Fall Television Preview — Thinking Comes Later

Now if you want to talk about a show they SHOULD remake...

Hawaii Five-O

This is a remake of a show that was popular in the 1970s. Remakes are popular with studios because it’s a formula that’s been proven to work in the past. So naturally this show should work, right? I mean, people have the same attitudes and sensibilities as they had 40 years ago, and plenty of folks in the coveted 18-to-35 age group advertisers shoot for grew up watching the show, so there’ll be that connection, right?

Oh, wait. I guess not. Well, still, it’s a cop show, so at least there isn’t a whole lot of competition.

Oh, wait. Well, uh… At least it’s set in the one place in America where they haven’t already had either a CSI or a Law and Order.

Shit My Dad Says

Am I the only one who’s a little bit bothered by the fact that they made a TV show about a Twitter feed? I mean, really? That’s 140 characters or less per update. Three years now I’ve been cranking out an average of 2000 words per week, and as I’ve mentioned many times before, nobody has given me a fucking TV show yet. I had to go out and make my own, and it got about one trillionth of the hits that that guy’s Twitter feed did.

How’s about this for a show - Shit That Happens To Truman. Every week it’s a new 22 minute long peek into my ongoing and bloody war with the modern world. Spoiler alert: Not a lot of sex on this show.

Mike & Molly

It’s a sitcom about two fat people, which I suppose is reflective of networks assuming that couch potatoes watching their shows want to see similarly proportioned characters on TV. I’ve got to call shenanigans on this one, because all three of my roommates are fat and they spend between 70 and 100 percent of their time talking about what thin blonde woman on TV is hottest.

Regardless, according to the show’s synopsis on Wikipedia, the titular Mike and Molly “…will have to deal with the comments, jokes, and criticism from Mike's fast-talking [coworker] Carl McMillan; Molly's slim sister Victoria, and her mother Joyce.”

Outside of the fact that Mike and Molly meet at an overeaters’ anonymous group, this is all the description they give, which leads me to believe that the show is nothing beyond a weekly chain of fat jokes, which was a viable concept when The Drew Carey Show pioneered it but doesn’t work quite as well anymore.

The Walking Dead

It’s a serialized TV show about the zombie apocalypse being produced by AMC, which has recently been giving HBO a run for its money with Breaking Bad and that show about people smoking in the past. Angry Dudes, I think it’s called.

I can’t tell you how excited I am for this show – not just because it’s the union of the two things I love most (zombies and television’s ability to tell epic stories) but because this is the sort of thing my main bro Alexander and I have been talking about wanting to see for the past ten years or more. It’s good to know that somebody’s finally listening.

Secret Millionaire

It’s a reality show about undercover rich people going into the projects, living like poor people for between a week and ten days, and then dramatically revealing their wealth to their salt of the Earth Bruce Springsteen friends and rewarding them with large amounts of money. Presumably, this solves all of society’s problems.

I don’t know if you heard, but I worked in reality television, and I’ll tell you this right now – if you’re making a TV show about something, people know. Snappy editing (some of which I was responsible for) obscures a lot of this, but the creation of a reality TV show requires at least two cameramen, a dedicated sound crew, a crack squad of producers, and at least $15,000 worth of equipment.

The presence of all these people tends to disrupt the very reality that’s trying to be conveyed in such a way that bystanders tend to notice. And no matter what alibi the camera crew gives the poor people around the secret millionaires, I’m pretty sure in an era of constant reality TV show pranks and inversions (Intervention, Undercover Boss, Dame Edna’s Neighborhood Watch) just about anyone – even poor people! - will be able to connect the dots between the presence of a camera crew and forthcoming good fortune.

Outsourced

Last year, Parks and Recreation really screwed with my Thursday night NBC schedule. Things started off strong with the shining brilliance of Community, but then, in the half hour before 9:00 when The Office and 30 Rock took up the comedy reins, there was Parks and Recreation.

I don’t want to slander any of the writers for that show, because they were doing the best they could with a concept that was basically, “Do The Office, only Michael Scott is a lady.” But it wasn’t a great show, plain and simple. It was a buzzkill between Community and The Office. In protest, my friends and I would actually turn off the television and just talk to each other for half an hour until The Office came on.

So that’s why I’m glad Outsourced, a strikingly original concept for an office comedy (in spite of being a spinoff of a movie) coming to NBC’s dynamite Thursday night lineup. Good or bad (I think it’ll be good), it’ll be rocking/sucking in a bold new way, which at the very least is worth some brownie points.

Conan

Whenever I got sad or lonely in England, I would pull up old YouTube videos from Late Night With Conan O’Brien or the magical seven month window then The Tonight Show didn’t suck and let Coco’s antics remind me that my friendly homeland with its rich, exploitable pop culture was waiting for me.

I am going to watch the fuck out of this show.

Truman Capps thinks that watching TV on his roommates’ 62 inch television will be akin to watching NBC’s Thursday night lineup in an IMAX theater.