Passing down the fall verdict
IS THERE HOPE FOR THIS TV SEASON, OR DO WE NEED TO LEARN HOW TO SET FIRE TO AIRWAVES?
Lost in the magic of David S. Pumpkins and Black Jeopardy on Tom Hanks’ dynamite Saturday Night Live episode was a pretty sharp TV criticism sketch called “Funny New Comedy.” It detailed a fake new CBS show called Broken, the “funniest, cable- iest” sitcom on the network, about a “family of adjunct professors who are all diagnosed with depression on the same day.”
The joke was mostly on Amazon’s Transparent, which bills itself as a comedy for award- show purposes, despite the fact it is basically about watching selfish people almost destroy each other under the guise of love. But it was also a kind of tacit admission that the networks and the premium likes of cable and streaming are barely playing in the same medium anymore: “Bazinga!” and medical dramas versus genredefying indie films crammed into a television format.
With October slipping away, the networks’ new fall series are now fully rolled out, just waiting to hang around until their midseason replacements usher them to an early grave, or perhaps inspire enough loyalty to get their catchphrases branded on company T- shirts. But what fate do these shows really deserve? Now that we’ve had a chance to take a full look at what they’ve got, let’s break down the best and worst of the new broadcast hopefuls.
THE BAD: SET FIRE TO THE AIRWAVES The Great Indoors
The only benefit to this existing is that, in 25 years time, when millennials are complaining about the lazy, entitled kids and their newfangled eye- implant- socialnetwork- trips- to- Alpha- Centauri, or whatever, we can beam the pilot straight into their brains and force them to realize that they are now every bit as hopelessly out of touch and ignorantly scared as every generation that’s come before them. Cross-generational comedy should require, by law, more than one Pinot Grigio-soaked dinner with your fellow upper- middle- class tele- vision executives where you only talk about how much your teenage kids look at their phones.
Kevin Can Wait
The name might actually be the most clever thing about Kevin James’ return to network television, a profoundly lifeless comedy that is enough to make you pray for another Paul Blart, just to fill up his schedule. When the premise is basically “Kevin James is funny, you’ll watch him do anything, right?” you might at least go deeper into the Rhymezone list for potential show ideas. “Stairway to Kevin”: Kevin James stars as a former personal trainer trying to get his life, and his clients, back. “Kevin- Eleven”: After his home reno business goes under, Kevin James is forced to work the late shift at a local convenience store. “Un-Kevined Bread”: Kevin James navigates a conversion to Judaism for his latest unreasonably attractive, hectoring sitcom wife.
MacGyver
Look, we all knew that the original MacGyver existed solely because of Richard Dean Anderson’s smouldering sexuality, and the simple fact is that Lucas Till is not fit to walk through the same Stargate as The Mullet from Minneapolis.
This Is Us
The amount of rapturous praise this series has managed is why stuff like Crash wins Oscars. If you are this intent on being smacked in the face with smug feelgoodery, just follow cute animals on Instagram. Of course then I guess you’d miss the pseudo-intellectual puffed-up humanism that lets you feel as though you’re doing something important. This is going to be so successful, and in its way is a perfect distillation of the difference between broadcast and TV’s higher aspirants: on network TV, they’re going to hold your hand through the feel-good stuff, too.
Notorious
The smarmy cynicism of the premise — a lawyer and TV producer collude to help his high-net-worth clients — would be slightly easier to take if the dialogue wasn’t just people either shouting or sexy- talking their motivations, cares and forthcoming plot goals at each other. I get that not everyone is into subtext, but basically everyone on this show could be played by a cue card that lays out the details of the casting call, except that I guess you rarely want to watch a cue card get locked in an airless room.
THE GOOD: THERE’S HOPE YET Speechless
Network TV comedy has gotten a fair bit of mileage of late just out of diving into the kind of stories it has previously ignored, and this comedy about a family trying to find the best situation it can for their son with cerebral palsy is no exception. It works partly because it has a lot of fun skewering the hands- off politesse that everyone seems to treat the kid, JJ, and his family, but mostly because the cast — from hard- charging mom Minnie Driver to the sly older-brotherliness of personal assistant Cedric Yarbrough to Bart Simpson- y puckishness of Micah Fowler as JJ — is just spot on. More than any network, ABC has figured out how to keep the good old- fashioned family sitcom humming in an age that demands a bit more honesty underneath its laugh lines.
The Good Place
As with most of the sitcoms Mike Schur has been involved with ( The Office, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99), it takes a bit to settle into its premise, but this refreshingly droll take on what it means to be a good person is finding its groove quicker than most. Helped along by the flippant cynicism of Kristen Bell’s bad- girl- forced- good, and Ted Danson’s desperate- to- please designer of the afterlife, it is managing to be sharply quotable, and not a bad argument for treating everyone around you a little better.
Frequency
In a weird boom year for screwy time- travel- y premises, The CW’s detective- inflected version seems to be the most human, treading that line between gripping little genre thrills and tricky personal implications that its superhero series manage.