’Tis the season to copycat
We’ve gone trick-or-treating and been to the polling booth. Make way for Christmas shopping. “Superstore” (NBC) anticipates the shopping onslaught with back-to-back episodes, concerning staffing up for the holidays (8 p.m., TV-14) and an outbreak of food poisoning on Black Friday (8:30 p.m., TV-PG). (NBC’s “The Good Place” returns on Jan. 5.) While this is the only television comedy now set in a big-box outlet, “Superstore” is not immune to some of the copycat “idea”-sharing that’s infecting network series this season.
Evie and Xavier “meet cute” over a rutabaga at a farmers’ market on the CW romantic comedy “No Tomorrow.” On “Superstore” Jonah (Ben Feldman) finds love, or at least a girlfriend, at a farmers’ market, in the person of Naomi (Azie Tesfai) — much to Amy’s (America Ferrera) surprise and consternation. Such trends may indicate that Hollywood writers are more likely to frequent farmers’ markets than big-box stores and their overworked and underpaid employees.
But this coincidence is minor compared to the similarities between CBS’ “Pure Genius” and “Bull,” dramas featuring fairly charmless protagonists out to revolutionize their fields (medicine and law, respectively) with super-expensive technology.
Also on CBS, we have “Kevin Can Wait” and “Man With a Plan,” sadly uninspired sitcoms starring Kevin James and Matt LeBlanc as blue-collar dads floundering in “Mr. Mom” roles. New ABC sitcoms “American Housewife” and “Speechless” have stories about feisty, protective, nonconformist mothers who move their families to rich towns because of better special needs programs. And much has been made of what CBS’ “The Great Indoors” owes to ABC’s “Last Man Standing.”
“Imitation,” it was written some 60-odd years ago, “is the sincerest form of television.”
Cult choice
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Med students turn neardeath into a mind-bending game in the brooding and silly 1990 thriller “Flatliners” (7:30 p.m., MTV Classic), starring Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin and Oliver Platt.