Telly season starting in earnest now, with new shows debuting and old favorites/habits returning. In no particular order, the current viewing season has brought us House, Community, Glee, Eastwick, Greek, NCIS: Los Angeles, CSI: Miami, Crash, Modern Family, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fringe, Heroes, Mercy, Flashforward, the Forgotten, the Good Wife, the Vampire Diaries, Supernatural, Castle, Melrose Place, Bones, 90210 - pretty busy watching period for me. The only new show I'm wary of is Mercy, as me and medical dramas haven't got on since I tried to watch the first season of Grey's Anatomy and found it an aggressively smug and hateful show full of unlikable characters I would have little hesitation in punching in the mouth. Melrose Place I'm not sure what to make of, as I've never seen the original, though the name - via pop-cultural osmosis alone - brings up assumptions of glossy Los Angelinos and soap operatics about their privileged never worked an honest day in their life problems, but it started with a murder and that was enough to intrigue me, even if the rest actually is glossy Los Angelinos and soap operatics about their privileged never worked an honest day in their life problems - all it needs is a naive actress who swings both ways and it'd be complete trash. As it is, it's just kind of trashy and lacking in substance.
NCIS: Los Angeles is trash, however - absolute, unapologetic trash of the first order. I've never watched an episode of the parent series, so I'm at a loss why I gave this one a shot, but the credits revealed that it starred both Chris 'Batman And Robin' O'Donnel and LL Cool J, so my ass was watching this bitch just to see what kind of car crash occurred, and it was just terrible enough to be compelling in the same way that CSI: Miami and Bones are.
Good Wife is typical courtroom stuff but inoffensive enough that I'll probably watch another episode, while Flashforward is laughably derivative and stiff Sci-Fi Channel reject material that pads out the minutes with leaden plotting and shameless lifts of the establishing moments of Lost, and I honestly can't think why I'd watch another episode - none of it is particularly terrible, it's just that none of it is particularly good and there's not an ounce of originality on display.
Modern Family is cynical on the surface, but has a happy ending up it's sleeve in the form of a face turn for the homophobic dad played by Married With Children's Ed O'Niell, and while happy endings were once played-out on tv, they're now so rare that this comes across as a welcome bit of schmaltz that makes the rest of the cynicism and misanthropy more palatable in much the same way that House's season opening happy-ending moment of rare euphoria for the title character was.
All in all, the new season is off to a good start, but we'll see what I'm still watching in a month's time.
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