Fall TV?

Stop me if I've said this before, but when I was young, publication of the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide was always a big deal for me. It used to (in the 60's and 70's) come out around Labor Day, which meant at the beginning of the school year, so it was a race as to which would come first--first day of classes or the Fall Preview issue. I would read it from cover to cover (which I did with every TV Guide anyway), marvel at the lovely, colorful photos that accompanied each new show's entry, and plan my fall TV schedule.

Compared to those days, I barely watch TV anymore, TV Guide is a spindly shadow of its former self, and I work all year round, so fall is not such a big deal anymore. There are only two new shows I'm even bothering to dip into. Glee, about the misadventures of the geeky members of a high school glee club, actually aired its first episode last spring and it sucked me in with its creative musical numbers, quirky characters, and campy aura. But already, two episodes into its fall run, it's feeling a little tired. My main problem: the campy bloom is off the rose; as a friend noted, it's becoming a lot like Desperate Housewives, a show which also started off as something fresh and strange and quickly drowned in typical soap opera histrionics. Both shows kinda want to be Twin Peaks, but become Dallas. I'll still watch Glee for a while, for the production numbers (the first week's peak was a version of Jazmine Sullivan's "Bust Your Windows") and for Jane Lynch, the funniest character-you-love-to-hate I've seen in a long time, but I can see that even she is gonna get stuck in a rut pretty soon as the glee club's super-nemesis.

The other show is FlashForward, which is like Lost, except the whole world is the island. One day, every person on the planet blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds and gets a vision of his or her life 6 months in the future. The blackouts cause lots of death and destruction (planes fall out of the sky, drivers hit each other, patients die during operations) and we follow a loosely-knit group of characters as they muddle through the event's aftermath and try to figure out what the flashes mean: did they see a future that is predetermined, or can their actions change what they saw?

The central character is Joseph Fiennes, an FBI agent who is assigned to figure out if the event was a terrorist attack of some sort. His wife, Sonya Walger, sees herself living with another man whom she doesn't recognize (though we see him at the end of the first episode). Fiennes' work partner, John Cho, is understandably upset that he saw nothing during the blackout: does that mean he'll be dead in six months? And so on. One thing I like is that the layout of the show isn't clear or predictable yet: each week, will they delve into different people's stories? Or will it center on this small group of characters? In other words, will it be a detective show or a soap opera? Or, wonder of wonders, will it be something, in the words of Monty Python, completely different? The production values are high, the acting is good (Broadway star Brian F. O'Byrne plays Fiennes AA sponsor), and the first episode was intriguing enough to make me come back for more.

The only other shows I'm still watching regularly are all clustered on Mondays: Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Castle, and with Don still watching Heroes, our DVR must remain in good working order. This week, we're dipping in and out of the latest Ken Burns' opus on PBS about the National Parks; it's beautiful and it makes me want to visit one of the parks, but as usual with Burns, it's too long and a bit too pretentious at times. Otherwise, it's just Jeopardy, Daily Show, Colbert, and Turner Classic Movies. I miss those Fall Preview days...