a) "The Gifted"
As tired as I get of Batman and Spider-Man movies telling the same stories about the same characters over and over, I'm glad that something with a far wider cast of characters like X-Men has been able to spin off so many screen adaptations over the last 17 years with a variety that really expanded a lot just in the past year with Logan, "Legion," and now "The Gifted." My favorite part of the pilot is Emma Dumont, who has a really interesting, memorable performance as Polaris, daughter of Magneto, but for the most part "The Gifted" is just a story about mutants in a world without X-Men that is untethered from the characters and storylines we're used to seeing, and I'm pretty excited to see where it will go (and thankfully so far it seems a lot less indulgently artsy than "Legion," which I felt kind of alone in hating).

b) "Inhumans"
About a week before FOX premiered "The Gifted," ABC rolled out its own new Marvel Cinematic Universe series, "Inhumans," and the enormous gap in just the production values alone was striking before you get into the overall quality of the series (I've noted more and more, in recent years, that anything on ABC that attempts something more visually ambitious than a standard courtroom or hospital procedural tends to look like total shit, which is strange considering this was the network of "Lost" not too long ago). "Inhumans" was, of course, spun off from the Fantastic Four, which is a lot less promising than an X-Men spinoff just on its face, but I was really surprised by just how dull and incoherent this show is, you just get plunged into this grandiose story without really being drawn into caring about the characters at all.

c) "Ghost Wars"
This new SyFy show about a haunted town in Alaska features Vincent D'Onofrio and Meat Loaf flapping their jowls at each other and the pilot episode was pretty promising, good ominous mood and look.

d) "Big Mouth"
Nick Kroll's "adult animated sitcom" for Netflix about puberty, which is some poorly drawn and fairly gross shit with occasional animated child penises and shit like that, basically one step above "Brickleberry." I hate how "Family Guy" and "South Park" have opened the floodgates for cartoons to be as unabashedly shitty looking and 'edgy' like webcomics.

e) "The Magic School Bus Rides Again"
I never watched the original "Magic School Bus" much, I was kinda too old for it already by the time it came along. But I put on the new Netflix version for my kids, my 2-year-old liked it but the 8-year-old had no interest. I liked the animation style, though.

f) "50 Central"
50 Cent was, in his heyday, one of hip hop's funniest artists, especially when he wasn't even rapping and just talking shit at the end of songs. And even after his peak he'd do some ridiculous shit like the 'Pimpin' Curly' video that would be pretty memorable. So it's not entirely a bad idea for him to do a comedy show, and I thought the FOX sitcom he had in development a couple years ago had some potential. But this sketch show on BET, where Fif basically hosts and does occasional cameos and lets a cast of actors do the heavy lifting, seems kind of like a waste of his post-"Power" juice in the TV world. There have been a couple decent sketches but I think the funniest thing about this show is how the token white guy in the cast looks like Fabio with a manbun.

g) "Liar"
This British series currently airing on Sundance is pretty impressive in terms of the acting and storytelling and production values, I found the first episode pretty gripping. But the entire premise is a little troubling. TV right now is full of season-length story arcs about accused murderers and criminals that constantly try to push the viewer's suspicions this way or that way for a titillating mystery. And I feel like we really don't need a show like that about a rape accusation that could possibly ultimately be about a hysterical woman falsely accusing a man, at a time when the relatively few instances of false rape accusations have been obsessed over and inflated as a cornerstone of rape culture.

h) "Rosehaven"
Another foreign acquisition running on Sundance, a sitcom that takes place in a small town on Tasmania. It's kind of sweet and quietly charming, haven't found it terribly funny but it's likable and unique enough to keep coming back to.

i) "Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders"
The O.J. show was of course pretty good and I recently enjoyed the show about the Unabomber investigation, but I'm starting to really tire of the scripted TV trend of just reliving every big news story of the 1990s (David Koresh miniseries coming next year!). And there's just something particularly pathetic and loathsome about NBC shoehorning this trend into the "Law & Order" franchise with no real link besides the famous "L&O" font being used whenever the date or location is flashed on the screen. The cast is pretty good, though, I'm always happy to see Josh Charles in the mix (and I'm amused that Elizabeth Reaser in this as well as "Manhunt: Unabomber," like she's just stuck in this mini-genre right now).

j) "Me, Myself & I"
I really warmed up to Bobby Moynihan over the course of his "SNL" tenure to the point that I miss him there a little now, so I wish that his first TV project after leaving was better. It even has sitcom MVP John Larroquette, as well as Kelen Coleman, who I still have a massive crush on from when she was the only sympathetic character on "The Newsroom." But the whole concept of watching one character at three different ages in every episode, it kind of collapses under its own weight, there are some sweet moments but it's missing something. Also, when watching the pilot, my wife pointed out how weirdly pervasive the comedy trope is of the male protagonist becoming single when he walks in on his wife/girlfriend with another man. I can't even begin to count how many shows and movies start with that scene.

k) "The Opposition with Jordan Klepper"
It's been over a year since Comedy Central sadly cancelled "The Nightly Show," and it appears that their best idea for an 11:30 "Daily Show" companion is to basically redo "The Colbert Report" except lampooning Alex Jones instead of Bill O'Reilly (and this is after a few months of Colbert himself doing a Jones-inspired character on "The Late Show"). It's certainly not an idea without comedic potential, and Klepper had throwing himself into a 'terrible white guy' character on "The Daily Show" with fearless abandon for a few years anyway. But there are a lot of pitfalls to a show like this, as evidenced by the fact that Klepper had to open the 2nd week of the show by breaking character and saying something sincere about the Las Vegas shootings, on the same day that the real Alex Jones basically said it was a false flag. There are parts about the show that work pretty well, particularly Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson's Milo-like characters. But I still wish they had went with my idea of Desi Lydic as a sendup of Fox News blondes.

l) "The Brave"
I feel like Anne Heche has starred in so many forgettable TV shows since she flunked out of not being particularly memorable in movies either. "Hung" was good at least. There were one or two scenes where I felt like this show kind of punctured the usual military drama mythology, but mostly it feels like more of the same.

m) "SEAL Team"
Another network military drama, but even blander because it's on CBS.

n) "The Good Doctor"
This show seems kind of well intentioned in forwarding the idea of people on the autism spectrum holding complex, high pressure jobs. But it's pretty boring and I hate that Richard Schiff has been in like half a dozen unremarkable TV shows in the past couple years instead of just one good one. I'm amused that the lead actor is Freddie Highmore, since a decade ago in his child star days he starred in August Rush, which I reviewed and mused about whether the viewer was supposed to assume that the character was autistic.

o) "Young Sheldon"
Sheldon on "The Big Bang Theory" is another TV character who I guess we're supposed to assume is on the autism spectrum? But the ridiculous prequel show about him as a child is mostly a bland little show about an uptight kid in Texas. My favorite theory is that you could change the name of the show to "Young Ted Cruz" and change nothing but the name of the character.

p) "Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father"
I'm not familiar with Jack Whitehall's standup but the premise of just following a guy and his cantankerous father around the world to different countries is kind of fun. It kinda makes me wish I could've done that with my dad.

q) "Baroness Von Sketch Show"
IFC picked up this show after it already aired two seasons in Canada, so they've been just airing both seasons back to back, and I really feel like there's a notable step up, both in production values and execution, the second season is really funny.

r) "Room 104"
HBO's horror/dark comedy/random bullshit anthology series has a different story with different characters every week, and I've really disliked the majority of the first season's episodes so far. But given its grab bag nature, I keep giving it a try and hoping for the best. I liked the episode starring Sarah Hay that was kind of a story told through dance similar to her work on "Flesh And Bone."

s) "Channel Zero: The No-End House"
SyFy's creepypasta-inspired horror anthology series "Channel Zero" has one story per season, and I had mixed feelings about last year's first season, but I'm glad it's an ongoing project, I think it has a lot of potential. "The No-End House" has been good so far, John Carroll Lynch is always so good in creepy roles and here he's a dead family member who's mysteriously alive again. If I ever do another "the busiest actors of Peak TV" piece, I'll need to make special mention of Aisha Dee, perhaps the first actor to star in 3 full seasons of 3 different shows ("Sweet/Vicious," "The Bold Type," and "Channel Zero") in the space of 12 months.

t) "The Exorcist"
I really loved the first season of "The Exorcist," but now that that story arc is over, I'm a little unsure of how well they can follow that up and put the 2 priests into a new story that is as gripping. And I definitely raised an eyebrow at how the second season opened, with them performing an exorcism in the back of a pickup truck while pursued by cops through the countryside, as if they were 'The Dukes of Pazuzu' or some shit. But it's starting to get interesting, I really don't know exactly where the foster home story is going and I'm curious.

u) "The Good Place"
The first season of "The Good Place" had one of the all-time great season-ending twists, not so much that it was impossible to predict but that it was deployed so well to completely upend the logic of the show and basically give the writers a completely differently playing field to work with in the second season. And it's been really funny this season to watch them throw out the rulebook and really get laughs out of such an increasingly insane context. I have no idea how they can keep up this pace without kind of blowing through every possible scenario in just a few episodes, but I'm excited to see whether they keep it up.

v) "Kevin Can Wait"
I watched the first episode of Kevin James's unremarkable new sitcom last year and then promptly moved on with my life and forgot about it. But I wanted to check back in on it because of the bizarre development that they mysteriously killed off the wife character, played by Erinn Hayes, between seasons to bring in James's old "King of Queens" costar Leah Remini as the new female lead. It's still a flimsy, unremarkable show, I'm just kind of fascinated that they decided that such a traditional light family sitcom could easily weather the abrupt death of the mom.

w) "Nathan For You"
Every time this show comes back I try to give it a chance because the people that like it really like it. And there are always a couple of really inspired absurd moments in every episode, but it just feels like there's so much dry quiet airtime just setting up the Rube Goldberg machinations for that payoff, and I just don't have the patience for it.

x) "Will & Grace"
I was never a big fan of "Will & Grace" and don't think it has aged especially well beyond the particular cultural moment it captures. But it increasingly feels like old shows come back mainly because the stars don't have a lot of better stuff to do, and the aggressively topical first episode back seemed hellbent on planting the show's flag into our current 2017 cultural moment. Like, the first five minutes of the episode featured the phrases "woke" and "fake news," and then the episode ended at the Trump White House. But I will say, I'm as attracted to Megan Mullally, and Mullally as Karen, as ever, and she's almost 60, damn.

y) "TRL"
"TRL" is another show that debuted in 1998, captured the zeitgeist for a time, then went away, and doesn't seem entirely ready to be back in 2017, but here we are. I was already kind of a cynical budding music nerd by the time "TRL" premiered while I was in high school, but I still will sporadically tune into just about any music video countdown show. The new version is hardly more vapid and obnoxious than the original, but the multitude of hosts drafted from YouTube and farming of content from the internet feels a little desperate. And it was funny to see the first week of the show make a few gestures at Trump resistance after the showrunner told the press he'd "love" to have the president on the show.

z) "Saturday Night Live"
This really feels like the Kate McKinnon show now, which I really don't mind since she's a bit more chameleonic and unreliant on running characters compared to the last unofficial star of "SNL," Kristen Wiig. I feel like Cecily Strong is finally creeping back into the spotlight a little more, 3 years after leaving the "Weekend Update" desk.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 09, 2017 at 2:57 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.