The Fall pilot season is not over – it lingers on well into Winter – but our sustained coverage at Antenna ends here with 47 shows reviewed. Partly as a coda, partly to change things up and have one person weigh in on several shows, and partly because my own blog is currently hacked and/or dead, I thought I’d give a round up of what I consider to be the best and worst. These aren’t group picks, just the choices of my own addled brain.

(and a quick disclaimer: I’ve not yet seen Casual [don’t have Hulu] or Blood and Oil [didn’t record], so they’re not included in consideration)

Best New Sitcom

The Grinder – Rob Lowe is excellent in this, bringing the best of his Parks and Rec performance, with both a great knack for comedy and a deft ability to hit touching moments within and through that comedy. It’s outlandish and over-the-top, but quite gloriously so. And, to compare to the other alliteratively paired FOX new sitcom starring an ageless 80s icon, The Grinder is smart enough not to rely upon Lowe as much as Grandfathered relies upon John Stamos, as Fred Savage holds the show together in many ways. It’s lightweight and has little of note to say about anything, but it’s very funny.

Honorable mentions:

The Muppets – This is fun. It’s not brilliant, but it’s done well, the script is at times very crisp, I’m not wailing “think of the children!” just because there’s some adult humor, and the sub-genre at least pulls something different out of a set of characters that I love. Perhaps I’ll turn off in a week or four, but for now I’m happy to continue with the ride. Besides, Gonzo always deserved more comic action, and here he gets it.

The Carmichael Show – Loretta Devine bugs me, as she does on Doc McStuffins, but otherwise it’s a passable sitcom. I’d never seen Carmichael prior to the show, yet he is all types of comfortable in the genre. I fully plan to check back in on this one, but with such a tiny first season, it hardly encouraged me to do so till later.

Worst New Sitcom

Benders – I was happy to see my old neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens feature on television as something other than the location of a key witness on Law and Order, but that’s almost all I liked. It’s trying to be It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and yet doesn’t pull it off. Weak performances make it feel like a bad script reading not even the final product, weak and telegraphed humor tries to be edgy but is too unoriginal to manage it, a weak concept holds over it all, and there’s not even any ice hockey in a show about an ice hockey team.

Honorable mentions:

Dr. Ken – The stinkiness of the writing here is quite stunning at times. Sitcom pilots regularly stink but this one has so far to go to get anywhere half-decent. The jokes are the worst sort of dad jokes, making Two and a Half Men and According to Jim look proficient and positively witty by comparison. A real pity, especially since Albert Tsai ruled Trophy Wife and can do so, so much more than half-baked mime jokes.

Moonbeam City – Take Archer, modify it slightly for the 80s (but only slightly: visual and comic styles should remain), add comically gifted actors, and it should be alright, yeah? Nope. Very unfunny.

Best New Procedural

The Player – This show is really stupid, and makes no or negative sense half the time. But it’s a lot of fun and it’s never trying to be more than it is. I’ll need to be in the right mood to watch it, but if that mood calls for mindless, silly, yet high-paced action, it fits the bill. NBC out CBS’d CBS. Plus, all those silly elements (people running the world who like to bet on whether some random dude in Vegas will stop a predicted kidnapping or robbery? Whuh?) are silly enough to allow for a touch of camp, like a higher budget A-Team.

Honorable mention:

Blindspot – A rather gripping pilot that did a good job announcing itself as The Blacklist 2. The Blacklist doesn’t do it for me, and nor will this one, but it’s well-acted, tightly scripted, and once the woman is out of the bag (not a metaphor), it sets a good pace and isn’t as icky as I thought it would be. Not for me on a regular basis, but a step above the “No Thanks” category.

Worst New Procedural

Limitless – Matt Sienkiewicz’s review is really smart and deserves reading, much more than the show deserves watching alas. For me, it just couldn’t get its tone right, jolting between camp, serious, goofy, cool, grave, and frequently with music that jolted a different way. Not horrible, just not worth more time.

Honorable mentions:

Rosewood – Morris Chestnut is good in this, but it’s paint-by-numbers. Granted, some other things I like are paint-by-numbers, too, but I don’t especially care for these numbers. You know those B- papers you read that are okay but don’t really try to do or say anything about anything? This is that. It doesn’t fail, it’s not bad – it just put so little effort into being anything other than adequate.

Public Morals – Just so boring. I guess it’s okay, but I couldn’t get far enough into it. Ed Burns may be one of the more boring people alive, so this show fits him, but after rewinding twice to watch a scene that I’d zoned out of, I realized it wasn’t my fault. (note: maybe it’s not a procedural and belongs in the serial category, which is why I gave the nod to Limitless here, but I’d need to watch more to work that out, and I just can’t).

Best New Serialized Drama

Fargo – A brief history of me and this show: I thought it immensely stupid to try and make the film into a television show, and I avoided it. Then Myles McNutt told me I really should watch Season One, for my class, so I did, and I was blown away. When my fellow Peabody Board members and I awarded it a Peabody, I was excited and proud. It’s a truly amazing season. So where could one go from there? Season Two is off to a superb start, again visually and aurally experimental for television, yet in different ways from Season One, again getting amazing performances from its cast (I saw better acting from Kirsten Dunst in a scene than in her career to date. Even Kieran Culkin rocks his scenes), again delighting with an unpredictable plot, and again an artful mix of gravity and levity. If you choose to watch only one of the new shows, make it this one.

Honorable mentions (though a big gap exists between the above and the below):

The Last Kingdom – Compelling television, this has been billed as BBC and BBC America’s attempt to do Game of Thrones with some historical stakes and referents. So it’s not the fantastical universe of GoT, but nor is it entirely trying to be the same thing. If anything, in fact, it’s BBC and BBC America trying to do The Vikings. And they’re doing it well for now. A decent mix of drama, action, and a tiny bit of history to make it feel like one is eating one’s cauliflower while watching men with unkempt beards bash swords and heads against each other.

Quantico – After the second episode, I already feel this one sliding down in my estimation, but it delivered a very impressive pilot, that packed about ten times as much in as its peers, and that balanced anti-terrorist intrigue and suspense with hot young people mating and dating. Grey’s Anatomy meets Homeland, we were told, but since both shows fell apart, I see the writing on the wall for this hybrid.

Worst New Serialized Drama

Bastard Executioner – I was bowled over by how bad the acting and writing were, such that twenty minutes in, I turned it off. It’s hard for me to comprehend that the same guy who wrote Sons of Anarchy penned this pile of medieval turd.

Honorable mentions:

American Horror Story: Hotel – I don’t subscribe to the AHS Just Gets Worse script that so many others uphold, but this season just strikes me as a different type of horror altogether. I grew up reading and watching huge amounts of horror, but I simply can’t stomach torture porn, and this season is too gleefully going the way of AHS: Hostel. Its filming, editing, and cinematography are still beautiful and refreshingly inventive, but I just can’t watch. At least something like Texas Chainsaw Massacre built up to and earned its scenes of gore, whereas the pilot stumbles from death and bloodbath to death and bloodbath with only thirty seconds or so of setup each time.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – Stalking is neither funny nor endearing, Hollywood. So I was overboard and swimming for dry land at the premise alone. Jenny Clark’s review made me consider turning around to swim back a little, but we only have so much time in our lives. Extra points docked for putting a “West Covina” earworm in my skull.

Best New Reality Show

I’ll Have What Phil’s Having – I really don’t like Exporting Raymond, seeing it as the Uncommon Grounds (see below) of documentaries about the media, and it led to me finding Phil Rosenthal as intensely annoying. But if we hit the mute button on Rosenthal, this is amazing food porn, filmed beautifully, and striking, for me, the right balance between travel show and food show. And Rosenthal’s not that bad – I appreciate how nothing grosses him out, and he’s not out to depict anywhere as a space of either mysterious exoticism or odd barbarism (so far?). I’ve watched two to date and enjoyed both quite a lot.

Honorable mention:

Suddenly Royal – my review is here. I expected nothing from it but was intrigued. Still, as much as I’ve meant to check back, I haven’t, and that probably says something. Passable, interesting, a cut above many others, and just such an interesting premise that makes it somewhat unique in a very paint-by-numbers genre, but ultimately nothing to write home about.

Worst New Reality Show

Uncommon Grounds – Todd Carmichael proves himself to be a jerk, but I thank him for providing me with a few clips to use next time I teach Othering, since his belittling commentary on Japan dominates a glorified informercial pilot. Many of the other shows that I disliked at least tried to do something and do it well for an audience that isn’t me, whereas this is lazy in every way, and the only people I could conceive of who’d want to watch this are in the “people who enjoy seeing other countries made fun of” demo, which may be large, but fuck them.

Honorable mentions:

Bazillion Dollar Club – my review is here. When you find yourself rooting for everyone on a reality show, contestants and judges alike, to fail and fail abysmally, it’s kind of over, yeah?

Monica the Medium – my review is here. There’s just so much wrong with the person at the center of the show that I can’t stomach the idea of spending more time with her.

Best New Variety or Talk Show

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah – my review is here. Noah’s still not done enough to suggest he’s up to the challenge of interviewing real political guests, which worries me, but with John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Larry Wilmore, South Park, and occasionally Bill Maher (when he’s not being a monumentally sexist, racist douchebag) doing some heavy-lifting on the satire front, The Daily Show doesn’t need to lead the pack any more, and there’s enough in it to amuse and impress me, so I can wait it out a bit longer.

Honorable mention:

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Sacrilege not to rate this higher? Look, it’s me – I just don’t like hour-long latenight talk shows that much: too much loud cheering, sketches that go on too long, a lot of guests that say the same thing. They all do it, and it’s great for some people (I don’t mean that to sound patronizing either: I’m just not one of them). Colbert’s better than many, and he’s using the new platform in some interesting and exciting ways, but I liked The Colbert Report better, so I’m still ambivalent about this one.

Worst New Variety or Talk Show

Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris – Blame me, since I’m not a fan of variety shows in general – or blame the show, as did Antenna’s reviewers. Either way, it’s clawing, contrived, and as much as I love NPH, that only made me want to conduct a rescue mission.

Honorable mention:

Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe – I could be all kinds of snarky about this, and obviously I’m too old and fat to be part of its intended audience (which is why I take some mercy on it, and don’t let it win this category), but I haven’t seen another television host who is so clearly just reading cue cards. Heck, I’d settle for someone underlining the words Zoe could emphasize on those cue cards; Siri and xtranormal put more inflection into their speech than Zoe. It’s wooden, dry, slow, and lifeless.

First, some quick introductions:

• Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) co-edited Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era and is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality.
• Amber Day (Bryant University) is author of Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.
• Chuck Tryon (Fayateville State University) wrote for many years at his blog The Chutry Experiment on political television, and is author of the forthcoming Political TV.
• Geoffrey Baym (Temple University) is Professor Colbert himself, having written many of the canonical treatments of Colbert, and is author of From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News.
• Ethan Thompson (Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) co-edited Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era and is author of Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture.
• Nick Marx (Colorado State University) is co-editor of Saturday Night Live and American TV and is currently editing a reader on comedy studies.

Jonathan Gray:

With each of the other major change in hosts of the various late night shows in the last few years, the new host has been given considerable scope to change the show considerably. It may still be called The Late Show, therefore, but the set’s different, the band’s different, Colbert’s not doing Top Ten lists, Rupert and Biff are gone, etc. What struck me immediately about The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, therefore, was the same old voice announcing the date, the camera swooping over a fairly familiar looking set, while the same ol’ theme song played. Interestingly, then, while a lot has been made about whether Noah can “replace” Jon Stewart, in fact he seems only to have been asked to fill the chair and role of convenor, as Jon’s show, style, and feel are very much still in play. This extends even to Noah’s comic style at time: I’ll discuss a few differences, but so much of his delivery, his play with the camera, his faces at the on-screen bad punny section titles, and so forth felt very “Stewartian.” Even the crappy, unfunny, politically sterile segment about police racism and brutality on Wednesday night’s show feels like the junk that Stewart’s lesser staff members phoned in some times.

I wonder, though, how much of this continuation is a bridging strategy. I think here of the advice I give to grad student lecturers, to teach the regular professor’s class as the professor did, and to leave changes to the second time they teach it. Maybe Week 10 or Season 2 of Noah’s Daily Show will look as different from Stewart’s Daily Show as Colbert’s Late Show is different from Letterman’s, but for now it’s a shrewd move with a not-entirely-popular choice for replacement to keep the machine running rather than reinventing it.

And run it did. Noah is good at this job. He’s funny, he mixes groany dad jokes with edge with skill, as did Stewart. He has good chemistry with the camera. He exudes an intelligence becoming of the role. Nor is he just aping Stewart completely: his own segments seem to move quicker, his delivery and pacing crisper; his relative youth means he doesn’t need to adopt the patrician mode that Stewart did increasingly; and like John Oliver, he can use his non-Americanness to great comic and satirical effect. I was not one of Noah’s many detractors, but I still expected far less than he provided in those first three nights.

Still, though, he’ll need to improve with interviews to keep me from turning off the TV half way in. While the experienced Colbert was booking Jeb Bush and Joe Biden in his first few days, The Daily Show’s bookers either lost their mojo completely, or were savvy enough to give Noah training wheels, opening with Kevin Hart then moving to the founder of a new dating app. Even Chris Christie was a wise first “real” interviewee, since one can count on Christie to know the audience and show and move the interview himself. Even then, in the interviews Noah has been feckless, clearly out of his depth, starstruck, wooden, and a far, far cry from Stewart. Admittedly, Stewart was a superb interviewer, and it’s early days, but the beauty of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was the two shows in one — critique of the news, then an interview with bite — and unless Noah is a quick study, and as much as the producers may have kept a lot of the old Daily Show, the new one may be only half its former self. I’ll definitely stick around, though, and I don’t begrudge Noah the need to improve.

Amber Day:

This first week of Trevor Noah’s tenure on the Daily Show has had its ups and downs, but I do think that the host shows a good deal of promise.

I agree with Jonathan that the interviews have been disappointing.  In particular, the first two interviews both began with what seemed like a pre-rehearsed (or pre-agreed upon) opening joke that fell so flat as to be almost unintelligible (Kevin Hart’s supposedly disappointing gift of ties and the Whitney Wolfe conceit that interviewer and interviewee were on a date).  Like Jonathan, I may well end up turning off the program half way through (or more likely, cherry picking segments to watch on the Comedy Central website), though I do acknowledge that being a good interviewer is a skill that is entirely different from delivering a tight monologue, and one that will almost certainly take some time to develop.

On the other hand, I think that the comedy portions of the program this past week were well done.  Noah’s self-deprecating bits about the perils of trying to fill Jon Stewart’s shoes struck the right opening note, while momentum continued to pick up as the week progressed.  Here, the one segment over which I disagree with Jonathan was the correspondent piece about racial profiling and police brutality.  I thought the segment did a very good job of highlighting the radically divergent ways in which the majority of white Americans versus black Americans view the police force, while very deliberately allowing the spokesperson for a police anti-bias training program to make a case for why such a program is necessary and what it is meant to accomplish, a message that slipped through in the background while the correspondents clowned in the foreground.  Though it was certainly gentle, I think it was a form of advocacy journalism tailored for an exceedingly touchy subject.  I happened to be watching that episode with my mother-in-law, whose political views are widely divergent from my own, but it felt like a conversation starter that we were both comfortable with, while it did still have substance.

The other highlight of the week for me was the extended story on Donald Trump being akin to an African president, detailing his striking similarities to notorious military strong-men and megalomaniac dictators like Gaddafi or Amin.  Though Trump is certainly an easy target, the piece allowed Noah to use his own background and knowledge to provide global context for the American political race, while also producing a very funny segment.

Going forward, Noah will, of course, have to grapple with the ins and outs of American party politics, but he would do well to continue to draw liberally from his strengths: an international perspective, as well as a heightened sensitivity to contemporary race relations.  If he can manage to bring some of that savviness to his interviews, he will have it made.

Chuck Tryon:

During the opening monologue of his debut episode on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah promised to uphold the legacy of Jon Stewart by continuing the “war on bullshit.” For those of us who became accustomed to Stewart’s relentless attacks on cable news, however, Noah’s contributions actually look quite a bit different, at least so far. Thus far, Noah has generally offered a much more genial perspective, one that draws on his experiences as a non-U.S. native to denaturalize some aspects of American political discourse rather than focusing excessively on cable news (although he did offer a mildly humorous critique of cable news’s tendency to focus on distractions such as “pumpkin spice” season). That being said, like Jonathan and Amber, I also see plenty of room for Noah to grow into the role of Daily Show host and to adapt the format to his comedic strengths, in much the same way that Stewart refocused the show away from Craig Kilborn’s sterile, apolitical humor.

This “outsider” status was powerfully displayed in the inspired segment in which Noah compared Donald Trump to a laundry list of African dictators. Like Amber, I appreciated this segment, in no small part because it provided a more global perspective on American politics, but also because it brought a fresh perspective to the Trump parodies, which have become overly obvious in recent weeks. Other segments were somewhat less successful. I was somewhat ambivalent about the police brutality sketch, in that its politics seemed somewhat incoherent to me, but that’s likely a product of the writers finding their stride, rather than any limitations on Noah’s part. The “Panderdemic” segment also showed promise, as Noah worked to pick apart the ways in which politicians seek to appeal to specific voters, often in disingenuous ways.

Perhaps the biggest concern about Noah has been his performance during interviews. But it’s worth remembering that Stewart, especially during his early career, seemed equally star-struck during interviews. And while I’m no fan of Chris Christie, Noah was probably better served by taking a relatively genial tone with him. In fact, Noah did offer a subtle pushback against one of the common tropes of conservative politics, in which presidential candidates campaign against “the government,” even though they are part of that government. He also managed to tease out some of the absurdities of Christie’s draconian immigration policy. These moments suggest that Noah may be a quick study on American political discourse, and I’m willing to give him time to develop his skills as an interviewer while waiting for Colbert to start.

Ultimately, I think Noah will grow into his role as host of The Daily Show. It’s unfair at this stage to hold him to the high standards established by Jon Stewart, who seemed to become the political conscience of cable television over the last few years, but given time, I’m hopeful that Noah can bring a unique perspective to the fake news genre.

Geoffrey Baym:

I want to build briefly on Jonathan’s suggestion that Trevor Noah has kept “the machinery running” through his first week.  While it is right to consider what changes Noah will make to the program as he settles in to the role, I’m also quite interested in the power of the machine to operate as designed.  Or to put the point differently, we’re seeing what I would characterize as the institutionalization of the form.  When so many of us began paying careful attention to The Daily Show more than a decade ago, it seemed like something unprecedented and risky – a novel mechanism for engaging with and interrogating the public political conversation that had more to do with the particular vision and talents of the host than it did the power of formal convention or institutional lineage.  And the host himself long insisted that he was an institutional outsider, a jester throwing spitballs, rather than the opinion leader and influence broker he so clearly became.  That of course is the point of the long-running joke: “From Comedy Central World News headquarters in New York, this is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Unlike those long-established and institutionally entrenched news outlets on the other channels, Comedy Central of course had no “world news” operation, nor a “headquarters” where nationally significant command and control decisions could be made.

Notably, that intro line remains – the only difference being the last two words (“with Trevor Noah”) – as does the swooping camera motion, the spinning globe, and the theme music.  All of this suggests that the joke has taken on new complexities, it seems now to fold back in on itself.  Like the institution of nightly news it long imitated, The Daily Show truly has become more than the personality and skills of its host. It is an institutional product – conceptualized by a team of producers and writers, governed by production conventions and audience expectations, and located in a particular cultural milieu.  It may have a new set, new font, and a new graphics package, but those are the same kind of cosmetic changes that all news operations make periodically, just as they bring in new anchors and new correspondents from time to time.  Certainly, Noah’s personality and interests will begin to shape the content.  Chuck and Amber are right that the Trump-as-African-Dictator gave us a glimpse at the more global and ethnically nuanced discourse most of us are expecting to see from Noah.  And of course, his interviewing skills are far from where they’ll need to be.  But through a wider lens, this Daily Show is remarkably like the last Daily Show (or the one that John Oliver hosted while Stewart was on leave directing Rosewater), and that continuity is for me the major take-away here.

Finally, there are important linkages to be made between the institutional consistency of The Daily Show and the work that Colbert (and Stewart apparently) are doing on CBS.  After nearly a month on air, the Late Show looks a lot like a more grandly theatrical, if perhaps slightly less subversive, Colbert Report.  Just the other day, John Oliver sat with Colbert for an interview, with the two explicitly positioning themselves as former Daily Show correspondents.  Oliver, of course, has taken the genre of news parody in a new direction on his HBO show Last Week Tonight, devoting 18 minutes per episode to deconstructing often obtuse public problems.  Meanwhile, back on Comedy Central, Larry Wilmore (formerly The Daily Show’s Senior Black Correspondent) is still holding on with his panel discussion program, The Nightly Show.  Scholars of TV and political communication have long been looking for “The Daily Show effect,” and finally I think we can identify one.  Jon Stewart’s show spawned numerous copycats, both in the US and around the world, but more importantly, it has seeded the landscape of political television and created a new kind of media institution while doing so.

Ethan Thompson:

A few minutes into Trevor Noah’s first interview with Kevin Hart it hit me, and I felt oh-so-stupid for not realizing it sooner: the shift from Jon Stewart to Trevor Noah is first and foremost a generational shift.

Stewart was 37 when he started back in 1999. Have you seen a photo of him recently? Noah is now just 31. Stewart’s departure was a chance for Comedy Central to reset the show with a new host who might appeal to a more youthful demo. The olds will keep tuning in anyway, and if Noah isn’t quite suited to their (my) tastes, there’s always Oliver, Wilmore, Maher, Colbert, and/or Myers to queue up on the DVR or switch the channel to later. The Daily Show may be the house that Jon Stewart (re)built, but Daniel Tosh has done more for Comedy Central in recent years, and I expect that that is the audience the network hopes to attract. I wish them luck.

I could think of at least a half dozen people I would have rather seen taking over the anchor spot, but that’s because I was thinking of established people in the post-Boomer/Generation X cohort. Dumb me, and smart Comedy Central. I thought Noah’s first week of programs was solid. He has the presence and personality to carry the show as host, and the various correspondent pieces showed that the program can sail on without Stewart’s guiding hand. I’m glad that Comedy Central is investing in Noah as a host who might cultivate another generation of satire fans.

Noah’s biography is compelling and much has been said about the potential his global perspective might bring to the show. This amorphous “global” perspective was rightly ridiculed on his first show. Still, the standout piece of the first week for me (and apparently the others writing here!) was Donald Trump: America’s African President. Whether or not this was a product of Noah’s global perspective, it was both meaningful and funny.

Television satire, especially the fake news variety, is expected to live and die by the personalities of the performers. Ever since Chevy Chase transitioned from Weekend Update host to movie star after the first season of SNL, fake news has been a springboard, with Colbert’s ascension from Daily Show correspondent to the Colbert Report to his CBS show the corresponding bookend. Stewart’s tenure is an anomaly.

The truth, of course, is the other writers and producers are largely responsible for making the show funny and meaningful on a consistent basis. I hate to take too much credit away from Noah, because I do think he has done a good job and it would be a different show without him. However, I think what Geoffrey Baym describes above as the institutionalization of news satire may ultimately be most interesting to consider. Comedy Central can choose a youthful host without a track record because the form has gelled enough that the program is not dependent upon the host the way it once was. There won’t be anything revolutionary about Noah’s Daily Show the way Stewart’s once seemed. The form, and not just the viewers, have matured.

Nick Marx:

Geoffrey’s description of the “institutionalization” of satire television and Ethan’s observation about generational shifts echo a lot of what I thought about the Stewart-to-Noah transition before last week–that The Daily Show has more or less become Saturday Night Live at this point.  That’s intended neither to slight nor compliment either show, but to highlight how both have been integrated into political, industrial, and social discourses beyond the programs themselves.  Noah’s hiring (like that of SNL’s Sasheer Zamata, Leslie Jones, or short-lived Daily Show correspondent Michael Che) was less about late-night transitions than it was about race, gender, and televisual representation.  It’s been heartening to see Noah, then, arrive in Stewart’s chair with little else around him changed and instantly shine.

Conversely, I was often much more appreciative of the way Stewart’s Daily Show shaped broader public deliberation about important topics™ than I was of his on air presence (good riddance, exaggeratedly-Jewish-Jerry-Lewis voice!).  Noah seems to be, at least so far, a much more conventionally funny and likable stand-up comedian.  I expect that we’ll see a lot more bits rooted in Noah’s race and nationality (like the Trump-as-African-dictator segment), and I hope the show will continue experimenting with correspondent segments in act one, or even entirely interview-free episodes.  Like Colbert’s Late Show, The Daily Show is clearly still struggling to find a new voice while paying proper homage to its predecessor.  Fortunately, it’s also got the charismatic ringleader to find that voice quickly.  Here’s to hoping Noah doesn’t jump ship after seven or so seasons to make buddy comedies with Will Ferrell.

We have three more weeks of Fall premiere reviews, but now seems like a good time to stop and take stock. So far, we’ve published 57 reviews of 30 new shows. Below we offer links, summaries, and (for the networks) some Nielsen numbers (from TV By the Numbers, and just the 18-49 ratings, since those are what most of these channels care about. No cable ratings numbers since they took too long to find). I’m deeply distrustful of the Nielsen numbers, but since they’re the coin of the realm, should you be deciding what to try watching and what to avoid, the numbers may give you a sense of whether they’re likely to stick around long enough to bother.

ABC

Blood and Oil was reviewed by Melissa Aronczyk (Matt Sienkiewicz will review soon), who saw little awareness by the show of what oil means, but some awareness of what melodrama means. A 1.4/4 is a little anemic (or is the correct bad metaphor “all dried out”?).

The Muppets was reviewed by Melissa Click, Kyra Hunting, and Caroline Leader, none of whom loved it, but Melissa and Kyra will be sticking around to see how it develops, while Caroline, Statler, and Waldorf were decidedly colder on the effort. A 2.8/10 is a strong opening.

Quantico was reviewed by Kyra Hunting, Kit Hughes, and Bradley Schauer. Kit wasn’t impressed, while Kyra and Brad will be back for more. A 1.9/6 improves on last year’s Revenge premiere, but is a little lackluster for ABC.

ABC Family

Monica the Medium was reviewed Jonathan Gray and Louisa Stein, with Louisa showing more kindness and interest, Jonathan showing only dislike.

Amazon

Hand of God was reviewed by Charlotte Howell, who was cautiously optimistic and intrigued by its pilot.

AMC

Fear the Walking Dead was reviewed by Amanda Keeler (here), who is sticking around for more, having liked a fair deal of what she saw.

CBS

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was reviewed by Geoffrey Baym, Amber Day, Nick Marx, Chuck Tryon, and Dannagal Young (special post here), garnering reactions ranging from slight amusement to excitement. Fallon’s been beating Colbert in the ratings, but Colbert’s doing alright.

Life in Pieces was reviewed by Kelly Kessler and Derek Kompare, neither of whom seemed interested in picking up the pieces. Its 2.7/9 premiere would be great for NBC, but represents a hemorrhaging of lead-in Big Bang Theory’s 4.5/16.

Limitless was reviewed by Matt Sienkiewicz, who had many smart things to say about the show’s point that while not amounting to an attack on the show don’t exactly suggest warm appreciation. A 1.8/6 is weak for CBS.

Comedy Central

Moonbeam City was reviewed by Alyxandra Vesey, who wanted to relocate Elizabeth Banks and Kate Mara to another town, leaving a poor show well behind.

Disney XD

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy was reviewed by Nicholas Benson and Kyra Hunting, with Nick enjoying it less. Groot.

Pickle and Peanut was reviewed by Camilo Diaz Pino, who noted the show’s capacity to pick up a bro audience, and who admired its aesthetic, but who won’t be joining the bros.

FOX

Minority Report was reviewed by Nick Benson, Paul Booth, and Kristina Busse. Kristine liked it the least and (precog that she is) predicted imminent death, though neither Nick nor Paul glowed. A 1.1/3 is pretty lousy for FOX.

Rosewood was reviewed by Derek Kompare and Myles McNutt, both of whom found the wood rotten. A 2.4/9 is okay, but surely Fox would rather a better lead-in to Empire.

Scream Queens received mix reviews from Kyra Hunting, Alfred Martin, Andrew Owens, and Philip Scepanski. Kyra and Phil enjoyed it somewhat, while Al and Andy were unequivocal is their dislike. With a 1.7/5, fourth in its timeslot, its beginning is iffy.

FX

Bastard Executioner was reviewed by Mary Beth Haralovich and Karen Petruska, and though it didn’t demand execution from either, nor did it seem to appeal all that much.

Lifetime

Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe was reviewed by Erin Copple Smith, who found it derivative and uninspired.

MTV

Todrick was reviewed by Tony Tran and Alyxandra Vesey, both of whom found it a little pitchy.

NBC

Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris was reviewed by Kelly Kessler and Tony Tran, both of whom, it’s safe to say, did not have their best time ever watching it. It opened with a 1.9 then climbed to 2.2 in week 2.

Blindspot was reviewed by Kristina Busse, Melissa Click, and Laura Felschow, none of whom seemed too concerned to leave it in their rear-view mirror. A 3.1/10 that’s first in the timeslot (and ahead of NCIS: Los Angeles and Castle) is an especially strong opening for NBC.

The Carmichael Show was reviewed by Phillip Cunningham, Alfred Martin, and Khadijah White (special post here), all of whom found enough of value to stick around for the season. NBC burnt off that first season, but it’s already received a second season order.

Heroes Reborn was reviewed by Paul Booth and Melanie Kohnen, both of whom were disappointed. Garnering a 2.0/6, third in its timeslot, was great for NBC these days, though hardly superb news.

The Player was reviewed by Myles McNutt. The House lost. With a 1.2/4, moreover, its debts may soon be called in.

Netflix

Narcos was reviewed, and not favorably, by Kristina Busse (here).

PBS

Indian Summers was reviewed by Eleanor Patterson, who will be watching, but not because it’s especially good.

Syfy

The Bazillion Dollar Club was reviewed by Christopher Cwynar and Jonathan Gray, with neither choosing to invest further.

TLC

Suddenly Royal was reviewed by Jonathan Gray, who found it surprisingly interesting.

TNT

Public Morals was reviewed by Kristina Busse, who found it adequate but yet another story about white dudes with badges.

Travel Channel

Uncommon Grounds was reviewed by Christopher Cwynar and Alyxandra Vesey, neither of whom found it their cup of tea.

truTV

Road Spill was reviewd by Jonathan Gray, who found it preeminently banal.

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.

*

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!

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

…

“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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

Minority Report (Premiered September 21 @ 9/8) trailer here

Since Almost Human did so well for them, why not try the dystopian future sci-fi procedural again, right? Trade out Michael Ealy, Karl Urban, and Minka Kelly for Meagan Good, Stark Sands, Nick Zano, Wilmer “Fez” Valderrama, and Laura Regan. It’s 2065 (ie: 15 years after the film’s action) and a decommissioned “precog” (clairvoyants) takes to helping a detective on the side. No Tom Cruise, but lots of air holograms will be pinched and swiped to remind you of the film.

*

Minority Report opens with a monologue that quickly explains the events of the 2002 film adaptation of the Phillip K. Dick short story. That version was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Tom Cruise and, although it was well received by critics, is certainly one of the deeper cuts from both their filmographies. The intro to the episode informs us that, for reasons I dare not attempt to consider here, the television show is a direct sequel to the movie and takes place 11 years after Tom Cruise’s character shut down the unit of the police force that used psychic humans to stop crimes before they happened. The assumption that anyone watching this pilot saw and/or remembers the movie vividly enough to care about continuity, if nothing else, highlights the absurd level to which the “shared universe” philosophy has come to dominate the media industry. The main problem with the show thus far, is that a lot of time is spent having characters explain what the pre-cog unit was, and how life was so much better when we arrested people before they committed crimes instead of cleaning up the aftermath; a sentiment which is antithetical to the moral of the film they are trying to connect to. These quibbles aside, and despite being delivered in stiff and heavy-handed fashion, there are some genuinely interesting ideas introduced in this first episode. I find the relationship between the pre-cog siblings to be ripe with tension and well worth exploring over a season. The show also contains some visually interesting set pieces, and the characters — although only shells here in the pilot — have some real potential to grow in interesting ways. In short, although perhaps leaning a bit too hard on its predecessor, there’s enough original schlocky sci-fi story potential to make this latest Fox procedural worthy of further investigation.

Nicholas Benson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a media and cultural studies scholar with a focus on production cultures, media franchising and failure.

*

It has been argued that finding the right elements—the chemistry of the lead actors, the cultural moment for a television show to land, the spark of creativity in the writing—is like magic. Arguably, our contemporary media-driven society is the perfect time to assemble a show about multi-cultural characters engaging in a highly developed and esoteric procedural world, making overt and prescient quotes about the issues of the day (surveillance, big data, social media, the police state), and debating the present day (re: retro) as a humorous curiosity amid a crushing techno-futurism. That show is here, and it is called Mr. Robot.

But this review is about Minority Report, a show that manages to neuter even the tepid Steven Spielberg film, which serves as the show’s direct antecedent. That film included an interesting analysis of the police state, but was a far cry from the bleak and anxiety-ridden vision of Philip K. Dick’s prophetic critique of surveillance society in the original short story.

Today’s Minority Report (also produced by Spielberg) is an orgy of techno-porn, a spectacular spectacle that wants to boggle the mind even as the eye merely ogles the screen. The complex backstory isn’t fleshed out very much and the plot to kill the candidate for mayor is so cockamamie it’s beyond unbelievable. But there are hints that the show might be able to make compelling arguments applicable to today’s data-driven society. Since “precrime” was outlawed after the events of the film (the future being pretty tricky to pin down), the Mayor mentions his new plan to fight crime—using surveillance, big data tracking, and algorithmic manipulation to detect when crimes would happen. These are some really perceptive and timely issues—if I were a precog, I’d say they were topics bound to be hotly debated during this election cycle. I just hope that the show knows that as well.

Paul Booth (DePaul University) studies fandom, time travel, and digital technology and is the author most recently of Playing Fans and Game Play.

*

I have a love-hate relationship with the film on which this series is based on: it’s a Philip K. Dick adaptation that doesn’t bear too close philosophical investigation; it’s a fun action movie with Tom Cruise; it’s an interesting premise and yet the world building seems lacking to me. So it isn’t the first film I’d expect to be adapted for a long term TV series.

And yet the idea of the precogs and their partial visions is certainly enticing. And the pilot offers both the basic setup (female cop and one of the male precogs who’s come back from his isolated retreat), the weekly story line (precog gets a vision of a crime to be committed and they need to prevent it), and the larger mythos (the threat to all three precogs to be taken back in).

However, the pilot felt more like a cable summer show than prime time FOX, and even there it’d have to quickly improve its chemistry between the characters, world building, and crime story to keep audiences. At the moment it’s too generic to really engage either with the potentials of the world or the philosophical impact of the Precrime premise and its non-stop surveillance replacement. And I have a feeling this is one show where FOX’s all too quick cancellation policy may indeed be a mercy.

Kristina Busse (independent scholar) studies fan fiction and fan communities and is co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures.

Scream Queens (Premiered September 22 @ 8/7) trailer here

Ryan Murphy turns to the horror-comedy realm in what hopes to be an anthology series. The sisters and pledges at Kappa Kappa Tau will be picked off one a week, introducing something of a whodunit (Murphy has said it’s like Ten Little Indians). Emma Roberts, Lea Michele, and Abigail Breslin star with the dean of scream queens herself, Jamie Lee Curtis, as dean of the university.

*

When I set my DVR, I was excited about the idea of reviewing Scream Queens. I had binge-watched Popular in a week, almost made it to the very end of Glee, ranked American Horror Story seasons…..I knew what I was getting with Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuck (the good and the uneven) and thought I liked it. Then I was hit with the phrase “white mammy” in the first 15 minutes and wondered what I had gotten into.

I don’t think it is fair to say Scream Queens isn’t smart or savvy but it is desperately in need of an editor, and of the standards department spoofed in yesterday’s Muppets episode. Scream Queens‘ greatest brutality, for better or worse, comes not from its gory murders but from its social machinations and humor. At its best Scream Queens satirizes privilege, exemplified when a group of sorority girls dance gleefully to socially critical song “Waterfalls” while letting another girl die upstairs. My favorite line of the night, “I’d love you a lot more if other people love you too,” had just enough restraint to hit true as a critique. At its worst, the episode leaned to the outrageous simply because it could, moving from cutting to tasteless.

By placing most of its worst lines in the mouth of abhorrent sorority girl Chanel #1, some might see it as “excused” but the joke is the lines not Chanel as the teller and worse yet isn’t funny. One of the episode’s most effectively winking moments, a recreation of a scene from Heathers, was weakened by a cringe-worthy ongoing joke about a deaf Taylor Swift fan. And yet…one line that offended me the most as an extreme lesbian stereotype I sat with for an hour and began to see as a jab at a common “subtly” homophobic refrain. At the end, I find myself oscillating between seeing the potential for camp and satire where cringe-worthy lines are occasion for thoughtfulness and seeing an offensive failed attempt to shock and spoof that fell flat. I am just curious enough which to stay tuned, but I doubt for long.

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

*

Admittedly, my expectations were low when I tuned in to Scream Queens. The series, which centers on a sorority house at a fictitious university, took all of the actors I dislike from Glee (Lea Michele) and the American Horror Story franchise (Emma Roberts), and put them together on one show. Ryan Murphy as an auteur doesn’t seem to suffer from a lack of ideas for television series. However, Scream Queens, like some of the more recent entries in the American Horror Story franchise, reads as a half-baked idea masquerading as a television series pilot episode (and I have no idea why I had to sit through two hours of this crapfest).

Murphy seems to take the “check box” approach he took on Glee with Scream Queens featuring the popular guy and girl, the nerdy outcast girl, the gay guy and the sassy black girl. In fact, the characters seem to be drawn from the broad (and un/underdeveloped) caricatures in Glee. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Cathy Munsch is essentially Sue Sylvester 2.0, “Mean Girl” Chanel Oberlin (Roberts) is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Santana. It all just feels stale, and surprisingly joyless.

Certainly Murphy has enjoyed a degree of success with Glee and the American Horror Story franchise, but Scream Queens is what happens when television auteurism runs amok. Murphy (I think) likes to imagine himself as a master of satire and parody, but it doesn’t work. Instead, Murphy scripting Chanel to call the Kappa Kappa Tau house cleaner a “white mammy” and a “white slave” before forcing her to say, “I don’t know nothing ‘bout birthin’ no babies” from Gone with the Wind, it just feels tone deaf. Additionally, when Murphy has Nick Jonas’ gay character Boone lust after alleged heterosexual heartthrob Chad, it feels forced and – as much as I loathe the word – stereotypical. Kiki Palmer’s Zayday Williams seems to be in the cast in order to provide the series with a sassy black girl. Unlike Sammy Davis Jr., I don’t have “high hopes” for the show. Scream Queen is what you get when auteur happens to bad show runners.

Alfred L. Martin, Jr. (The New School) studies race, gender and sexuality in American media as they intersect with production and audience reception.

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If one of the marks of good satire is a tone we’ve come to recognize as “tongue-in-cheek,” Scream Queens, the newest series from small screen auteurs Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has its tongue planted firmly in the next zip code, wagging at us in incessant defiance. Emma Roberts stars as Chanel Oberlin, ruling matriarch of Wallace University’s Kappa Kappa Tau sorority and adolescent adversary to Cathy Munsch (Jamie Lee Curtis), Dean of Students who would like nothing more than to see KKT’s club of pumpkin-spice-latte-drinking clones picked off campus one by one. Lucky for Ms. Munsch, a serial killer is stalking KKT and is only too happy to oblige.

To say that Scream Queens is intentionally offensive in its particular brand of off-color humor, (“That obese specimen of human filth scrubbing bulimia vomit out of the carpet is Ms. Bean…I call her ‘white mammy’ because she’s essentially a house slave”), would be a gross understatement. And while horror spoofs of the Scary Movie ilk often do depend on jabs of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., Murphy and Falchuk never let us come up for air, marathoning misanthropic mockeries one after the other. In attempting to create the perfect Mean Girls meets Scream mix tape, Scream Queens mostly comes off as just plain old mean.

But if there is a silver lining here, it’s surely Curtis, playing the rebel-turned-administrator with a healthy dose of selfie realness, channeling her own aged Laurie Strode of Halloween: H20.

Andrew Owens (Boston College) studies horror, gender, and queer media.

*

Did you ever watch Glee and catch yourself thinking, “Man, I really wish someone would just murder these kids?” Well you’re in luck! From a verbal description, the new horror television show by Glee creator Ryan Murphy, sounds thematically more closely related to his more macabre fare like Nip/Tuck and American Horror Story. But it is in many ways more evocative of the high school musical (not to be confused with High School Musical). Scream Queens‘ one-dimensional characters are overacted to the extreme. Its color schemes, in both set and costume design, are similarly loud. Its cinematography is overly stylized, jumping from too-perfectly-composed symmetry to discomfitingly unbalanced deep-focus shots.

Many, if not all (I don’t recall any significant Toland-influenced deep focus shots in Glee), of these techniques seem directly descended from Glee – a show whose tireless, noisy, hoopla grew very tired very fast. Where Scream Queens departs from its predecessor is that the kind of nervous energy built up by overcaffeinated television finds highly satisfying, humorous release in horrific murders. Whereas most horror builds tension by playing on fear, it seems that Scream Queens is more intent on raising the audience’s blood pressure with well-crafted annoyance before releasing the tension in violence.

It’s a horror-comedy whose comedy aspects take a strong cue from Tim and Eric. And although it functions as a kind of televisual double-negative, it is quite fun.

Philip Scepanski (Vassar College) studies comedy, trauma, and television.

Rosewood (Premiered September 23 @ 8/7) trailer here

Morris Chestnut is the best pathologist in a city that television has told us needs a lot of them, Miami. Jaina Lee Ortiz is the Miami PD officer who must work with him to solve murders aplenty.

*

It wouldn’t be a new TV season without a disposable generic procedural crime drama. Rosewood fits the bill perfectly.

Beaumont Rosewood (Morris Chestnut) is a hyper-intelligent, hyper-smug, and hyper-smarmy private pathologist in Miami with a quick tongue, cool clothes, a cool car, and a ridiculously cool office (a high-tech crime lab somehow crossed with a trendy design firm in a gentrifying neighborhood). As usual in this genre, he’s surrounded by grumpy, ill-equipped detectives who resent yet accept his genius, and he has “issues” (in this case, a ridiculous raft of debilitating yet conveniently invisible medical conditions). The acting is safe, but enjoyable and solid enough, despite the creakingly well-worn plot and trimmings, and the production exploits its Miami location for predictable, yet edge-less spectacle (blue skies and waters, palm trees, beautiful bodies in swimwear, and latin dance music, but minus the ominous atmosphere of Miami Vice). Basically, we’ve seen this all a million times before.

The only significant, and refreshing, difference this time is that Rosewood is black, his reluctant crime-solving partner is Latina, and white characters are thankfully scarce. Fox and the producers deserve some credit for the multicultural casting and worldbuilding, but it’s sad that this is still exceptional enough to merit notice. Sadder yet is the wasted opportunity with this cast and the general premise. I believe there’s still creative mileage to be had in crime TV, particularly with characters we rarely see in lead roles otherwise. It’s just too bad that material that’s neither pitch-dark and opaque (like True Detective) nor light and predictably bland (like Rosewood) rarely gets a chance on American TV.

Derek Kompare (Southern Methodist University) is the author of Rerun Nation (2005), CSI (2010), and many articles on television form and history.

*

It’s easy to spot the things that Rosewood thinks make it stand out amidst the other shows focused on a cop teaming up with a consultant to solve murders: the cop is a widow (that’s one), returning to her Miami hometown (that’s two), who gets an unwanted partner-in-crime-solving in the form of a private pathology consultant (that’s three), and who treats his patients like mysteries because he himself is dying (that’s four).

None of these are remarkable: the widow and terminal illness stories come via heavy-handed exposition, the Miami setting is established through every trope imaginable (with the generic Latin music somehow managing to sound even more generic than it is on other shows), and the novelty of a private medical examiner is erased the moment you realize it just means the show is glamorizing private medical practice and the fancy technology for-profit doctors have access to. Rosewood has nothing to add to the genre it belongs to, no matter how many it times it reminds us of these low-impact points of distinction.

What it has is an African-American lead in Morris Chesnutt, and a progressive view on inclusion that includes a no-big-deal lesbian couple (Rosewood’s sister and his assistant), both of which are meaningful in theory but meaningless in practice. It’s no shock that Fox’s marketing has barely focused on anything but Chesnutt’s star presence, as this is an almost impressively empty shell of a pilot. It’s not necessarily hard to imagine a second episode of the show, but I can’t imagine anyone finding much impulse to do so.

Myles McNutt (Old Dominion Univerity) studies the media industries and wrote a dissertation chapter about TV representations about Miami and he still had almost nothing to say about this show.

Grandfathered (Premieres September 29 @ 8/7) trailer here

Uncle Jesse is now Grandpa Jesse. Ageless “Can Work With Kids” John Stamos plays a recently divorced bachelor, restauranteur, player who discovers he has a son … and a granddaughter. Josh Peck, Paget Brewster, and Christina Millian co-star in this single-cam family sitcom.

*

Grandfathered has the perfect kind of high concept—selfish lothario discovers within the series’ opening minutes that he is not only a father, but also a, well, you get it—for a broadcast network sitcom, but tonal clashes drag the pilot down. If the last decade of cable television has taught us anything, it’s that it’s certainly not impossible to build a comedy around an unlikable lead. Where Grandfathered gets it wrong, though, is how hard it works to redeem Stamos’ character Jimmy by the premiere’s end in the most transparent ways possible.

Take the show’s soundtrack, for instance, which cues viewers’ emotions with all the subtlety of Google’s “Parisian Love” ad. Jimmy spends the first two acts indulging in the kind of unfunny enlightened racism and misogyny that usually begets comeuppance of some kind. Instead, we get Jimmy rushing his granddaughter to the hospital to the tune of the opening piano riff of The National’s “Fake Empire,” then celebrating later with his ad hoc family to Jamie Lidell’s “Another Day.”

The supporting cast turn in fine performances but don’t come anywhere near anything resembling a punchline. It’s the John Stamos show, for better or worse. If Grandfathered is to survive its first season, it will need to take a cue from The Grinder, the kindred spirit sitcom that leads it out. If building your series around an aren’t-Gen-X-playboys-with-Peter-Pan-complexes-crazy kind of appeal, go easy on the pathos.

Nick Marx (Colorado State University) is co-editor of Saturday Night Live and American TV and is currently editing a reader on comedy studies.

*

Grandfathered is not a funny show, which is disappointing because I expect more from Danny Chun. Although it is pleasurable to watch John Stamos run down the street holding a baby in a tailored suit. Hashtag ladyporn. If you are wondering where washed up teen idols go to die, look no further than Grandfathered, as this show boasts the acting talents of both Josh Peck and Christina Milian. Or rather, their cheesy overacting makes Stamos and Paget Brewster look like John Gielgud and Judy Dench. The premise is contrived, but show me a situation comedy that isn’t, and in theory, I really like the prospect of making a man raising a child and trying to balance work and home life visible on television. At the climax of this episode, Stamos’ character Jimmy is babysitting while working at his trendy restaurant, and not only is it impossible for him to work, but the baby gets sick and he needs to take her to the hospital. This trope has been used countless times in film and TV to convey the post-feminist consequences of being a working mom, and so perhaps Grandfathered can do some of the cultural work of re-gendered parental labor … if it gets picked up, and there might be enough Full House nostalgia to make that happen. However, Grandfathered recuperates hegemonic masculinity by characterizing Jimmy as a successful and wealthy metrosexual bachelor. In fact, we viewers are meant to believe that Gerald only really decided to seek out his father so Jimmy could teach him how to be a ladies’ man. So I’m not sure that any gender constructs are really going to be subverted here. Or if any humor is actually going to occur.

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

The Grinder (Premieres September 29 @ 8.30/7.30) trailer here

Fred Savage and Rob Lowe are brothers and both lawyers, kind of. Savage is an actual lawyer, brilliant but a horrible speaker, while Lowe is coming off years as a beloved TV lawyer. Lowe comes to work with his brother, to provide the pizzazz. Lowe is in three new shows this year, but trailers suggest he’s having all sorts of fun in this one.

*

Fred Savage, where were they gone, your Wonder Years? No fear, Rob Lowe, aka-twice The Grinder, is here! And the grind does not rest until “Grinder rests.”

Packing in a punch with his appealing persona of thin-lipped, everyday-smart superiority, sweetened by his role as the perennially-sunny Pawnee city manager in Parks and Recreation, Lowe brings nuance and serenity to his misleadingly outlandish character Dean Sanderson’s desire to help his brother, Savage’s Stewart Sanderson, get his Boise, ID lawyer groove back. Savage, in turn, excels (maybe even more) as straight family man aptly cutting his TV star-brother lines of doubt and incredulity.

The two actors play off of these conflicts with enjoyable chemistry, thanks to a keep-story-points-simple four-act structure. I was snickering throughout the pilot, and hope future episodes retain the meta plus ‘en famille’ commentary. The Grinder, at its heart, promises to be a show about two brothers who haven’t yet mapped out the ways they care for each other, while also being sophisticatedly self-reflexive and toasting-marshmallows-at-academic-retreat critical. Accepting that domains of culture are unrelentingly bound up in each other, the writers furnish several chuckle-worthy sketches upfront:

• Celebrity intertwined with lawyering (Lowe: “Right now, all this case is about is apartments, rents. What it should be about is… character”; Savage: “Oh sure, acting on a TV show is the equivalent of going to law school!”)
• Childhood in the shadow of adulthood (Savage Jr.: “I’ve been really coming into my own lately, and I think he’s picking up on that.”)
• Entertainment inseparable from justice (Plaintiff: “I feel like I’m in a Grinder episode right now”; Sanderson Sr.: “I love watching a transformation!”)

So, by the time the climactic court scene rolls around, we know how to read into even minor characters, such as Rose Abdoo’s stern yet star-struck judge or Kumail Nanjiani’s incredulous prosecutor. All in all, recommended, and hoping for something less tired than a case-every-week approach (although, writers, please look to 30 Rock for pro-tips on how to name South Asian characters. #Leonard?!?!).

Ritesh Mehta is a recent PhD in Communication, and studies popular entertainment and production culture.

*

Fred Savage has mainly been working behind the camera over the last few years, directing episodes of Garfunkel & Oats, Two Broke Girls, Modern Family and others. But I am happy to see him on a network comedy again, especially one as clever as The Grinder (we can all forget about Working now, right?). This show’s self-reflexive meta-humor is tightly written and the entire cast is fantastic. Kumail Nanjiani has a cameo in the pilot, need I say more? And Rob Lowe and Savage seem to evoke the chemistry of a leading pair that has been acting together for a while. Lowe seems to be channeling his Chris Traeger performance here, aloof, vain, although perhaps more selfish and superficial. But it works well. And Savage’s nebbish note card reading beta-male is hilarious. If the show seems familiar, it is because I would argue that The Grinder’s witty dialogue and premise owe much to Arrested Development and 30 Rock’s legacy. Savage’s Stewart is our Liz Lemon/Michael Bluth sardonic straight man to Lowe’s Dean, whose mentoring of Stewart, blind confidence and witty comebacks are reminiscent of Jack Donaghy. Lowe also channels the Bluth clan with his oblivious arrogance and narcissism. Sometimes the hyperbolic dialogue is overdone and misses the mark. And, really, the men folk go fishing after a day in court? But my main complaint is that the female characters have no substance. Stewart’s wife only seems to have dialogue when she is sitting in the marital bed supporting her husband. Meanwhile, we only get to know Stewart’s daughter in her role as sexbait to help her younger brother’s social status. However, this show made me laugh, and on that evidence, The Grinder rests.

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

*

As a longtime fan of Castle, I’ll shamefully admit that I’m sometimes charmed by stories of charismatic people proving themselves inexplicably competent at jobs others have spent years training for. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the inherent problems in that setup, however – and that kind of recognition is what makes The Grinder such a delight. Rob Lowe’s character, Dean, is essentially Castle, a man whose experience with a particular fictional narrative (in this case, playing a lawyer on TV) leads him to believe he’s capable of performing that job in real life. The humor of the pilot largely stems from the ridiculous and inexplicable confidence both Dean and his fans have in his abilities, contrasted with the frustrated disbelief of Dean’s brother Stewart (Fred Savage), an actual lawyer. That parody plays to the strengths of both Lowe (drawing equally on his over-the-top Parks and Recreation character and an exaggeration of his 1980s heartthrob appeal) and Savage (who absolutely nails the sardonic, awkward, frustrated nebbish). Meanwhile, the show engages in an additional, and successful, layer of parody with scenes from Dean’s TV role as “The Grinder,” which are full of dramatic music cues, overwrought soliloquies to the jury, and other tropes of the legal procedural genre.

Beyond that, however, the show’s narrative successfully twists the Castle formula by presenting a more realistic account of the balance between charisma and knowledge. Ultimately, Dean’s acting experience does help his brother’s case, but it’s Stewart’s comprehensive knowledge of law that truly saves the day – and Dean’s attempts to study for the bar exam point to a recognition of the need for real training. I’m not sure where the show will go next – and it could very well fall into the traps it seeks to parody and overturn – but I’m cautiously optimistic.

Jennifer Margret Smith (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a PhD student with scholarly interests in the superhero comic book, production studies, and mediated representations of identity.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (premiered September 8 @ 11.35/10.35) advance clips here

Dave Letterman retired, Stephen Colbert left The Colbert Report, and though no longer playing the role of Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert will now host (albeit without the Colbeard).

*

see Antenna’s roundtable discussion here.

Life in Pieces (premiered September 21 @ 8.30/7.30) trailer here

At this point in the American family sitcom’s history, what new spin could one give it? CBS is banking on telling four independent stories from the same extended family each episode, with cast Dianne Wiest, James Brolin, Colin Hanks, Thomas Sadowski, and more.

*

With Life in Pieces, CBS’s new vignette-based family comedy, I was hoping for Rashomon or Boomtown with a sense of humor: a family comedy with narrative overlap and distinct subjectivities through a sustained bit of storytelling. Instead creator Justin Adler gives something seemingly tailored to the assumed short attention spans of contemporary viewers. The 30-minute pilot includes 4 short, self-contained stories, three of which introduce the three adult children and the family matriarch and patriarch, and one that brought everyone together at a faux funeral/70^th birthday party. At 6 minutes per bit, the writers and actors have very little time to get anything moving or make us care. Sure, by the episode’s end we have a good idea of the who, what, and where, but the 4 parts pass so quickly, the viewer neither learns much about the individuals (who pretty much appear as gross stereotypes because of their lack of time to develop), nor has a reason to care about them. It reads a little bit as if Adler said, “hmm, I’ve done amnesia (Samantha Who?) and I’ve broken the 4^th wall (Better Off Ted), but I need a gimmick. Ooh, ooh, parallel stories!” The show could well pull together. It has strength in its cast: two-time Oscar winner Diane Wiest (Bullets Over Broadway, Hannah and Her Sisters) as the matriarch, James Brolin as the patriarch, and Colin Hanks (Orange County, Dexter, Fargo), Betsy Brandt (The Michael J. Fox Show, Breaking Bad), and Thomas Sadowski (The Newsroom, The Slap) as the grown kids. The pilot has some funny bits and ends with Brolin being rushed to a Jiffy Lube while locked in a casket. If it can figure out how to create cohesion between the bits, it might have some staying power. I mean, I give it points just for saying Jiffy Lube.

Kelly Kessler (DePaul University)’s work primarily engages with gender and genre in the American television and film, often as it relates to the musical.

*

In the quest to replicate the success of ABC’s Modern Family, few attempts have felt as strained as CBS’ Life in Pieces. While copying much of the fabric of that series–an extended family of adult parents, siblings, spouses, lovers, and kids, albeit all thoroughly white and heterosexual this time–episodes are divided into four parts. While this could have been an interesting programming tactic, distilling plots to five-minute chunks between ad breaks, this show also airs earlier, yet goes raunchier. By halfway through the pilot we’d already endured painful riffs on post-birth vaginas and adolescent penises. It’s not that the ABC show doesn’t also go into that territory; it’s just that they do it much better, as winking farce, rather than as Seth MacFarlane on a bulldozer.

Some might be surprised that this is on CBS. But this material is squarely in the comfort zone of the network that’s relied on Two and a Half Men, Mike & Molly, The Big Bang Theory, The Rules of Engagement, and Two Broke Girls. A wrinkle this time is that the raunchy yuks are produced single-camera style, rather than via the usual multi-cam laugh-track machine. More shockingly, there’s formidable comic talent in front of that single camera: James Brolin, Dianne Weist, Colin Hanks, Betsy Brandt, Dan Bakkedahl, Zoe Lister Jones, and Jordan Peele. That’s a hell of a lineup, and it almost actually redeems it. The material is full of typical pilot shrillness and flop sweat, but the cast, pros all, gives it their best shot.

In an alternate universe, the same cast might have worked in a quieter, slyer, darker comedy. But since that’s not the flavor in Lorre-land, we’re stuck with this. And while it won’t grace my screen again, I won’t be surprised if it actually works exactly as it was designed.

Derek Kompare (Southern Methodist University) is the author of Rerun Nation (2005), CSI (2010), and many articles on television form and history.

Limitless (premiered September 22 @ 10/9) trailer here

Jake McDorman gets a pill from Bradley Cooper, reprising his role from the film of the same name, that gives him super intelligence (cause that’s Bradley Cooper’s gift to give, apparently) and perfect memory. Jennifer Carpenter plays the cop who tries to reel him in to help her and boss Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

*

Everyone wants something. But is there something everyone wants? There’s a whole lot of theory and a fair amount of experience that suggests not really. But, what the hell, it’s pilot season so Limitless is going to give it a shot.

NZT is a pill that makes you very smart. Apparently, being smart can get you things you want: money, women, a human liver.

Fair enough. But watching a chemically enhanced fictional character get the fictional things it fictionally wants is neither the stuff of great entertainment nor that of passable ratings. Imagine if Superman spent his time thinking up brilliant plans so that he didn’t have to fly.

Fortunately, that’s not what Limitless is about. It’s about a fantasy far bigger and more relatable. It dramatizes the same attraction that drives popular infatuations with big data and convinces young men to attend Pick Up seminars instead of just joining a gym or learning how to have a civil conversation.

It’s the tantalizing delusion that there really are answers to the messiest, most complex problems of human existence. That love only looks like an impossible Escher staircase because we haven’t seen it from all the angles. That getting rich is about plugging in the right variables in the right equations, not popping into existence at the right time in the right place. Hell, Bradley Cooper even shows up to remind us that death is the one puzzle that we can never truly solve, the one game we can never truly beat. Unless, of course, it isn’t.

Take the clear pill and find out. It’s what we all want.

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

Code Black (premieres September 30 @ 10/9) trailer here

Starring Marcia Gay Harden and Luiz Guzman lead the cast of this medical drama focusing on an overcrowded and understaffed ER in LA, and based on the 2013 documentary of the same name.

*

My interest in Code Black has more to do with its production history than its logline—after the show’s table read, Maggie Grace (who is 31) left the series, and producers replaced her with the already-cast-in-another-role Marcia Gay Harden (who is 56). It makes for a fun counterfactual: how different would the show be if the residency director bossing around the new residents was much closer to them in age, and without the same sense of presence that Harden brings to the part?

It’s admittedly more interesting than the show itself, which is rarely bad—the exception being the d-bag male resident who seems drawn from a d-bag male resident catalog—but is operating in some very familiar spaces. While based on a documentary, the show feels closer to ER, distinctive primarily in the fact that it resists any single point-of-view in its pilot: we get various backstories (grieving mother starting a new career [Harden’s original role], golden boy, etc.) but the various residents end up all blurring together. And while the sheer volume of patients-of-the-week fits the show’s focus on the chaos of a “Code Black,” there comes a point where no single character or story or even moment feels like it sticks with you.

There’s nothing wrong with the storytelling engine in place here, and the casting switch has given the show a solidness that feels comforting in its own way (especially if you take this as a stealth spinoff of Harden’s character on Trophy Wife. But the “So what?” of the whole affair makes it difficult to recommend the show beyond a case study in how the ups and downs of TV development can dramatically reshape a series’ identity.

Myles McNutt (Old Dominion University) studies media industries and definitely paid more attention to the pilot’s casual violation of IRB protocol than your average viewer.

*

Code Black, a term meaning an influx of patients without enough resources to treat them, is aptly named, for it was just as overcrowded with problems.* The first and most distracting was The Good Wife’s new wig, which we saw early in a tease for the premiere, that poor dear. Give back Johnny Depp’s toupee, CBS.

Unlike Grey’s Anatomy, there’s nothing glamorous about Angels Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, a place so afflicted even its blue fluorescent lights cast a jaundice-yellow glow. The set is dirty, the walls all scuffed up, and the action plays on a constant background of dying people of color waiting hours for treatment while a troop of doctors fuss over a young white girl and her feelings. But before you write me off as a queen with a heart raisin, though normally an accurate assessment, hear me out: Weren’t we supposed to translate all these gritty aesthetics and the show’s own premise into a cultural criticism about race, class, gender, and the injustices of this country’s healthcare system? Because if so, what happened in the script, and why was it so hyperfocused instead on the female resident’s age?

There was remarkably little plot in this episode, and the patients moved in and out of importance so quickly, I failed to grasp onto someone to actually care about. It really did feel like video footage of an ER rather than a TV show, and yes, that could be simply symptomatic of it being a sweaty pilot, but it could also mean it will never explicitly address issues of race and class. Will they ever mention why this hospital is always in a code black? Maybe. Or maybe we’re just supposed to infer from it looking vaguely “inner-city.”

Of course an implied cultural critique is not helped here by centerpiece Marcia Gay Harden, a woman who plays roles so typically Hollywood glam and posh, she actually gets away with the name Gay. Look, I am normally all in for MGH, but I’m not here for another white savior show, and I feel some confidence she’s about to be blindsided, Sandra Bullock style. That’s if Code Black succeeds ratings-wise, which it might since Madam Secretary is somehow still a thing.

*I did enjoy the joke about the IRB, though. That was satisfying.

Taylor Cole Miller (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies syndication and queer television.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW, October 12 @ 8/7) trailer here

Because stalking is always an endearing premise for romance (?!), and because crazy women are the bread and butter of many a comedy (?!), this musical rom-com focuses on a woman who ten years after being dumped decides to move across the country to pursue her ex.

*

From its opening scene, a flashback to the end of a short-lived romance at summer camp, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s humor relies upon gender disparities. While Rebecca imagines her first romantic and sexual relationship as a meaningful one, Josh does not. He suggests they “take a break,” to which Rebecca responds, “What? But I love you!” “And thanks for that,” Josh says, unmoved by thoughts of emotional attachment and long-term commitment.

With such an introduction, I settled in for a tedious rehash of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Set to music.

Thankfully, however, CEG quickly moves to problematize the differences between men and women. Rather than simply assuming an inherent binary gender division, it considers why women experience the world differently from men and sympathetically explores painful experiences common to many women.

By the end of the opening scene, the show has introduced viewers to anger at divorced and unloving parents, suicidal behavior, and talk of abortion. By the episode’s end, the show has expressed a host of feminist critiques. The sexist double-standard of beauty culture is depicted in a manner both humorous (woman struggles to put on Spanx) and graphic (full bikini wax results in blood splatters on the bathroom wall). The exploitation of women is figured through sex work and unfulfilling pink collar office work. And, perhaps most significantly, a woman’s unwavering romantic attachment to a man—the very premise of the show—is found to be untenable. When confronted with the accusation that she moved across the country for Josh, Rebecca counters with the absurdity of such a decision. “So you’re saying that I moved here from New York, and I left behind a job that would have paid me $545,000 a year for a guy who still skateboards?” she asks sarcastically, only to realize that she actually has. For a woman to sacrifice so much for a man is “crazy”—not as in a Beyoncé lyric celebrating the overwhelming effects of love but as in an actual mental health issue.

I may be taking it too easy on CEG. It puts racism and anti-Semitism on display but, at times, only to produce an uncomfortable situation. Mental illness is played for laughs, perhaps too uncritically. The show’s tone can be confusing, and musical interludes outlast their purpose. In spite of these problems, I’m curious to see how dark the show will get, how unappealing yet sympathetic (particularly to women viewers, I suspect) the main characters will get, and how many feminist-inflected jokes will make it to air. For these reasons, this strange and potentially disappointing show is worth watching.

Jennifer Clark (Fordham University)’s work in television studies tends to gender concerns both historical (women’s labor and role in production) and contemporary (representations of masculinity and anxiety).

*

I want to like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend because it’s created and written by women, Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna, and directed by a woman, Joanna Kerns. I’d hoped that meant the series would engage a feminist sensibility in its humor (especially given Bloom’s history producing funny yet thoughtful videos). Raising my hopes, Entertainment Weekly compares the series to Portlandia and Flight of the Conchords, and calls it “an empowerment fantasy.” Going a step further, Time asserts that the show flips “the Bechdel Test on its head.”

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a great example of how passing the Bechdel Test doesn’t mean a media text is feminist. Bloom’s character, Rebecca Bunch, has spent much of her life miserably cramming down her own feelings, yet it’s hard to watch her leave her job as a respected lawyer to relocate to West Covina, California, chasing an ex-boyfriend she dated for two months at summer camp as a teenager. Rebecca needn’t become Alicia Florrick, but I wish she hadn’t spent the remainder of the pilot chasing after her long lost beau Josh to the exclusion of anything else. The one great moment in the episode is the musical number “Sexy Getting Ready Song.” Rebecca’s song describing her preparations to see Josh that evening is humorously interrupted when a rapper, who (presumably) enters the song to objectify the women dancing in Rebecca’s fantasy, expresses horror at what it takes women to get ready for men. He apologizes and walks off set, reemerging at the end of the episode to apologize to a list of women he had previously disrespected.

I loved these moments in the pilot, but believe that this humor is at odds (at least so far) with Rebecca’s character. At the end of the episode when I’d hoped she’d give up on Josh and move on, her co-worker Paula pledges to help her get Josh just as he texts to ask her to dinner. These two are going to have to talk about more than Josh to keep me watching!

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

*

When I first heard the premise of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I immediately thought of Felicity, in which Keri Russell’s character moved to New York because a guy she’d had a crush on, but never spoken to, was attending college there. It was presented as only slightly crazy.

For Felicity, though, the choice was Stanford or the similarly prestigious University of New York. For Rebecca, it’s between $545,000 dollars a year in New York City vs. a bigoted boss in West Covina, where “People dine at Chez Applebee’s” and the beach is four hours away. She comes off deranged.

It’s the most original show this season—star Rachel Bloom parlayed YouTube videos into a co-writing gig—and yet still seems derivative. It’s like Glee, in the sense that the lead is a Jewish overachiever who sings and dances. Or maybe it’s more like Smash, because of the original songs, and the Broadway stars. Some songs had funny lyrics, but I never laughed out loud, except at the Simone de Beauvoir- referencing rapper.

Rebecca does not seem all that rootable so far, although she got more so when teamed up with the similarly crazy Paula. The notion that the last time she was happy was when she was 16, at summer camp, and that she’s trying to recapture that through the seemingly boring, aimless, Josh, is sad. So are allusions to a past suicide attempt. I get that we are in the age of anti-heroes, but this seems like it’s supposed to be a straight-up comedy, not even a dramedy like Orange is the New Black or Nurse Jackie are supposed to be. It’s hard to imagine how this holds up long term.

Cindy Conaway (SUNY Empire State College) writes about girls on teen dramas and dramedies.

The Carmichael Show (premiered August 26 @ 10/9) trailer here

Jerrod Carmichael is joined by Greek’s Amber Stevens West, Doc McStuffins’ Loretta Devine, LilRel Howery, and David Alan Grier in this family sitcom.

*

Note that this initial review will be followed up by a roundtable discussion on the show later this week with Alfred Martin, Khadijah Costley White, and Phillip Cunningham.

*

The Carmichael Show stars comedian Jerrod Carmichael as axial character Jerrod as he navigates his relationship with live-in girlfriend Maxine and his overbearing family. The show, part of the growing frenzy that includes the networks bulking up on more quantitatively racially diverse series and casts, is ultimately a strange series on its face.

On one hand, it feels dated in its use of the laugh track, proscenium shooting style and live, studio audience. The series uses two main sets – one that includes the apartment Jerrod and Maxine share, and his overbearing parents’ home, which looks as if it was recycled from 1980s/1990s sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Roseanne.

On the other hand, the sitcom feels fresher than I expected. While the laugh track is distracting, the series settles into a wonderful groove, largely because of the work of Loretta Divine and David Alan Grier as Jerrod’s loving and overbearing parents. However, adding to the series’ freshness is that its storylines are rather current. While the series pilot is mostly concerned with “pilot business” such as setting up relationships and broad overviews of characters, the second episode (NBC is burning off episodes two at a time) is called “Protest,” and deals with a set of protests following the shooting death of an unarmed black man in Charlotte (where the series is based) and discusses aggressive policing and the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The episode attempts to grapple with these issues while simultaneously “keeping it light” enough to be a sitcom.

The bottom line is that the cast is strong and the writing has gotten better after it got over the business of the pilot episode. Given its third and fourth episodes, called “Kale” and “Gender,” respectively, it seems the series is resurrecting the issues-based series. “Kale” deals with race and healthy eating habits, while “Gender” is concerned with the cast attempting to grapple with (and understand) transsexual identity. I’ll certainly be staying tuned to see how this series develops.

Alfred L. Martin, Jr. (The New School) studies race, gender and sexuality in American media as they intersect with production and audience reception.

Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris (premiered September 15 @ 10/9) trailer here

An American adaptation of England’s Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, Best Time Ever will see its titular host offer a variety of acts, games, pranks, stars, and such.

*

In early 2005 I attended the Broadway opening of the jukebox musical Good Vibrations. One of the takeaways of the evening was that the closest thing to a celebrity on-hand was Neil Patrick Harris, and who cared about Neil Patrick Harris. In less than a year NPH hit with HIMYM and soon became one of America’s favorite gays and a perennial and lovable awards show host. His charisma and singing, dancing, and acting chops made The Best Time Ever an intriguing prospect, but instead of bringing back the Broadway-style numbers and cheeky sketches of 1970s variety shows, the opportunity was wasted. One need only know that Carrot Top made an appearance to understand how truly awful it was. What emerged over the seemingly never-ending hour was an embarrassing train wreck projecting an air of Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Eve meets The Man Show meets the X Games meets Solid Gold meets Double Dare meets The Jamie Kennedy Experiment meets Remote Control meets American Gladiators meets Circus of the Stars. It wasted the A-list star power and talent of NPH and Reese “guest announcer” Witherspoon on an interminable string of audience participation bits, awkward banter between celebrities, bad karaoke (forcing poor Gloria Gaynor to trot out “I Will Survive” yet again), big glitz/small payoff physical gags, and a big final musical number. No, it didn’t capitalize on NPH’s proven Broadway showmanship; instead it vomited a chaotic mixture of marching band, sleight of hand, cocktail tricks, and pogo stick choreography all over the viewing audience. I have absolutely no idea who this was targeting, and the Marvel Universe Live! and (TWO!) Fisher Price commercials seemed to illustrate that they didn’t either. America loves NPH, but I’m not sure anyone could salvage that show. I’ll just hold out hope that Hugh Jackman can parlay his Wolverine and Broadway chops into a sellable variety show.

Kelly Kessler (DePaul University)’s work primarily engages with gender and genre in the American television and film, often as it relates to the musical.

*

As NPH asks: Why is NPH doing this? Good question. Which leads us to our new game—Questions? Cue Bieber’s What Do You Mean? Sponsored by Ask Jeeves (Google it).

Does Reese Witherspoon need money for her legal fees? Do people find the dumb blonde banter funny? Are most of the game titles just pop songs? People do know that Alabama vs. Wisconsin @ AT&T Stadium was in Arlington, TX, not Dallas? I would be pissed, because do you know how much nachos cost at AT&T Stadium?

Why is Nicole Scherzinger a Price is Right model? Asians do karaoke games better—that’s not a question, just a fact. Carrot Top? Is that Matt Iseman from American Ninja Warrior? How did they do that? Does Witherspoon always talk in third person when climbing things? Is that The Voice? How did they do that?   When does The Voice premiere with their new season? (Answer: Next Tuesday on NBC).

Did anyone notice there was so much advertising that it felt weird when the cups on The Voice didn’t have Starbucks logos? Did you know the Jeep Renegade is a versatile yet stylish car? Did you notice they used American Authors’ Best Days of My Life again in a Jeep commercial (one that appeared during a commercial break, not during the show)? No way Gone Girl, Kohler, Hilton Hotels, and Sharper Image can get crammed in, right?

Verdict? Had a few funny moments, NPH has the energy and charisma to mostly hold my attention, I like the randomness, needs more product placement, “pranks” are too PG, the Show at the end of the Show was…there. Would watch again if it accidently appeared while channel surfing, but I’ll probably pick up the highlights on YouTube the day after while eating a Fiber One Chewy Bar.

Tony Tran (University of Wisconsin-Madison) likes to ask questions about Vietnamese diaspora and new media in urban spaces.

Blindspot (premiered September 21 @ 10/9) trailer here

A naked woman (Jaime Alexander) is found in a bag in Times Square, with no recall of who she is or how she got there, with an elaborate, mysterious full body tattoo that offers clues to an FBI agent (Sullivan Stapleton) that unravel a large conspiracy.

*

The show starts in high velocity and rarely slows down in its pilot. Within a couple of minutes we’ve met the basic characters and set up the weekly story in which a new tattoo will be explored as well as the longer storyline in which Jane Doe’s mysterious background will get explored.

I loved the Bourne Identity premise, especially when Jane started kicking ass and taking names. That was particularly a relief after we saw her in physical and psychological pain through much of the earlier parts, severely traumatized and tuning toward an unprepared FBI for help. But the story is quite clearly hers and she demands to be part in researching her own mystery. Given that I empathized with her trauma and cheered on her agency and attempts at situating herself in this to her new world, I was strangely unsettled by the hints given to us in the end that she participated in her own victimization.

I’m not sure I’ll stick around for more than a few eps depending on how this will play out, but I was definitely not bored with this pilot. In fact, if anything, I am worried they’ll be able to sustain this frantic pacing and whether the overall conceit will collapse and become absurd within a few weeks/months. This struck me as a show that might have done better with the shorter UK format, but we’ll just have to see if the leads can carry the fairly contrived and yet nevertheless weirdly familiar plot. But I may just stick around a bit longer for Jaimie Alexander being both vulnerable and self assertive in turn. Because who doesn’t love Lady Sif?

Kristina Busse (independent scholar) studies fan fiction and fan communities and is co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures.

*

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported the (obvious) fact that NBC hasn’t had a hit show in two years, and as a result, has more fall offerings (14 new shows) than any of the other networks. Aside from Sunday Night Football and The Voice, the only recurrent program on NBC’s schedule that is reasonably attractive to both viewers and advertisers is The Blacklist, a procedural that pairs criminal-turned-informant Raymond Reddington (James Spaeder) with FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) to solve never-ending terrorist plots and unravel the twisty mysteries of Keen’s past. It should come as no surprise, then, that panicky NBC greenlit Blindspot, created by Martin Gero and produced by hot ticket Greg Berlanti. The show mimics The Blacklist’s premise by pairing FBI agent Kurt Weller (Sullivan Stapleton) with mystery woman Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander), whose amnesia and numerous tattoos offer clues to drive at least ten seasons of mysteries. I confess that I do watch The Blacklist (don’t judge me) and likely will continue to watch Blindspot because I’m curious about Jane Doe’s past. But I find the “woman with a mysterious past who must figure out her strengths while guided by a strong and all-knowing man” storyline tiresome. While Blindspot’s Jane Doe may have the potential to become a strong and interesting female character, I’d be more intrigued by a pilot that—instead of placing its female lead naked in a duffle bag in New York’s Times Square—introduced her as a powerful character from the start. Blindspot won’t help NBC change its dwindling status among the networks, but NBC’s (over)reliance on the new show does signal the need for the network to focus on developing programs that tell innovative and unexpected storylines instead of thinly veiled facsimiles.

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

*

Last TV season, Jaimie Alexander guest starred as an amnesiac woman warrior on ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Practice must make perfect, because in Alexander’s hands, Blindspot’s Jane Doe is a dynamic heroine. She deserves a far better show built around her. As it is, Blindspot’s only bright spot is its leading lady.

Any crime procedural is only as good as its central partnership, and Sullivan Stapleton as stoic, seasoned FBI agent Kurt Weller has a generic gruffness that’s predictable. That the Australian Stapleton can’t convincingly settle into an American accent is distracting; that there’s yet another square-jawed, blue-eyed white man in the lead is just boring.

The supporting cast sports a little more diversity, though the narrative constraints of a pilot episode mean that little is learned about them. One of Jane’s tattoos does point to a potential storyline concerning FBI director Bethany Mayfair, played by the underrated Marianne Jean-Baptiste. However, IMDB doesn’t list Jean-Baptiste as a cast member beyond the pilot, so this thread may be disappointingly dropped.

The promotional material for the show focuses on Alexander’s naked, tattooed body, so it’s no surprise that the talented actress spends far too much time strategically covering herself or standing in artfully cast shadows. The fetishistic study of this woman’s body parts is oh-so-conveniently integral to the show’s narrative, so it’s doubtful that Blindspot will move beyond all this looking.

Whether or not Blindspot can be more than a tattoo-of-the-week episodic procedural remains to be seen. The pilot mires Jane in a potential terrorism case so easy to solve that it makes one wonder if every tattoo will lead to a story so rote. The overarching mystery of Jane’s identity and the motive for her intricate tattoos promise some serialized elements, but the elaborate set-up may demand a payoff too big to actually deliver.

Laura E. Felschow (University of Texas-Austin) is researching gender in the superhero genre from an industrial perspective.

The Player (premiered September 24 @ 10/9) trailer here

Rich bastards bet on whether Philip Winchester can stop big, nasty crimes from happening, and Wesley Snipes makes the whole thing happen. Taxes are paid in full. And NBC uses the most over-used line for anything set in Vegas in their website’s blurb: “the house always wins.”

*

“I need you to wrap your head around the impossible, Alex.”

Look, there’s nothing wrong with a show that has a ridiculous premise. Television is a fictional medium, and so the idea of a syndicate of billionaires betting on crime in Las Vegas does not preclude The Player from working as entertainment. Alex Kane driving a motorcross bike through an abandoned mall to “Tick Tick Boom” as bad guys fire automatic weapons at him is not without its charms.

Where the show runs into problems is when you move beyond its premise and its sensationalist action to the character at the center of it. The pilot knows it has to work hard to explain why anyone would willfully work for “The House”—which sets the odds on crime—when the opening scene of the series is the last employee lying dead in the desert. The show wants this job to appear dangerous, so much so that they show us the odds on our hero’s death, but this is still a TV show—we know that the real impossible is the marketable lead (who got his action credentials on Cinemax’s Strike Back) meeting the same fate as his predecessor.

But what’s frustrating is that the writers saw no other possible option to get him to that point than speedily fridging his ex-wife/partner before act one had barely gotten started. The juxtaposition between the schlocky action and the constructed tragedy never reconcile, and that isn’t helped when her death is thrown into question for the purpose of creating a serialized mystery component for the rest of the season. The dynamic that brings the pilot to its close has potential—a competent action hero with a direct line to all-powerful tech support grappling with the moral complexity of these components—but the emotional dimensions of the pilot have nowhere to breathe, and that moral complexity feels at odds with every other signal of what the show is betting on.

Myles McNutt (Old Dominion University) studies the media industries and wonders if pilot season is secretly billionaires just gambling on what they can convince people to watch.

Heroes Reborn (premieres September 24 @ 8/7) trailer here

Was anyone even still watching when Heroes ended? Still, Zachary (Chuck) Levi joins the cast, and HRG himself returns (Jack Coleman), albeit joined by the others who couldn’t get post-Heroes jobs (in other words, to save the world, one apparently no longer needs the cheerleader).

*

Second verse, same as the first.

There’s a telling moment at the end of the second hour (!!) of the Heroes premiere when Zachary Levi’s character Luke has stolen Noah Bennett’s car, and he looks at the Heroes symbol hanging from the review mirror. “Who’s car is this?” he asks his wife Joanne, after the two of them have inexplicably shot up Primatech paper.

There’s no mystery to “who’s car this is” because we know the answer; but in depicting that symbol, the show alludes to the previous seasons of Heroes (2006–10) that serve as background and fodder for this new miniseries. The problem here—and it’s a larger problem within the Heroes Reborn narrative—is that the symbol, half a DNA strand in an S-shaped curve, propelled an immensely compelling mystery in the original show. Here it serves merely as a mnemonic, reminding us that “Yes! We’re Watching Heroes!” while doing nothing to deepen the mystery or move the narrative onwards.

In fact, nothing really moves this plot forward. While I enjoyed the preview of the upcoming season—lots of action! And guest stars! And story!—I was underwhelmed by this season premiere. Two hours (with, as NBC incessantly droned, limited commercial interruption) should have been enough time to develop the characters and plot. Instead, the story about resurrecting the investigation of the “Evo” (evolved human) population took almost 90 minutes to unroll while other elements (the CGI video game scenes?) seemed to be completely superfluous. I’m sure things will start to come together as the show progresses, and as a miniseries it will certainly be able to weave a stronger arc than the last few seasons of Heroes did originally. But I found the whole experience tiresome, like I was watching Heroes try to out X-Men the X-Men, and I’m not sure I’ll have the stamina to care if the show continues to plod instead of develop.

Paul Booth (DePaul University) studies fandom, time travel, and digital technology and is the author most recently of Playing Fans and Game Play.

*

Heroes Reborn has big shoes to fill: when Heroes premiered in 2006, it set itself apart through intensely serialized storytelling, a visual style reminiscent of comics, and transmedia extensions. All of these aspects have become commonplace. Particularly considering the dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and multiple superhero TV shows, Heroes Reborn faces an uphill battle in terms of garnering viewers. Did the premiere build a strong foundation for this undertaking? Not entirely. While I didn’t find the premiere terrible, I also didn’t find it innovative. I appreciate that Heroes Reborn gave many nods to its predecessor (complete with awkward car product placement) and anchored its narrative in some of Heroes’ central themes (conspiracy, identity struggle, impending catastrophic event). More disappointing were the lazy techno-orientalism weaving through the Tokyo storyline and the one-dimensional female characters. There is some potential even in those weak aspects: I found the video game sequences interesting in terms of folding a typical transmedia extension into the main text, and the reveal of Molly Walker might suggest that there’s more to her than the weak storyline she had in this episode.

In terms of transmedia, there isn’t much—9^th Wonders is a cover for a standard show Tumblr account, and the app seems to repackage information also available at NBC’s website. The prequel web series Dark Matters is richer in content, but familiar in form. Most interesting is the ARG-style HeroTruther YouTube Channel: launched in June and without any apparent connection to the show or NBC, but the mostly low viewing numbers suggest it didn’t have the impact often expected of promotional ARGs.

Melanie E.S. Kohnen researches television, digital platforms, the media industry, and cultural diversity.

Truth Be Told (premieres October 16 @ 8.30/7.30) trailer here

This sitcom follows two couples who are friends, with facile commentary on sex, race, and relationships. Marc-Paul Gosselaar, Vanessa Lachey, Tone Bell, and Bresha Webb star, after Meaghan Rath was pulled away since another show starring her was greenlit, and was in her first position. Titled People Are Talking in development, till they realized that pretty much nobody was talking about this one.

*

Look, Truth Be Told is bad at its very core. The show believes that it has something significant to say about race and gender, and the truth is it has nothing to say: every joke skims across the surface of anything significant, reducing complex cultural issues down into not simply bad jokes, but bad jokes that fail to accumulate into anything approximating reasonable human behavior.

But here’s the thing: I knew this. It was clear from early critical reactions, and from tin-eared comments from creator DJ Nash about writer diversity at the Television Critics Association press tour. What I didn’t know was that #TruthBeTold would be so incompetent from a production perspective, especially given How I Met Your Mother vet Pamela Fryman in the director’s chair. The show is aiming for a hybrid format similar to HIMYM’s, with a significant amount of outdoor scenes in addition to standing sets, but there’s one problem: this is an ugly mess of a television program.

I’ve never seen anything like it as far as broadcast sitcoms go. Whatever Fryman was going for completely falls apart: the compositing work on the daytime driving sequence is embarrassing, the lighting differences between the indoor and outdoor scenes are too jarring to be seen as realistic, and the laugh track appears to be being played on a mid-2000s iPod dock just off-screen given the lack of fidelity. And yet it’s the editing that’s the most obnoxious, going for the type of quick cuts that HIMYM was known for but failing to understand the necessary flow for such jokes to land. In one scene, a character continues a sentence she started outside after having moved inside, and how anyone who watched the show felt this was anything but distracting confounds me even more than the writers who believe this trifle to be anything close to provocative.

Myles McNutt (Old Dominion University) studies media industries, and voted for Kodos in the show’s on-screen “Thorny Issues” social media polls.

Monica the Medium (premiered ABC Family, August 25 @ 8/7) trailer here

ABC Family is aggressively pursuing the lucrative demographic of Penn State student-mediums who have never played Flip Cup by featuring their very own Monica Ten-Kate with this reality show.

*

This show is trolling anyone who has ever said that “kids these days” are self-obsessed, spoiled, and narcissistic. Monica, in case you hadn’t guessed, is a medium. She claims she’s also just a normal girl trying to find a job and a boyfriend. Her search for the job in the pilot is comical, inasmuch as it’s dominated by her concern over whether she should come clean that she is a medium, when everything else in the pilot suggests she’s incapable of not telling people she’s a medium (‘cause, you know, when I meet someone, this is the first thing about them that I want to know). Cutaways to the people to whom she gives “readings” are all sympathetic and glowing, meanwhile (as when a young woman expresses amazement at the fact that Monica knew her mother’s cancer had metastasized, a detail she didn’t share with anyone, but, erm, if you die of cancer, doesn’t that kind of require metastasization?).

Indeed, not once are we treated to someone who is skeptical of her abilities, motives, or mental health. Instead, the show seems intent to use her being a medium, and her friends’ and potential suitors’ acceptance of it, as a parable for how we should all be more accepting and understanding. Monica the Medium should just be allowed to be Monica the Medium, it seems to be saying … even when that involves accosting strangers with manipulative, trite sentiment about dead loved ones. Admittedly, reality television’s bread and butter lays in offering us people to judge, and boy do I judge her, but the pilot’s unwillingness to cast even an iota of doubt on her claim to talk to dead people, or on her insistence that she must pass on messages from these dead people whenever she feels like it, had me wondering whether to despise the show or Monica the Medium more. Bad joke, real sentiment: this show is now dead to me.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and is currently studying media dislike, while disliking this show.

*

“It’s really hard trying to find a guy while you’re a medium and you’re a college student. It’s next to impossible, actually.”

It would be easy to write a derisive review of ABC Family’s new foray into reality TV, Monica the Medium. I could say that Monica the Medium is certainly no Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite Monica’s repeated uttering of bastardized versions of the core themes of that beloved series. Where Buffy intertwined humor and depth, here the sense of lightness and loving parody is missing. (I mean, there are some pretty funny lines in this series, but I’m guessing that their humor isn’t intentional…) I could also say that despite sharing a network and arguably a target demographic, Monica the Medium is no Pretty Little Liars—that ABC Family juggernaut that has managed its mix of multiple filles fatales, whiplash plot, and questionable fashion for six seasons and counting.

What Monica the Medium does offer is a somewhat awkwardly constructed glimpse into the lives of a group of college students not marked clearly upper class (a la The Hills) nor lower class (a la Jersey Shore) who cringe as their friend Monica goes into regular situations—parties, workplaces, a fashion boutique, a nail salon—and brings her emotional conversations with dead people (talking with “the spirit” as she calls it). She inserts the inappropriately emotional and the “spiritual” into each space, rupturing expected norms of behavior and replacing pleasantries with tears and cherished or (supposedly) suppressed memories. Somehow she seems to know the intimate and private and makes it public before returning to the closure of a sequence; (she does indeed finally buy an outfit and get a manicure, after in both situations speaking to multiple dead people related to the various staff).

Look, I’m not saying this is great TV; (it’s certainly no Unreal, nor even Everlasting, the fake reality show on Unreal) and I don’t know if it will find an audience, be that an audience that laughs at it or with it. But for its insistence on bringing emotion and “spirit” into the everyday (and not via horror movie tropes or destructive femme fatales), combined with its seemingly unintentional ridiculousness, it might see viewers sticking with. I for one will give it a few more episodes and will be keeping an eye on the reviews to see what pleasures it offers its viewers.

Louisa Stein (Middlebury College) is author of Millennial Fandom and studies gender, media, and audience culture.

Todrick (premiered MTV, August 31 @ 10/9) trailer here

We’re just gonna quote MTV on this one: “quadruple-threat Todrick Hall lets fans into his creative factory and introduces them to the passionate troupe of creative collaborators who pour heart and soul into his weekly videos. Unwilling to wait for Hollywood to make them stars, Todrick and his faithful crew write, choreograph, style, and direct full-scale productions weekly – all while balancing side jobs to pay the bills – to try to make their dreams come true on their own terms.”

*

Todrick’s title theme song gets one point clear: this is a show about Todrick being Todrick in “Toddywood.” Todrick even assures himself in his own theme song that the show is, in fact, about him: “Just making sure!” Todrick tells Todrick. And this makes it confusing because I’m not sure how meta the first episode is meant to be. Todrick has a video idea of critiquing celebrities who will do anything “crazy” or “freaky” to extend their 15 minutes of fame. But is this a critique of himself—a castoff of American Idol Season 9 who desires fame—as he goes around town doing self-defined crazy and freaky things for attention? Perhaps he knows this, but the show and his crew don’t really seem to even be aware of this point.

Even when Todrick isn’t about Todrick, it is about Todrick. A subplot involves the upcoming birthday of his makeup artist, Nicole, but the show is less concerned about her and more focused on Todrick’s benevolence in planning a surprise birthday video (and downplaying the issue that he is forcing her to work on her birthday). Also, Todrick manages to track down one of Nicole’s (supposedly) favorite music artists, Kelly Rowland, but in Todrick fashion, he films himself with Rowland giving a shout-out to Nicole. You know, instead of giving Nicole the day off to actually meet Kelly Rowland.

However, the subplot is probably needed because the show is literally a behind-the-scenes look at Todrick’s YouTube channel, and sometimes feels it would be better just as a YouTube video. With that said, Todrick is undeniably talented and it does give a sometimes interesting, if slightly fabricated, look at the frantic and DIY nature of producing YouTube videos. Yet, as someone indifferent to Todrick, I would prefer the condensed YouTube version.

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

*

Early into the pilot, Todrick’s star writes a song as a gift for his make-up artist, Nicole Faulkner. With clipboard in hand, Todrick Hall enumerates his vision for “The Birthday Dance,” which producer Jean-yves “Jeeve” Ducornet quickly assembles by a wall of monitors and synthesizers. Hall then records his vocals, “the easy part” of the song’s compressed (and unreliably plotted) journey to becoming YouTube ephemera. Hall and his team also record a video, find costumes and develop choreography for it, and integrate fan-made clips and singer Kelly Rowland’s birthday message into it. Faulkner also sacrifices her birthday for the production, which overlaps with the shoot for Hall’s riff on tabloid culture “Who Let the Freaks Out.”

Hall’s studio visit takes two minutes of screen time, but it’s a formative moment. When MTV launched in 1981, it would have been more interested in putting “The Birthday Dance” into rotation than in crafting a narrative around its creation. Of course, Todrick benefits from a post- political climate supposedly removed from MTV’s original, racist “rock videos only” mandate (a lie Nicki Minaj challenged by asking “Miley what’s good” the night before Todrick premiered). But MTV has always commodified pop stardom as a lifestyle, with music functioning as part of an artist’s brand. In that regard, Todrick honors a programming tradition that stretches back to Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1985-1987). It also reveals the chipper resourcefulness and pathological entrepreneurialism often required to “put on a show,” whether the performer is a vaudevillian entertainer or a YouTube celebrity with an army of telegenic industry hopefuls, Toddlerz (Hall’s term for his fanbase), and the off-screen hand of manager Scooter Braun to raise him up. The music is incidental, but Todrick’s half-open window into pop celebrity’s psychology and invisible labor is nonetheless compelling and ripe for critique.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

Suddenly Royal (premiered TLC, September 9 @ 10/9) trailer here

An American auto repair advisor researches his ancestry online, only to find out that he’s actually royalty, heir to the British Isle of Man. So he and his family pack up and move to their kingdom. A Princess Diaries whose star will likely never end up playing Catwoman, this seems so much like it’s faux, yet it seems it’s for real (well, as real as reality shows are), and that dude honestly thinks he’s a royal, and has done so since 2007, though he only recently moved there.

*

Hey, if Donald Trump or Scott Walker could become President, why can’t David Drew Howe become King of the Isle of Man? The premise for this show is pretty amazing, as Howe finds he likes his ancestral line better than Ben Affleck likes his. This situation doesn’t exactly occur every day, which produces a fascinating generic hybrid – there’s an “outsider in bucolic England” angle that feels a lot like one of the BBC’s favorite genres (except that many of those involve murders, so oddly I was watching very closely to see who would have a motive to kill, say, the royal secretary), mixed with a bit of House Hunters International and its ilk, as middle America deals with smaller beds, horses next door, and insufficient numbers of local takeaway restaurants. Yet undergirding it all is run-of-the-mill reality television being run-of-the-mill reality television: the cutaway counterpoints, the closeups on smirks, etc. And thus watching Suddenly Royal produced an interesting experience that was both utterly familiar and fresh.

Howe may need grooming into royal material, but he’s absolutely ready for television, as I found his sense of humor a lovely mix of homey Dad-joke and dry, delicately edgy (when his daughter expresses concern about how they’ll make money on the Isle of Man, for instance, he dryly offers the possibility of plunder and pillage). Howe’s wife Pam plays his straight (wo)man well, so there’s some comic schtick on offer. And all three family members’ attitudes to their circumstance is amusing, even refreshing. This is TV being TV really well, and an engaging hour. I expected to dislike or be bored by this, but instead I will definitely watch more, and encourage you to give it a shot, even if only to experience the odd genre hybrid for an episode.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and evidently prefers would-be-king narratives to entitled teen medium narratives.

Uncommon Grounds (premiered Travel, September 14 @ 11/10) no trailer available at this time

After having searched the world for rare coffee in Dangerous Grounds, host Todd Carmichael obviously still has more high-flying international coffee man of intrigue business to conduct in this new show that will explore various countries’ culture through their coffee.

*

There is nothing particularly uncommon about this documentary-style reality program. The premiere’s flimsy narrative sees the La Colombe founder immersing himself in Japanese culture so as to secure an agreement with the company UCC to mass-produce his new coffeemaker, ‘The Dragon’ (a hybrid between a siphon and pour-over device). Along the way, Carmichael and his cameraman ‘Hollywood’ experience a night out in Tokyo with Japanese businessmen, a visit to a Sake plantation, and an Aikido lesson.

One of the program’s persistent themes involves Carmichael’s fish-out-of-water status – “I’m the loudest person in Japan, even when I’m using my indoor voice” – and its partial resolution through the identification of common cultural touchstones with respect to life and business. This is where the series is most interesting – and most revealing with respect to the current cultural moment. In Carmichael’s admiration for Japanese obsessiveness, efficiency, and precision, we see the basis for a common ground between Japanese culture and the relentlessly-driven entrepreneurialism of contemporary US culture. With Carmichael’s background as an extreme endurance athlete and risk-taking businessman, he finds a lot to admire in the Japanese work ethic and obsession with perfection. All he needs is a basic understanding of the conventions of Japanese business culture to secure the deal.

The final scene before the climactic business meeting encapsulates the banality of this instrumental approach to cultural immersion. As Carmichael meditates in a traditional temple, a voice-over relates his thoughts about the upcoming meeting. An activity that is ostensibly devoted to peace and wholeness becomes the final step in preparing to seal a business deal. This dynamic is emblematic of a program that might have offered earnest cultural exploration and exchange, but which ultimately functions primarily as an extended commercial for American entrepreneurialism, Carmichael’s company, and his new brewing device.

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin-Madison) researches public media, digital culture, and consumer-citizenship.

*

According to Uncommon Grounds’ host Todd Carmichael, “Japan is the third-largest coffee importer in the world. They’re known to spend upwards of $1,000 a pound for the best beans.” On his previous show, this piece of information would initiate a trans-Pacific boondoggle for the daredevil co-founder of Philadelphia’s coffee roaster and café La Colombe Torrefaction to find the best coffee the country has to offer. But for the premiere of his new Travel Channel show, Carmichael sets his sights on Japan to find a manufacturer for his new glass brewer, the Dragon.

Carmichael anticipates that his maverick businessman posturing will create friction with Japanese commerce’s supposed “penchant for precision and detail” (though, conveniently, he forgot to pack a suit). To prepare for his presentation for Ueshima Coffee Co.’s executives, Carmichael and his cameraman Hollywood spend a week in Tokyo and Kyoto drinking with businessmen, eating sushi on the Shinkansen, visiting the Chikurin Sake Brewery, taking in a fish-cutting presentation and a multi-course meal with its owner Niichiro Marumoto, learning Aikido’s basic principles, and meditating (!) on the Travel Channel’s dime. Unsurprisingly, Carmichael hoists a box of UCC-produced Dragon brewers during the end credits–the price of doing business on basic cable.

The Travel Channel likes to cast middle-aged white male gourmands as rock stars whose escapades viewers can enjoy from safe distances. It’s a branding strategy that reeks of chauvinism, regardless of how many Uzbekistani weddings Anthony Bourdain attended on No Reservations. Uncommon Grounds doesn’t challenge this, in part because it presents culture’s commodification as international currency without problematizing the U.S.’s position in this exchange. But when the product is a coffee maker—an appliance that processes an ecologically and politically fraught consumer good—there needs to be a deeper discussion than the one Uncommon Grounds is willing to engage.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

The Bazillion Dollar Club (premiered Syfy, September 22 @ 10/9) trailer here

A six episode docu-series that follows two startup incubator founders in Silicon Valley as they try to advise companies towards, well, a “bazillion” dollars by offering such gems like “if you’re not willing to risk everything, you’re going to fail.” Rinse and repeat with HBO’s Silicon Valley afterwards.

*

This is a formulaic documentary-style program based on a 16-week startup accelerator ‘boot camp’ offered by the angel investors and startup gurus Dave McClure (of 500 Startups) and Brady Forrest (HighwayOne). Over the course of the season, these two will endeavor to help six different startups to ‘accelerate’ their growth in terms of revenue, customer, base, and, most importantly, fundraising.

The first episode sees the duo dispensing tough love and hard-bitten wisdom to Ethan Appleby of Vango, which seeks to be ‘iTunes for art’. The Fassbender-esque CEO is feeling the pressure of trying to keep his dream alive while following through on behalf of the other core workers who have sacrificed time, money, and energy to contribute to the project. This becomes a plot point as Monique, the effervescent and industrious client relations specialist, requests a raise. Appleby cannot afford to lose ‘Mo,’ but he also can’t afford to ‘give her the raise she deserves.’ The only solution is to find some more money – somehow.

The fate of the company – and Mo’s raise – ultimately seem to come down to a 3-minute talk that Ethan is to give to potential investors on a 500 Startups ‘Demo Day.’ Will Ethan be able to distill his message down to its essence and deliver it with confidence, charisma, and enthusiasm? In effect, the question is whether Ethan can effectively sell himself and embody the promise of the idea he represents. In this respect, BDC provides a straightforward reflection of a society in which many believe that the path to freedom and fulfillment involves the marketing of the self and the building of something that can be validated in the marketplace. It is an unexceptional reality program, but its portrayal of startup life is likely to appeal to those viewers who themselves dream of beating the odds to achieve exceptional success on America’s tech frontier.

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies public media, digital culture, and consumer-citizenship.

*

My experience of watching of this show is a testament to the power of flow, not simply in the all-on-television form famously explicated by Raymond Williams, but including the ebbs and flows of social and cultural context. I watched this while waiting to see billionaire bigot Donald Trump interviewed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, hoping that Stephen’s satirical fangs were still in tact. And I watched on a week in which the news was dominated by three stories: (1) young CEO Martin Shkreli deciding that his company Turing would increase the price of Daraprim – a drug used to treat patients with AIDS – from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill, (2) young-ish former Boy Wonder of the GOP, Scott Walker, announcing the suspension of his campaign to become President, in the wake of failing to secure enough investment in either cold hard cash or likely voters, and (3) British Prime Minister David Cameron being allegedly revealed to be, quite literally, a rich pig-fucker. And thus I was so very primed to dislike the young white entrepreneurs of this show. As Vango’s head expressed regret that he “couldn’t” pay a valued staff-member what she’s worth, I wondered how much his shirt cost. As the coaches told him how to present himself, so that people will give him their money, my mind drifted to thinking about Walker boring live audiences, unable to get yet more donor money. And as the show marched its way through a tour of how wonderfully awesome, smart, and able young white CEOs can be, I thought of Shkreli, Walker, Cameron and their egos. I’ve seen too many instances of the corporate world’s excesses this week, and of “the art of the deal” hubris. Admittedly, if the show was actually gripping, I might have stayed in the here and now, instead of floating away on a current of flow, but it isn’t: it’s just yet another celebration of the uncelebratable.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts.

Road Spill (premiered truTV, September 23 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Focusing on what people really talk about in the privacy (or, nationally televised, reality television “privacy”) of their own cars. Also promised by truTV are hilarity, road rage, and moral dilemmas.

*

People Other Than Comedians In Unremarkable Cars Being Unremarkable. So, here’s how it works: regular people get in their cars and drive around, then answer tepid questions pitched at them, such as “is it too intimate to share the same toothbrush?”, “how far out of your comfort zone have you gone to please a loved one?”, “who is grosser in the bathroom? Men or women?”, or “what do you think about men in Speedos?”. I’d spare the judgment if this was something that someone did with a cheap camera and put on YouTube, but it’s so weird to see this on non-public-access, commercial television in 2015 – and a whole half hour of it – especially when some people are saying there’s “too much good television.” It might work as a radio show, albeit a boring one, but the visuals are entirely irrelevant here. Then the commentary is like something you’d overhear on a bus, in a restaurant, or at the mall. You might chortle a little and note it to someone you’re sitting next to, but you’d then go back to your conversation and zone out. So here’s my suggestion, to round out the review: next time a student wants extra credit, tell them to watch a season of this and write a 20 page paper. Make em work for it. Harder than anyone involved with this show seems to be working.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) already has too many bios on this page.

Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe (premiered Lifetime, September 24 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Stylist and designer Rachel Zoe hosts this talk show focused on fashion, “beauty,” and pop culture.

*

It was only three minutes into the premiere of Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe that I was thinking about Watch What Happens Live!, the Bravo late night chat show hosted by Andy Cohen. That’s not surprising given that Zoe stepped out of the shadows of her celebrity styling clients for her Bravo series The Rachel Zoe Project. It’s also not surprising given that WWHL! has been an incredible success for Bravo, and Lifetime is clearly patterning Fashionably Late in its mold, positioning it after Project Runway, which they directly nabbed from Bravo. But Fashionably Late doesn’t only carry vestiges of WWHL!—it’s also obviously attempting to mimic E!’s Fashion Police following its dramatic fall from grace this year following Joan Rivers’ death, Giuliana Rancic’s racist comments at the Oscars, and Kelly Osbourne’s departure. In fact, the segment “#whatwereyouthinking,” in which Alba was asked to reflect on some style choices from her past is a direct steal from Fashion Police.

It’s probably telling that I spent the majority of the episode thinking about all the things it cribbed from other cable channel weekly chat shows—the show itself was not terribly compelling, feeling mostly like a rehash of concepts I’d seen before. As someone who really enjoys Rachel Zoe, who has always appreciated her quirks, her unapologetic style, and her catchphrases, I felt like this venue muted her. Maybe she was so busy being crammed into different existing boxes that she wasn’t allowed to be Rachel Zoe. In truth, I enjoyed the teaser segments that aired in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the premiere much better. (See here for one example) Here’s hoping the format loosens, Lifetime stops trying to steal its competitors’ ideas, and Zoe finds her groove. I’m not sure I’m going to hang around to find out, though.

Erin Copple Smith (Austin College) studies media industries, focusing specifically on product placement and conglomerate cross-promotion.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (CC, September 28 @ 11/10) promo here

Noah faces the daunting task of winning over would-be audiences likely divided into those who regard Jon Stewart as amazing and likely irreplaceable, and those whose lack of interest in Stewart or active disdain for him likely overflows to the show and the format in general. But with Trump and Walker still in the GOP race, at least the jokes and criticism will come easy.

*

Note that we will post a separate discussion of The Daily Show after it’s been on for one week

I’ll Have What Phil’s Having (PBS, September 28 @ 10/9) trailer here

Media scholars may best know Phil Rosenthal as the protagonist telling Russians why they suck in Exporting Raymond, the documentary about his attempts to translate Everybody Loves Raymond to Russia. Apparently, he’ll now be telling other people of the world why they suck (even if their food doesn’t always) in this food and travel show.

*

I was worried that the appeal of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having would hinge entirely on how easily one could digest an hour of Phil Rosenthal’s mugging. Thankfully, that’s not really the case. For the most part, the program realizes that the food and the city (here, Tokyo) are the true stars of the show. On the surface, there’s not a whole lot that distinguishes this from No Reservations beyond the hosts’ very different personae (Rosenthal’s vacillation between wide-eyed excitement and wider-eyed incredulity vs. Anthony Bourdain’s labored, hypermasculine cool). Like Bourdain, Rosenthal cracks wise through a tour of local food that covers street grub, haute cuisine, and little in between.

Although the program follows American food TV’s disappointingly traditional convention of ensuring that the viewer has a compatriot tour guide/avatar to lead our way through the unfamiliar terrain, it’s reasonably light on the Othering that winds up insulting the host city and the audience’s intelligence in equal measure. Which is not to say that it’s absent—there are a few groan-inducing references to a “Blade Runnerish” collection of bars and some exaggerated, bug-eyed reactions to still-living sashimi, but Rosenthal’s approach to cross-cultural encounters is somewhat more earnest and playful than one might expect.

But again, I’m really here for the lovingly shot food and cityscapes. On that front, the show more-or-less delivers. I’ll Have What Phil’s Having doesn’t quite reach the heights of what food television can achieve (for my money, that would be Netflix’s recent Chef’s Table, a beautifully shot, warts-and-all exploration of the equal measures of genius and madness required to be one of the world’s greatest chefs). But it’s a decent-enough food travelogue, even if it’s not adding a whole lot that connoisseurs of the genre haven’t already seen.

Evan Elkins (Miami University) researches and teaches issues pertaining to the media industries, media criticism, globalization, and digital technologies.

*

PBS’s new program “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” suggests in its title an equivalence between its host, Phil Rosenthal (Hollywood showrunner, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond) and the audience, but you can only be a peer of Rosenthal’s if you have quite a bit of money—or fancy friends. In the premiere episode, Phil eats at a range of restaurants in Tokyo, Japan, but the majority of them are super, duper fancy (molecular gastronomy fancy). In my less generous moments, I viewed Rosenthal as a dilettante. Yet his manner is what makes him more of an “everyman,” for he balks at the most exotic fare, including eel (bones and all), ants (they taste like lemon), and freshly killed (and uncooked) shrimp.

This program is aiming for the niche covered so well on basic cable by fellow travel food hosts Andrew Zimmern (Bizarre Foods) and Anthony Bourdain (Parts Unknown). What this program has not yet figured out, though, is that Zimmern and Bourdain thrive, in part, based on the personality of their hosts. Zimmern is childlike and bold in his enthusiasm for all things gross; Bourdain is all sharp edges, but he is also an incredibly knowledgeable chef with noble aspirations. Rosenthal lacks expertise, but what he can offer is humor and a deeper look into his personal life. In particular, the show is missing its biggest possible appeal in the fact that Rosenthal’s brother is the producer! When Phil skypes with his parents from Tokyo, his father repeatedly asks for the unseen brother, Richard, much to Phil’s chagrin (“here is the son you actually love,” he complains as the camera turns towards Richard). The entire show came alive in this moment of relatable family joshing. With so much food TV out there, this show needs Rosenthal to let us see him as a father, son, husband, and brother, because those are the things to which his audience can relate.

Karen Petruska (Gonzaga University) studies the media industries, television history, and media policy.

Adam Ruins Everything (truTV, September 29 @ 10/9)

Adam Conover moves his show from a College Humor web series to the big time (if truTV counts as the big time). You can see an example of his College Humor show here, and quickly get the idea: brief explorations of a wide variety of issues, trying to uncover things and go against the current of popular belief, with comedy and irreverence.

*

Adam Ruins Everything has bold ambitions. Its first episode sees the host tackle a series of beliefs around “giving.” He notes that diamonds as emblems of romance are completely a product of De Beers’ advertising, he explores the silliness of Tom’s Shoes promising to give a free pair of shoes to a random African kid for every pair you buy, he interrogates the (il)logic of canned food drives, donating blood after natural disasters, and saving ring tabs for charity. It’s visually interesting, too: Daily Prophet-style, authors’ dust jacket photos come alive and talk to him, plenty of animation and CGI are used, and there’s a pace to it. He even gets bonus points for having professors on and (!) for using footnotes on screen to show his sources. It’s trying to be edutainment for adults, and I appreciate the attempt to debunk that which needs debunking.

But holy moly is this a big stinking pile of mansplaining. The pilot consisted mostly of host Adam Conover telling an oh-so-naïve young white woman how dumb and ill-informed she is. She was set up as one half of a couple, but somehow her fiancé didn’t need the lessons like she does. Even worse, she’s a teacher, so Conover’s performance is predicated on telling a woman who thinks she’s smart that, no honeycakes, actually you’re not. Then, when she’s disappeared, as a coda to the show, he accosts another wrong-but-pretty white woman at a bus stop. Admittedly, he embraces and owns the fact that he’s annoying, but never that he’s a sexist jerk. The show reminds us he’s “ruining” things for people too often, virtually suggesting that he’s (a very, very white) Morpheus come to give the women and schoolgirls of the world the red pill. Indeed, the CGI and animation set him up as some omniscient, omnipresent being. As much as the show seems to want to be educational, it’s draped with the ickery of talking to a male audience who are presumed to have had the blue pill, and who just need a few more factoids as arsenal in their mission to fix all the pretty little heads of the universe. Maybe future episodes will see him lecture dudes too, but it’s utterly tone deaf for a pilot to be this full of mansplaining, so I’ll just put the show down over here and not come back to it.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) has numerous bios up this page.

The Brain with David Eagleman (PBS, October 14 @ 10/9) trailer here

A six-part study of the brain, how we think, how we feel, and how it all works, hosted by neuroscientist and best-selling author Eagleman.

Narcos (Netflix, August 28) trailer here

The Red Viper, Oberyn Martell, lives, and fights drugs in Colombia! Based on the true story of cocaine drug cartels spread around the globe, and ensuing battle with law enforcement, and centered on the notorious Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura) and the Mexican DEA agent Javier Peña (Pedro Pascal / The Red Viper) sent to capture and kill him, Narcos was shot on location in Colombia.

*

See Kristina Busse’s review here.

Hand of God (Amazon, September 4) trailer here

Hand of God’s pilot won over viewers (sufficiently for Amazon to order an entire show) when streamed in August 2014. Now we can see the rest. It follows Ron Perlman as a debased judge who suffers a breakdown and emerges believing, Judy Sheindlin, that he is the titular hand of God, charged with seeking out vigilante justice. Also starring are Dana Delany, Andre Royo (aka The Wire’s Bubbles), and Garrett Dillahunt.

*

Hand of God is a show that is trying to say something. That much is clear in the pilot, the only episode I was able to watch before writing this review. What that that is, how it will convey its message, and how that will affect the overall storytelling quality of the show will unfold as the series does, but religion will certainly be a big part of it. The title establishes that subject, and the first episode dives deep into the thin line between faith and insanity. Ron Perlman’s Judge Pernell Harris begins the series naked, in a fountain, speaking tongues, and having been recently born again. His newfound religious fervor guides his actions in the pilot, from ending his longstanding date with an escort to dropping charges against a psychopath who professes to be working as part of God’s plan. The worst of these actions, forcing his daughter-in-law to publicly examine the genitals of a suspect in her rape, is instigated by a vision he believes is sent by God. Pernell was Saved, but his belief that he is hearing the word of God and acting on His behalf is disruptive, dubious, and actively harmful to the people around him. This view of Christianity is the novel and fascinating core of the series. It sometimes gets lost among the casual drug use, rampant local government corruption, and grotesque violence surrounding it, but the idea of a series examining the powerful discourse of Christianity and its notion of salvation in contrast to the worldly things that the saved do and their consequences is edgy in a way few series are. Even if all Hand of God turns out to be is a show that delivers edge more than anything else, the fact that it is focusing on religion within that mode should be commended.

Charlotte E. Howell (University of Texas-Austin) is researching religion on television dramas from an industrial perspective.

Casual (Hulu, October 7)

Jason Reitman’s single-cam comedy written by Airheads’ Zander Lehmann focuses on a bachelor brother and recently divorced sister living together again while trying to help each other in their respective dating worlds, and while raising the sister’s teenage daughter. Trophy Wife’s Michaela Watkins, The Mindy Project’s Alex Cole, and Aquarius’ Tara Lynne Barr star.

*
From its opening scene, in which siblings Alex and Val and Val’s daughter Laura behave badly at the funeral of the family patriarch, Casual feels familiar. The type of family dysfunction, self-involvement, and boundary issues on display reminded me of Transparent. The cynicism and narcissism of modern dating takes a page from You’re the Worst. Casual’s capitalization on the trends of recent critical darlings and innovative niche programming is understandable, yet it also reminded me of less-acclaimed programming. As the show (attempted to) nonchalantly reference Uber and Vine, I couldn’t help but think of Younger. Darren Star’s TV Land show envisions hipster culture through the perspective of a 40-year-old woman who passes as a 26-year-old. Whereas Younger’s try-hard attempts to understand millennials devolve into a fever dream of a Patricia Field’s fashion show (beanies! flannel! skinny pants!) and word soup (IRL! Snapchat! Taylor Swift!), Casual’s anxiety about contemporary 20-something culture is both hostile and misogynistic.

When Alex jiggers the online dating site he developed to find dates for himself, it comes across as mildly unethical and a sign of his rakish man-child tendencies. One of the younger women he dates because of it, however, is not treated as kindly. During their date, with plenty of up-talking and the use of “like,” she explains the health benefits of a Paleo diet in the form a bun-free bacon burger. Based on a conversation she had at Crossfit, she argues that such dietary habits are proven successful by the long, healthy lives of cavemen. Alex laughs at her remarks, repeatedly commenting, “I’m pretty sure that’s not true.” Val’s response to young women is no better. When she takes her first Soul Cycle class, when her young assistant reassures her that she is datable by volunteering to have sex with her, or when she goes out drinking with her assistant and her friends, Val finds women in their twenties to be dumbfounding in their vulgarity, promiscuity, and vapidity.

In spite of strong casting of female characters (hello, Michaela Watkins and Frances Conroy!), Casual, much like its middle-aged protagonists, both courts and fears millennial culture. While this tension could be played out with critical awareness, the show feels largely unconscious of its own investments and anxieties. This, unfortunately, results in very conventional attitudes about young women, who are singled out as the agents of contemporary cultural decline.

Jennifer Clark (Fordham University)’s work in television studies tends to gender concerns both historical (women’s labor and role in production) and contemporary (representations of masculinity and anxiety).

*

Dating is hard, fickle, unpredictable. For many people. (Rich, white people. Ish.)

And online dating? An algorithm is to rhythm as phenomenon is to epiphenomenon.

I get it. We feel empty.

Problem is, Casual doesn’t comment on the emptiness of modernity. It stays closer to merely depicting it.

Sex, when ‘sought’ by algorithms, if meaningless, is justified, because deeper bonds, if sought, turn out to be meaningless. Nothing wrong with a quick hay/jacuzzi roll. But ifs and whens matter. “Pardon me for living.” (#darlingdepartingDownton)

Brother. Sister. #MissingABCmelodrama Her daughter. White patriarch who dies. (How many shows have opened with last-mentioned trigger! Don’t worry, not looking at you Six Feet Under.)

Speaking of shows that got emptiness right—because, unlike Casual, SFU’s pilot made us actually feel emotions of/around emptiness: sadness, fury, frustration, helplessness, mystery, longing—where was Frances Conroy? She was the only paratext (of three) I was excited to enter with.

{the second: Jason Reitman directed. Hmm. Up in the Air was also quite empty. People bonding over mileage miles? I had more feels with the Friends joke about 300 flying peanuts.}

She might’ve dug the show deeper. Even make us dig.

{the third: line on bus shelter poster – “Family comedy. Single drama.” Former, dryyy. Latter, never wet.}

I’m being mean. Michaela Watkins was great. She has the gravitas I detected in the annoying Transparent siblings. Her therapist character may render Freud simplistically. But she convinces with the one truth spoken about her: “Cold and alone.”

I get it. People are dealing. Shortcuts are… better than not cutting.

Just give me a dose of likeability (not algorithm creators who think serving in a war is a travel opp). And a narrative hook with a bit more curve.

I love cold and lonely greys: casual watercolor.

But I prefer papyrus with more built-in texture.

Ritesh Mehta is a recent PhD in Communication from USC, and studies popular entertainment and production culture.

Super Mansion (Crackle, October 8) trailer here

A stop-motion animated comedy from the Robot Chicken team, Super Mansion follows a group of older superheroes fighting to stay relevant. The show boasts an impressive list of voice talent, led by Bryan Cranston as the show’s lead, Titanium Rex. Old people jokes abound.

*

Superhero comic books have been engaging in their own self-parody and self-critique for decades. From MAD Magazine to Marvel’s “What The–?!” comics, from Watchmen to The Authority, the comic book landscape is full of fake Batmans, Captain America analogues, and serious questions about the troubling political underpinnings of a genre that celebrates vigilante justice and peace through violence. When you add parody from other media into the mix – from The Tick to Mystery Men, or even 2008’s execrable Superhero Movie – the pile of mediated criticism becomes almost insurmountably high. These days, it’s difficult to find a way to parody or critique the superhero genre without simply duplicating what someone else has already done better.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

SuperMansion is the epitome of lazy parody. Its jokes are aggressively unfunny, aggressively offensive, or both at once. Your hero from the 1940s is racist and sexist? How original! Your cat-based heroine (the only woman on the show) is a sex-crazed caricature joking about going into heat? What a stunning piece of cultural commentary! Someone is trying to legally shut down a superhero team? Clearly, no one has ever thought of that before. And the less said about the incoherent anti-Semitic jokes surrounding “Jew-Bot,” the better.

The above is deliberately snarky, but it captures the emotions I felt upon watching SuperMansion. I enjoy the cast, and though I’ve never been a fan of the creators’ Robot Chicken, I’ve certainly heard good things about it. This show, however, strikes out on every conceivable level, and it has no excuse. Creator Zeb Wells is also a fairly prolific comic book writer; he’s certainly familiar with the medium, genre, and history of both. But what he’s produced here is something I would not recommend to anyone.

Jennifer Margret Smith (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a PhD student with scholarly interests in the superhero comic book, production studies, and mediated representations of identity.

Red Oaks (Amazon, October 9) trailer here

Another survivor of Amazon’s pilot project, Red Oaks is a coming-of-age comedy following a young tennis player working at upmarket New Jersey country club Red Oaks in the 1980s. Craig Roberts stars alongside Paul Reiser and Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner Jennifer Grey.

*

Red Oaks certainly looks like a sex-romp comedy from the mid-80s, complete with poofy hair and a requisite skinny-dipping scene. The aesthetic is so convincing, in fact, that rather than appearing self-consciously satirical (like The Goldbergs or Wet Hot American Summer), Red Oaks looks like it was actually transported, untouched, from three decades ago.

Unfortunately, aesthetic sensibility is not the only thing Red Oaks recycles. The characters and plot of the pilot are flat and expected (even the bare breasts and swearing feel obligatory), and the supposedly climactic tennis montage sequences are lifeless instead of campy fun. In other words, for all the success of the “retro” aspects of this retro comedy, it fails to deliver on the comedy. Red Oaks isn’t actually funny; there are virtually no jokes, no sharp characters, and no clever or unexpected situations. At the same time, the pilot’s drama is rote – a middle-class kid from New Jersey might not get to keep his cushy summer job, and feels pressure from parents and hot girlfriend to recreate the bourgeois suburban existence that surrounds him. The horror.

Red Oaks is not a bad show; the acting is uniformly solid, the dialogue convincing (if not particularly compelling) and the show boasts a strong pedigree, including director David Gordon Green and executive producer Steven Soderbergh. There is little of the pilot, however, that makes the nine episodes Amazon released on October 9 particularly appealing. The premise and execution have been done before and done better, so instead of spending time on the rest of season one, I’ll just re-watch Adventureland – or cut out the nostalgia and go for an actual mid-80s sex-romp comedy.

Anne Gilbert (University of Kansas) studies fans, digital culture, and media industries.

*

I’m not quite sure to do with Amazon’s new original “comedy” Red Oaks. Presented by executive producer Steven Soderbergh and the man who brought us Magic Mike XXL, the show falls a bit awkwardly into the current original streaming landscape.

Set at a New Jersey country club in 1985, it feels like cross between Caddyshack—with its horny twenty-something, slacker workers and rick jackasses—and Dirty Dancing—with the protagonist’s Jewishness foregrounded immediately and Jennifer Grey cast as his mom. The jokes were funny enough and the protagonist, David, nerdily lovable enough, but in the hunt for hippest original streaming series that hearkens back to the teen sex comedies of late seventies and early eighties, it can’t help but be compared to Netflix’s campy, star-studded Wet Hot American Summer and its riff on Caddyshack’s poor cousin Meatballs (and every other horny teen comedy of the era). Although much less intentionally campy than Wet Hot, the show’s Wedding Singer-eque embrace of over-the-top 80s fashion and stoners makes it hard to take the characters at their word. Don’t get me wrong, I’m already intrigued by the “Jennifer Grey as closeted lesbian mom” angle and am looking forward to more Paul Reiser, who plays Ted Knight, I mean the jerky president of the club. However, its half-hour, not-too-cool or edgy dramedy (I think?) format and problematic comparison to something hipper may make it an awkward sell. That said, I would be remiss to not mention the pop culture mind-blow the show gave me as I took umbrage at the Richard Kind/Jennifer Grey pairing as David’s parents. I was sure it was one more case of Hollywood casting a much younger and more attractive woman as the wife of a dumpy older man. Who knew Kind was only three years older than Grey. Okay then. My bad. Nobody puts baby in the corner.

Kelly Kessler (DePaul University)’s work primarily engages with gender and genre in the American television and film, often as it relates to the musical.

*

For a show set in a Jewish country club, there sure are a lot of blonde shiksas running around, aimirite? I wanted to like this show because it’s nice to see Paul Reiser and Richard Kind working together again. I thought Jennifer Grey was in this, but I haven’t seen her at all (plastic surgery joke, zing!). However, I can’t recommend wasting any of your precious precious TV time on Red Oaks. Mainly because this show hits you over the head with the tired beta-male-finding-his-inner-hegemonic-masculinity bullshit premise. The pilot sets this up by demonstrating the obstacles we can anticipate main character David will have to man-up in order to overcome: overbearing parents, overbearing hot girlfriend, other men trying to sleep with said girlfriend, a resident asshole/country club president who David literally has to beat at tennis to keep his job, and a budding flirtation with the asshole’s daughter. Reiser plays this asshole, I wish they gave him more to work with than the cardboard character he plays, because he out acts everybody else around him. On a side note, I cannot help but wonder if the writers did their historical research via a Comedy Central marathon of 1980s college sex comedies. The male characters are sex obsessed, perhaps most offensively, David’s Indian mentor Nash. Nash is a broadly drawn foreign, smarmy sex fiend. Turkish-American comic Ennis Esmer (racial drag!) totally bases his accent on Peter Sellers’ sonic brownface in The Heiress. There will probably be a second season, it’s Amazon, and this show looks pretty… But I’d rather catch up on Transparent, Orphan Black, and The Americans, all available at Amazon Prime, before I stream the rest of Red Oaks. And I recommend you do the same.

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

Fear the Walking Dead (AMC, premiered August 23 @ 8/7) trailer here

A spinoff of The Walking Dead follows a family in LA at the beginning of the outbreak, Fear begins with a six episode season, but already has an order for a second season of fifteen episodes, guaranteeing many more deltoids will be eaten, and many more “don’t go out there” commands will be ignored.

note: see Amanda Keeler’s full-length review here

~~~

Public Morals (TNT, premiered August 25 @ 10/9) trailer here

Another police drama set in New York City, this one focuses on the Public Morals Division and hence lots of vice. Star-executive producer-writer-director Edward Burns is joined by Justified bad guys Michael Rapaport and Neal McDonough, 30 Rock’s Cecie, Katrina Bowden, and Elizabeth Masucci.

*

At first sight, Public Morals looks great: strong actors giving great performances; a morally ambiguous setting at a moment in time when things are changing rapidly; and enough of a family plus job plus crime story to keep us entertained. So why is Public Morals releasing all its episodes shortly after the premiere simultaneously? Part of the answer needs to dig deep into current changes in audience demands through the Netflix/Amazon model. Part of the answer needs to address the way TV shows have become so much more complex and experiment with forms of pacing that are not conducive to the 45 minutes a week format.

But as I was watching the first episode of Public Morals, I wondered if we’ve finally simply hit the point where we’re tired of watching white dudes being white dudes yet again. It feels like all too many cop stories we’ve seen—albeit with possibly better zeitgeist awareness and better characterizations. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether we deserve a different story in 2015. In fact, I kept on waiting for scenes in which Muldoon’s wife showed up, because her awareness of how the world is changing around them was a breath of fresh air amidst all the pretty young prostitutes. I’ll give it a few more episodes but I, for one, would like to hear someone else’s story and maybe look at this time period through someone else’s point of view for a change.

Kristina Busse (independent scholar) studies fan fiction and fan communities and is co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures.

Pickle and Peanut (Disney XD, premiered September 7 @ 9/8) sneak peek here

Jon Heder is a pickle, Johnny Pemberton is a peanut, and they are friends. Of course they are. This new animated offering comes from Fish Hook and Almost Naked Animals’ Noah Z. Jones.

*

Pickle and Peanut isn’t very good. It might also prove to be the bro-iest cartoon on TV right now. Both of these things are a pity, as it’s probably the most forward-looking cartoon on Disney XD aesthetically speaking, drawing from such sources as vaporwave, hipster rap, the doodle-like artwork of such programs as Regular Show and the surreal, VHS-like graphics of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job. I want to get my hands on its credit music. Above all else though, this show about a pair of slacker best bud supermarket employees owes its existence to the cultural impact of Adult Swim on the adult (and now, children’s) animation landscape. Pickle and Peanut might be the first show on Disney XD to be actively fostering a stoner demographic.

Perhaps more importantly, it might be the first time I’ve seen a show that’s trying to be a stoner comedy on training-wheels, affecting the same detached (yet nostalgic) pop culture saturated white-boy sensibilities that can so often be seen in Adult Swim shows and skewing them towards a younger audience. That is to say, they remove the swears and deflect the sexuality entirely onto codified “no-homo” rituals and the broad construction of female characters as entirely vapid objects of attraction. The phrase “Yoga Pants” is repeated as something of a mantra at one point. It’s early days still, and I’m prepared to give this one a chance (both the aforementioned Regular Show and the wonderful Adventure Time began with similar buddy comedy formulas), but this first pairing of episodes is a shaky start. The prospect of grandma jails and zit monsters should really deliver more, if only in terms of creativity. Indeed, I would grant more credit to the idea of a humongous pimple bringing sudden popularity to its host if I hadn’t already seen it done much better on Invader Zim, or indeed just two seasons ago on Bob’s Burgers.

Camilo Diaz Pino (U of Wisconsin Madison) studies animation cultures with a focus on transnational circulation.

Bastard Executioner (FX, premiered September 15 @ 10/9) trailer here

Sons of Anarchy showrunner-actor-director Kurt Sutter and partner in life / partner in SoA crime Katey Sagal’s next outing should feed Sutter’s ample taste for blood, set in Medieval England, and focusing on a warrior who can’t seem to lay down his sword as much as he’d like to do so. True Blood’s Stephen Moyer joins Sagal, Sutter, and star Lee Jones.

*

Bastard Executioner begins with a lengthy crawl, a history that may function primarily as realist motivation for mayhem. BE asks for comparison to Game of Thrones and also evokes Middle Earth – see the happy couple gamboling along the village street. In his New York Times review (15 September 2015), James Poniewozik finds BE to be “thin” as drama, “one turkey leg away from a Renaissance Faire.”

Gendered violence is a foundation of BE’s story setting. It establishes a man’s cruel nature. A sex scene appears seven minutes into the pilot — older man and much younger woman; “a barren hole with swollen meat,” he complains. It motivates the vengeance that will work toward an independent nation-state. BE calls upon an established inspiration for rebellion against British overlords. Offscreen violence energizes rebels in Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) and The Patriot (Roland Emmerich, 2000). In BE, wretched cruelty visited upon women and children is piled on taxation that supports the lifestyle and power of the 1%.

It is a cruel world. BE has lots of on-screen violence and close-ups of body parts being violated accompanied by squishy sounds. In the novel The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1983), the story of Arthur and company remains with the women while the men are off fighting. Staying in the domestic space of the castle saves reading pages of descriptions of hand-to-hand combat and dismemberment on bloodied fields. Instead, a paragraph or two summary of the battle suffices.

By the end of the pilot, three women – the mysterious healer, the newly widowed Baroness (oriented to social justice and with a mystical connection to the land), and the newly widowed executioner’s wife — appear to have agency. Two have been liberated from sadistic husbands. With BE, one can fast-forward through the mayhem to follow the womanly power.

Mary Beth Harolovich (University of Arizona) is a film and television historian, and a founder of Console-ing Passions.

*

Within the first ten minutes of The Bastard Executioner, the plot for the first hour becomes clear to any longtime viewer of television—from the moment you see our protagonist’s beautiful, young, blonde, and super pregnant wife appear, you recognize (yet dread) that she’s never going to make it. Our hero gets vengeance, yet that scene of brutality left me as unsatisfied as it did the hero—must the audience be forced repeatedly to glimpse a dead baby’s tiny body in order to experience the slight (but unsettling) schadenfreude of the bad buy Baron getting his comeuppance?

There is a lot of gore in this pilot—an arm is hacked off, a head is separated from its body, at least two people have daggers/swords thrust through their skulls—yet my chief complaint about this program is not its violence, nor its predictability. Rather, I was disappointed by the lack of character development. For some reason, medieval dramas seem to forget that folks who lived in the past were just as human as we are. The character who becomes most intriguing is one who lives largely in the background of the two-hour opener. The wife of a “punisher” is called upon to expose that another man has taken on the identity of her (deceased) husband; instead, after a rather touching apology from the stranger, she accepts the stranger as her new mate and father of her children. What an interesting moment and choice! There is a mysticism that runs through the pilot that offers some mystery—why do our hero and “the witch” character share visions?—but largely this program opts for cliché and empty shock over character distinction and growth.

Karen Petruska (Gonzaga University) studies the media industries, television history, and media policy.

Moonbeam City (Comedy Central, premiered September 16 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Parodying Miami Vice and its ilk, though looking a lot like the stills for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and also looking and sounding very Archerian, Moonbeam City unites Elizabeth Banks, Will Forte, Rob Lowe, and Kate Mara in an animated show about Moonbeam City PD.

*

First draft: Whatever. [switches over to You’re the Worst]

…

Second draft: Elizabeth Banks is better than this. This year, she’s reprised her part in Wet Hot American Summer, hit a home run with Magic Mike XXL, and directed Pitch Perfect 2. Kate Mara is better than this too. In a better version of Hollywood, she’d star opposite Ellen Page in True Detective instead of getting boxed out of Fant4stic.

The “this” in question is Moonbeam City. The animated series was created by Scott Gairdner and riffs on Miami Vice as Archer does with James Bond (a dog whistle I can’t hear, though obviously Comedy Central would want some version of that for itself). Banks and Mara play beleaguered police chief Pizzaz Miller and by-the-book detective Chrysalis Tate to grossly incompetent “loose cannon” Dazzle Novak, voiced by Rob Lowe. Will Forte kills time as Novak’s professional rival, Rad Cunningham.

Moonbeam City apes Patrick Nagel’s geometric sensuality and synth pop outfit Night Club offers an atmospheric score. But by the end of the pilot, I was as fed up as Miller and Tate. Novak is the butt of the joke, but the show never indicts his boorishness. Instead, strippers orbit him and he beds a singer of indeterminate Middle Eastern descent whose name he can’t pronounce. Finally, the comedic flatness Moonbeam City tries to purloin from Archer requires a straight man who doesn’t realize he’s crazy. Rob Lowe was a walking Nagel painting in 1985, but he’s no H. Jon Benjamin. Television doesn’t need more programs like this, but Jon Hamm would have been a better choice (also what better way to take the heat off your last Mad Men Emmy nomination than parody @80sDonDraper?). Moonbeam City is falling apart; the better show would focus on Banks and Mara reassembling it.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (Disney XD, premiered September 26 @ 9.30/8.30) trailer here

Hoping to capitalize on the success of the film, this animated offering also aims to pick up where the film left off. No Chris Pratt, but probably lots of Disney’s good will and hopes for success.

*

The Guardians of the Galaxy animated series answers the age old question: if someone farts in space, will anyone laugh? And although I’m glad I can finally sleep at night knowing the answer (and I won’t give it away here), I did expect more from this extension of the Marvel Universe.

On a basic level the series is fine — perhaps better than fine (I must admit my exposure to the current animation landscape is limited). The animation is super sleek, and the series relies on a team of experienced voice actors who all do their part to keep things interesting. However, although the show is full of wise cracks and one liners, it feels more akin to typical animation banter we’ve seen a million times than the delightfully irreverent humor of the movie.

It’s also worth noting that the story of a misfit crew of scoundrels roaming the galaxy is almost identical to Disney’s other new series, Star War: Rebels. This is unfortunate for Guardians considering Rebels is a far superior animated series on every single level. Where Rebels pulls you in using interesting re-occurring themes and relatively complex and evolving character relationships, Guardians leans heavy on plot lines to get us hooked, and seems content to allow the movie to do the heavy lifting in the character development department.

The bottom line is, for being based on a movie that was a breath of fresh air to the Marvel cinematic universe, the series isn’t breaking any new ground for animated television. That being said, if you like loud laser battles every 5 – 8 minutes and really thought what the movie needed was more space farting, tune into Disney XD on Saturday nights at 9:30 eastern!

Nicholas Benson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a media and cultural studies scholar with a focus on production cultures, media franchising and failure.

*

Donning his trusty Walkman, Peter-Quill (Starlord) danced onto the screen of DisneyXD this weekend in the new animated series Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The series is an adaptation of one of the Marvel film series’ most interesting films, characterized by a strong ensemble, its morally ambiguous characters, and distinct sense of humor. Retaining the tone from a blockbuster film in an animated tv series is extremely difficult and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy succeeds admirably in this goal. In its first episode the series found its characters often torn between their heroic and mercenary influences and while the somewhat extreme distillation of each of their character traits for the pilot left much of the humor on Quill’s and Rocket’s shoulders, that humor was consistently strong.

The film’s greatest strength was in the complex but ultimately supportive dynamic of its central team and the series exploits this dynamic well. At first the extent to which the voice acting and physical features, some of which seemed troublingly more Caucasian, of the characters diverged from the original was jarring. However, I found it easy to adapt as the new variants of key characters kept the essence of the original personalities and dynamics effectively. As suggested by the series roll-out, which included the release of animated shorts exploring the background of each character, Guardians of the Galaxy is not just invested in the space adventure of the moment but in the mysteries of its characters’ pasts and their evolution as a team. I am neither a committed Marvel fan nor a franchise purist, and so the adaptation to the new format may bother others more; but, for me, the television series has managed to keep much of the film’s magic and made me into a future viewer. Besides, who can say no to baby groot?

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

Indian Summers (PBS, premiered September 27 @ 9/8) trailer here

“New” only inasmuch as it’s new to American TV, this show follows a group of socialites at the foot of the Himalayas in the age of the British Raj. Julie Walters stars.

*

If anyone has the right to tell the story of India’s fight for independence, it is British television makers. This story begins with the white British perspective of main character Alice arriving on a train. One of the main characters in this show is Indian, but we literally don’t hear him talk for the first 15 minutes, and the POV is decidedly white British. Thus, the stiff-upper-lip motif abounds. “Oh no, a home rule terrorist has vandalized a portrait of Queen Victoria. Tea time anyone?” The show seems self-aware and reflexive about colonial oppression, but there seems to be a winking ambivalence here. Yes, one of the earliest shots is a close-up of an Indian servant washing the door sign on the elite British Simla Club that reads “No Dogs or Indians.” Evidence of colonial oppression, check. But the camera invites us to relish and appreciate how fun imperialism was for the white people, as we see them glammed out in lavish period costumes singing, dancing and fucking in their elitist clubs and mansions, drinking champagne and being called sahib (or mam sahib for the lady colonists) by their native servants. This is all to say that Indian Summers seems to want to complicate Britain’s colonial history, as if to argue, see, things were not as black and white as you may think. Those Indian activists were cold-hearted killers, see? Plus we’ve cast a lot of hot Indian actors for all the interracial affairs! And there are strong female characters! I am going to keep watching, because I’ll watch any historical melodrama that promises plenty of sex scenes. I’m interested to see how race, gender and national identity are complicated as the show progresses, but I remain skeptical that this show can transcend the imperialist past it seeks to interrogate.

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

Benders (IFC, premiered October 1 @ 10/9) trailer here

A comedy examining God’s chosen sport, hockey, and a bunch of guys in an amateur league.

*

I was hopeful about Benders, especially after last week’s “sneak preview” episode. That episode had a hockey-centric plot, some solid jokes, good character dynamics, and was only slightly offensive. Goon (2011) it was not, but it wasn’t bad. The official premier episode, however, shuttled hockey to the episode’s bookends for the real plot of the episode: The main character, Paul, is asked by his grandfather to kill him, and Paul agrees to do it. This is not It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; these characters do not lack empathy. So why would you introduce them to an audience by having one choke his grandfather to near-death? Even more difficult to understand than this plot of ante-patricide is the episode’s continuous homophobic dialogue. It may originate from the show’s Rescue Me lineage or as an attempt to represent how men police masculinity, but it creates an atmosphere of aggressive homophobia that is antiquated and alienating. This line of joking is so pronounced within this episode but almost entirely absent in the preview episode. Maybe they grew up and realized that “no homo” is not the fount of humor they thought it was, but I doubt it. You’re better off watching Goon and Sirens and thinking of what might have been.

Charlotte E. Howell (University of Texas-Austin) is researching religion on television dramas from an industrial perspective.

American Horror Story: Hotel (FX, October 7 @ 10/9) teaser here

Lady Gaga joins the cast for this season’s outing, which takes its inspiration from numerous haunted hotel horror films, and from the Hotel Cecil and Elaine Lam’s death that went viral. Everyone involved has promised it will be darker, which is good, because psycho clowns who rip off their masks to reveal festering wounds was just way too breezy.

*

To understand why he is not thrilled with tv’s current horror shows (including AHS), tv critic Neil Genzlinger turned to Stephen King’s “three types of scariness” from Danse Macabre (1981): revulsion, coming face-to-face with a monster, and the dread (NYT, 7 September 2015).

AHS: Hotel certainly has revolting images as well as verbal descriptions of revolting images. Viewers are invited to come F2F with monsters and oddities – sometimes fleetingly but also in extended scenes of sexual torture of men. An observation: AHS appears to avoid visual exploitation of female victims.

In AHS, one can see how style intends to produce dread and/or perhaps an awareness of the conventions. This is much better articulated in Fear the Walking Dead as its characters explore darkened houses or hallways unaware that they are at the verge of the zombie apocalypse. Similarly, the AHS seduction scene at the outdoor screening of Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) was weak. One could see the intent of the gazes but the style did not deliver lusting with the eyes as well as it might have.

In the credit sequence, the Ten Commandments flash by but not in numerical order. Perhaps this invites fans to engage the text, to see if the ordering of the commandments is suggestive of story development. The commandments writ in neon horror red suggests the debauchery that will take place in the hotel. Were I a talent show judge, I would say “good song choice” for the vampiric blood and sex orgy that plays out over more than five minutes to the hard sex anthem from the band She Wants Revenge – “maybe this is danger and you just don’t know … I want to tear you apart.”

While AHS: Hotel builds visual/aural energy through lurid sexuality, the show presents a story foundation about families that are emotionally tortured. AHS enjoys the sex, but the parent-child relationship should provide the enduring melodrama for the season.

Mary Beth Harolovich (University of Arizona) is a film and television historian, and a founder of Console-ing Passions.

*

Is horror meant to be a seductive sheen of velvet red, petite blonde, emblazoned gold? An unstitched embroidery of retrograde modernity tropes? Blanched to the cross, cut off from sons, powdered by a central elevator, shifted by eerie hallways? Lipstick and a wayward kiss, monsters hogging warts, sushi with radiation, neighing carnival carousels?

Majestic 1920s trying to pass as a disfigured 2010s is not horror. The vacant exposition of a mother needing to protect a junkie son is not horror. Perfect bodies barely connecting is not horror. American Horror Story: Hotel is seductive enough in its first thirty minutes, but whatever it lapses into as an entirety of an episode is not horror.

I’m not looking for more than five minutes of my fix of American beauty (which stodgily remains white, if also queer). I’m not looking for more than ten minutes of Gaga-ing over a pride of celebrities and their “jawlines for days.” I’m not looking for more than twenty minutes of entering and exiting stunningly staged horrendous rooms. I am looking for more than a hat tip to the Best Exotic Budapest Hotel California.

Bring me to a hotel whose abandoned dilapidation I can use to critique the tongued luxury of capitalism. Dress me a Los Angeles that doesn’t know the terrifying paradox of a void fashion mecca. Infuse fresh blood—real warts, internalized crucifixion—into the tired mother-son emblem. Give me a reason to be scared for, not by, the characters.

I’ve only seen the first season of AHS, but recently I’ve seen some good horror, especially in film. This installment of AHS, or at least its first episode, is all color palette but no muse. Emptied hotels can be such potent portrayals along the ruin porn genre. AHS: Hotel sort of gets the porn but misses the ruin.

Ritesh Mehta is a recent PhD in Communication from USC, and studies popular entertainment and production culture.

*

I am an enormous fan of American Horror Story‘s first two seasons. In both of these seasons, the narrative centered on strong central characters, allowing the ensemble to orbit with limited intrusion. The last two seasons suffered in part from a lack of focus, jumping from character to character in endless false starts and wasted opportunities. Though I can’t ring the funeral toll on this season yet, I worry about the number of seemingly disconnected storylines and important characters offered in episode one. Although nominally connected, the pilot episode already presents two strong narrative poles as well as a number of as-yet largely disconnected side plots. American Horror Story works best when constructed like a solar system. This is an asteroid field.

But in other ways, this season appears set to surpass the high marks of previous American Horror Stor[ies]. Though to varying degrees, formal artistry has remained consistently strong. To my taste, it reached a zenith exploring the temporal disorientation of its main characters’ subjectivity within the claustrophically too-unified space of confinement in a mental institution. This season appears to double down on its already-impressive style and, incidentally, engages with spatial and temporal disorientation comparable to its best efforts. The most notable aspect of the first episode was set design with costuming arriving a close second. Center framing and symmetrical staging perfectly displays the geometric complexity of the art-deco interior design. In being too balanced, shot composition paradoxically offers an uncanny sense of unbalance hidden just below the aging carpet in the hallways. The richly saturated colors are equally well-suited to denote the luxurious setting, the eccentric costuming, and horrific set pieces.

Taken as visual art, this season appears headed to its highest achievement yet. I hope it can deliver a narrative worth caring about, but I’m not optimistic.

Philip Scepanski (Vassar College) studies television history, media theory, and comedy.

The Last Kingdom (BBC America, October 10 @ 10/9) trailer here

BBC America (and BBC 2) gets in on the Game of Thrones action with this tale of the founding of England in the ninth century, complete with swordplay, bodice ripping, and warring tribes, adapted from Bernard Cromwell’s best-selling Saxon Stories novels.

*

The Last Kingdom arrives on BBC America courtesy of a co-production with Carnival Films, the production company that brought you ITV’s Downton Abbey, and it was commissioned by and will air on BBC Two later this month. ITV saw its reputation burnished by Downton Abbey’s success in the U.S., and the BBC is surely hoping for the same from The Last Kingdom, as the corporation fights off Tory marauders trying to plunder its license fee funding and ransack its public service orientation. BBC director general Tony Hall (presumably) won’t take on Conservative culture secretary John Whittingdale swinging a sword fiercely while fully engulfed in flames like Last Kingdom’s Viking warlord Earl Rangar, but spectacular images like that do help to make this an engaging opening hour and bolster the BBC’s case that its system can foster enthralling drama that keeps up with the likes of HBO’s Game of Thrones. If you do like the “macho dudes with beards and heavy furs gore each other to achieve supremacy in period times” genre, this series seems likely to engage you, as its first episode offers an intriguing and shifting set of “good guys” and “bad guys” in detailing late-Ninth Century battles to control England. Unfortunately, the opening episode does overwhelmingly feature guys, outside of a few women there to be sexually assaulted, gutted, or wooed as the plot needs. Critics have seen four episodes, and a number of reviews (like this and this) contend that the series gets more thematically complex and character-rich as it goes along, so I will keep watching in hopes of seeing it get there. I also will keep an eye out to see how Tony Hall and his band of public service broadcasting warriors try to capitalize on the likely critical praise for this series in their own fierce battles over the future of England.

Christine Becker (University of Notre Dame) is currently working on a research project investigating cultural hierarchies in contemporary American and British TV.

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If you seek a moodier, grey-toned knock off of Game of Thrones with less humor and fantasy and more animal skins, then look no further than The Last Kingdom. Real British will have to wait until October 22 to watch their own history on BBC 2, making it clear who this show is primarily for: Americans. TLK is also produced by Carnival Studio, known for packaging lavish British heritage for hungry American viewers in the past with Downtown Abbey. This show doesn’t have much exposition; while GoT built up to the conflict between warring factions with a first season of intrigue, replete with graphic violence and lots of sexposition, The Last Kingdom gets right down to business. Within the first fifteen minutes we are knee deep in gritty battle scenes. And, while rape and beheadings and sword fighting are present in TLK, I will say that it is refreshing to see that this show does not fixate on these elements in the same way that GoT seems in delight in gore and rape and general ultraviolence from a voyeuristic gaze that makes me, for one, feel complicit in objectifying suffering as pleasure. The Last Kingdom is also more straightforward in supplying us with a clear cut central protagonist named Uhtred (say it ten times fast and you have 50% of this episode’s dialogue… Uhtred Uhtred Uhtred Oh no Danes! Uhtred Uhtred!). Extra points if you recognize Rutger Hauer among the wrinkle-faced dirty characters that populate this show; shame on them for killing him off in the first episode. TLK’s obvious preoccupation with a hypermasculine warrior narrative makes me wish this show had more of GoT‘s ambivalent gender politics. But I have high hopes for Uhtred’s sidekick/lover Brida, so I’ll stay tuned to see what happens.

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

Fargo (FX, October 12 @ 10/9) trailer here

How will Fargo follow up on an amazing first season of dark comedy, murder, and deceit in the snow? The new cast for a new story includes Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Jean Smart, Jesse Plemens, Brad Garret, Bokeem Woodbine, Ted Danson, Nick Offerman, Cristin Milioti, Adam Arkin, and for the oddity factor, Kieran Culkin.

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I realized that all three of the reviews I’ve done this cycle for Antenna have been for shows that are based on other things. Minority Report is a sequel to the film; Heroes Reborn is an extension to the original show; Fargo is based on the film of the same name. While there are things to like in each of these shows (well, maybe not Heroes), it’s really only Fargo that I’m tempted to continue watching, and it’s interesting that Fargo is also the show that deviates the most from the original in terms of plot. But in terms of tone and subject matter, it is a dead ringer.

Despite being incredibly violent, there’s a subtle beauty to Fargo. In the shoot-out in the diner, for example, a quick image serves as a metaphor for the series as a whole: blood mixes with milkshake; violence splashing against innocence; red and white spilling onto the floor. The everyday banalities of life mix with shocking violence.

I like this sort of imagery because it’s not overt. The camera doesn’t linger over it. There’s no reference to it. No one comments on the mixture dribbling onto the floor. But it’s there and it reflects the way simplicity is often the most subtle of all storytelling.

Watching this new season of Fargo unfold, I experienced something I haven’t experienced for a very long time—the sheer delight of having no idea what to expect. I love laughing as we go to commercial break because I literally have no idea what’s going to happen next. Last year I binge-watched the first season of Fargo; this season I’m eager for those pauses so I can reflect, learn, and be surprised.

Paul Booth (DePaul University) studies fandom, time travel, and digital technology and is the author most recently of Playing Fans and Game Play.

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Season One of Fargo started small and, thanks to a host of poor decisions made by selfish characters trying to save their own skins, sprawled out to lots of bloodshed and death. This season starts much bigger, with machinations of an organized crime family and a future president lurking about the edges. The cast of characters, though, is still filled with peppy Midwesterners quick with poorly conceived crimes and an “All right, then,” and as a result, Fargo feels kitschy and delightfully macabre.

The show’s inciting incident – a triple murder at the Waffle Hut – illustrates its tone. Fargo is darkly funny, poking at the characters’ provincial regionalisms and in the retro glory of its 1979 setting. At the same time, the violence is no joke; the premiere alone features five deaths, four of which are quite bloody, even if they are also a bit bumbling.

While the cast is a parade of recognizable faces (some made barely recognizable by creative facial hair and a liberal use of hair feathering) who comprise a strong ensemble already going interesting places, the show may feel the loss of its central villain. In the previous season, Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo was an ominous, malevolent force of reckoning. His evil was both competent and compelling, providing a necessary foil to the cheery façade of the setting. Season Two thus far has lots of criminals and blood, but no black hole around which the action can swirl.

Fargo will get to “the Sioux Falls incident” mentioned in Season One, and the premiere sets up Midwestern mob revenge and a presidential campaign. If the narration balances these sweeping stories with the tiny details that made the first season (and the film) work so beautifully, it should be well worth the ride.

Anne Gilbert (University of Kansas) studies fans, digital culture, and media industries.