There were several new prime time network television programs debuting this fall and I decided to view as many as caught my interest- a little comparison shopping if you will. I don’t have the ability to tape shows, so if two good ones aired at the same time, I had to choose one. Here are the programs I ended up watching: “Heroes”, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, “Jericho”, “30 Rock”, “Twenty Good Years”, “The Nine”, “Six Degrees”, “Men in Trees”, “1 Versus 100”, and “Brothers and Sisters”. What follows is a mini-review of each.

The first premiere I saw was “Jericho”, which runs Wednesdays nights on CBS. Jericho is the name of a fictional small town in rural Kansas. During the first ten minutes of the show, Denver is destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Apparently, Atlanta gets wiped off the map too. The show is about the town’s reaction to the bombings and the knowledge that they might be cut off from the rest of the U.S. or even the world. There is a great deal of hysteria initially, but the townspeople eventually realize that they must band together if they are to survive. There are various attempts to communicate with the outside world and venture away from the town, in order to gather information and see if anyone else survived. The plot is interesting if implausible in places. The soundtrack is good, featuring music by bands like The Killers and Snow Patrol.
“Six Degrees” airs on Thursdays on ABC. It’s set in New York and is about whether or not the people we meet, are by chance or by design. At first, the parade of random characters is confusing. Then about halfway through the premiere episode, they reveal that the depressed woman who’s always watching the news is actually watching a tape of her husband’s last report as a journalist before he died. Then, the connections happen very quickly, some for the better, some for the worse. For example, a woman with a shady past is hired by the journalist’s widow and is romantically pursued by a public defender who doesn’t know who she really is. The widow also befriends an engaged woman who is an executive at a marketing company. The executive’s fiance has been cheating on her, but she doesn’t find out until he tries to hit on the widow at the engagement party. In one episode, all of the main characters pass by the same store, having a sale on wicker furniture. The premise is interesting, but you do have to be watching pretty closely for the show to make sense.
I missed ABC’s premiere of “Men In Trees” but caught it the following Friday night. I was skeptical because the premise sounded like a re-run of “Northern Exposure”- New Yorker ends up in Alaska, a fish out of water amongst quirky residents. The show has a pilot, a one person radio station, a bar. But this New Yorker is a woman (played by Anne Heche), a relationship expert who writes self-help books and is stood up at her own wedding. On the first show I saw, she gets a check in the mail for half the expenses of the wedding that never happened. She can’t bear to keep it, so she spends all of it at a bachelor auction. Instead of a going on a date, she has her “purchase” re-arrange her furniture, do handyman stuff around the house, and fix her truck. The poor man gets accidentally run over for his pains. But nature has its revenge when she gets sprayed by a skunk. I found the show suprisingly funny and endearing. In fact, if “1 Versus 100” hadn’t started airing during the same time slot, I would be watching “Men in Trees” every week. It’s definitely worth a look.
“Brothers and Sisters” airs on ABC on Sundays. It had so many stars on it that I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Calista Flockhart is a conservative radio talk show host who makes a move to television. This requires her to move back to California, where her family is. Sally Field plays Flockhart’s liberal mom who harbors a grudge because she believes her daughter “sent” one of her sons to fight in Afghanistan after 9/11. That son, unable to cope with his war experience, is high most of the time now. The father, played by Tom Skerritt, is involved in shady business dealings and an affair. He dies of a heart attack during the very first episode, leaving a rotten legacy for Flockhart’s other siblings to deal with. It has probably the best dialogue and acting of all the new shows this season.
One of the biggest surprises of the season occurs on Mondays on NBC. The show is called “Heroes”. The premiere episode started out with lots of characters and jumped around from place to place. But I kept watching because the Japanese fellow cracked me up. His name, oddly enough, is Hiro, and he’s totally obsessed with Star Trek and going on about sci-fi topics like altering the space time continuum. His friend thinks he’s a nut job and so does the viewer, until he really does freeze time and space and teleports himself from Tokyo to New York! At first, he thinks this is a great deal of fun until he finds out that he needs to use his powers to save the city from a nuclear attack. There are others in New York and elsewhere who have unusual powers, such as a man who can paint the future, two brothers who can fly, a woman with a murderous alter ego, and a cop who can hear people’s thoughts. The pivotal character, however, appears to be a high school cheerleader who can survive any sort of physical trauma, including being murdered. Her father is an evil man trying to catch and deter all the heroes as well as the researcher’s son who knows about them. The show is exciting, shocking, quirky and very worth watching. It is my favorite of all the new programs.
I also watched “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”, which airs right after “Heroes”. I skipped the debut episode because I didn’t like Matthew Perry when he was on “Friends”, but my neighbor friend said she really enjoyed it, so I gave it a shot the following Monday. It’s basically behind the scenes of “Saturday Night Live”, a fact they do not disguise at all. It’s more serious than I was expecting. There are some chuckles and smirks in there, but nothing fall-on-the-floor funny. I think it does a good job of explaining what really goes on in making a television show. The dialogue is pretty good. Worth checking out.
“The Nine” is an ABC show appearing on Wednesdays. It’s basically about people who survive a bank robbery hostage standoff. Each person is changed and has to deal with that. The nine survivors also find themselves staying in contact with each other because of their common experience. They try to go back to their regular lives without much success. Some are interviewed by the media, and there is some question as to whether to hold the police accountable for the breakdown of negotiations, which resulted in the shootings. Not a bad start, but I don’t know how this premise is going to maintain enough momentum for a series.
NBC has two new shows on Wednesdays airing back to back: “30 Rock” and “Twenty Good Years”. The first one is ANOTHER series about behind the scenes of an SNL-type show, but it’s a half hour comedy instead of an hour long drama. Tina Fey plays the writer of “The Girlie Show” (a takeoff of Comedy Central’s “Man Show”??) and Alec Baldwin is her brand new boss who knows more about marketing a convection oven, than he does a TV show. Tracy Morgan is the crazy comic who is recruited to join the cast of the show, or perhaps take it over entirely. It’s too early to tell if this show will be consistently funny, but the first two episodes made me laugh, so that’s a good sign.
“Twenty Good Years” stars John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor as old friends. Lithgow is an arrogant surgeon who is forced into retirement on his 60th birthday, and Tambor is a judge who seems to have trouble making decisions in his personal life. Lithgow decides that since he and his friend probably only have 20 good years left in their lives (hence the title), they should start embracing all the things they either didn’t have time for or were too timid to do, such as joining the Polar Bear Club or even dating the same woman at the same time. Tambor and Lithgow are convincing as buddies who have known each other so long that they bicker like an old married couple. I look forward to watching their adventures.
“1 Versus 100” is an NBC game show created by the guys from “Deal or No Deal”. Basically, a contestant competes against 100 celebrities and/or smart people. For instance, Ken Jennings of “Jeopardy” is part of the 100, also referred to as “the mob”. Both the contestant and the mob answer a multiple choice question. The contestant must get it right, or they walk away with nothing. If the contestant is right, then they win a certain dollar amount for each member of the mob who gets it wrong. Each mob member who gives an incorrect answer is eliminated. The dollar amount per incorrect mob member answer goes up every time the contestant gets one right, and there are fewer mob members to compete against each time because of the eliminations. After every correct answer, the contestant has the option to take the money and go home, or risk all of it on the next question. The contestant does have two opportunities to ask for assistance from a mob member if they are uncertain on a question. The catch is that while the mob member must be honest about which answer they chose, they can lie about why they chose it. The first contestant went home with $135,000 which I thought was pretty impressive. I love to see people get rewarded for using their brain. I will make this part of my regular viewing.
It appears the new prime time fall season offers a little something for everyone: solid dramas, a couple of promising comedies, and a new game show. Grab the remote, settle into a comfy chair, and enjoy.
Submitted by: Karen Brauer, Butyoudontlooksick.com, © 2006