As a new fall television season begins, I have decided to watch as many of the new shows (and returning old shows) as possible. I will post my brief opinions on all these series as they premiere, with an emphasis on any shows I think may be good/mildly interesting. I will not watch all of these beyond this first episode—I won’t watch most of them, in fact—but writing these posts will give me incentive to watch as much television as possible. Because why not? This second post will mostly focus on returning shows, with the only new show being Whitney. The third post—out later this week—will focus on several new shows. And then this experiment will be done.
Community – “Biology 101” (NBC)
Here’s the problem with ending a season of television with a cliffhanger: you’re going to have to resolve it at some point. Hence, the first episode of the subsequent season has a tendency to feel perfunctory in nature. This is more or less how I felt about the third season premiere of Community; it was certainly funny at points but it often felt like it was trying too hard to a) resolve the Pierce Hawthorne problem, and b) be an über-meta episode of Community in its own right. Still, this episode does not concern me in the slightest when it comes to the rest of the season to come. Quite the opposite, in fact. The dean Pelton/John Goodman feud promises many laughs to come, and the addition of Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire) has the potential to be great, even if it felt clunky in this first episode. All in all, “Biology 101” felt like little more than solid set-up for the season to come. Now that this first episode is over, Dan Harmon and company can finally get down to business. I’ll also choose to ignore the musical number during the cold open, which did not work for me in the slightest.
Grade: B
Fringe – “Neither Here Nor There” (Fox)
As the fourth season of Fringe begins, the show finds itself in a rare position of having to perform some damage control. To say things got a little crazy toward the end of season three—too crazy, many would argue—is a bit of an understatement. I never thought the show went completely off the rails as some did, but I don’t think the ultimate payoff was something a lot of people were in love with. Plus, when the show pulled the rug out from under us one final time with the cliffhanger ending, most viewers weren’t excited so much as they were confused. So what does the show do with all of these questions hanging over its head? It starts us off with an old-fashioned Freak of the Week episode! I think this was a conscious choice by the show simply to calm everything down before further exploring everything that happened at the end of last season, and in that case this episode was a solid if unspectacular re-entry point. The worst case scenario is the writers just went “ah, screw it” and decided to scrap most of what came before, which would be disappointing. I doubt that’s the case, but “Neither Here Nor There” wasn’t an important enough episode to either reassure me or worry me.
Grade: B+
Modern Family – “Dude Ranch” / “When Good Kids Go Bad” (ABC)
The first season of Modern Family was a frequently-hilarious show about, well, a modern family and the various situations they find themselves in. The second season was more hit-or-miss in my eyes, and I found myself frequently worried that the writers were refusing to let the show grow into something more than it was. In fact, the second season’s “when in doubt, recycle a first season plot” mentality was frequently a problem for me. There were a few laughs in just about every episode, but too often I felt as if Modern Family was starting to lose its freshness far too early. The two episodes the show chose to lead off the third season (“Dude Ranch” and “When Good Kids Go Bad”) were not the most reassuring start. “Dude Ranch” in particular was just a mess; as if the writers thought of the concept of the trip to Wyoming but never actually bothered to create a genuinely interesting episode out of it. Sure, there were some attempts at important character moments (Alex kisses a random boy who is defined wholly by a silly New Jersey accent! Dylan tags along but then decides out of the blue to stay in Wyoming!), but they felt forced, underdeveloped and—worse yet—never particularly funny.
The second episode was an improvement, if only because it just looked like the good old Modern Family that we all know in love. There were still problems—mostly because it felt condensed within an inch of its life—but there was more to laugh at in “When Good Kids Go Bad” than in “Dude Ranch.” (I mostly just liked whenever the new talking Lily threatened to kill any potential siblings.) However, it still didn’t feel like a show that was evolving, and that’s troublesome to me. It normally takes shows five or six years before they start to feel old, but Modern Family’s hair is already showing signs of graying at the beginning of its third year. I can’t deny that the ensemble is as great as ever, but something needs to change in the writers’ mentality before the flaws become irreparable. It’s still a very good show, but I can see a point in the distance where I might lose my patience. Oh, and Nolan Gould needs his own spin-off show as soon as possible.
Grades: C+/B
The Office – “The List” (NBC)
It’s no secret that the sixth and seventh seasons of The Office were a precipitous step down after the greatness that came before, yet the show continues to lumber on even after its star jumped ship toward the end of last year. (However, Steve Carell’s finale episode was all kinds of fantastic.) Now we enter this year with a new boss—well, technically two new bosses. James Spader is now the CEO of Dunder Mifflin/Sabre, and Ed Helms’s Andy is now regional manager, because The Hangover. The result of all this changeover? A pretty mediocre episode of The Office, that’s what. It wasn’t as bad as it could of have been, but the show still feels like its missing its emotional core in the post-Carell era, and I’m not sure how long Spader’s mysterious shtick can last and still be effective. We’ve got a long season ahead—and I’m not sure this show’s going anywhere—but if “The List” is as good as The Office is going to be I’m not sure if I’ll last the entire season. It was still fine, but there may come a point when there will be better ways for me to spend my time.
Grade: B-
Parks and Recreation – “I’m Leslie Knope” (NBC)
In its shortened season last year, Parks and Recreation cemented itself as one of the best comedies on television. Now it has come back and—like its NBC neighbor Community—it ended its previous season on a cliffhanger that this premiere had to spend most of the first episode resolving. As a result, “I’m Leslie Knope” also felt like it was setting up the season more than it was trying to be a great standalone episode, but I think it was also more successful than the Community premiere in the straight-up humor department. There’s not a whole lot to say about this episode—despite the fact I found the lewd e-mail subplot to be a tad too silly for its own good—except that it was quite good and I expect the rest of the season to be great. From what I hear, the next few episodes are just that. So yay, Parks and Recreation!
Grade: B+
Whitney (NBC)
This fall television season has confirmed that this is the year of Whitney Cummings. She co-created the promising 2 Broke Girls on CBS, and she also got her very own show on NBC! She even named the show after herself, because apparently we are still in the ’90s. The result, frankly, is pretty awful. Where 2 Broke Girls felt like a modern, vibrant take on the multi-camera, live-in-front-of-a-studio-audience format, Whitney feels downright dated and sluggish. It is not easy to take a comedian’s stand-up persona and integrate it into a conventional sitcom, but Whitney never quite comes close to succeeding. Instead of taking Cummings’ observations about relationships and creating an ensemble of interesting characters, the pilot amounts to little more than scene after scene of Cummings dishing out one-liners and getting in weird situations. Whitney is uninterested in all of the characters outside of the lead, and there isn’t even all that much to Cummings herself except that she can pull a zinger out of her back pocket whenever the script sees fit.
There’s much potential for improvement here, I’ll admit. Cummings co-wrote 2 Broke Girls, after all. Whitney is a show that needs to learn how great television works, for reasonably clever dialogue alone does not a good show make. It just needs to find a way to feel a bit less emotionally empty, and her character’s boyfriend (Chris D'Elia) needs to stop laughing at everything she says as soon as possible. Good comedy does not laugh at itself, and it is never in love with how clever it is. Whitney is both half as great as it thinks it is, and about 25% of what it can be. I shan’t be watching again, but as soon as it gets better let me know. Assuming it lasts long enough.
Grade: C-
Next time: The final post looks at some of the most intriguing new shows of the year, plus the return of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.
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