABC) – Canada’s own sci-fi novelist extraordinaire, Robert J. Sawyer, is the creative force behind this new one.  I trust ABC to completely screw it up, but I still have my fingers crossed.
• Fringe (17 September 2009 on Fox) – returns for a second season after a really cool first one.
• True Blood (still airing its second season, but returns sometime in 2010 on HBO) – this adult fare has been renewed for a third season and provides an alternative to the well-laundered supernatural tales like last year’s Moonlight and this season’s The Vampire Diaries.

I’ll be watching lots of other shows, but very few deserve special mention.  Glee (Fox) was much anticipated and really isn’t all that good.  NBC, after taking the risky foray into sci-fi with Jericho and Heroes (which is actually returning for a fourth season if anyone still cares) is sticking to Biggest Loser reality, wall-to-wall Law and Order, and not one but two medical dramas to try to fill the space left by ER (Trauma and Mercy).  CBS is donning a similar bland franchise suit with CSI-o-rama and NCIS (now with two flavors of its own).  I am at least grateful to CBS for having more scripted dramas than reality shows (Survivor is back and remains one of the better reality shows if you simply must watch that kind of crap). CBS also resurrected Medium after NBC canceled it, but honestly that show is running out of legs anyway.

The buzz is growing louder about the new TV season.  Of course in today’s fractured broadband, narrowcasting world, we’re usually talking all-season re-treads.  Original ideas are hard to come by.  Even original ideas are copied so quickly and with such gusto that it is hard to remember who thought of something first.

The people are talking most this season (as measured by official “buzz tracker” OTX) about Bionic Woman, a re-tread from the 70s.  Keep in mind, the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica and The Transformers has given me much more faith in re-makes than I ever had before.  I am actually looking forward to seeing what David Eick has done with this classic from my childhood.

The airwaves will be saturated with more medical dramas, perhaps House or Grey’s Anatomy lookalikes — but even ER is soldiering on, returning for a 14th season.  There will even be a few attempts to cash in on the popularity of Heroes, including a try by the show’s creators themselves with something called Heroes: Origins.