Deadly Furniture

Last season, Elizabeth and I probably watched one or two new pilots altogether. I don’t know if just nothing sounded very interesting or if we were too invested in old television shows to bother with new ones, but whatever the case I’m pretty sure we watched the pilot of The Event (that turned out well) and then called everything else a bust. (To be fair, we picked up Parks & Recreation which was perhaps the best move we have made in the history of our television watching). This year promises to be different--or at least that’s what the networks have promised me and they have bombarded the internets with clips, enticing spoilers, and previews to make me root for their shows.

Take, for example, Charlies Angels. Because Wonder Woman mercifully failed to get a pick-up by NBC, this ABC show will haunt our commercial breaks until the end of time. ABC really wants us all to remember how popular the original show was and those two movies, and also wants us to know that their version is going to be much better. I’m less than optimistic. With so much emphasis being put on the brand and how hot the main characters are, it seems like scripts and interesting/exciting/unexpected storytelling could become second/third/low priority. Will I watch the pilot? Sure. Why not? Do I expect to be watching much more? Nah.

This season is also the season of “pairs.” NBC and ABC are both putting up fairy-tale shows and period shows and it promises to all end in an epic showdown that the press will make a huge deal of and then we’ll all forget about in a year or two. ABC has Once Upon A Time, the story of what happens when fairy-tale characters have to survive in the real world. NBC has Grimm, the story of a police officer, last name Grimm, who realizes that he’s one of the few people who can see that the world is populated by evil fairy-tale characters. Having seen clips for both of them, and had the entire first episode of Grimm spoiled in the process (thanks NBC), I can’t say that I’m impressed by either. Sure, it may have something to do with the very sub-par special effects that grace the opening of Once Upon A Time, or it may be that Grimm looks sorta boring. However, I’m pretty sure it’s that both of these got picked up, and Ron Moore’s promising magic-themed pilot (with three, THREE Battlestar Galactica veterans) failed to get a pick-up. I mean, how could either of these even hope to compare?

Since it’s been announced that Mad Men is off our screens for what seems like eleven years (WHY!?!?! WHY?!?!?!) NBC and ABC are hoping to capitalize on AMC’s loss by giving us The Playboy Club and Pan Am. They’re both what you would expect from their titles and I can already tell that I’ll watch both of their pilots. That being said, I’m pretty sure only one of these is going to last the season and, because I actually liked the clips of The Playboy Club more than Pan Am, my bets are on Pan Am surviving.

Into the mix of this season’s pilot season then comes the shows that you watch merely for the people that are in them. Michael Emerson’s (of Lost fame) role in CBS’s Person of Interest means that Elizabeth and I will both watch a show that we would never have tuned into anyways, Jason Issacs in the mid-season Awake (he’s a GOOD guy) is going to be great, and Sam Neill and Jorge Garcia in Alcatraz gives us even more reason to watch the sci-fi thriller besides the fact that it’s a sci-fi thriller. And, while we’re talking about sci-fi thrillers, ABC’s mid-season show The River is either going to be great or horrible. Here’s hoping great.

And now, to wrap it all up in a nice and convenient way, a list!

This Year’s Chase: Prime Suspect

This Year’s Obvious Glee Copy-Cat: Smash!

This Year’s Most-Anticipated Mid-Season Show: Awake

This Year’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Ringer

This Year’s Sure-to-Be First Cancellation: Unforgettable (‘cause it’s forgettable. Get it?)

This Year’s O.C: Revenge (now with more Marc Blucas)

This Year’s Rebecca’s Most Anticipated Show: The River

There is an audience out there, a pretty large audience, that loves the predictability of a procedural storyline. There’s something comforting about the fact that, although the story-of-the-week changes, there’s a known rhythm, an expected turn, a happy ending at the end of the forty-two and a half minutes. This audience is the reason why CBS is the most watched network on television--all CBS does (besides Survivor, the detestable Two and a Half Men, and other nameless, forgettable sitcoms) is procedural dramas.

However, there’s also a large audience out there that needs a variety in storytelling. We sicken at the ability to predict turns in the storyline, say what a character will say before they get around to saying it, and know that this isn’t the bad guy because we still have thirty minutes left before the show is over. These are the type of people that find their heaven in shows like Lost, The West Wing, and Battlestar Galactica--all shows that threw large curveballs (if you’ll figure the cliché baseball reference) at its audience that left them talking and pulling their hair out until the next show aired.

That being said, I have a soft spot in my heart for these CSIs, NCISs, and Cold Cases. I, in fact, was a faithful watching of CSI: The Original before the characters stopped acting like characters and refused to grow in any way possible. One of the most suspenseful hours of television from my younger, pre-Lost days was season one’s “Grave Digger,” an episode directed by Quentin Tarantino himself. Then there was the military drama JAG that, besides having perhaps the catchiest theme song before NBC’s Parks and Recreation, I still list as one of my old-school favorites. Both of these series had predictable, structured approaches to storytelling, yet I loved them anyways.

I think as a lover of television--even someone who loves the odd, the unpredictable, and the sci-fi--you’re bound to have a couple procedurals that you watch. Mine happen to be ABC’s Castle (whose success is only 90% thanks to the great and powerful Nathan Fillion) and, more recently, CBS’s The Good Wife. Nothing says that I wouldn’t like any of the other countless cop/lawyer/investigator drama’s out there. There most be something appealing about NCIS (besides the great and powerful Mark Harmon) for it to continue to get the ratings that it has, and there doesn’t look like there’s anything necessarily uninteresting about The Mentalist or Blue Bloods. But the fact is, my mind can only handle a limited number of structured, known shows at a time--and these are the two that I’ve currently chosen.

The Good Wife (airing on CBS on Tuesdays at 10) centers around Alicia (played by Julianna Marqulies), a wife whose political, state attorney husband (Chris Noth) cheats and lies. While he goes off to jail, she is left to pick up the pieces of her family and try to avoid the inevitable limelight. Thanks to her good old-friend Will (Josh Charles), she lands a job at a large, Chicago law firm where she becomes a junior associate. From there, the expected court cases start coming, but there’s a surprising amount of variety of them (murder cases, terrorist charges, civil cases, class actions) and of telling them. Add to this the fact that there’s more than a small spattering of character growth and drama as well (something that CSI had in bygone days. [Insert nostalgic sigh here]).

After watching a couple of episodes of The Good Wife, I found myself unexpectedly caring, a lot, about what happened to these characters. It isn’t just the love stories or will-they-won’t-they-tension, I cared about the friendships (notably between Alicia and Archie Panjabi’s investigator character Kalinda). I cared about whether the struggling law firm would survive so that these characters could continue to scheme. I cared that a character was fired, and almost teared up by the end of some episodes. The show also manages to bring in interesting and compelling guest stars without you even really noticing (Amy Acker and Michael J. Fox anyone?). To my shock and surprise, I suddenly realized that this was my new show to watch on Tuesday nights.

I’m sure that if I ever got around to turning on The Mentalist or the newly-dead Medium, or NCIS, I may be able to find equally compelling characters and stories behind the procedural bore. Maybe one day, when Nathan Fillion finally makes it big in the movie world and Castle has to end, I’ll watch one of them. For now, I’m too busy watching the non-structured genius of Community and Parks and Recreation.

Episodes to Watch: “Heart,” “Running,” “Breaking Up”