The Muppets (premiered September 22 @ 8/7) trailer here

Surely one of the most anticipated new shows of the season, The Muppets returns Kermit, Fozzie, Piggie, Gonzo, and company to prime time 17 years after Muppets Tonight was cancelled, and 34 years after The Muppet Show ended. Filmed in Office confessional reality style, it follows our multiple leads as they produce Up Late with Miss Piggy. Start polishing Gonzo’s Emmy.

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Showrunner Bill Prady claims that when people learn that he is the force behind ABC’s The Muppets, they say the same thing to him: “Listen, the Muppets were a really important part of my childhood. Don’t fuck this up!” I haven’t met Bill Prady, but I’m one of those people. The Muppet Show on CBS (1976-1981) was a much-anticipated event in my home, enjoyed by adults and kids alike. I’ve introduced my own kids to the show on DVD, and watching it as an adult has reinforced my appreciation for the show’s clever writing, multi-layered humor, and engagement with current events.

I was excited to hear the show was being updated and reworked for ABC, and hoped it would build on the success of the 2011 The Muppets movie, which received strong reviews and did well at the box office. But I was also worried that the reboot, shot in mockumentary style and made to be “more adult,” would fail to capture the essence of its predecessor. While I respect that Jim Henson meant The Muppets to be more an “adult property” than a kids’ property, after watching the pilot, I won’t be watching The Muppets with my kids. I don’t agree with One Million Moms’ claim that the show is “perverted,” but I did find the humor to be a little too straightforwardly and immaturely adult, and I felt the characters were a bit more jaded and dysfunctional than I’d like them to be. ABC sees The Muppets’ long-lived popularity as a guarantee that the new series will lure audiences, but the 13-episode venture does risk negatively impacting the relationships fans have already built with the characters. I’ll keep watching, but if Bill Prady steers too far from the characters I love, he may be hearing from me!

Melissa A. Click (University of Missouri) studies media audiences and loves the fall TV season!

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Turning on the The Muppets felt immediately familiar: the characters, the rhythm, the back-stage business. But that feeling soon wore off and what was left felt a little too much like a preamble – like the web-series roll-out to the next movie. Like Life in Pieces it suffered from under-development of its characters and premise. One might think that the characters’ familiarity removed the need for such introduction but these iterations were so different from the originals (Kermit without Piggy? Fonzy without jokes?) that I needed more narrative than this first episode offered to adjust. The series’ over-reliance on the mockumentary format also added a feeling of distance that hampered the need to connect us to these new muppets (Donald Trump would be very concerned about their low energy).

Despite these challenges, The Muppets had its moments. Some of its behind the scenes humor favorably reminded me of some of 30 Rock’s media-savvy humor. (I will already be using its opening scene in class this week). While, in this episode, trying to balance peeks at the Muppets’ social lives, the labor of putting on Miss Piggy’s show, and moments of the show itself was simply too much, the premise of the set-up, which allows for a wealth of guest stars and bands for the Muppets to play off, has a great deal of potential. While some have remarked on the way in which making the Muppets more “adult” took from their sweetness and warmth, that base point has seemed to keep The Muppets blessedly free from some of the race to the bottom humor that has cropped up in other series. In what has struck me as a sparse fall season, The Muppets has potential but will badly need to improve its focus and pacing to capture that Muppet Magic.

Kyra Hunting (University of Kentucky) studies genre, representation and children’s media.

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The Muppets‘ narrative format is well adapted to the small screen in this newest iteration of the 1976-1981 The Muppet Show. Unlike Muppets Tonight!, which aired in 1996, The (current) Muppets may benefit from network audiences’ recent memory of NBC’s docu-comedy hits The Office, 30 Rock, etc. This format also allows for classic Muppet antics, such as the writing team segment where the Muppet crew cannot be effectively corralled by showrunner Kermit.

My favorite plotline, though, was Fozzie’s brief relationship with a human, played by actress Riki Lindhome, and the inevitably disastrous introduction to her parents, Jere Burns and Meagan Fay. Unfortunately, the plot ended with Fozzie initiating a breakup, and so we return to the primary Muppet cast.

The Muppets pilot was fine, and perhaps even promising in terms of what a pilot tries to achieve—some modicum of character interest and plot tension. The question, for me, will always be: why the Muppets? The disappointing answer is: money. While I try not to defame the idea of remakes and relaunches—these endeavors have been rewarding elsewhere—the Muppets feel outdated, not nostalgic, to this super fan. Maybe it’s the psychedelic ravings of Dr. Teeth and his stoned band members or Rizzo’s slimy pick-up lines, but the 1970s ethos doesn’t translate.

I also can’t shake the fact that Disney seems desperate to squeeze money out of the franchise, which undoubtedly has cost them millions in marketing. Their purchase of the Muppets (2004) came 15 years after initial sales talks with the late Jim Henson. Today, The Muppets relies on transgenerational fandom to pick up decades of slack; adults who watched the Muppets at their zenith in the 1980s will introduce their kids to the characters. However, for this obsessed fan, the show will always be 25 years too late.

Caroline Leader (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies family media and franchising.

Blood & Oil (premiered September 27 @ 9/8) trailer here

Following the largest oil discovery in American history, a young couple move to North Dakotan to get rich. Think Dallas, though it’s probably best they didn’t call it Williston. Don Johnson plays the big oil tycoon, with a large cast of others including Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford, Revenge’s Amber Valetta, and Delroy Lindo. This primetime soap has been in the trades a lot due to a rocky production history including dumped showrunners, a move from USA Network, and more.

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If you’re old enough to remember Don Johnson sporting a pink T-shirt under a shoulder-padded linen jacket, then seeing him in plaid flannel and a cowboy hat (as the oil baron and domineering dad Hap Briggs) in ABC’s new nighttime drama, Blood & Oil, may be a little jarring. If you’re even older, and pining for J. R. Ewing’s bad old good old Dallas and its oil-fueled rivalries, you may be disappointed. The cowboy hats are smaller here in North Dakota, and the Bakken is no Miami or Dallas.

There is plenty of drama in the first episode. All roads lead to Rock Springs, it appears, as the little town is in the midst of a major oil boom. Recently wed Cody and Billy LeFever (Rebecca Rittenhouse and Gossip Girl’s Chace Crawford) are following the crowd, planning to set up a laundromat and make an honest living. When that fails out of the starting gate, they set their sights on land. Trouble is, that land is coveted by Briggs, the “baron of the Bakken,” and his devious wife, Darla (Amber Valletta). Plot twists ensue, covering more ground than one might think possible in a 42-minute pilot: pregnancy, extortion, jail time, an oil fire, a rig crash, even a dead moose. All the elements of your typical prime time drama.

But in the drive to stuff the show with as many soap opera-style scandals as possible, some key elements get left out. The issues that for many are the real stuff of drama in the North American oil boom, like the infrastructure strain, the toll on immigrant families (for an important take on this, see J. Christian Jensen’s 2014 documentary White Earth), and — the oil-soaked elephant in the room — the impact on the environment and climate – are not uttered. Neither is the word fracking. The show also feels a little dated, given the recent impact of the global decline in oil prices. But cheap oil isn’t very dramatic.

Melissa Aronczyk (Rutgers University) writes about representations of oil and the climate in popular media.

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…

“I get it. I’m pretty sure I get it.”

“You don’t get it. If you got it, we’d be talking season 2 already.”

“It’s a metaphor, right? Like a visual sort of a metaphor.”

“It’s more than a metaphor. Let me spell it out, again. So, the oil drill thing. You know the pointy thing on the end of the seesaw kind of thing? That thing. It goes in and out, up and down, like, over and over, all rhythmic like.”

“Uh huh.”

“And, when it, well, when it hits the spot, so to speak, there’s this big gush.”

“Of oil.”

“Right, of oil. And then everyone’s all in ecstasy or whatever. Just like…”

“Sex, yes, it’s sort of like sex.”

“And the characters sometimes pay a lot of money for the oil and they lie to get it and it makes them feel powerful and stuff.”

“Also, like sex. I guess?”

“You’ve got it. So we’re greenlit?”

“I mean, I like the metaphor. It’s a good metaphor. I’m just not sure it’s going to sustain a whole network series”

“What do you need?”

“Well, could we possibly do this so it premieres at the worst possible time?”

“So, wait until oil prices have plummeted and North Dakota is shutting down rigs, undermining the whole conceit of the show?”

“Yes. That. Love it. Oh, could you also have Don Johnson do an unplaceable accent?”

“That’s actually a really good note. Yes.”

“And, well, this is delicate, but, are there going to be any people who aren’t of the fair skinned variety?”

“Well, we were going to have a Native American woman.”

“Hmm.”

“How about we just have her talk about spirit animals then disappear?”

“That works.”

“Oh, and an African guy.”

“But he’s just the cook who takes care of the handsome white people right?”

“Look, we’re professionals. Of course he’s just the cook for the white people. Do we have a deal?”

“If I say no, are you just going to explain the metaphor again?”

“I am.”

“Fine. Deal.”

…

Matt Sienkiewicz (Boston College) teaches and writes about global media, politics, and comedy.

Quantico (premiered September 27 @ 10/9) trailer here

Priyanka Chopra is at the center of this thriller focusing on the lives of several FBI Training Academy recruits, told in flashbacks, leading up to a massive terrorist attack that incriminates one or more of them.

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Perhaps because I watched Blood and Oil—an abandoned, smoldering oil-well-fire of a disaster—right before Quantico, the latter show held my begrudging interest—at least for a while. Using an academy exercise for exposition and character description exposed as much about our interviewers as our interviewees by showing-not-telling (rather unlike the “remember-I’m-not-your-partner-or-your-girlfriend-anymore” conversations between Liam and Miranda). This modicum of cleverness, however, was easily overwhelmed by the show’s overly-telegraphed reveals (Nimah’s twin, Alex shot her father), its silly Breakfast Club montage of Arrow shirt models misfits coming in on a Saturday for the “toughest boot camp and hardest grad school,” the FBI’s apparently terrible accountability for monitoring their gun inventory and conducting background checks, and the shockingly weird ending in which the Quantico director hijacks an FBI van to free n00b Alex “only you can fix it” Parrish.

My two principle complaints against the show, however, are these:

• the glib use of terrorism as a plot device. The preview for the next episode describes the attacks as a “riveting whodunit mystery,” reinforcing the pilot’s treatment of a pernicious and debilitating mode of contemporary warfare as nothing more than an inciting incident for clever plotting. Indeed, given the emotional weight ascribed the bombing, Quantico could just as easily be about a bank heist (but then, as the broadcast logics go, how would they “realistically” incorporate so many people of color while smugly teaching their audience about “tolerance” when we finally learn [just a guess] the attacks were carried out by a [more narratively central] white person.)
• No one ever puts their hand up to the brim of their baseball cap and keeps it there while going through a crowd unless they definitely just did something and are nonchalantly trying to blend in (just fyi, FBI).

Kit Hughes (Miami University) is writing an alternative history of television, taking into account its development and use within the American workplace.

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My first thought on completing Quantico was that the episode seemed to have twice the time that the other pilots of the week had. In its hour long slot it successfully drew an image of the distinct world of Quantico, introduced a relatively large ensemble, and set up a substantial ongoing mystery. While a season/series long mystery has become almost requisite for this year’s drama premieres (Blindspot, Minority Report, Scream Queens, The Player, Heroes Reborn etc.), Quantico was the first series that effectively made me feel invested in the outcome of its story arc.

Much of this investment comes from the excellent performance of Priyanka Chopra as FBI agent, Quantico student, and terrorism suspect Alex Parrish. But the credit goes not only to Chopra’s performance but also to the writers for giving sufficient time to her development as a character. Smart and confident, haunted by her past (her father was an FBI agent who she killed for attacking her mother) and sexually adventurous, her character (and her dynamic with fellow female Quantico candidates) reminded me, favorably, of the women of Grey’s Anatomy in its early seasons. (A connection I am sure ABC hopes more of its audience will make.)

It is hard to imagine many of the other over-stuffed pilots this season taking the time to watch a character jog, but Quantico showed a strong understanding of when to give itself space. The series takes place in two time periods – the “present” aftermath of a terrorist attack that Alex has been framed for ,and Alex’s time in Quantico a few months earlier where she worked alongside the real culprit of the attack. Quantico uses this conceit to allow for a tremendous amount of narrative information without feeling either slow or chaotic. How all these elements (serial mystery, FBI training, past and present) will interact over the long term is yet to be seen and I am not sure what the series’ second or third episode will look like. But in this case, I think that is a good thing.

Kyra Hunting (University of Kentucky) studies genre, representation and children’s media.

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This was fun, although it was hard not to detect a little flop sweat from a show trying this desperately to grab and keep your attention. Creator Joshua Safran’s “Gray’s Anatomy meets Homeland” tag is apt, with a bunch of young, hot FBI trainees under suspicion for executing a post 9/11 terror attack on Grand Central Station.

One narrative gimmick is nested within another. We get a flashback structure, seemingly obligatory in high concept dramas today, where Alex Parrish (played by preternaturally good-looking Bollywood superstar Priyanka Chopra) is compelled to recall her FBI training in order to discover who is framing her for the attack. This is all very loose, since most of the FBI scenes use omniscient narration and aren’t connected to Alex’s point-of-view at all. But the show has so many narrative threads to introduce, it would be impossible to stick to the subjective flashbacks it nevertheless wants to employ in places. Within the flashback the trainees are assigned to dig up revealing information about one another, allowing the show to quickly get to the hidden motivation of each character, which in most cases appears to be some kind of family trauma. Doesn’t anybody want to join the FBI out of a sense of civic duty anymore?

Quantico has a lot going for it. Chopra’s star quality is off the charts, and a few supporting actors stood out as well, like Tate Ellington as the friendly (maybe TOO friendly??) gay trainee Simon. And if you’re bored with what’s happening at any one instant, just wait ten seconds. Hopefully, with the pilot out of the way, the show will be willing to put on the brakes just a bit, without sacrificing its frenetic appeal.

Bradley Schauer (University of Arizona) writes about the American film industry, past and present.

Dr. Ken (premieres October 2 @ 8.30/7.30) trailer here

Ken Jeong gets his own sitcom. Starring alongside Trophy Wife’s breakout awesome Albert Tsai, and Dave Foley and Suzy Nakamura, Jeong is a doctor (in case the title didn’t cue you in) and a dad. ABC’s second sitcom focusing on an Asian-American family in as many seasons sounds good, till you see it placed ominously in the graveyard that is a Friday night slot.

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Ken Jeong’s memorable roles as Senor Chang in Community and Mr. Chow in the Hangover gave him the star power to helm his own sitcom, but there’s little trace of his trademark unexpected, off-the-wall antics in Dr. Ken. Here Jeong is toned down, particularly since he starts out the episode a bit edgy but ultimately must be understood to be a good doctor and a good dad. His therapist wife and two kids are cute (perhaps not Black-ish adorable, but that seems like an impossibly high bar at this point) and their conflicts are familiar, in a good way. I like them all. I’m a little worried that audiences won’t stick around to see what hijinks this cranky doctor gets himself into (and then out of) for the rest of the season. It’s also unfortunate that the show is stuck in the format of the multi-camera family sitcom shot in front of a live studio audience—it literally feels dated already, particularly when compared to family sitcoms like Modern Family that can no longer be said to be pushing any boundaries.

That said, I’ll keep watching, hoping it gets quirkier and less formulaic as the season progresses. Fingers crossed that there will be a scene to rival Jeong as the doctor in Knocked Up, yelling at Katherine Heigl about how her cervix is like a soggy peach. Also, let’s be real, I’ll support this sitcom because it’s Asian American, and the only way we can alleviate the burden of representation is by allowing room for 90s-era immigrant dads AND cranky doctor dads; Indian American gynecologists AND overseas call center workers. I may have gotten a bad case of the “rep sweats” while watching this pilot, but I think the proper diagnosis is just to stay the course and hope that relief is on the way.

Lori Kido Lopez (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies Asian Americans and media and is the author of Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship.

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Watching Dr. Ken is like an acid trip back to 1990s sitcom hell without the high. Replete a storyline about raves and ecstasy, and 1990s sitcom stars Tisha Campbell-Martin and Dave Foley. Wait, is that a reference to Circuit City? Non-funny ‘90s nostalgia overkill. I can smell the gin he needs to drink just to deliver these lines seeping out of Dave Foley’s pores through the screen. But I still love that girl drink drunk. I love Ken Jeong too. And yes, for the first time in American history, there are TWO sitcoms on TV that boast Asian American casts. With Ken Jeong writing and producing Dr. Ken, he is also heightening the visibility of non-white creative labor within LA’s very white male sitcom production community. Although I am reluctant to analyze Dr. Ken from a critical race studies perspective, because every sitcom is engaging with race and the work of representation, and it is unfair to make Dr. Ken bear the burden of responsible complex nuanced depictions of non-whites. We should expect that from every sitcom. And wouldn’t it be nice if there was an interracial marriage and we could step away from segregating sitcom families by ethnic/racial categories? Technically Ken and his wife Allison are at least somewhat interracial, as Jeong is the child of Korean immigrants and TV veteran character Suzy Nakamura is Japanese American. Although I doubt this show will attend to cultural specificity, and rather, continue to portray the Parks as pan-Asian implicitly Korean Americans. I want to give this show time to hit its stride and find a voice. I know it’s not fair to judge a sitcom based on pilot alone, and Margaret Cho is going to be a future guest star. But I also want to watch a comedy that is funny. So step it up Señor Chang.

Eleanor Patterson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the cultural politics of post-network broadcasting.

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Dr. Ken is a challenging show for me. Even though the number of Asian American family sitcoms has increased 100% —we now have 2!—the limited, but growing, AA roles still create the sense that we must root for any visibility, especially when we are leads on both sides of the camera (it took 20 years for another AA family to appear after Margaret Cho’s All American Girl!). But while watching Dr. Ken being amazingly unfunny and generic, I question if any visibility is good visibility because the show is bad. And I feel guilty and sad for typing that because it’ll probably be canceled and AA family sitcoms will decrease by 100%. But the show is really bad…

Dr. Ken is mostly colorblind and that’s a problem for me. I like Fresh Off the Boat because I feel it has insider humor that I can giggle about with AA/POC, but broader humor that won’t completely alienate other viewers. Dr. Ken doesn’t have either. If anything, it is an argument that using colorblindness to “normalize” us (read: make us White) doesn’t work on any level; the family is interchangeable and I personally don’t relate to anything as an Asian American.

When the show does “address” race, it’s the racist boss who gives away vacation days in lieu of not being racist. Of course, the mostly minority cast, in colorblind fashion, happily accepts like racism isn’t a big thing. Hah? And what a waste of supporting characters. I’m glad the show has such a diverse cast, which makes it sadder when you end up with a sassy/”urban”-accented Black nurse and a nerdy South Asian doctor. And while Constance Wu plays a vital part in FOB, Suzy Nakamura (and all of the women) barely register behind Jeong’s character. One word review: Sad.

Tony Tran (University of Wisconsin-Madison) researches Vietnamese diaspora and new media in urban spaces.

Well, technology is a glittering lure. But there is a rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash – if they have a sentimental bond with the product…. [I]n Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone.

            – Mad Men (Season 1, Episode 13: “The Wheel”)

Certainly you’ll recall that particular Don Draper pitch from an early standout episode of Mad Men, co-written by series creator Matthew Weiner. While embedded with countless themes, Mad Men for much of its viewing audience was a show about connecting with a past, a time and setting of which it was never really a part, but which is both recognizable and sentimental (a topic that Tsapovsky & Frosh examine in a recent Media, Culture and Society article). This pitch was meant to sell a tangible product – the Kodak Carousel – but even in his fictional universe, Don Draper probably wasn’t the first ad man to think of using nostalgia as a vehicle for sales. Today, we see many examples of long gone television series and films finding new life, sold to audiences on the premise of memory.

I use Mad Men as an example for televised nostalgia both because of its recency and its thematic engagement with these ideas, but there are a few threads that connect the show to the current trend of resurrected nostalgia properties on television. There’s the fact that Mad Men existed as a show about memory (or the avoidance thereof) and rebirth. And there’s the recognition of the platform on which many of the show’s fans first encountered it – Netflix, the burgeoning media giant that is in the process of giving new life to several beloved properties. One can imagine Ted Sarandos and his brethren watching “The Wheel” a time or two before making some of their recent programming decisions. A “twinge in your heart” for Full House? Well, for a certain generation, perhaps.

The much buzzed about Fuller House, a many-years-later follow-up to the 1990s ABC staple, certainly does not mark the first time programmers have banked on nostalgia to build audiences. Even Full House progenitor The Brady Bunch had a (bizarrely soapy) sequel in 1990. But for at least the first half century of television history, the medium had little tendency to look back on itself. As scholars like Holdsworth (2011) and others have noted, the notion of television as an ephemeral or disposable media form is diminishing. To some extent, television series as ephemera (and this follows for film as well) began to lose steam early in the post-network era as rerun culture took hold on cable and in syndication. Now, though, television series exist in readily accessible archives, and the economic value of that access is not insignificant; just look at FX Networks’ success with #EverySimpsonsEver or Hulu’s recent acquisition of exclusive streaming rights to Seinfeld for a rumored $700,000 an episode (the show launches on the platform in late June).

To some extent, the archival presence of series like these (among hundreds of others) removes those shows from time. I know many undergraduate students who love shows like Full House and Seinfeld, even though most of those shows’ episodes were produced before the students were born. Yet for many others who experienced them years ago on an episodic basis, these shows are important signifiers of a bygone time – Draper’s “sentimental bond.” The cross section of these two experiences may be key in influencing platforms like Netflix to take a chance on new episodes of a series like Full House. Even 25 years later, in a more cynical television landscape, it’s a property that can resonate with both young and old.

Of course, there are nostalgia properties that would appear far less foolproof, like Netflix’s upcoming prequel to 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer. The film itself was a commercial flop that gained a cult audience through DVD and streaming. It also featured a huge ensemble cast including Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, and Bradley Cooper, whose names are far more recognizable now than they were at the time of the film’s release, and all of whom have returned for First Day of Camp (and are joined by big name newcomers like Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig). It may be the case that Netflix will find greater success with their spinoff series than the original film could ever hope of boasting. And this is not the first time that Netflix has revived a cult property, as the (10 years delayed) fourth season of Arrested Development can attest.

The reboot phenomenon is certainly not unique to Netflix, and over the top providers are not the only content hosts that are reaching into the past for programming ideas. ABC’s fall schedule includes The Muppets, a behind-the-scenes, mockumentary-style look at the fictional entertainers. Showtime’s on-again, off-again reboot of Twin Peaks is back on, with director David Lynch on board. Fox is bringing back The X-Files for a limited series event in January (after doing the same for 24 last season). And there are a surprising number of other nostalgia properties coming to the small screen soon.

Is there more to this phenomenon than just a reflexive turn among contemporary television audiences? It’s doubtful that all of these properties will be commercially or critically successful, so these reboots are not safe bets for networks and streaming services any more than a series featuring a well known and likeable star would be (remember The Michael J. Fox Show?). Perhaps television as it stands now is effectively eradicating time. Already, newcomers to a show like Arrested Development can watch seasons one through four in a single binge, utterly unaware of the lapse in time that made the fourth season notable (and controversial). In a few years, a viewer will watch the first two seasons of Twin Peaks and dive right in to the sequel, or watch early episodes of Full House interspersed with the travails of grownup D.J. Tanner on Fuller House.

Even as we have constructed television in terms beyond the ephemeral, we still often think of the medium as a vehicle for public memory, when in fact the nostalgic “twinge” or “bond” is an individual one. As content demands increase, and more money is spent resurrecting the old, it will be interesting to see if audiences still crave more of their favorites, or seek a renaissance of the new.

If you go by Ava DuVernay’s masterful Hollywood film retelling of the story in Selma, you’d think that people across the country turned on their TVs that Sunday afternoon and saw live, breaking coverage of the beating and gassing of marchers by Alabama state troopers as it was happening.  Of course that couldn’t – and didn’t – happen.  In a pre-satellite era, direct-to-air broadcast from news hot spots typically wasn’t possible.  Americans did not see live coverage from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  What did happen was actually more significant and helps to explain precisely why the newsfilm, when it was broadcast, had such an impact.

ABC was the third-run network in 1965 but on Sunday nights, it had a ratings hit with its prime-time “Sunday Night at the Movies.”  And on March 7^th it was expecting especially large audiences for the TV premier showing of Stanley Kramer’s 1961 blockbuster, Judgment at Nuremburg.  With an all-star cast, it examined German moral culpability for the Holocaust.  An estimated 48 millions viewers (more than would typically watch the evening news and far more than would watch prime-time news documentaries) were settled in when ABC’s news division abruptly broke in to the movie with a report about the attack on the Pettus Bridge.

This may not have been Raymond Williams’ “planned flow,” but the transfer of meanings from the one text to the other certainly amplified, sharpened, and made more poignant the brutality in the Selma footage.  As I discuss in my book Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, many commentators and ordinary people made the logical connections between Nazi storm troopers and Alabama state troopers.  Had the Bloody Sunday report merely been a story in the following Monday’s evening news, it likely would not have had the resonance it achieved by being placed in prime time – especially prime-time Sunday, then and now the most watched night of the week.  That the footage was juxtaposed to a narrative about Nazi brutality to victimized Jews made already frightful footage even more shocking.

The imagery of victimization is also crucial to how and why the Bloody Sunday newsfilm moved audiences the way it did in 1965 and continues to do so 50 years later.  In his examination of civil rights era news photography, Martin A. Berger in his book Seeing Through Race, argues that the images that have come to represent the civil rights movement typically give us activated whites and powerless, subjugated blacks who are meant to serve as objects of white pity.  Look at this iconic photograph from the 1963 Birmingham campaign (pictured above, top): the white firemen are in charge as they brutalize helpless blacks prone on the ground. Likewise, the Bloody Sunday footage (pictured above, bottom) gives us blacks knocked over and sprawled to the ground as the state troopers plow over them. The ultimate message is that whites are always in control and that good white people, seeing these images, need to take control away from bad white people to ameliorate the condition of victimized but powerless black people.  Berger criticizes this impulse in civil rights iconography as it discounts the agency of African Americans; its short term benefits (passage of legislation) undermines attention to more long term structural issues around racism and white supremacy.

Berger’s argument is compelling but it does discount the agency among civil rights activists in orchestrating these confrontations.  During the Selma campaign, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly proclaimed, “We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners.  We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”  Rather than hapless, docile, pathetically suffering objects, civil rights activists knowingly embraced the redemptiveness of  unmerited suffering (as King put it) and the iconography of white violence.  They were active agents in these narratives, whether or not white audiences grasped that fact or not.  Ironically, the white racists were less in charge than they may have thought.  On Bloody Sunday, probably none of the marchers expected they were heading to Montgomery that day.  Marching to Montgomery wasn’t the narrative.  Segregationist oppression and obstruction was the story the marchers expected to tell.  None of those marchers, however, expected to degree of the brutality they encountered.  And that’s why the footage is so shocking: the white violence is so out-of-control, so excessive.

The sheer hyperbolic, disproportionate response of white power at the Edmund Pettus Bridge calls to mind another set of images that galvanized the attention of the nation a lot more recently: Ferguson (pictured left).  This is one of the iconic images of the August 2014 confrontations between the militarized Ferguson police force against the unarmed mostly black Ferguson citizens protesting the police killing of an unarmed young black man.  The now-famous “hands-up, don’t-shoot” stance by the protesters suggests victimization and a docile subjugation.  But, of course, it’s anything but.  The Ferguson protesters empowered themselves and their community, eventually leading to the recent action by the Department of Justice, in part by the dissemination of media imagery that suggested powerlessness.  In the end, the protesters commanded far more power than the police with their 2014 body armour and Humvees or the 1965 troopers with their billy clubs and tear gas.  In both cases, they made the federal government take action.  In both cases, they understood the power of media imagery to tell narratives that at key moments they controlled.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that shortly before its open call at the world’s largest consumer technology show, ABC aired an episode of Shark Tank (Season 6, “Week 4”) that devolved into a debate over what a technology is. The company that prompted the debate, called Reviver, makes a fabric wipe that masks odors when rubbed on clothing. Company founders, brothers Ben and Eric Kusin, of Dallas, Texas, pitched the show dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of jeans and candy colored company t-shirts: in their case, light blue tees with their company name screen-printed across the front in lower case, white, sans serif letters. “I think you’ve got a good product,” entertainment mogul and Shark Tank judge Mark Cuban tells the brothers midway through the segment, “but first, you’re not a technology.” The soundtrack’s stock music swells, then turns ominous. The brothers counter that they’ve spent $150,000 on custom machinery; Cuban insists that machinery does not a technology make. “It’s not a technology!” he repeats as the shot closes in on Ben Kusin’s stunned expression. Dramatic twist achieved, ABC cuts to commercial.

Shark Tank plays by the reality TV rulebook: editors cut hour-long sessions into scenes lasting minutes, splice in reaction shots out of sequence, and post-zoom wide shots into close-up for dramatic effect. Ben Kusin’s slack-jawed stare, broadcast as his response to Cuban’s pronouncement, may well have come from a different moment in the shoot. Yet the tension cultivated by the TV show comes as much from the producers’ editing suite as from the judges’ ability to fast-track products and fund fledgling companies. In tech industry parlance, Shark Tank’s objective is monetization, not innovation; the argument between Cuban and the Kusins stems less from disagreement over the nature of a technology than over its association with market value. After the commercial break, Eric Kusin defends Reviver’s technological status based on its multiple applications. “We just started thinking of ourselves as a technology because the manufacturers are telling us what this can do,” he explains, and begins ticking potential features off on his fingers—but Cuban cuts him off immediately, at “mosquito repellent,” noting that talcum powder also has a lot of uses. To Cuban, it seems, technology means digital, or at least electronic, whereas to the Kusins, technology means machinic and scalable.

Despite their quarrel over the ontological status of odor masking wipes, however, Cuban and the Kusins alike define technology as a means of accruing venture capital. For the Kusins, both the uniqueness of their formula and its potential for further applications, which they see as technological properties, indicate the desirability of their product to prospective investors. Although Cuban rejects the Kusins’ assertion that the wipes are technological, he perceives the brothers’ insistence on calling themselves a tech company as a reuse for acquiring funding—from their father, founder of the video game corporation GameStop, from whom they received a two million dollar investment to start their venture. (“You only call it a technology because that allows you to go to dad and say, dear dad, we have a technology!”) Cuban may or may not be correct that the elder Mr. Kusin restricts his interest in his children to their interest in the tech sector, but entrepreneurial calculation undoubtedly led the brothers to adopt the language and aesthetics of Silicon Valley. Describing their “freshness revolution” while dressed in t-shirts that Reviver (which, like Twitter, Tumblr, and Uber follows a tech industry naming trend), the brothers emulate celebrated CEOs of the digital economy: usually, like the Kusins, young white men in jeans and t-shirts (Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick are exemplars), whose products promise to revolutionize something. Contra Cuban, it seems to me that the Kusins frame their product as a technology in the hopes that doing so will attract investors other than their father; they look like hundreds of aspiring tech entrepreneurs roaming the exhibition halls at CES.

Self-presentation is always part of pitching prospective funders. When the pitch is broadcast on national TV, performance plays an even larger role. Shark Tank contestants frequently dress according to a theme, and it’s easy to imagine introducing a similar product with entirely different stylistics. Another set of contestants, pitching a product that freshens clothing, might put on, say, aprons or athletic wear—especially if those contestants are women. Interestingly, the Kusin brothers avoid feminine associations with cleaning or clothing, distance bolstered by coding their product as a tool of technology rather than domesticity.

Partnership offers the Kusins receive from Shark Tank judges at the end of the segment underscore the domestic and technological duality of their product: one from Robert Herjavec, who made his fortune in the IT industry, and another from Lori Greiner, of the QVC home shopping network. That the brothers opt to partner with QVC, drawn in part to the exposure afforded by the TV network, suggests how the entrepreneurial aesthetics of digital technology transcend industrial sectors.

The Kusins’ dispute with Cuban gets no further attention. Their post-pitch interview, a confessional clip that Shark Tank usually devotes to rehashing contestants’ perceived slights at the hands of judges, focuses on Barbara Corcoran, founder of Corcoran real estate. Upon learning that their father has already given them two million dollars, Corcoran declines Reviver on the grounds that she doesn’t invest in rich kids. “We’re not rich!” Ben Kusin tells the camera after the segment, “That’s an unfair characterization of how they made it out to be, because of our father’s success.” Blindness to privilege isn’t restricted to Silicon Valley either.

FOREVER [Premiered Sept 22, 2014]

Ioan Gruffodd stars as an immortal medical examiner who knows death more intimately than anyone who’s alive, but whose inability to truly know the meaning of death continues to haunt him.

*

Paul Booth, DePaul University

When I explained to my wife that we were going to watch a show about a doctor who is reincarnated every time he is killed, she remarked, “sounds like a video game!” In fact, there are a great many things that the series Forever sounds like (rewrite that last sentence with “A Doctor Who is reincarnated” and you get at least one of those progenitors); this may be the biggest mélange of the season. Take one part Elementary (CBS 2012–): brilliant but eccentric British deductionist? Check! Add one part Bones (Fox 2005–): forensic medical examiner with cheeky sidekick (Bones alum Joel David Moore)? Check! Mix with one part CSI (CBS 2000–): police officer investigating odd crimes? Check! Stir like crazy and you’ve got Forever. But of course even that doesn’t begin to approach the conflicting set of antecedents to this show – beyond the superficial biblical references (protagonist Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd) has an interesting relationship with a father figure, an elderly confidante named Abe (Judd Hirsch); every time Morgan is “reborn” he emerges “baptized” from a nearby body of water) and shout-outs to Sherlock Holmes and Dorian Gray, Forever also owes a great debt to shows with similar immortal protagonists like New Amsterdam (Fox 2008) and Torchwood (BBC 2006–2009; BBC/Starz 2011). Oh, and did I mention the police officer’s dead husband (did he really die?) was a lawyer? (Law and Order: Immortal Edition, here we come!).

So does this jumble work? At times I was interested in the larger story arc, in which Morgan is contacted by another supposedly immortal creeper (a Moriarty to his Holmes). But largely the episodic plot fell flat, as the rather ludicrous scheme to poison travelers at Grand Central Station felt tacked on rather than a natural outgrowth of the villain—the episode spent so much time setting up the number of competing narrative expectations that hardly any room was left for something like, I dunno, character motivation. But there is something compelling about Gruffudd and Hirsch that makes me want to keep watching. As long as you don’t think about itfor too long, Forever is entertaining in the moment.

*

Kristina Busse, Independent Scholar

Middle-aged white guy with extraordinary deductive abilities and remarkable memory pairs with pretty female police detective to solve crime. Or, immortal haunted by his one true love and accompanied by his familial quirky sidekick searches for true death. Or, Forever Knight meets Highlander meets Sherlock meets New Amsterdam, and I’m already dreading the many historical flashbacks.

I love genres and tropes and all things repetitive as long as there’s enough of a difference in there. Forever feels too hackneyed even for me. If the cases become interesting enough, I may stick around for those, but the bingo card back story so far has me yearning to fast forward through the existentialist angsting. Pilots are notoriously difficult, maybe especially for procedurals, but even the “surprising twist” at the end resorts to an overused ploy.

The show itself was visually pleasing, the dialog not too cringeworthy, and the acting solid. But none of that suffices when the plot’s as predictable as the character arcs. If you complement generic crime show with a charismatic protagonist, the protagonist needs to catch and keep my interest. Dr. Henry Morgan never did, and that’s a shame.

*

Kit Hughes, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Our protagonist, Dr. Morgan, boards a train just long enough for what is fast becoming one of my least favorite scenes on television: the brilliant and handsome but emotionally stunted man strikes up a conversation with a woman (who, in certain variations, may be romantically interested in him). He scans the woman for intimate details about her life (in this instance, Dr. Morgan’s fellow passenger is a chocolate-loving Russian on her way to a cello performance). Upon relating his interpretation to his mark in smug certainty, the woman is either upset and unsettled (demonstrating the sociopathic tendencies of our hero; his superhuman genius, alas, means he will never quite be able to relate to the more basic—read: feminine—elements of life) or she thinks it’s cute and invites him to her symphony concert. Before you can say “Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch and that new show Scorpion that I accidentally watched the first 20 minutes of,” the train crashes, tossing the woman into obscurity, killing her alongside 13 other unnamed passengers. In revealing Dr. Morgan’s struggle with non-immortals (and making for a very pretty corpse) she’s served her purpose. Personally, I’m getting pretty tired of shows where most characters are completely disposable people that serve little purpose other than telling us about the awesome white dude at the center. Did I mention that Dr. Morgan got his super-special powers of immortality after being shot for standing up for a slave (the only black character in the episode)? And his adopted “son” (Judd Hirsch; is that guy ever not playing chess on television?) is a baby rescued from a WWII concentration camp?

~~~~~

BLACK-ISH [Premiers Sept 24, 2014 @ 9.30/8.30]

Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis-Ross, and Laurence Fishburne star in this exploration of how race and identity are understood in the context of a 21^st century, upper middle class, multi-generational African American household. If this description made even the faint image of the word “Cosby” form in your brain, ABC has won.

*

Melanie Kohnen, New York University

The Black-ish pilot wants to address still-existing racial tensions and misunderstandings while at the same not pushing the envelope too far. It wants to be culturally specific with the aim of communicating struggles within Black culture that aren’t often visible on broadcast TV yet it also tries to embody “universal” values. The result is a post-racial sitcom that invites viewers to laugh at ignorant (white) people who stereotype Black culture while also allowing viewers to distance themselves from that ignorance. The show has moments in which it makes frequently unspoken biases visible. For example, it contrasts main character Andre Johnson’s expectation to be promoted to Senior VP with the reality of him being promoted to Senior VP of the newly created Urban Division. Angered by being viewed in such a reductive way by the all-white management, Andre creates a presentation on “urban” culture that features material from the 1992 L.A. Riots. The grainy archival footage is jarring both for the diegetic audience and the TV audience. The show suggests that this flashback clearly doesn’t belong in either Andre’s presentation or this sitcom. The ending reaffirms this rejection of a too-violent past (which does not appear quite so “past” considering recent events in Ferguson): Andre embraces his new title and creates a vision of Black culture that is “hip, cool, and colorful;” a vision on which all of “us” can supposedly agree.

*

Alfred L Martin, Jr., University of Texas at Austin

What do you get when there is a call for more culturally specific series about black people?  The series probably looks a lot like blackish, ABC’s new series that focuses on an upper-middle class black family struggling to maintain their claim to “authentic” blackness as they “move on up.”  ABC is clearly (at least outwardly) invested in the success of the series, granting it the “pimp” spot after its hit series Modern Family.  However, blackish feels like it was created in a laboratory.  It has all of the elements, but they don’t quite come together in a wholly enjoyable way.  I appreciate that blackish is concerned with blackness in an era when Shonda Rhimes would have us believe that race, gender, class and sexuality no longer matter.  That blackish attempts to balance the “problematic” of being a culturally specific, upwardly mobile Huxtable clan is refreshing.  The “Pilot” has to do a lot of heavy lifting, as “Pilot” episodes often do.  It must attempt to set up the central tension while also attempting to be funny.  Discussions about baked “fried” chicken, hot sauce and grape soda help to make the series feel like it might be doing something different with televisual blackness (other than reifying stereotypes).  That Larry Whitmore’s Whitmore Films is involved in production also helps to buy the series some capital.  However, I remain bothered that the series wears its bootstrapping narrative on its sleeve.  Can there never be a televisual sense of the transference of black wealth?  Must televisual blackness always already be about “new money?”  Ultimately, blackish is what network fare is supposed to be – mildly amusing and inoffensive.

*

Karen Petruska, University of California at Santa Barbara

This show is going to (rightly) attract a lot of attention because it features a prosperous African-American family on a sitcom—a rarity—talking explicitly about what it means to be wealthy and black in a white world—a greater rarity. A possible problem, though, is that the show suggests race is a preoccupation of our protagonist, Andre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) but no one else. The show concludes the episode’s central dilemma—has Andre been promoted just because he is black?—with Andre changing his own interpretation of the situation, without any explicit questioning of his white boss or larger power structures.

Another possible issue is generic. Because the show is a family sitcom, airing after Modern Family, it likely feels a need to end with a message and a smile. For Andre to feel better about his promotion, therefore, he decides to define “urban” as “hip” and “cool” rather than delver deeper into the complexities of being black in (corporate) America. There is one other character in the house, Pops (Laurence Fishburne), who seems intended to be the measuring stick for what qualifies as “authentic blackness”—and boy will it be interesting to see if he exists in this world to speak the truth while Andre finds endless means to compromise.

There’s an impressive group of prominent black creatives behind this show, including creator Kenya Barris and executive producer Larry Wilmore. Barris has discussed “double consciousness” when describing his goals with the show, and the conflict between colorblindness (espoused by the wife and children) and cultural specificity (espoused by Dre and Pops) could prove fertile ground for racial commentary. I should also note the show was funny, the female lead was well drawn, and there seems a lot of room to grow. With these folks heading the project, I’m pretty optimistic.

~~~~~

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER [Premiers Sept 25, 2014 @ 10/9]

Viola Davis stars in the latest Shonda Rhimes-produced series, this one focused on a first year law school class that doubles as an internship competition for a prestigious law firm, and which may or may not have students exploring the series’ title by the time they earn their credits.

*

Kelly Kessler, DePaul University

Perhaps not most importantly, but noticeably in light of last week’s The Mysteries of Laura, How to Get Away with Murder’s Annalise Keating is everything Laura fails to be. She’s fierce. She’s composed. She’s, in fact, everything the other leading women of the Shonda Rhimes block failed to be in their series introductions. (I know, this is not technically a Rhimes show, but it has been sold as part of her brand, is helmed by someone coming from her stable, and now completes ABC’s Thursday night Shonda block.) The opening episode is solid. I see it as Reunion meets Law and Order meets Legally Blonde (just because of the competition) with a fierce, hot, perhaps amoral and unflappable female protagonist. Viola Davis is fabulous as the show’s steely leader, and unlike Grey’s Meredith or Scandal’s Olivia, both of whom were introduced as unequal sexual partners to men in power, Annalise clearly has control of the situations at hand. Her unyielding composure, badass leather jacket, and ability to manipulate those around her—students, cops/lovers, and employees—quickly establish her as a woman with which to be reckoned. Her young, hot, diverse, faithful, and easily led law students’ anxiety and desire to please prove a nice juxtaposition to her sense of cool. The show’s narrative mystery of “who killed Keating’s husband (poor Tom Verica), why, and will they get away with it?” emerges through a mélange of flashbacks and flashforwards brought to us through heavy underscoring, quick shots, fast movement, and flashy graphic matches. These flourishes don’t, however, seem to compromise the show’s clarity or watchability; they simply provide a pulsing rhythm for the ensuing mystery and the pilot episode’s panicked dash to bury the body of the titular murder. Viola Davis, check. Strong female protagonist, check. Twisty plot, check. I’m in.

*

Louisa Stein, Middlebury College

I spent the first 41 of the 44 minutes of the premiere of ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder suspended in between hopeful, doubtful, and cringing. I think fundamentally what I really liked about the series was that it didn’t dumb itself down plot-wise for the viewer. Yes, its episodic plot–in which law students of the famed Professor Keating (Viola Davis) must help her with a case–was forgettable and familiar. But the episode at the same time set up not one but two serial mysteries, all the while only indirectly asking how the two are connected.

How to Get Away with Murder allows us to feel the pleasurable confusion of a long form mystery. It fosters uncertainty and uses it to draw the viewer in. It doesn’t feel the need to hit us over the head with narrative explanation of its mystery set up; it doesn’t even signpost when we time shift with changes in filter a la Damages and Pretty Little Liars.

Don’t get me wrong; How to Get Away with Murder’s premiere was no Damages or Pretty Little Liars. This premiere feels almost purposefully uneven. It’s like you can see the perforation lines, the chunks that are meant to be promo friendly, or to add sensation for sensation’s sake. How to Get Away With Murder is more an intriguing but lumpy mix than an elegant synthesis.

And there are moments when the actors’ performances transcend the episode’s unevenness. Like that one moment after Professor Keating has inappropriately cried in front of and then fondled a student; (I could barely watch—it was So Wrong). But after the student (Wes Gibbons, also very engagingly performed Alfred Enoch) leaves the room, the camera lingers with Keating/Davis as she collects herself, and I was mesmerized. I felt a nuanced character there, palpably, beyond the writing, and I want to get to know her more. So for Keating and for the fun of a serial mystery that isn’t afraid to be complicated and a bit over the top, I’ll be tuning in next week.

*

Tony Tran, University of Wisconsin – Madison (with Liz Griffin, Duke Law JD)

As suggested by my partner in crime (and regular The Good Wife viewing companion), this show may want to change its name to How to Get Fired from Law School.  Apparently attorney-client privilege isn’t important wherever Middleton Law School is located, but having your client (and all her files) open to a large group of unknown and subpoenable people isn’t the best strategy for a murder case.  Violating doctor-patient confidentiality through misleading conduct?  Eh, just Fruits of the Poisonous Tree.   And, no, you can’t enter random evidence through the legal argument of “Oh, I thought you had that”—at least call a recess!  And we’re sure the Torts and Evidence professors will say something at the next faculty meeting about encouraging students to skip their classes.

Legal issues aside, I struggled to care about anyone on this show.  The law students—which took up way too much screen time—are annoying in both timelines, a mixture of characteristics derived from lawyer jokes and the teenagers from I Know What You Did Last Summer.  Even when Viola Davis actually gets a chance to showcase her skills in a scene with Wes (Alfred Enoch), I was more distracted by the awkward setting and placement of the scene (and wondering why my advisor never cries at an uncomfortable distance with me in the bathroom).  While I am usually invested in the verdicts of The Good Wife’s trial of the week, the court case in the pilot was rushed, uneven, and abruptly concluded.  Is it unfair to apply our legal standard and compare “Revenge/Scandal in Law School” to The Good Wife?  Totally.  But at least when The Good Wife is taking liberties with the law, Alicia, Kalinda, and Co. are characters I want to watch.

*

Taylor Cole Miller, University of Wisconsin – Madison

I can’t help but feeling a little bait and switched by the pilot of How to Get Away with Murder (HTGAWM). The teases for this show were so damn captivating, highlighting the serious badassery of Viola Davis’ Annalise Keating with her tailored suits and leather jacket drawing me into something dark and lascivious and decadent–all set to my current jam, “Love Runs Out” by OneRepublic. What I got instead was a Grey’s Anatomy of law school, where a bunch of actors and characters I don’t find all that intriguing were hogging the screen from Viola Davis.

Still, Davis’ performance is terrific, and I mean crying-from-the-nose-after-fondling-a-student terrific. HTGAWM could convince me to sit through hours of endless student banality, laboring to color in a world as captivating as a Hogwarts Law School (someone please make that show) mixed with I Know What You Did Last Summer (thanks, Tony), just to give Davis the breathing space to bring her little bits of magic to that world week after week. Where I think the ABC Shondaland bloc is dangerous is how old and obsolete HTGAWM makes Grey’s Anatomy feel, where a one-night stand gay rim job (!) replaces the “sweet lady kisses” and monogamy Grey’s constantly trots around. Meanwhile, Scandal‘s Cyrus bizarrely articulated everything wrong with that show in its new premiere and how monotonous and boring the circular relationship between Olivia Pope and Fitz has become. So, even with all its problems and its occasionally dull student characters, I anticipate liking HTGAWM far more than its TGIT predecessors.

~~~~~

SELFIE [Premiers Sept 30 @ 8/7]

Karen Gillan and John Cho star in this social media-age Pygmalion riff, as Eliza must detox from her Instagrammed existence to confront her sense of identity with the help of an uptight but successful Henry.

*

Kit Hughes, University of Wisconsin – Madison

That the Laughing Cow commercial featuring a softly-spoken, bright red cartoon bovine musing about the unfortunate trajectory of snacking in America while wearing large disc-shaped earrings made of her own cheese was not the most objectionable thing I witnessed during the half hour I watched television for this review is somewhat discouraging.

Is this what it really means to contemporize Pygmalion? Not by recasting the story into a tale of two people mutually interested in each others’ fate and welfare negotiating desires and frustrations encountered while trying to shape a life together, but by adding lots of on-screen widgets, chat abbreviations, and hashtag talk? I get that this is a comedy. And while I will be inwardly amused by any joke that makes fun of Goop™ I will be equally disturbed by a show that introduces its main character by noting she is the top sales rep in her company only to toss off the punch line “the magic of the miniskirt.”

One of the problems with transforming Pygmalion into a serial television show is that the critical part—the last two acts, in which Eliza pushes back against the objectifications and controlling demands of Professor Higgins to realize her own agency—can be endlessly delayed, making the show’s primary narrative engine the transformation of our “butt on the inside” heroine plagued by “loose morals.” And what’s worse, this Eliza is getting it from both sides. In the most misguided rip-off of New Girl I’ve seen yet, Eliza’s next-door neighbor, Bryn-Makeunders-Are-My-Everything, stops by with a coterie of knock-off Jesses to doll up (doll down?) Eliza for a wedding while singing a ukulele version of “Bad Romance.” Invoking a different Lady known for her (confrontational) transformations while forcing our Eliza into a peach sheath and a nude lip? #tryAgain

*

Melanie Kohnen, NYU

Selfie lost me in the first five minutes. There are two main issues I have with the show: one, that it once again portrays relationships forged via social media as shallow and inferior to “real” friends, and second, that it represents selfies as narcissistic pursuit, echoing a very gendered popular discourse. Instead of considering selfies as a way for young women to take control over their own image, the show portrays them as evidence of female obsession with popularity and vanity (not to mention that Eliza’s successful career is attributed entirely to her attractiveness). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Eliza needs an intervention from a man who will show her the way to becoming a “better person.” While Henry also embodies a stereotype of the digital age—the cranky hipster who doesn’t get social media—the diegesis is far less hostile toward him and grants him a position of authority. As much as I like Karen Gillan and John Cho and would like to see a sitcom with them, Selfie and I will part ways here.

*

Matt Sienkiewicz, Boston College

Selfie has a theory about new media. Well, a couple of theories. The first, and perhaps the more obvious, is that new media, no matter how crassly invoked, still makes everything it touches a little sexier. AOL once built a business model around this concept. Yes, that 10,000 free hours disc was the epitome of junk mail, an unsolicited come-on for a product you would have asked for, had you wanted it. But it was a CD. And it could bring you online. In a mailbox full of Eastbay catalogues and K-Mart circulars, the disc may not have been cutting edge. It was, however, new. Selfie fills your screen with Facebook logos and Instagram filters, offering today’s televisual equivalent of a late 90s CD rainbow reflection—pretty colors signifying little more than a soon to be embarrassing vision of modernity. But it does feel new.

Selfie’s second theory of new media is more intriguing but less convincing. In its best moments, the show asks an interesting question about the capacity of our cellphone apps to adequately reflect that mysterious inkling we call personal identity. The answer, less interestingly, is that they cannot. New media, in the world of Selfie, forces you to trade You for @you. And no one wants to date @you.

All of which, of course, positions television in a surprising place. The medium that once threatened to turn suburban kids into ultraviolent, oversexed, undereducated hooligans no longer has the power to corrupt our essences. This is a loss. But what television no longer has in danger, Selfie suggests it has replaced with Archimedean perspective. From the vantage point of a TV studio, anyone can see the futility of looking for truth in a tiny screen you once forgot at the laundromat. A television, however, is different story. In Selfie’s worldview, television isn’t old media. It’s wise media.

*

Tony Tran, University of Wisconsin – Madison

If one were to exchange the #Selfie music video for the first five minutes of Selfie, I don’t think anyone would notice with the similar “social media” aesthetics and grating voiceovers. How did “most butt” become this hollow character? And how did someone like that become the number one salesperson? Or perhaps the show is making an argument about the gender dynamics of big pharma and the lack of women in the medical field? Or maybe not.

Once you get pass the techno, vomit, and Frozen reference, Eliza (Karen Gillan) slowly gets more depth and the show actually becomes funny (if still a bit uneven). The Goo Goo Dolls paired with Snake on a Nokia made me giggle. And someone on the writing staff isn’t a fan of Zooey, but that is completely fine with me—more random ukulele covers of pop songs please! However, as a follower of the goop lifestyle, not sure how I feel about Gwyneth jokes.

The star of the show for me is John Cho as Henry. On paper, a boring, uptight Asian American male lead generally doesn’t bode well, but I found Cho charming and funny (and we can credit the My Fair Lady influence for some of the uptightness). Weirdly, I just find his movements comedic, showcased in the scene at his house (and as an emo Harold). I hope race continues to be mentioned; it would be easy to push a color-blind adaptation, but his boss’ forwarded email forces us to think about everyday Asian American experiences. And while Eliza calls him gay—which can trigger a history of Asian American male emasculation—I’m glad Henry/Cho just shrugs it off, because it’s not an insult (and it doesn’t matter because at 42, he looks amazing!).  Will tune in to see where this goes.

~~~~~

MANHATTAN LOVE STORY [Premiers Sept 30 @ 8.30/7.30]

The story of two young and attractive New Yorkers whose relationship gets off to a rough start, the show works to differentiate itself by having two internal voiceovers from both male and female leads. The results will surprise you (if you’re surprised by essentialist depictions of gender, which seems unlikely).

*

Sarah Murray, University of Wisconsin – Madison

The intended object of our affection in Manhattan Love Story is the voiceover. If, as the show’s promotional trailer would have us believe, we’ve exhausted the shocking twist romcom ending wherein woman ends up not with man but with independent self, then this half-hour comedy brings us back to the happy ending we’ve missed. Dana (Analeigh Tipton) is a new New Yorker, a fresh-start-follow-your-dreams gal who pre-loves New York. Her bucket list of New York to-dos is the prop that carries us through her first disastrous date with the womanizing Jake, our established New Yorker. (Although Jake’s only New York-ness seems to be the fact that he would never go to High Line Park…a New York-ness inauthenticated by comment snark indicating the pilot’s initial reception: “no one calls it High Line Park – it is the High Line”). Nothing says love like a bad first date in a bucket-listed New York (BLNY).

With the comfort that love will likely prevail, we are left to focus on the filter-free thoughts of the two disconcertingly attractive leads as the show sets up their story through the disconnect between their on-screen actions and their internal streams of consciousness. Voiceover and romantic comedy maintain a loveless yet occasionally comforting marriage. Manhattan Love Story renews those vows. The re-return to voiceover, as inner monologue, makes sense – its confessional nature has always held the potential for humanizing characterization. Here, in BLNY, it’s like listening to gender socialization happen. The show wants voiceover to be our unexpected love, the site where our quietest thoughts offer surprising dimensionality. Instead, this fraught narrative technique introduces a rather boring world of hastily engineered quirk and humorless objectification.

*

Nora Patterson, University of Wisconsin – Madison

There were a few moments when the snarky, quirky, hipster humor of this show made me smile. I am embarrassed to admit this, because Manhattan Love Story really is the epitome of lily-white, heterosexist, network drek. I was turned off the second the camera began rolling and we met lead love interest Peter as he walks down a New York street, checking women out and mentally noting whether or not he would bang them. This is cross-cut with footage of Dana doing the same mental checklist as she walks down a street, but this time, mentally drooling over purses. Ok, we get it, men are sex addicts and women love purses. Man, if we are to believe this comedy, Manhattan is populated by good-looking, straight white yuppies. The only person of color in this show locked Dana in the stairwell on her first day of work. Oh wait, there may have been some non-white extras too. Because Manhattan’s cultural diversity is really just the backdrop for WASPy romance. The dialogue is contrived, and none of the jokes seem fresh. I literally remember the “typing-someone’s-name-into-my-Facebook-status-instead–of–the–search–box” gag from ABC’s sitcom’s ill-fated 2013-14 sitcom Trophy Wife. In fact, I am convinced the writers just went through failed sitcoms scripts looking for material; I remember the date scene, internal dialogue included, from the short-lived 1995 FOX sitcom The Crew. Did I mention Peter works for his family’s trophy-making business, a premise more suited to a small, Midwestern Main Street than a Manhattan office building? Honestly, besides the canned writing, the whitewashed depiction of NYC, and thinly-veiled misogyny of this show, the fact is that none of the characters are really likable. Will this stop ABC from ordering more? Maybe not. But the low ratings might.

~~~~~

CRISTELA [Premiers Oct 10 @ 8.30/7.30]

A multi-camera family sitcom from Cristela Alonzo, the series focuses on a young law student struggling to get her life started, and her multi-generational Latin American Texas family whose love doesn’t always offer the kind of support she’s hoping for.

*

Karen Petruska, University of California – Santa Barbara

Cristela’s biggest asset is Cristela herself: stand-up comic Cristela Alonzo brings to this role the enthusiasm of the novice. Every so often, Alonzo—portraying an aspiring attorney, newly appointed legal intern—would throw her head back in a full-throated laugh, and it seemed so entirely genuine that I could not help but be charmed. Her extended, knowing, exchanges with seeming antagonists, including her brother-in law (disgruntled to have Cristela living in his home, rent free) and her new boss (possessing a casual bigotry that she has no problem acknowledging) give Cristela room for her “bump-set-spike” comedic stylings, though the larger pleasure of the scenes derives from the actors having free reign for equal opportunity offense. A domestic and workplace comedy, Cristela plays off some universal sitcom tropes—offering the expected complaining grandmother; the dumb,
entitled blonde; and the randy admirer—while nevertheless grounding the series in a broad Latino sensibility (with unsubtitled Spanish spoken at times). My favorite moment was more serious, where
Cristela’s sister took her to task for intervening in their parenting, and it showed that while this show might be a traditional laugh-track comedy it also can achieve grounded moments of honesty. I likely won’t add this show to my rotation, but that’s mostly because it is a perfectly solid example of an old-school sitcom (old school on many levels), and I tend to look for something a bit different.

*

Ethan Thompson, Texas A&M – Corpus Christi

Cristela has taken six years to finish law school, repeatedly dropping out to care for her mother, and living with her sister’s family. Now she’s ready for the big time: an unpaid internship at a law firm. Her Mexican-American family is skeptical. Wouldn’t she be better off taking a job at the call center where her sister works for $12.50 an hour? They just don’t share Cristela’s conviction that this is what it takes to leave behind your working class origins.

Cristela could be an interesting twist on the domestic comedy, and not just because its star and family are Mexican-American. By setting up both a workplace family and an extended family at home, there could be plenty of opportunities to explore different expectations of what constitutes the “American dream” and what role families play in that dream, or supporting each other as they seek to find it.

Unfortunately, all the individuals are one-dimensional stereotypes, and the series seems most interested in cheap jokes about Mexican-Americans being janitors, or being illegal immigrants, or selling oranges. The most Cristela amounts to is an opportunity to map what makes a joke about Mexican-American identity acceptable on network television in 2014.

For example, when he first meets Cristela, the boss at the firm asks, “You can’t swim? How’d you get to Texas?” Later he tells her that if she messes up he knows he can just call the immigration service. Since he hired her, maybe we’re supposed to believe he doesn’t mean these things, that he is just performing this offensiveness.

That’s the problem with Cristela; it doesn’t want to mean anything. Maybe that attitude makes it easier to say whatever you want, but it doesn’t encourage viewers to care about your characters, and that’s something else a domestic comedy needs.

As the posts go up, we’ll add links to them here, should you wish for this page to be your gateway to all the reviews to ABC’s new shows, CBS’, The CW’s, FOX’s, NBC’s, and those on cable and at other venues.

In the meantime, we invite you to watch along with us. Towards that end, below are short descriptions (penned by our own inimitable Myles McNutt) of what’s coming your way, along with premiere times.

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Comic Book Drama

THE FLASH (The CW, Tues Oct 7 @ 8/7) – In this spinoff of Arrow, the DC Comics universe expands to Barry Gordon, who gains unexpected powers following a tragic explosion and wakes up with a new, motion-blurred view of the world, one that sheds light on tragic details from his childhood.

GOTHAM (FOX, Mon Sept 22 @ 8/7) – It’s a basic police corruption procedural starring Ben McKenzie and Donal Logue, but the city they’re patrolling will grow up to be Batman’s Gotham. In the meantime, your favorite caped crusader and his villain buddies—Penguin! Riddler! Catwoman! The gang’s all here!—are still living through what will eventually become their origin stories.

Crime Drama

FOREVER (ABC, Mon Sept 22 @ 10/9) – Ioan Gruffodd stars as an immortal medical examiner who knows death more intimately than anyone who’s alive, but whose inability to truly know the meaning of death continues to haunt him.

GRACEPOINT (FOX, Thurs Oct 2 @ 9/8) – If you haven’t seen Broadchurch, this tells the story of a Northern California town racked with tragedy following a young boy’s death, and the detectives and family members caught up in the pursuing investigation. For those who have seen Broadchurch, it’s an often shot-for-shot adaptation of that U.K. series, although they’re promising a different ending.

NCIS: NEW ORLEANS (CBS, Tues Sept 23 @ 9/8) – In this second spinoff from the highest-rated drama on television, and the first to be shot outside of Los Angeles, Scott Bakula stars as yet another specialist in Navy-related crimes, this time in the Big Easy: The Land of Mardi Gras and generous filming incentives.

SCORPION (CBS, Mon Sept 22 @ 9/8) – Based on a real-life genius who has done work with the government, it’s a high-octane—seriously, there’s a big car setpiece—procedural about a gang of anti-social geniuses who work alongside Homeland Security to solve high-tech problems while learning how to survive when life stops being high-tech and starts being real.

STALKER (CBS, Wed Oct 1 @ 10/9) – Maggie Q and Dylan McDermott star in this sensationalist drama from Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek, The Following), which focused on a stalking prevention unit of the LAPD where each member of the team has their own history—either as victim or perpetrator—with the crime in question.

Crime Dramedy

THE MYSTERIES OF LAURA (NBC, Wed Sept 17 @ 8/7) – Debra Messing stars in an hour-long comedy procedural about a mother of twin six-year old hellions who just also happens to be a great detective—the mystery is how she keeps it all together. Alternate title, per NPR’s Linda Holmes: MomCop, CopMom.

Family Drama

THE AFFAIR (Showtime, Sun Oct 12 @ 10/9) – Starring Dominic West and Ruth Wilson, it’s the story of an extramarital affair during a summer in Montauk, but told through a distinct structure that explores issues of class and gender intersecting with the affair itself.

KINGDOM (DirecTV, Wed Oct 8 @ 9/7) – A multi-generational family drama set in the world of Mixed Martial Arts, the series stars Frank Grillo as a the patriarch of a family on the wrong side of the law who work out their issues in and out of the ring in southern California.

Family Sitcom

BLACK-ISH (ABC, Wed Sept 24 @ 9:30/8:30) – Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis-Ross, and Laurence Fishburne star in this exploration of how race and identity are understood in the context of a 21^st century, upper middle class, multi-generational African American household. If this description made even the faint image of the word “Cosby” form in your brain, ABC has won.

CRISTELA (ABC, Fri Oct 10 @ 8:30/7:30) – A multi-camera family sitcom from Cristela Alonzo, the series focuses on a young law student struggling to get her life started, and her multi-generational Latin American Texas family whose love doesn’t always offer the kind of support she’s hoping for.

Family Dramedy

JANE THE VIRGIN (The CW, Mon Oct 13 @ 9/8) – What would happen if a twenty-something virgin was accidentally artificially inseminated? And what would happen if the sperm involved was attached to an absurdly contrived set of circumstances that create legitimate tension over whether or not the pregnancy should be terminated? Jane the Virgin is here to tell this story.

TRANSPARENT (Amazon, available Fri Sept 26) – The Jill Soloway-created family comedy focuses on Maura (Jeffrey Tambor), a transgendered patriarch beginning his transition from a man to a woman while his children confront their own identity crises and their changing relationship with their father.

Horror

AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW (FX, Wed Oct 8 @ 10/9) – Pushing further into people’s most-common nightmares, Ryan Murphy and his collaborators return to explore the clown-riddled terror of the freak show in the series’ fourth installment of its seasonal anthology model.

Hospital Drama

RED BAND SOCIETY (FOX, Wed Sept 17 @ 9/8) – Octavia Spencer leads an ensemble cast of those who live and work in an extended youth hospital wing, where the diagnosis is hormones, pathos, and self-discovery as chronic illness mixes with adolescence.

Legal Comedy

BAD JUDGE (NBC, Thurs Oct 2 @ 9/8) Kate Walsh stars as a party-loving judge who lives the contradiction of being bad at living a healthy life but great at punishing those who break the law—I would tell you more, but it’s on its third showrunner, so other than this your guess is as good as anyone’s.

Legal Drama

HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER (ABC, Thurs Sept 25 @ 10/9) – Viola Davis stars in the latest Shonda Rhimes-produced series, this one focused on a first year law school class that doubles as an internship competition for a prestigious law firm, and which may or may not have students exploring the series’ title by the time they earn their credits.

Other Sitcom

MULANEY (FOX, Sun Oct 5 @ 9:30/8:30) – Based on the standup of star/producer John Mulaney, it’s a throwback multi-camera sitcom about a comedy writer working for a difficult boss (Martin Short) and living life with his roommates.

Political Drama

MADAM SECRETARY (CBS, Sun Sept 21 @ 8/7) – Tea Leoni stars as a CIA Analyst turned university professor who’s called into service following the tragic death of the previous Secretary of State.

Reality

UTOPIA (FOX, already started) – What happens when Fox sends 15 strangers to live on their own without rules? What kind of society will they form? What kind of lives will they lead? What role with religion or government play? And will anyone actually be interested in the answers to these questions? Only time will tell.

Romantic Comedy

A To Z (NBC, Thurs Oct 2 @ 9:30/8:30) – Ben Feldman and Cristin Miloti play a couple who unexpectedly stumble into a relationship that might well be the product of fate, which the series’ frame narrative reveals may be more complicated than its alphabetical title would suggest.

MANHATTAN LOVE STORY (ABC, Tues Sept 30 @ 8:30/7:30) – The story of two young and attractive New Yorkers whose relationship gets off to a rough start, the show works to differentiate itself by having two internal voiceovers from both male and female leads. The results will surprise you (if you’re surprised by essentialist depictions of gender, which seems unlikely).

MARRY ME (NBC, Tues Oct 14 @ 9/8) – Happy Endings creator David Caspe returns with another irreverent comedy, this one focused on a couple (Casey Wilson, Ken Marino) whose delayed engagement creates tension between them and their friends and family following a proposal mishap.

SELFIE (ABC, Tues Sept 30 @ 8/7) – Karen Gillan and John Cho star in this social media-age Pygmalion riff, as Eliza must detox from her Instagrammed existence to confront her sense of identity with the help of an uptight but successful Henry.

Teen Dramedy

HAPPYLAND (MTV, Tues Sept 30 @ 11/10) – Set in a low rent Disneyland-style theme park, it follows a young woman who grew up in the park with her employee mother whose own time working at the park brings laughs, romance, and an episode-ending revelation that may or may not involve a Les Cousins Dangereux-esque situation.

A young Patrick McDreamy Dempsey as JFK in Reckless Youth.

In the history of broadcast television in the United States, there have been no less than eight fictional historical mini-series and made-for-TV movies about the Kennedy family.Those that have focused on JFK specifically include ABC’s 1974 made-for-TV movie Missiles of October, which told the story of the Kennedy Administration’s actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis and based. There is also NBC’s 1983 Kennedy, which is a five-part mini-series depicting JFK’s presidency, and notably starred Martin Sheen as the ill-fated president. ABC showed the three-part miniseries The Kennedys of Massachusetts in 1990, which primarily focuses on the early history of the family, beginning with Joseph Kennedy’s courtship of Rose Fitzgerald and ending with JFK’s inauguration speech. One of my personal favorites is ABC’s 1993 miniseries JFK: Reckless Youth, which starred Patrick Dempsey as John F. Kennedy, and chronicled JFK’s youth through to his first congressional election. These representations, for the most part, reinforce JFK’s public persona as a cold war warrior, and are emblematic of a 1960s brand of New Frontiersman masculinity, typified by his reputation as a brilliant scholar and athlete at an Ivy League university, and membership within groups mainly exclusive to men, including boarding schools, fraternities, the military, clubs, and government. And yet, also personalized by his unique Boston accent, and Irish Catholic ethnicity.

In January, 2011, The History Channel announced that it would not be airing its mini-series The Kennedys for U.S. audiences. THC picked up The Kennedys project in December, 2009, and it starred Greg Kinnear as JFK, Katie Holmes as Jacqueline Kennedy, and was produced by 24 creator Joel Surnow. It was part of the network’s greater push from Executive Vice President and General Manager Nancy Dubuc to expand into glossy, cinematic fare, and The Kennedys was slated to be THC’s first scripted original docudrama program. As you may know, THC decided to drop The Kennedys after a series of protests online at Stop Kennedy Smears, although it still aired on THC’s global network in the UK, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. Looking at the objections protestors had about The Kennedys, which were based on leaked copies of the miniseries script, it is clear the JFK’s masculinity is at the forefront of concerns. Protestors comments that this miniseries demeans JFK’s legacy by making him out to be emotionally and physically weak, portraying him as a man with a crippling back injury, as well as a sex addict and a drug addict. This public outcry illuminates how The Kennedys was interpreted as a challenge to JFK’s mythic New Frontiersman masculinity.

The infamous 2011 The Kennedys mini-series is a bit heavy handed in its re-telling of John F. Kennedy’s story. The Kennedys begins its program with an emphasis on JFK’s back pain, and throughout the series is aggressive in its characterization of Jack Kennedy as an incapacitated leader during his presidency. This is compounded as he is treated in secret for his back pain with shots of methamphetamine, and when he isn’t grimacing in pain, or getting doped up on meth, he is usually overshadowed by a father he cannot stand up to or lying to Jackie about his infidelities. And while some of these aspects may be backed up by historical evidence, it is a portrayal US audiences are not accustomed to seeing, and which did not resonant with some viewers’ conception of who JFK was. What this does demonstrate is the role of audiences in historical meaning making through television, as well as the contested nature of historical television and collective memory.

National Geographic’s Killing Kennedy is the most recent JFK historical docudrama to air on television in the United States. In the As you know, it is not the first televisual account of JFK’s life, however it is the first to be based on a book written by Bill O’Reilly, directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Rob Lowe in the titular role as Kennedy. His Kennedy accent alone is worth the watch. This miniseries is perhaps different from its predecessors in the way it parallels the story of JFK and Jackie along side Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina. In this sense, it is an attempt to reassert the official narrative about JFK’s assassination by a lone gunman on the grassy knoll, and attempts to explain Oswald’s motivations for killing the president. O’Reilly’s book is reportedly full of factual inaccuracies, and this straightforward story about the assassination challenges the conspiracy theories still circulating about JFK’s death. Nevertheless, Killing Kennedy drew 3.4 M viewers to National Geographic when it aired on Sunday, November 10th, which is a viewership record for National Geographic. More importantly, both the production investments in big name producers, stars, and a Hollywood director, as well as the popularity of Killing Kennedy, demonstrate the continued fascination with retelling JFK’s story through televisual docudrama.

No, they weren’t.  In 1963, Cronkite was not yet “Uncle Walter” and the CBS publicity campaign from whence came “The Most Trusted Man in America” was almost a decade away.[i]  NBC’s The Huntley-Brinkley Report had higher ratings than Cronkite’s evening news show and my research suggests (although it’s impossible to say definitively) that more Americans were watching NBC on the day of the assassination.  But we seldom, if ever, see clips of NBC coverage.

The iconic status of the Cronkite moment, along with images from Kennedy’s state funeral – the rambunctious riderless horse and especially little John-John saluting his father’s casket – tend to obscure how American television actually brought the assassination to the American public.  I want to suggest that the networks did a woeful job in the early hours, but that a local Dallas affiliate of third-rated ABC provided remarkable journalism that not only helped ABC scoop the more established NBC and CBS, but showed what live television news would be doing in a few years.

In those first few hours the networks’ coverage was chaotic at best, characterized by what scholar Philip Rosen terms “technological insufficiency.”[ii]  When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 PM on Friday, November 22, many network news personnel were literally out to lunch.  Scrambling to get to their studios and on air after the wire service bulletins began coming in, newsmen at all three networks in New York had to wait a good fifteen to twenty minutes for cameras to warm up.  In the mean time, bulletin cards were thrown onto the screen and network television turned into radio: a voice-based medium with no images.  All Cronkite and the other New York newsmen could do anyway was read wire service copy.

When they finally had working cameras and visual transmission, there still was nothing much for viewers to see.  There was no live feed from Dallas.  That would take some time to set up and, in CBS’s case, its mobile unit was at the Dallas Trade Mart where Kennedy had been scheduled to give a noon-time speech.  CBS eventually showed live footage from the aborted luncheon with guests milling about.  But no news was happening there.  NBC grappled with the headaches of trying to communicate with its Dallas correspondent, Robert MacNeil, who had telephoned in from Parkland Memorial hospital where Kennedy and Texas Governor Connally had been taken.  On air, reporters fiddled around with a telephone speaker in an excruciating attempt to allow viewers to hear MacNeil’s report.  The cumbersome technology refused to work properly.  Over at ABC, viewers watched as workmen literally built a newsroom set around the anchor as another reporter beside him stood with a phone glued to his ear trying to get updates. [iii]

Network television news, while certainly maturing as a journalistic medium – both NBC and CBS had inaugurated their nightly half-hour news shows almost three months earlier – was not ready for live, breaking, crisis coverage.  Neither the technology nor the journalistic conventions for doing this kind of television coverage had yet developed.

At WFAA-TV in Dallas, the situation was very different.  Program manager, Jay Watson, was in Dealey Plaza with another staffer to watch the Kennedy motorcade.  The studio was only a few blocks away.  The shots rang out just as they were turning from the Plaza back to work.  Watson somehow managed to zoom in on one family lying on what we now call “the grassy knoll.”  He ran to them, grabbed them, flagged down a car, and raced them all to the studio, having sent his colleague ahead to alert the newsroom.

While NBC, CBS, and ABC were showing bulletin cards and disembodied voices reading wire service copy before going back to scheduled programs and commercials, WFAA commandeered a live camera from the homemaking show that was going out live as Watson dashed into the studio.  Thus, Watson was on camera with eyewitnesses a mere fifteen minutes after the awful event.  Clearly out of breath and somewhat emotionally frazzled, Watson read the same wire service copy the Cronkite had read, but then he did what Cronkite could never do: Watson brought in his colleague and they gave their ear-witness accounts of what had occurred in Dealey Plaza.  Watson then turned to the young family seated by him – a husband and wife with their little sons on their laps.  The Newmans happened to be the best eyewitnesses Watson could possibly have grabbed.  Literally right along side Kennedy’s limousine when the fatal shot blew off the top of Kennedy’s head, they had seen it all.  Watson’s interview with the couple provided riveting television and pretty conclusive evidence within twenty-some minutes of the assassination attempt that the president was unlikely to survive such a head wound.

The scoops kept coming for WFAA.  Not long after the Newmans appeared, Abraham Zapruder happened to walk into the studio hoping the newsroom could develop his film.  Zapruder had been right behind the Newmans on the grassy knoll, balancing on a concrete abutment to capture footage of the Kennedy motorcade.  We all know what he filmed.  While the technical staff looked into developing the film, Watson decided to interview the dapper-looking Zapruder.  It’s an odd interview.  Watson almost doesn’t appear to be listening to Zapruder – he clearly doesn’t know quite who he has sitting next to him.  In fact, Watson was doing two jobs at once: functioning as impromptu anchor and interviewer, but also acting as producer coordinating the show with his director in the control booth.

Watson wasn’t the only WFAA newsman in Dealey Plaza at 12:30.  Tom Alyea, a reporter-cameraman was driving back from Fort Worth, where Kennedy and his entourage had spent the previous evening.  As he and a fellow WFAA reporter came into Dealey Plaza, they heard a report on the police radio band about gunfire at Elm and Houston.  Alyea jumped out of the car and ran to the intersection filming as he went.  Following police, he managed to dash right into the Texas School Book Depository.  Alyea was one of the only reporters to get inside the building and the only one with a camera.  The remarkably accommodating Dallas police allowed Alyea to tag along with them as they explored the building looking for the assassin.  Alyea filmed as they scoured the sixth floor, eventually finding the sniper’s nest and the carefully hidden rifle.  Trapped inside the now quarantined building, Alyea managed to toss his film out the window to another WFAAer who ran the film back to the studio where it was quickly developed and broadcast.  Neither CBS nor NBC had access to footage like this.

Yet another WFAA newsman, Ron Reiland, got inside the Texas Theater as police searched for Lee Harvey Oswald, hiding inside.  Unfortunately, in the excitement, Reiland adjusted his film camera for outside filming rather than interior filming and thus ruined what could have been spectacular footage of Oswald scuffling with police before his arrest.

ABC quickly made a decision to turn over large amounts of its network coverage to WFAA.  And while fewer viewers around the nation were watching the third network, those who were saw the future of television news.  They also got the best and most comprehensive coverage of that day’s awful events.

It’s lamentable that the story of WFAA’s coverage of the day of the assassination isn’t better known, but then again ABC didn’t have the clout of its rivals in the 1960s.  CBS seems to have made a concerted effort over the decades to brand itself and its anchor as the sole bearer of the news of Kennedy assassination to the nation.  In the recent 2013 Emmy Awards, the television industry ballyhooed its importance in 1963 with only CBS material.  In the avalanche of programming commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, PBS wraps an entire program about TV news coverage, JFK: One PM Central Standard Time, around Cronkite.  A New York Times review of the documentary notes that it “strives mightily to reinforce the perception that Walter Cronkite was the only journalist working that day.”[iv]

The most impressive TV journalists working that day were far away from Cronkite’s New York studio.  They are the largely unheralded and unknown news personnel of WFAA-TV in Dallas.

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland [Premiered 10/10/2013]

In this spin-off of ABC’s other fairy tale drama, Alice (Sophie Lowe) is institutionalized by a disbelieving father before breaking out with the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha) and the White Rabbit (voice of John Lithgow) with the hopes of returning to Wonderland and reuniting with her true love who she believed had died at the hands of the Red Queen (Emma Rigby).

Kyra Hunting [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland strikes me as, more than anything, an example of what can go awry when a program simply has too many resources and too much technology. As was the case with several other offerings this season, the series establishes its massive storyworld and cinematic special effects throughout the pilot. But this series suffered deeply from an over reliance on these elements and the CGI that makes them possible. Granted it is hard to create a convincing Wonderland when most viewers already have so many ingrained in their mind, but this didn’t just not feel like MY wonderland but ANY land at all; instead the CGI often pushed the landscape to far into the realm of video game animation (particularly in images of the Red Queen’s Castle) and the actors frequently felt like they were on rather then in the world.

The episode had its bright spots: Michael Socha was charming as the Knave of Heart and I am always a sucker for a girl who’s an expert in hand to hand combat (not to mention a love story). However, even its rework of Alice (from the madhouse to the battlefield) felt far too familiar after many XBox sessions of American McGee. While I could forgive familiarity—which in itself can be a pleasure—had this well worn territory been well executed, for me this adaptation lacked the wonder of Wonderland and gave away too may of its most interesting cards, particularly the fate of Cyrus, in one fell swoop. Alice, when done well, has always been an interplay of restraint and excess, and here I felt the balance was hopelessly off.

Myles McNutt [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Wonderland has a problem with balance (and I swear I wrote this before I read Kyra’s response). Once Upon a Time had similar problems, but one of its two sides was a fairly grounded small town drama that offered some semblance of stability. That the other side was a fairy tale world filled with dodgy CGI was a problem, certainly, but the show had a structure to build on.

Wonderland is far from a terrible show, but it also never feels like a cohesive whole. This is in part because it was picked up based on a twenty-minute pilot presentation, and thus the pilot is cobbled together out of existing footage and other footage designed after the show went to series. It’s not that the new footage is dramatically better or worse, but rather that the parts that weren’t there before—particularly Naveen Andrews as Jafar—are disjunctive, and make the rest of it seem equally disjunctive in the process.

The other problem is that the entire affair is heavily reliant on CGI that—while far from awful—isn’t good enough to pull off the conceit. While Once’s duality gave it space to grow at its own pace, here we’re flung into a wide-ranging adventure where both the past and the present are whimsical and magical and a bit overbearing. The show often looks very good, but the wow wore off quickly enough to make me wonder how sustainable the show’s pace/structure would be in the future, a question a pilot like this one shouldn’t pose.

Super Fun Night [Premiered 10/02/2013]

Rebel Wilson and an American accent—her choice—star in this comedy about three nerdy women (Wilson, Lauren Ash, Liza Lapira) who venture beyond their apartments to expand their horizons and enjoy an exciting night life every Friday.

Suzanne Scott [Arizona State University]

Super Fun Night, originally developed/dropped by CBS in 2012, and retooled by ABC as a single camera sitcom, feels its age.  It feels like a meeting in 2011 in which someone said, “That nerd show is ratings gold, let’s do a lady version.” In the intervening years, Big Bang Theory has winningly developed its female characters, leaving the protagonists of Super Fun Night unfashionably late to the party.  But, no matter how many HIMYM-esque quickie comedic flashbacks Super Fun Night employs, its comedy stylings feel older than 2011.  Specifically, it feels like 1982: as if someone slapped a female POV on a Zapped or Porky’s underdog story…and then arbitrarily set it in a law office. This “premiere” is clearly the second episode of the series, meaning the entire premise of the show (Rebel Wilson’s Kimmie, along with her gal pals Marika and Helen-Alice, decide to stretch themselves socially by moving their indoor kid Friday evenings outdoors) is hastily/confusingly established.  There’s real chemistry between the three friends, and Lauren Ash brings a nice, Emma Stone-esque energy to Marika.  It almost seems like we weren’t allowed to see the gang’s super fun nights in, because we’d be rooting for the ladies to stay home.  At the very least, we would have had fewer jokes about Spanx.

Jennifer Smith [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

Super Fun Night is much like an amethyst: there may be a sparkling gem hidden inside, but I’m not sure I have the fortitude to scrape up my hands on a layer of jagged gray rock to get to it.  What appealed to me about this show was the promise of a sitcom that focused on the friendships between young women who aren’t conventionally beautiful, nerds who adore each other but are still coping with high school mean girl PTSD.  In other words, I wanted a sitcom about the world in which I, personally, live.  But much like Big Bang Theory, this pilot left me with the unsettling feeling that people like me will always be the butt of jokes even when they’re ostensibly the heroes.  The fat jokes surrounding creator and star Rebel Wilson were relentless, and while I appreciate the “Fat Amy” impulse to make fun of yourself before others get the opportunity, the single-mindedness of the mockery drowned out all other character moments, and the jokes as a whole were disappointingly unoriginal.  The cast is promising – Liza Lapira, especially, is a great actress who’s had rotten luck in TV project choices, and Wilson herself is a gifted comedian who makes the physical humor (if not her abysmal American accent) work.  But I wanted, and expected, more.

~ ~ ~

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. [Premiered 09/24/2013]

As the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands into the Marvel Televisual Universe with the help of executive producer Joss Whedon, Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) anchors a team of investigators tasked with responding to less cataclysmic instances requiring S.H.I.E.L.D. intervention in the post-Battle of New York world, here focused on the experiment-gone-wrong Mike Peterson (J. August Richards).

Suzanne Scott [Arizona State University]

As the tagline goes, “Not all heroes are super,” and neither are most pilots. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the rule rather than the exception, which isn’t to say it’s not exceptional, as both a high-profile transmedia extension of Marvel’s film universe, and as the newest televisual entry to the Whedonverse.  This doesn’t spare Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D from succumbing to pilot pitfalls (the rote “Agents, Assemble!” establishment of the ensemble, the laughably bad backlot shots of “East Los Angeles”), ones I was hoping we’d be able to skip over given our familiarity with the fictional world and the pedigree of the production.  Agent Coulson, who has served so ably as Marvel’s deadpan everyfan, the transmedia glue holding superhero teams and franchises together, also suffers from his new leading man status.  Let me be clear: I LOVE Coulson.  I think Clark Gregg is an exceptional actor, and he still lights up every scene he’s in.  But Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. also makes him a one-man Avengers: cracking wise like Tony Stark in one scene, Hulking out on his colleagues in the next, and delivering a final soliloquy worthy of his hero, Captain America.  Whether this is the origin story of a truly great ensemble show, or if it will flame out under the Extremis pressure (see what I did there?) of creating meaningful connections to the Marvel Universe, remains to be seen.

William Proctor [University of Sunderland]

Marvel’s transmedia experiment continues drawing from the model of comic book continuity and creating an interconnected universe with multiple episodes spanning multiple media windows. Following the critical and commercial triumphs of cinematic chapters, from Iron Man to Avengers, comic book tie-ins and mini-webisodes, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D pulls television into the hyperdiegesis with a blinding opening episode that embraces all the fun, fantasy and frolics of the Marvel films whilst retaining a serious post-9/11 aesthetic following the ‘Battle of New York’ featured in 2012’s blockbuster, The Avengers. The show is beautifully shot and further breaks down the barriers between cinema and TV like no other in history. The script is so polished, it shines like a brand new Iron Man suit, and the dialogue is crisp, sharp and witty. A lot happens in this opening episode, and a mystery is set up early on regarding Agent Coulson’s miraculous resurrection which hints at the intrigue to come. One caveat may be the wealth of intertextual breeding with the other Marvel films and tie-ins, but as a comic book consumer, I relish the potential here as the universe continues to expand and sprout narrative appendages that represent the apotheosis of transmedia storytelling in the 21st century. Spectacular stuff!

Derek Johnson [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Agent Simmons describes all the MacGuffins in play as “every known source of super power thrown into a blender”—an apt description for this pilot. Unlike many spin-offs, this pilot not afraid of baldly referencing the parent project(s), and I was surprised the producers drew so much so quickly, rather than meting out connections to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Hopefully this is just flushing the system—acknowledging and moving past supersoliders, gamma radiation, Chitauri tech, and Extremis—rather than indicating intent to make every episode a mélange of familiar plot points.  If this does continue, they might as well use some kind of on-screen pop-ups to emulate the old comic book practice of editors’ footnotes.  (“Last seen in Thor—Memory Joggin’ Joss”).  Though I do want to know what resurrection meant for Coulson and his cellist.

What I couldn’t parse were the racial politics of J. August Richard’s character.  I wasn’t thrilled with the angry black man trope, but his end-of-episode speech about SHIELD’s failures and false promises seemed to double as critique of dominant white social institutions (driven home without subtlety by the multicultural mural behind him).  But then he started laying hierarchies between humans and superhero gods on top of that, and the metaphor muddied the more overt critique.

Lots more to say here—I really hope Suzanne covers the “sweaty cosplay girls”!

Kyra Hunting [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

Marvel Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. came with sky-high expectations, carrying the baggage of the massive film franchise, decades of comic books, and the involvement of Joss Whedon. It can be forgiven, therefore, if it didn’t fully meet those expectations. The series did some things well right out of the gate: I appreciated the pilot’s commitment to moral complexity, with ever-shifting notions of heroes and villains. (Although the angry young black man as literal time bomb theme was worrisome). It was also adroit at both seamlessly situating itself in its storied franchise history and setting up a workable thematic structure. Its model, investigating the strange, has great episodic and serial narrative potential, proven by programs like Warehouse 13, Supernatural and Whedon’s own early series. However, the at-times witty and referential banter was not timed quite right and the episode’s commitment to action over back story did a nice job of replicating the feel of a Marvel film but a poor job establishing enough of a relationship with the core characters. The show has definite potential, the guests stars alone! But it needs to slow down and start working on characterization soon if it is going to fulfill its high expectations. TV series are less flings and more long term relationships and while I am certainly interested in a second date, I am not yet ready to commit.

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The Goldbergs [Premiered 09/24/2013]

Travel back to the 1980s, when video cameras were enormous and pant waists were high and cassette tapes were how you listened to music; anchoring this nostalgic vision is a family with parental challenges (Jeff Garlin and Wendy McLendon-Covey), teenage problems, and a pre-teen vantage point (whose adult narration is provided by Patton Oswalt) to bring this familial comedy into perspective.

Eleanor Patterson [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

Let me now dispel any question whether this show is a remake of Gertrude Berg’s The Goldbergs. It is not. That show was funny, while this product of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production studio is as stale and wincingly unfunny as they get. The Goldbergs is a historical TV show set in the 1980s, and does the cultural work of making the ’80s a sort of spectacle for millennial viewers. Protagonist tween Adam takes us back to his life as a in 1987 a la The Wonder Years, whose narrative structure, suburban family setting, and historical nostalgia The Goldbergs unabashedly cribs. However, where The Wonder Years was sweet and insightful, this show is contrived and devoid of likable characters. This does not invite nostalgia for a time of innocence, it is an invitation to ridicule a period it assumes we are glad to glance back at with ironic distance, in the same vein as those Awkward Family Photos. Here the ’80s are made strange through the gratuitous representation of old school technology, period fashion, and yes, an obnoxious dysfunctional Jewish family who is assimilated, but not quite as Aryan as those real Americans we remember from Family Ties or Growing Pains. Besides the title’s implicit reference to ethnic difference, many of the implicit Jewish American tropes are here, the most obvious being Wendi McLendon-Covey’s portrayal of overbearing mother Beverly who has unhealthy attachments to her awkward kids.  Frankly, this hack job excuse for a sitcom is below Covey’s amazing comedienne talent, and really, its below George Segal and Jeff Garlin, who also play central characters. However, my prediction is that they will not long be burdened with these roles.

Amanda Ann Klein [East Carolina University]

The Goldbergs opens with a montage of 80s nostalgia; we see clips from The Karate Kid, Knight Rider, and ALF while the show’s narrator, Patton Oswalt, explains that in the 1980s there were no parenting blogs, peanut allergies, or Twitter. “Back then,” Oswalt informs us, “the world was still small…” These truisms are crafted to flatter nostalgic 80s kids like myself, reminding us of our “authentic” childhoods, just as The Wonder Years’ evoked the authentic childhoods of television audiences in the 1980s. But these efforts fall flat, maybe because I’ve read too many of those “20 Signs You Were a Child of the 80s”-style Buzzfeed articles.

My primary complaint with The Goldbergs pilot, however, was its inability to balance broad, often mean-spirited humor with heartfelt emotion. For example, there’s a genuinely humorous bit in which Murray Goldberg, played by Jeff Garlin, tries (and fails) to teach his son Barry how to drive. This plot culminates with Murray cajoling a reticent Barry into singing along to “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” as they drive home. The moment is meant to be touching, with Murray attempting to connect with his son. But the scene felt too calculated, too much like an 80s punchline (remember how awful 80s music was?!), and thus, the father-son bonding unearned. Here’s hoping that The Goldbergs stays away from this kind of shorthand emotion, and concentrates instead on the one-liners that made me laugh out loud.

Jonathan Gray [University of Wisconsin – Madison]

I’m ready for some 80s nostalgia, so I wanted to like The Goldbergs. But why is everybody shouting their lines? Does the cast know that there are microphones on a television set? To be fair, I found some lines funny, and the central character was endearing in his own weird young pervert kinda way, I guess, but I so desperately wanted to ask the actors to try it from the top without yelling, or to leave me the script and just let me read it. I get it: this family fights. But especially since the show is so keen to offer schmaltzy reminders (with subtitles spelling it out, no less) that Dad really does love his kids, why put the audience on edge with all the yelling? As for the 80s nostalgia, so far it’s only background. Nothing in the script necessitates or grows out of the 80s, and thus the decade is just there as a wardrobe and a set of offhand references to Jedi masters, Burt Reynolds, and jazzercise. The pilot script could just as easily have been filmed with 70s, 60s, or 90s clothing and offhand references, and it doesn’t treat its references with much love. Oddly, then, there’s surprisingly little nostalgia in this nostalgic comedy, JUST A LOT OF SHOUTING.

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Trophy Wife [Premiered 09/24/2013]

Based on the real life experience of co-creator Sarah Haskins, Malin Akerman stars as the third wife—not a trophy wife, as the title’s meant to be ironic—of a lawyer (Bradley Whitford) who inherits his two ex-wives (Michaela Watkins and Marcia Gay Harden), their three kids, and the day-to-day challenges of being a stepmother all at once; the series charts their continued negotiation of parental responsibilities and personal identities in this atypical family comedy.

Suzanne Leonard [Simmons College]

I signed up to review Trophy Wife before learning that it was co-created by feminist comedian Sarah Haskins, whose Target Women routine ironically lambasted the media for the attention it pays to feminized pursuits such as yogurt eating, wedding obsessing, and beauty improving. Trophy Wife is apparently based on Haskins’ own marriage to a divorced older man with children, a fact that made me hopeful the show would present a progressive take on women in the sitcom genre. (Similar hopes were pinned last premiere season on Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project.) In this respect, Trophy Wife disappoints. While star Malin Akerman embraces physical and self-deprecating humor, the show oozes with privilege, and sets up an all too familiar rivalry between Akerman and her new husband’s dour ex-wives. In the pilot, her desire to be accepted by her husband’s kids leads her to chug a water bottle full of vodka to cover for her stepdaughter, an act that establishes her likeability. But her plight seems forced and retrograde. Is combatting the wicked stepmother stereotype really still such an issue for contemporary women? Is annoying family zaniness really all that funny? Thanks to Haskins’ storied pedigree, I expected so much more.

Bärbel Göbel-Stolz [Indiana University]

I don’t take to comedy easily, but Trophy Wife took me by surprise. The series’ format, by way of 2 ex-wives adds a polyamorous charm to a classic tale. Unexpectedly, the show is oddly heart warming as it posits its viewers, via voice over intro and outro, in the lead character’s struggle to adjust to a life as a third wife and stepmother. She makes melodramatic sacrifices to connect to the children. Plot lines could have been over the top and embarrassing, but instead were funny and light hearted. A few jokes, like the suspected Oedipal complex of her stepson Warren, were expected, but intelligently repackaged by unexpected narrative turns that had been put in motion early on. The writing is, as far as the premise allows this, on the smart side, even if comedy elements in the pilot are nothing new or special viewed independently.

A few things have to be said about the characters. The Trophy Wife is depicted as irresponsible and rather simple minded, possibly misguiding the show. The character line-up’s diversity, unfortunately, feels additive rather than inclusive, but it is too soon to dismiss the adopted child or bartending best friend as mere side characters.

Sarah Murray [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Sandwiched between The Goldbergs and Lucky 7, Trophy Wife’s rag-tag family carries the burden of moving viewers through ABC’s fresh Tuesday night lineup. The show has plenty going for it with a recognizable cast (who isn’t rooting for Bradley Whitford and Marcia Gay Harden?) and a group of writers, producers, and director with credits that include The Office, Pitch Perfect, Family Tools, and Bad Teacher (we’ll forgive Lee Eisenberg that last one). When a show has such firm grounding at the outset, you watch more defensively. Maybe it was because I was waiting for Whitford to fall on his face or maybe I was still confused about the show’s name, but whatever pilot failures I was bracing for never came.

Trophy Wife is funny. Not in a mildly guilt-inducing way that makes you wonder if you should admit to watching, but in a way that demonstrates how enjoyable a blend of physical humor and well-placed dialogue can be when the pacing is just right. Whitford and Akerman have great chemistry. Whitford looks good (no more West Wing hair and baggy suits). Akerman has a sharp sense of her own physicality and is attuned to when and how to use it for laughs. This is the biggest surprise and may be the reason to keep watching. Despite their tendency toward caricature, the gaggle of ex-wives and kids are still likeable. Trophy Wife is not a complex or original pilot by any means, but it’s tight, well-written and leads with a few promising LOLs.

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Lucky 7 [Premiered 09/24/2013]

In this adaptation of British series The Syndicate, Lorraine Bruce reprises her role as one of an ensemble of gas station employees who win the lottery and then face a host of difficulties ranging from petty disagreements to life-changing decisions, all without having even played 4 8 15 16 23 42.

Kit Hughes [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

My introduction to Lucky 7 came via a decontextualized video clip on ABC’s website (which I later discovered was a segment from the same network’s The Chew) in which Iron Chef’s Mario Batali opens by asking “Is this a shiny show or a dark show?” The cast jumps on the obvious answer you give to any of these meaningless either-or choices that pepper press tours and sideline reporting: both. Not only would I have to agree with them, I would go farther to suggest the show’s darkness comes from its wretchedly boring gleam. All dolled up in cinematography that makes heavy use of reflections, barriers, and telephoto lenses—not to mention its bizarre use of stop motion photography and the Fast and Furious (Lucky) Seven opening—this show lets us know: it’s serious. This is going to be about ethics, ethnics, class, the American dream, and greed. Never mind that its jokes rely on bidet humor (get it?) and it uses a passing mention of a miscarriage for pathos (for the “fat lady”). This kind of posturing is dangerous.

Also: why does the cabbie include Reagan alongside his clipped photos of Kennedy and Obama? Haunting.

Jonathan Gray [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

In many ways, this pilot is very well done. I felt I understood a fair deal about each of the central characters by the end, and got something about their complexities and nuances, which is altogether rare for a pilot to accomplish. It was paced well. Everyone held a line of performance – another feat rarely accomplished in ensemble shows – with Luis Antonio Ramos delivering an especially superb performance (and sheeeeeeeeeeeeet, Clay Davis is back on TV!). And in terms of setting up a whole bunch of issues, tensions, and conflicts for an entire season, it certainly delivered. As a drama about seven people and their families, it could be excellent, riveting even. My hesitation comes from the premise, as ultimately I don’t care about six people who have won the lottery. Either way, they’re headed for one of the two most trite, over-used sentiments of American television (and film): 1) money can’t buy you happiness, or 2) money can buy you happiness. For about twenty minutes there, American network television had a show full of working class characters, then it hit them with a gimmick, and though I’ll keep watching and will hope for the best, I feel they may never recover from that gimmick, and that the show is bound to disappoint me.

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Back in the Game [Premiered 09/25/2013]

Maggie Lawson (Psych) stars as a single mother struggling with a divorce who moves back home with her father, and relives her childhood struggles with her baseball coach father (James Caan) as she inadvertently volunteers to coach her son’s misfit little league team.

Myles McNutt [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

At the recent TCA Press Tour, a critic asked whether or not Back in the Game was an underdog sports story about the misfit “Angles.” Executive producer Mark Cullen quickly set the record straight: “they’re not going to win a game all year.”

Back in the Game isn’t intended to be a feel good story: like How To Live With Your Parents For The Rest Of Your Life—yes, I referenced it mainly for an excuse to write out the title—it tells the story of a young single mother who is forced back to her childhood home and her childhood dynamics with her parents after their life falls apart. Unlike that show, however, Back in the Game has baseball to bring them together, structuring the action and giving the “starting over” narrative a hook (or, if you prefer a pun, a curveball).

Maggie Lawson is compelling as Terry, and Ben Koldyke plays a reformable asshole well, but there’s not a lot in the pilot to make James Caan’s Cannon likeable or interesting or funny. The gender politics are too broad by half, and never result in many laughs or meaningful observations, but I’m a sucker for a baseball story and a believer that calibration might get better when test audiences and in medias res openings aren’t involved.

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Betrayal [Premiered 09/29/2013]

Hannah Ware stars as photographer Sara Hayward, who strays from her troubled marriage to a prosecutor (Chris Johnson) with a debonair stranger (Stuart Townsend) only to learn he’s the defense attorney in her husband’s career-defining murder trial involving a business magnate (James Cromwell).

Myles McNutt [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

The in medias res opening to Betrayal sets up two key questions: Who shot Sara Hayward, and which of the two men in her life are there to comfort her?

The remainder of Betrayal gives us little reason to care about these questions. Simultaneously mundane and ludicrous, the narrative works so hard to manufacture the conditions and circumstances of Sara’s affair that it never stops to consider what makes a mystery worth caring about. By the time Sara finally pieces together she has slept with her husband’s opposing counsel, the narrative weight of her so-called “betrayal” was almost impressively out of sync with my level of disinterest, the spilled red wine screaming out “Look at me, I symbolize her blood!” just as I was screaming out exasperation for giving myself this assignment.

Angling toward both Revenge and Scandal with its title and its emphasis on morally complex relationships, it fails not only due to a flat script and poor pacing, but also because it fails to understand what made Revenge work—note the past tense—and what makes Scandal pop: those shows had structures that gave them purpose and meaning. Betrayal has only intrigue masquerading as complexity and registering as nothing of value, empty to a degree that makes the pickup of this “limited series” feel like something of a betrayal.

Jenna Stoeber [University of Wisconsin-Madison]

Having been promised a show similar to Revenge, I was starkly disappointed by Betrayal’s limp drama and uninspired acting. The emotion is so awkwardly ham-fisted that I’m forced to assume that the main actors were chosen for their attractive face-shapes instead of their acting abilities. The writing is paltry and uninspired, and it’s hard to sympathize or care about the characters.

The affair between Sarah and Jack is played with an uncomfortable romantic earnestness that disregards the context of an affair. Hoping to draw in HBO viewers with flashes of skin, the premiere features TWO sex scenes, because why build emotional intensity when the characters can just do it? Everybody moves about in a detached chess-like manner. For example, the children of the main couple show up exactly twice; once to establish them, and once as a reminder to Sarah that maybe having an affair is bad. They are otherwise an invisible presence.

There’s nothing particularly redeemable about this episode, but it’s probably not the worst thing ever put on TV. The plot groundwork has been laid for some interesting interactions, but so far the quality of the writing and acting can’t carry the depth required to span the plot points.

However, in prominent popular discourse surrounding the series’ return, journalists have privileged the value of the programs to producers rather than their value to audiences. While talk of profit margins is all well and good, the two soaps’ move online involves asking audiences to accept new definitions of a soap opera’s value—once “free” over broadcast—within the television marketplace. Although the product itself—its characters, its narratives, its evolution—will determine its ultimate value to fans, Prospect Park’s release strategy intersects in complicated ways with discourses of televisual value within an evolving space of digital distribution, which is being adapted in order to fit the specificity of an atypical televisual form.

When broadcast networks started selling their shows through the iTunes Store, it was a pivotal moment for the digitization of media content and the growing impact of convergence on industry business models. However, it also rearticulated our conception of televisual value by placing a distinct price on an episode of television as a discrete twenty- or forty-minute entity.

This articulation was part of the larger digital distribution revolution: while iTunes and its competitors Amazon Instant Video and YouTube continue to sell individual episodes, streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have reframed televisual value through access to expanded libraries of content, largely leaving the iTunes model as an industrial afterthought (albeit one which is still useful for cord-cutters).

Prospect Park’s distribution strategy for All My Children and One Life To Live is an unorthodox merger of these two business models. Their primary partnership with Hulu—under their “Hulu Exclusives” acquisition strategy—is itself a combination of two different streaming logics: the online Hulu service features recent episodes of the series for free, ad-supported web browser streaming, while the multi-platform Hulu Plus service—$7.99 a month—will have the entire library of each series along with HD ad-supported streaming to tablets, game consoles, Roku players, etc. In order to articulate these options, particularly to viewers—imagined as older viewers in popular discourse—unfamiliar with online streaming, Hulu drafted One Life to Live stars for a video explanation:

In the process, Prospect Park and Hulu have dissected the experience of watching soap operas on television into two discrete values. The first is being able to “revive their daily drama habit”—to use Hulu’s marketing rhetoric—for free, with the caveat that their viewing must remain daily (as only the most recent episodes will be available). However, the second is the ability to “relax on your sofa and watch on your TV,” which Hulu has commodified by limiting device-based streaming to its subscription service. The distinction allows viewers to determine which parts of their soap viewing experience were most valuable to them, and specifically asks if watching on a television—or on a tablet—is worth $7.99 a month.

And yet Prospect Park’s arrangement with iTunes is even more interesting, given that no currently running soap operas are distributed through the service (whereas Days of our Lives and General Hospital also stream on Hulu). They are offering what they call a “Multi-Pass,” which is comparable to a “Season Pass” for primetime series with one caveat: instead of an entire season, it instead gives viewers twenty episodes—or four weeks—of a series for $9.99; viewers can also choose to purchase individual episodes for $0.99.

Whereas the Hulu arrangement asks viewers to place a value on their soap viewing habits, the iTunes arrangement explicitly asks viewers how much they are willing to pay for an episode of a soap opera. Prospect Park’s choice of $0.99 is half of what iTunes charges for primetime television episodes in standard definition (Hulu Plus remains the exclusive home of high-definition episodes), a decision that reflects the large volume of content viewers are expected to pay for—hence the Multi-Pass discount of $0.50 an episode—but also reinforces existing hierarchies of value between daytime and primetime programming.

However, the two soaps also fit somewhat awkwardly into the logics of streaming, given that one of the key values of streaming services—an extended library of previous episodes—is thus far unavailable to the two programs. Although one could expect that many fans of the two shows would invest in the ability to access decades of soap opera content through a streaming service like Hulu, the ability to revisit previous episodes has less perceptible value when there are thus far no previous episodes to revisit (as ABC’s stake in the new ventures—as license holders—is not strong enough for them to actively support Prospect Park with such library content beyond 8-10 minute recaps for potential new viewers).

Although it’s unclear what kind of data Prospect Park will be releasing—it will, as always, depend on whether releasing the data has value to them—any determinations about the “value” of the two relaunching soap operas have to be withheld until we understand how audiences respond to these initial articulations. While online distribution is often framed as offering audiences new ways to experience television, the habit-based nature of soap viewing has led Prospect Park and Hulu to devise and promote specific distribution strategies which emulate more traditional viewing patterns, at a price.

As a result, the stakes of this project are neither as simple as Prospect Park’s financial investment in All My Children and One Life To Live nor as broad as the very future of digital distribution. Rather, the specificity of this experiment will determine what value soap audiences have within future conceptions of digital distribution, their acceptance or rejection of industrial definitions of value shaping how and where they will be programmed to in the future.