The Upcoming New Fall TV Shows

I haven't known what the hell was coming on in the fall since I was a kid and -- I still feel shame about this -- would eagerly await the double-sized TVGuide Fall Preview issue and read up on just about every show, expecting almost all of them to be great.

Any action or adventure or cop or sci-fi show, I was convinced was going to be Star Wars. From 240 Robert to Supertrain -- yup, I was a little fat shut-in tv-watchin' dork paging through the TVGuide like it was glossy-paper porn.

The good stuff, I mean. Like Gent.

Anyway, here's a video preview of the shows. I can safely pronounce them all to be "teh suck."

The Cavemen (ABC, first tab) will be extinct in three weeks. They have failed to evolve and adapt to their changed environment of a sitcom, and they are doomed to be wiped out by more intelligent competitors, such as Flava Flav's new reality TV series, Pimp My Whore.

Pushing Daisies (ABC, first tab) will be pronounced dead on arrival. Apparently the networks are so starved for CSI knockoff forensic shows they've created a semi-comedy where the forensic scientist has the power to bring the dead back to life. So he can ask them how they died. Which seems to mean there won't be too many sexy gas-chromatography montages on this forensics-science show, or even much in the way of forensics science iof any sort. When you can just ask the dead girl who killed her, you really don't have to spend a lot of time fucking about with vials and centrifuges.

Not sure how they're gonna fill the remaining 42 minutes of the show. Maybe they'll just show costar Chi McBride washing his dick in the sink for a half hour or so. Appointment viewing, folks.

I'd've like to have heard the pitch for this show -- "It's like a cross between Six Feet Under and Bones!" Great, two fucking shows I refuse to watch in one. That means I gain an hour every time I don't watch this show. It's like Daylight Savings time coming every week, giving me an extra hour to sleep. Thanks, ABC!

CBS (second tab) has a show called The Big Bang Theory, which is about four dorky geniuses who have a super-hot blonde move in with them. You can tell they're geniuses because they have a giant double-helix DNA model standing in the corner like a frigging coatrack.

I liked this show better when it was on Showtime and it instead featured four super-genius hot chicks and one dorky guy who got to screw them all. Nymphobrainiacs, I think it was called. It was funnier, because they showed vag. Vag is always good for a chuckle.

Then they've got Jimmy Smits as a Cuban gangster who's really super big into sugar, pure cane. The show's actually called Cane, and no double-meaning is apparently intended. The clip tries to hook you with a riveting, passionate argument about (I'm not kidding) how sugar-based ethanol production is going to increase the value of their sugar holdings and thereby make the criminal enterprise rich.

Because, you know, all that fucking cocaine wasn't paying the bills.

I guess Jimmy Smits was willing to play a Hispanic gangster but didn't want to sully the reputation of Latinos by having anything to do with drugs. So instead his gangster family will be dealing with shady, dangerous buyers from the candy and soft-drink industries.

Oh yeah-- and ethanol industry, too.

For God's sake. I'm going to pitch fucking CBS my own series, all about an Irish crime family in NYC. It's called Spud. It's about the tensions between different generatons of criminals -- the wise grandfather, the neurotic father, the guns-a-blazing hothead son -- arguing with each other in their Hell's Kitchen walk-up while they stick tater tots up their asses.

Oh, PS, Jimmy Smits can't act. He's just tall. There's a difference, you know.

"The CW," or, as I call it, "that channel I skip over between QVC and the Knife Collector Network, from which I bought a set of six hundred tactical folders as well as a replica Triple-Bladed Sword from Sword & the Sorcerer (the first blade cuts the head off, the second blade pulls the neck-skin back taut, the third blade cuts across the suface of the truncated neck to insure the smoothest decapitation possibile)," has a Kevin Smith superhero show called Reaper which people will pretend is good but, as with most Kevin Smith stuff, actually sucks and isn't funny at all.

On NBC (fourth tab), we have a show "from the producers of the West Wing" (the down-home Emmy smell is baked right in), which seems to be about a San Fransisco reporter magically transported in time... back to 1987. Wow. Talk about high concept. 1987 was an era of magic and mystery, pirates and wizards....

They've been running this show for the past five years on VH1, where it's called Hey, Remember the Eighties? Really? So Do I, It Was Only Like Twenty Fucking Years Ago, Moron, starring Michael Ian Black and that the super-gay dude from Sex & the City. I imagine the new show will feature the same basic plot/structure, where the hero is confronted with artifacts from the remote past of 1987 and is compelled by mysterious government handlers to make not-funny-so-much-as-glib wisecracks about them.

A "comedic spy thriller" called "Chuck" has just about the lowest production values I've ever seen on a network TV show. It looks like an internet film. And it's about as good as the average YouTube lipsync video.

Finally, there's the Bionic Woman. Good news: Jamie Summer now has a bionic eye in addition to her bionic ear. Let's face it, that bionic ear was kind of lame.

The bad news? She also seems to have been outfitted with high-tech ultra-capacity bionic nostrils. Her first mission will be to track down her evil cyborg doppleganger, bratpack actor Judd Nelson.

Ugghh. I guess I'll have plenty of time for Warcraft and porn.

Thanks to Slublog.

In related news, Andy Richter of the cancelled NBC series Andy Barker, PI just emailed to say "Please kill me."

Update! Strangely enough, the ratings are in for all the new fall shows that haven't even aired yet. And the winnner is... The Courtship of Ron Paul, which earned a monster 19.4 rating and a thirty-share.

Proving once again that America has Ron Paul fever.

posted by Ace at 08:50 PM

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