The concept of a fall television season is
pretty outdated by now, given that new shows debut nearly every month on one
platform or another. Streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime just throw
things out there whenever they please; cable networks have never seemed to have
defined seasons; and even the old broadcast networks have fall, winter, summer
and “limited run” shows. It’s downright confusing for a child of the
rabbit-ears generation like me.
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| Wow, Mom and Dad--it's the Fall TV Season! |
But, okay, right now we have a treasure-trove
of new stuff to look at: new shows, old shows coming back with new episodes,
beloved canceled shows moving to new platforms. There is much too much content
for me to cover it all with a blog post; I recommend a subscription to TV Guide to keep up with everything. I
do have a few observations, however.
1) Some great shows have been saved from
cancelation by the streaming services. Lucifer,
starring Tom Ellis, a light-hearted paranormal crime dramedy, was picked up by
Netflix when Fox canceled it. I was cheering, because I love the characters in
this story of the sexy Devil who quits his “job” in Hell and sets up in a
nightclub in L.A., then falls for a detective in the LAPD. Word on the street
is that Star Trek star William Shatner
helped save this show by tweeting his support to his millions of Twitter
followers.
Our Spacefreighters favorite,The Expanse, was similarly plucked out
of the Syfy Channel discard file by Amazon Prime after a fan campaign. It’s
almost enough for me to buy that Prime contract, though I’ve been resisting all
these years.
2) Manifest,
another paranormal drama built along the lines of Lost orThe 4400, debuted
this week on NBC. A commercial airliner disappears on a routine flight from Jamaica
to New York, then reappears five years later. The people aboard haven’t aged a
day; to them, no time has passed, they’ve just gone through a little
turbulence. Their readjustment to daily life is complicated not only by what
has happened in the time they’ve been gone, but by the fact they’ve acquired
supernatural abilities in the meantime.
The first episode was intriguing in a
variety of ways, and not nearly as headache-inducing as Lost. The show definitely has a religious or spiritual vibe, though;
I found that interesting, but some may find it off-putting.
3) Speaking of Lost, a new show about a maverick hospital administrator seeking to
make sweeping changes in the way health care is delivered at a big public
hospital in the city describes New
Amsterdam, on NBC. I’m a sucker for medical shows, so I tuned in, only to
be so confused I had to turn to my iPad for clarification.
The star of the show is Ryan Eggold (formerly of The Blacklist):
Could he be the long “lost” brother of Matthew
Fox, star of “Lost?”:
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| Matthew Fox, actor best known for Lost |
Weird, right? Not that I would kick either one of them out of bed for eating crackers, as my mama used to say.
4) The best medical show on television is
still ABC’s The Good Doctor, starring
Freddie Highmore (Bates Motel), the
story of an autistic surgical resident with genius-level med skills and almost
no people skills. Highmore is brilliant as Dr. Shaun Murphy, and his supporting
cast stretches to come up to his level. Lisa Edelstein (House) joins the cast as the oncologist treating the brain tumor
affecting Dr. Murphy’s mentor, Dr. Glassman (Richard Schiff). If you aren’t
watching this show, start now.
5) Science fiction has cresting on
television for a couple of years now, but it appears that wave has receded. No
new shows have made the list (unless you count Manifest, which I wouldn’t, really.) Many have been canceled or
shunted to streaming services. The hot trend is “emotional family” stuff,
following the success of This Is Us (A
Million Little Things), heavy crime drama with an anti-terrorist twist (FBI, based on the success of SEAL Team, Blindspot and Quantico), or reality TV (too many
shows to mention).
The top 20 most popular shows are absolutely dominated by “unscripted”
shows—talent competitions, football, “bachelor/bachelorette” crap, game shows.
The only breakthroughs are aging comedies (Big
Bang Theory, and its spinoff, Young
Sheldon) and, rarely, a few episodes of the shows I mentioned.
My advice? Don’t look for a career as a
television writer, especially if you write SFR.
Cheers, Donna
I thought Nightflyers (a new Scifi series based on George R.R. Martin's novella) was supposed to premier on SyFy this fall, but I may be mistaken or they might have pushed it back. They were advertising it during Game of Thrones episodes, so it's been awhile.
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