Fall TV Season

You may think I haven't been blogging for a while, but I actually have, on the companion Totally Gruntled Rockies Blog which you can find a link to through this blog.  My wife and I actually got to attend the two playoff games in Denver.  Despite the cold and the two losses, the games were a lot of fun and exciting right to the end.

I'm still following the baseball games, but with a little less gusto.  I grew up as a Phillies Phan, so I'm hoping they repeat as World Series Champion.

In the meantime, I thought I'd post my thoughts on the Fall TV Season.

Each year, my wife and I go through the descriptions of new shows and decide which ones are worthy of a "3 Episode Tryout."   Then we record them on the DVR and watch them.

Sometimes we make it through all 3 episodes before deciding yea or ney.  We also chose many more than we usually do, one because this year for the first time in a while, there are a lot of new half-hour comedies on, and two because we have no life, as I still haven't found a new job yet.

So here are the 1st Annual Totally Gruntled Critic's Choices for the fall:

It turns out the Comedy is not really that funny.  The best of them was Community which wasn't too bad, but not great, but then they moved it an hour earlier on Thursday, which made it conflict with two other shows, so we dropped it.   We also looked at ABC's Wednesday night Lineup starting with Hank, The Middle, Modern Family, and Cougar Town.  We were very hopeful of Modern Family, but it only lasted two episodes with us.   Something was annoying to us about it, and it just didn't strike us right.  Probably the whiny, stereotypical characters, that didn't really show that much depth.  Hank, we were pretty sure we wouldn't like, because we just don't think Kelsey Grammer is that good as a lead character, and in that sense we weren't disappointed in watching only the pilot episode.  The Middle was better, and had better  characters, but we haven't watched anything beyond the first episode, which did have it's moments.   Courtney Cox is good in Cougar Town, but it's just one joke (middle-aged woman looking for young hot guys) and the joke got old halfway through the 2nd Episode.

On Monday's we added CBS' Accidentally on  Purpose, a Jenna Elfman show, which has a similar premise as Cougar Town, but with a little more substance.  We already watch How I Met Your Mother, and Big Bang Theory, both of which originally thought we wouldn't like, but after giving it the old 3 episode tryout we loved, (although HIMYM may be past it's prime), so for now we are sticking with Accidentally on Purpose.  In it, Elfman's character gets drunk and beds a young guy, and gets pregnant.   She continues to have a relationship with the father and even allows him to move in together, but doesn't let him sleep with her anymore.  The development of one of the father-to-be's friends could save the show for us.  Kind of like the Morgan character on Chuck. 

FOX introduced the Pilot to Glee back in May which is an hour long musical/Comedy , and we were intrigued enough to continue it into the fall.  Initially we liked it and still like the music and the Glee Club characters, but the plot lines have got pretty ridiculous pretty fast, especially with everybody quitting, joining, rejoining, infilgtrating, changing directors,  pregnancies, non-pregnancies, and assorted relationships or non-relationships.  It's really become too schizophrenic for us, and we are dropping it.  

On the Drama side, we've had a little more luck.

We started with CBS' "The Good Wife" where the wife of a disgraced (and jailed) politician goes back to work as a lawyer, while continuing to raise her two adolescent children with the help of her mother in law. She is in competition with the young brash associate who settles cases rather than try them.  Christine Baranski is one of the Partners in the Law firm, which is an interesting choice since she has done a lot of comedy in the past.  I think once they put away the cheating, thieving husband for good, this show has a chance to shine.

We also watched ABC's The Forgotten, which is a team of volunteer detectives who try to identify and then figure out what happened to dead bodies that turn up and reach dead ends with the police.  It's an interesting premise and is based on a real "Forgotten Network."   We got through 3 episodes of this, but after the 2nd one, I knew I was going to forget it.   The stories are interesting, but the leaps the characters take to get to a conclusion, are so contrived, they seem more like guesses that turn out to be amazingly true.  And as the clincher, the narration of each episode by the dead character is just, well creepy.

We made it through 40 minutes of the 2nd episode in the new Sci-fi drama, FlashForward on ABC.  In the first episode, everyone in the world goes unconscious for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and most people see a "flash" of the future 6 months from now.  Some had no flash, and one person is found on a camera still conscious.  The main character sees a flash of his future investigating his flash, while his wife flashes having an  affair with another man.   The rest of the first episode and the next starts the investigation and putting clues together as well as revealing other peoples flashes.  It looks interesting enough, but got too convoluted with all the visions, to continue to watch.  It also reminded me a lot of the first season of Heroes, where they tried to stave off Hiro's vision of the future.    Perhaps I'll watch the season ender of the this one in April or May, but I really don't want to see all the stuff in between.

NBC has a new medical drama on Wednesday's Mercy, primarily centered around 3 nurses, Chloe,  who is new and a little naive (from Amish Country in PA), Veronica who is recently returned from Iraq, and having Marital problems, and Sonia who is fairly normal, but still has issues with cops one of whom she is sleeping with.  Trouble ensues when a doctor comes in who had an affair with Veronica in Iraq.   Veronica is trying to reconcile with her husband who also had an affair when she was in Iraq, but is kind of a slacker.   I didn't expect to like this one, and expected another Grey's Anatomy (which I grew tired of after the first season), but this one is looking pretty good and we are staying with it.  

We were also curious about Eastwick on ABC, which has three women who are witches and don't really know it, but a mysterious evil guy arrives and starts causing trouble.   Maybe if you were a fan of Charmed this might be good, but it wasn't our cup of tea.