fall 2015

I have a long post on Lost I need to do so, since as I write this we're a day or two away from finishing our rewatch of the whole series. But for the moment let's just check in on the fall TV season as it ramps up.

One thing that surprises me is that the returning series I'm most looking forward to are iZombie and The Leftovers. In part this reflects the newly fractured nature of TV seasons -- some of my favorite shows aren't airing this fall -- and the fact that several of my favorite shows ended last season. So a sort of attrition has resulted in my favorite new series becoming, essentially, my favorite series tout court.

Also very happy that the second season of The Returned is coming soon, that Red Oaks finally has a full season coming on Amazon, that Fargo will be back in less than a month, and that I finally got around to watching Mom last season. I ought to blog about that show -- I avoided it because, well, it's fucking Chuck Lorre, but it turns out to have more in common with Roseanne than Two and a Half Men.

One reason I'm surprised at how much I love iZombie is because of how perfectly it fits the description of a TV subgenre I loathe:

Person with special abilities teams up with no-nonsense cop to solve murrrrders.

This is a pretty shitty way of telling stories in the first place -- I have so much disdain for the inability of TV writers to come up with anything other than a murder of the week to fill their hour -- even while it's obviously grounded in the traditional Genius + Sidekick formula of classic detective stories going back to Sherlock Holmes. And even Sleepy Hollow is just a brilliant and deranged twist on that formula.

But one reason the subgenre has been the focus of so much of my ire lately is because it's become even more common among every season's new offerings than "Some Doofus and His Hot Wife Parent Badly."

Limitless and Minority Report both waste the potential of the movies they're adapting (not that Limitless was that hot, but whatever) in order to boil out the impurities and reduce the ideas down to Person with special abilities teams up with cop to solve murrrrrders. Furthermore, in order to make this work, Minority Report has to go the additional step of saying that the whole point of the movie -- that using precognitives to fight "precrime" was horseshit -- was wrong.

That fucking Blindspot show that I'm so sick of the ads for -- and I shouldn't be surprised that it did so well in the ratings, because the things I think look awful so often do -- is another Per w spesh + cop essing ems show, which means we had three of these fuckers leading off the fall season. Jesus Christ.

Even the superhero shows tend to veer toward P-spesh & C S M territory. You've got your superhero and then you've got their Regular Folks support team, partly to personify the process by which the superhero finds crime to fight, partly to give them people to talk to / rescue / act as audience-surrogates. I'm not crazy about this -- the comics aren't structured that way, so right out the gate the stories feel very differently than the properties being adapted -- and it's one of the things I don't like about Arrow, though for some reason it bothers me less in Flash (maybe because of the way Tom Cavanagh's character became involved in the story).

I'm hoping Supergirl, which had the most promising pilot I've seen for shows premiering this season, doesn't go the PSCSM route, though there are many indications that it will. I guess I'll wait to say more about that until the show has aired.

So with the fall season just starting, there's three new shows I tuned in for worth mentioning briefly:

Scream Queens was awful. I mean, I have been watching Ryan Murphy shows since Popular's first season 16 years ago, so I feel like my expectations are properly modulated: every show will start out decent, with clever touches, and quickly climb up its own asshole. Glee went from being a bright, cute show to completely unwatchable in record time, Nip/Tuck became bizarre in ways that sort of predicted the Ryan Murphy of American Horror Story, etc. What I'm saying is, I didn't have super-high expectations, but I did expect the premiere to be good.

It was nearly unwatchable. Everything is on the nose, the performances are wooden, it's somehow not bad or broad enough to be campy (much less intentional camp), it's like watching a talent show at a school assembly. It's really, really awful. I was first startled at how bad it was, and then I was very quickly bored. I have sleep apnea, so I think I'm constitutionally incapable of watching another episode.

Heroes Reborn, on the other hand, was surprisingly all right. I watched maybe two and a half? seasons of Heroes and then caught random reruns on the Sci Fi Channel and G4. It was an uneven show: a first season that turned out to be better than expected, followed by extensive proof that nobody involved had any idea how to keep the story going in a reasonable and natural way. My hope is that no one would revive Heroes unless they had a solid idea of what to do with it -- why bother otherwise? -- and so far they haven't fucked anything up, though working around the absence of Hayden Panettiere is a little awkward.

Then there's The Muppets, of course. It goes without saying that I was and have always been a huge Muppets fan; this is almost inevitable given my age. Though I loved the Jason Segel movie, I thought Muppets Most Wanted was fairly weak, and wasn't sure what to expect here. The faux-documentary format of The Office makes sense -- there are no variety shows these days, after all -- but I wish they hadn't abandoned the genius fan idea that "Muppets canon" consisted of The Muppet Show and the first Muppet Movie, with everything else being something they had created as part of their Rich and Famous contract. Things like using Sam the Eagle as the standards and practices guy, while funny, don't support the idea of him being a performer who also plays a CIA agent in Muppets Most Wanted, etc.

My sister called it "cold," and I think that's right. It doesn't really seem like they had FUN making it, and so far lacks the manic energy that made The Muppet Show -- and all of Henson's pre-Muppet Show Muppets performances -- what it was. I can easily see that being a function of the pilot, though -- wanting to get everything right in an era that doesn't give shows a lot of time to get on their feet. And certainly the Muppets legacy is such that I have trouble imagining a Muppets show I wouldn't watch. I'm just hoping this one becomes more relaxed and comfortable with itself.