Media Shmedia:

The New Fall TV Season

A completely biased guide to what doesn't suck

by

Scott Patrick Wagner

Perhaps you've already gotten the rundown on the new fall season from a dedicated TV critic — a specialist who gets screeners of all the new shows well in advance, his erudite opinions planned to coincide with the public's first excited flush of discovery. Being a generalist, however, I watch this stuff over the air and shoot my mouth off with no timeliness and even less industry impact — or, to give it a better spin, with a timelessness that transcends expectations.

It is with this transcendent randomness that I present the Media Shmedia Guide to the New TV Season. And I offer my personal, generalist guarantee that I haven’t watched everything, and my recommendations are based solely on my peculiar tastes. I’m certain I speak for at least 8 percent of the viewing public. Make that 7.

Let's start with a Monday-night NBC entry called Chuck. It is a winning spy lark about a computer nerd thrown in with high-level secret agents because he was inadvertently exposed to a slew of top-secret information, which is now lodged in his subconscious and nowhere else. And, while Alias was a spy show juxtaposed atop family dysfunction issues, Chuck is a spy show dancing merrily around Cinderfella. Watching Chuck and the calculating female spy assigned to him begin to (apparently) have genuine feelings for each other is, thus far, irresistible. It may only work for one season, but it’ll be a very enjoyable season.

Also on Monday nights are two sitcoms with promise. Aliens in America, on the CW, has a premise that sounds predictable: a high school loser’s life changes when a foreign exchange student comes to live with his family. But that’s where expectations end: The exchange student is Muslim, and everyone in this typical American town keeps thinking the sweet-natured naïf is a terrorist. It is a subtly devilish satire on American mores, and the most unlikely place to find a carefully concealed indictment of the Bush Administration's impact on our collective mindset. Monday’s other sitcom, Samantha Who? on ABC, stars Christina Applegate as an amnesiac who can’t remember what a total bee-yatch she was before she went into the coma. Now that she’s awake, she's incrementally learning how sensationally awful she has been, and occasionally lapsing into her hideous personality. The show is a fascinating opportunity to explore the theme of whether people can really change and, so far, Ms. Applegate provides a very amusing palette on which to observe this battle of good versus nasty.

The other program to make this season’s list airs on ABC Wednesdays, before an insipid spin-off called Private Practice (insipid to me — if you like its source, the sloppy Gray’s Anatomy, you might find this thing watchable). But more on my unfair indictment of what sucks in a little bit; let’s finish the good stuff first. Pushing Daisies is a lyrical and irreverent fable about a young man who can bring corpses back to life with a touch, but will kill them permanently if he touches them again. The twist — an epic plot point handled as lightly as everything else — is when he revives his recently deceased childhood sweetheart, kindling a sweet love between them. It is a love that can't be expressed with even handholding, lest she drop dead all over again. As Greek-tragedy as that sounds, it is a delight.

In the last hour on ABC Wednesday comes the terrifically titled Dirty Sexy Money, which I can't unconditionally recommend, even with great talents like Donald Sutherland, Jill Clayburgh, and Billy Baldwin. But neither can I completely write off this serial/satire hybrid, mostly because of executive producer Greg Berlanti, who turned last season’s Brothers and Sisters into a hit, and once created a glorious, overlooked series called Jack and Bobby.

Of course, these aren’t the only new shows. To be fair, Reaper isn't bad, in a black-comedy Faustian kind of way, and Back to You is funnier than anything else non-animated on Fox. But I don’t have the time. And Gossip Girl seems to be catching fire with its target audience. But I’m not 12. I only lasted five minutes with these others: Bionic Woman has some British chick in the lead role trying to play American, with such a shrill voice  you wish it were called Bionic Mime; Big Shots is the unfunny guy at the party who thinks he is urbane and witty; Cane seems too self-conscious; Journeyman is humorless; K-Ville looks depressing; and Cavemen — well, if they were going to make a show out of a Geico commercial, couldn’t they have used the little gecko with the accent instead? I know there are a few other shows I haven’t mentioned. I haven’t watched them. Who has time, with 30 Rock mercifully back for another season? And Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives and Boston Legal are all back, gayer than ever. Which could mean they’re all festive. Or the other kind of gay. It’s all good.