The New

It seems the new TV season is upon us. I don’t exactly understand why the enigmatic “Television Executives” deem that we should have these artificial seasons for our entertainment; between the wash of reruns and the glut of expensively loud movies between May and August, I’m not certain what these individuals believe we are doing while the ambient temperatures rise. The gluttonously wealthy puppet masters who control the entertainment viaducts (a group of people I always imagine look like Kingpin from Daredevil comic books, or possibly this 80’s album cover) must have some strange vision of America streaming in hordes to the beach for three months at a time, leaving their television sets to collect a thick blanket of dust until the winds pick up and the trees begin to shake free of their leaves at which point everyone packs up the beach towels, surfboards, water wings and fishing poles and settles back into their couches for a long winter of frequently interrupted by words from our sponsors programming.

Regardless, the illogical wait is over and a crop of new shows have arrived. I certainly haven’t seen them all, nor do I plan to, and not all of them have even aired yet. However, thanks to the success of Lost, there is a heavy dose of suspenseful SF-tinged flava this year which at least bears investigation from your humble geek-in-waiting.

Since there are enough new shows I’m interested in this year, I won’t even bother covering returning shows here, just the hopeful fresh faces. Of course, like the march of the baby turtles to the sea, only a few will survive and those by sheer luck, force of will and overwhelming odds. To say nothing of which may actually deserve it.

Threshold

So a freaky alien thing shows up and people start flipping out. A kind of worst case scenario management specialist wrote a set of protocols to handle such a situation and assembles her team to combat the threat.

First of all, the premise is as old as the hills but there are enough twists and turns to give it a pretty long leash. I’d guess I’m invested for at least a half dozen episodes already (the two-hour pilot episode helped avoid some of the pitfalls other shows in this genre have this fall which is trying to introduce too much in too little time). The show is kind of like watching the beginnings of the conspiracy from the X-Files unfold, from the perspective of characters like Deep Throat and the Cigarette Smoking Man. Only these guys are less shadowy puppet masters and more smarmy oddballs.

Brent “Data” Spiner basically reprises his role from Independence Day as the paranoid/reluctant lab geek microbiologist; Peter Dinklage is probably the best actor of the bunch (and kudos to the writers for not even tossing in a passing joke about his dwarfism) playing a cryptographic analyst, mathematician and linguist; Robert Patrick Benedict is the sketchy Marshall-from-Alias-like physicist and Carla “Son-in-Law” Gugino plays the “contingency analyst” lead passably but certainly not remarkably. I’ll forgive some of the performances since starting a series usually means actors don’t quite have a grip on their characters yet. (Don’t believe me? Go back and watch the pilot for CSI and witness Marg Helgenberger’s “King Kong on Steroids” scene and try not to cringe.)

Some of the science-y elements were vaguely intriguing (four-dimensional beings, the “downloading” instructions via DNA, etc.) although the triple-helix DNA thing sounded hokey to me. The show’s ubiquitous logo was also poorly incorporated (fractal patterns “burned” onto the electromagnetic equipment?) and seemed more like a “hook” than an actual plot device. Kind of like marketing wanted something cool to slap all over posters and stuff so the writers kind of stuffed it in.

It was curious that Lost‘s deceased antagonist from season 1, Ethan, makes a sort of return in the competition as the alien-controlled first mate from the initial contact ship but is played with identical intensity by William Mapother as he brought to Lost. In fact, it really broke the fourth wall for me to see him acting this way because for a minute I thought Threshold might be some kind of prequel to Lost before I realized they’re on different networks. But in any case the weakest link on the show is Brian Van Holt’s massive yawn-inducing performance as a shadowy “special agent” and laughably bad chemistry with series lead Gugino. Here’s hoping something knocks his character off in a sweeps stunt. November sweeps.

Threshold manages one thing quite right and that is they go ahead and show most of the mysterious stuff right up front and let the “hows” and “whys” and “what exactlys” build the suspense. Unlike Lost which managed enough of that to not be lame (see Surface, below… ha!) but still got into the trap with the jungle monster thing where at some point you’re going to have to show this thing, and when you do it had better be good. The closest we got was the season finale on Lost and it looked laaaaame. So props to Threshold for not leaving me hanging on much more than the plot instead of the special effects.

Supernatural

Two brothers lost their mom in a freakish unnatural fire (on the ceiling!) and now fight spooks and things that go bump in the night trying to figure out what really happened.

Despite the incredibly lame premise, this was actually one of my favorite premieres this season. Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles create interesting if unoriginal characters out of Sam and Dean Winchester (and manage to do it in the one-hour pilot as well), plus they do a nice spin on the classic “Ghost Hitchhiker” campfire story and deliver some genuinely creepy moments throughout.

I have a feeling the cast is bound to expand past the two leads (although I wouldn’t be particularly upset if it didn’t get all serialized and managed to just stay a “monster of the week” kind of show) and while of all the new suspense-style shows this was the one I cared the least about what happens next, it was the one I cared the most about what happened within the one episode.

Despite it being high quality cheese, it’s on a crummy network and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it fade quietly from the lineup in January, a victim of being lost in the shuffle of other, higher-profile but ultimately lesser shows. Don’t get too attached to this one, but you might as well enjoy it while you can.

Surface

Weird stuff starts happening in all sorts of bodies of water and people race around trying to figure out what they are. Maybe they’re… aliens!

Surface really, really needed to go the Threshold route and do a two-hour pilot. Or at least air the first two episodes back to back because there was just too much stuff going on to possibly follow. Although Lake Bell (get it?) gives a decent performance and some of the effects worked on a basic level (I admit the show was quite a bit more freaky to me than it was probably even intended due to it hitting my phobic buttons; sort of like someone with an irrational fear of spiders watching Arachnophobia) I don’t think this show has much of a future.

The problem here is that most of the suspense relies on the audience not knowing what the creatures are, or even really what they look like. But at some point they’re going to have to show the creatures, and once they do, where’s the suspense? What’s left then? Are they aliens, aren’t they aliens? That’s really a very secondary issue behind what are they, what do they look like/do and what do they want? It won’t take long to answer those questions… at least, it shouldn’t, but I guess if that was actually the case there wouldn’t be much of a show.

Come to think of it, there isn’t much of a show here. This will probably be the first of the new TiVo season passes that I dump.

Bones

A forensic anthropologist and a G-Man flirt their way through cases where the majority of the evidence lies in small bits of bodies.

I’ll give David Boreanaz this: He can separate himself from the character he played for so long on Buffy and then the eponymous Angel. He shows a pretty solid sense of comic timing and while his co-star, Emily Deschanel—ehm, how do I say this? Sucks, she manages to not suck so bad as to ruin the show. So I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to pilot episode syndrome.

The first episode actually kind of bored me once it settled into a fictionalized Chandra Levy plot, but there were a few moments (the opening scene in the airport was surprising and amusing) where the show displayed enough promise. One thing that gets me is how they’re going to make an entire show out of this: CSI barely works because they give the labrats a liberal dose of creative license by having them present in the interrogations, pulling guns, and serving warrants. Real crime scene techs process crime scenes, do evidence procedures in the crime lab and testify in court. That’s it. Now we’ve narrowed it down even further to the point where we have a forensic anthropologist going out and doing police work? Uh-huh.

I’ll give this one another try or two, but I’m keeping it on a short leash.

How I Met Your Mother

This is the only comedy I’ve tried so far this year, and I admit I was extremely skeptical when I hadn’t even cracked a smile by the first commercial break. But the show picked up pace and managed (once they let Neil Patrick Harris’ character to get in some lines) to be laugh-out-loud funny in parts. I’m surprised that this was the first time I’d heard a “This is so going in my blog!” joke. It even sounds like a catchphrase to me.

The twist at the end of the episode was a nice touch and the narration/flashback angle was interesting (although ultimately unnecessary). I just wish they’d try something else for once with TV comedies. The only other comedy I watch is Scrubs because it seems like a real comedy to me and not some corny canned-laughter-laden rehash. The best comedies are dramas with funny writing anyway: Buffy was a great example of a show with smart, funny writing that didn’t have to rely on gag-a-minute tedium. Alias, in its heyday, did this well also.

How I Met Your Mother is perhaps worth a half dozen episodes of cheesy chuckles, but I seriously don’t see how they can make an entire series out of this: At least not without it grinding into even worse sentimental muck than Friends did starting, oh around halfway through its run.

To be continued after I watch more shows…