New Season TV
I’m not sure how many of you actually end up watching TV, but for the few of you who do, I’m curious… Are there any new shows you folk are watching?
With the new baby in the house, and the way that we’re choosing to let each other have uninterrupted blocks of sleep (I get 8pm until 3am, Sara gets the rest of the evening), we’ve actually had a remarkable amount of time to watch new shows. I basically went off of the critical reviews. So, we started the season watching Reaper, Life, Chuck, Pushing Daisies, Gossip Girl, Dirty Sexy Money and The Bionic Woman. So, it’s been…what…about a month or a little more since shows started.
Reaper sounded like a good idea. Ray Wise as the devil…any Twin Peaks fan would go along with that. A family who sells their son’s soul to the devil, who then makes him into a bounty hunter? Cool. Or…not. I’ve heard Buffy, Angel and X-Files discussions talk about the two basic episode types. Monster-of-the-week and the Mythology episodes.
Monster-of-the-week eps are basically what they sound like. A monster is introduced. The characters fight it and win. Mythology eps try to further a backstory…a thread that goes throughout the season. Buffy Mythos eps generally concerned the Big Bad of the season. X-Files Mythos eps concerned aliens, and an increasingly inscrutable series of layers of complex plot points which never resolved. (Hence why X-Files lost me.)
Reaper appears to be all Monster-of-the-Week. The pilot showed the dude become a bounty hunter for Satan. Every ep since is him getting a bad guy. Yawn.
Along the same lines, Chuck started out promisingly as well. Except, strangely like the far superior pilot to Alias. Geeky guy gets a CIA/NSA/FBI computer downloaded to his brain, and he has little missions. A different mission every week. They did lay out the potential for mythology, but I haven’t seen it come to fruition yet. So…bye Chuck.
Gossip Girl is exactly like The O.C., except on the upper East Side of Manhattan. I.e., it’s trashy, and awesome. It’ll burn brightly and quickly, and won’t make it past three seasons, but it’s got pretty kids being spoiled, so I’m in. Plus,narration by Kristin Bell, which lessens the Veronica Mars cancellation somewhat.
Dirty Sexy Money should have been like Gossip Girl. Nate from Six Feet Under becoming the lawyer for a Hilton-esque family, complete with their very own Paris. Didn’t spark for me, and that made me sad.
The Bionic Woman. Pbthththth. Didn’t even make it through the pilot. They have Starbuck from the new Battlestar Gallactica, which was nice, but snore…
Life, about a cop who was framed and put in jail for more than a decade. It’s a fish out of water story, combined with him trying to figure out who framed him. They have the potential to have the MOW, yet still advance the Mythology. Yay for them. Sara’s ahead of me, and she still likes it, so it’s a keeper for now.
Pushing Daisies. The only clear winner for me. A fantasy about a man who can bring people back to life…but only for a minute, or else someone else around him will die. It’s like Tim Burton meets David Lynch meets They Might Be Giants (complete with a rendition of Birdhouse in your Soul in last week’s episode). It’s contrived, people act in a very affected manner, but the narrator, storytelling, and especially the score, keep me entranced. It consistently cracks me up, and I like all of the people in it (except lonesome tourist Charlotte Charles’ Aunts).
So, that’s the only clear winner for me, with Life a strong possibility. What are the rest of you watching? Anything new?
Loading ...
I hear you about Dirty Sexy Money — Bartley and I watched the first episode and weren’t sufficiently intrigued to bother recording additional episodes.
Somewhere in the blogosphere, I read a complaint that Pushing Daisies rips off much of Amelie. Do you see any such parellels? (I haven’t watched the show yet.)
Yes, thank you! I was going to say Burton crossed with Amelie. It is most definitely a very similar narrative structure.
“Ripped off?” I’m not sure about that. I like Amelie, and I like Pushing Daisies. I think there’s a place for both. It’s definitely got the quirky, narrated story thing that Amelie has too… Of course, it’s about a guy who can bring people back to life for a minute, and it’s in English, so that’s two pretty major differences. Check it out some night…I gather they give pretty good “Previously on…” intros.
Gossip Girl turned me off instantly, but I never got into the O.C. or, back in the day, 90210 type shows. I think I just hate rich brats. That’s why Veronica Mars worked for me - cause she was dissing on them all the time.
Pushing Daisies I do like because it is valiantly trying to do something different. But I fear that it is just a bit too precious to last in the long term. If it tones down some of the stylization and focuses more on building the characters it could be really good, but for now I just find it mildly interesting. But that doesn’t mean they should cut down on musical numbers!
I wanted to like Chuck and Reaper and even watched that new vampire detective show just for a laugh, but they all just feel derivative. And Bionic Woman is only good when Katie Sackhoff is on screen, every other moment is total snoresville.
PS - Why is there no discourse on the best new TV show of the season, Cavemen!
Totally hear you on Pushing Daisies and the fact that it may over-precious it’s way out of existence. That said, this week’s episode was the first one I didn’t really love, so that’s a pretty good record.
Strangely, I’ve picked Chuck back up. It kept being downloaded…er…Tivo-ed, and when the baby is up at night, I’ll put something on to distract me while he’s eating. I think it’s easier to take if you throw away the arc idea and just let the episodes play. Plus, Summer from the OC is in it.
So based on your recommendation, I’ve been watching Pushing Daisies and loving it. Since I missed the beginning of the season, though, I have a question: who had to die so that Chuck could continue to live?
Awesome!
Chuck was at a funeral home…turns out the funeral director kept stealing the prized possessions of his dead clients. After Chuck came back, he bit it. Lucky for everyone else not so sleazy in the home at the time.
There’s a later episode involving the director’s brother that is probably my favorite one so far. The detective gets stuck in a window trying to get into the building, and the Winnie the Pooh jokes abound.