Let's face it, I watch Monday Night Football and tape whatever else I'm going to watch. That said, Monday night does house the best of the new shows this season and not the worst of the rest. In other words, an okay grade.
The best show is NBC's Heroes, a show that appeals to the comic book reader (hey, I've got close to ten thousand of them in the vault and downstairs. I AM A COMIC BOOK READER). But like other fantastical shows, this has cross-over appeal and a shot to compete in its time slot. The pilot was incomplete and the addition of Greg Grunberg, ex of Alias, in the second episode is a good sign this will be a good show.
Heroes is followed to the screen by Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, one of the more disappointing shows thus far. It's okay, but more was expected from Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford, playing riffs on their characters from Cheers and West Wing respectively. Not surprising, since West Wing came from the same fertile minds of Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme. Unfortunately, there is a truth in show biz. Viewers at home couldn't care less about writers, whether they be newspapermen, crusading magazine stars or TV Shows. Murder She Wrote was a detective show. And The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in a newsroom about as often as Mary enjoyed long-lasting relationships with men. In Studio 60, we get more of Sorkin, and maybe you CAN get too much of Sorkin. Still, I will watch the show if only for the pairing of Jack & Jill survivors Amanda Peet and Sarah Paulson.
Fox's Vanished is one of the two kidnapping shows this year (NBC cutting right to the chase by calling their show, Kidnapping). Lots to like about the show, which is the DaVinci Code tossed into the blender with 24. BUT, and it's a BIG but, the behaviour of daughter Marcy, played by Margarita Levieva, is preposterious. Marcy has to act impossibly stupidly in key sequences to further the plot. And everybody has to ignore her while she's making the bad decisions. Levieva IS quite cute, but I can't get around that.
The new network CW, runs Runaway against Vanished. It's a Canuck-content extravaganza. Competent, but blah. As a serial, it asks too much to get interested in the Rader family on the run, sort of The Fugitive on steroids. Would be surprised if it lasted til Christmas. I said the same thing about a comedy from ABC last year and it went the whole season. So it got a whole half-season more than I projected. My revenge is that I can't remember its name.
Which brings me to Class, the best of a woeful lot of comedies I've seen this year. Class gets a failing grade, and it's STILL the funniest of the new comedies. It depends on faux gay humour to a great degree, brings in suicide as an ON-GOING plot device, repeats the same punch line ad nauseum “Your party,” and features a philandering wife. I did laugh three or four times in two episodes. Time well spent? Not anymore.
It's time for some FOOTBALL!!
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