Las Vegas Weekly

Checking in on the fall’s new shows

Community

As the new TV season heads into its third month, only one new show (The CW’s The Beautiful Life: TBL) has been canceled, but while several have been picked up for full seasons, the only real hit that has emerged is CBS’ carbon copy of one of its staid franchises (NCIS: Los Angeles). For the most part, shows have garnered more buzz than ratings, and pilots that seemed encouraging have developed into series not nearly as entertaining.

What to me was the most promising show of the season, Flash Forward (ABC, Thursdays, 8 p.m.), has turned out to be a huge disappointment, with uninteresting one-dimensional characters, flat dialogue and lax plotting. The complex sci-fi show, in which the entire world’s population blacks out for two minutes and experiences a vision of six months into the future, has been hyped up as ABC’s next Lost, but it lacks the mystical intrigue, fascinating characters and sheer excitement of that show. Each episode so far has ended with a great cliffhanger—that’s then botched by the follow-through. Maybe just tuning in for the final two minutes of each episode is the way to go.

Flash Forward

Also turning out to be a disappointment is Glee (Fox, Wednesdays, 9 p.m.), the off-the-wall musical/comedy/teen drama hybrid from Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy. The pilot that aired back in May promised a freewheeling mix of dark comedy, high-school satire, old-fashioned production numbers and heartfelt sentiment. The subsequent episodes have featured all of that, but jumbled into such a mess that it’s hard to tell where the show is going from one moment to the next. The plot barrels ahead at an insane pace, with huge events introduced, resolved and forgotten within one episode, and the characters are completely inconsistent. The musical numbers are still unique and mostly great, and Jane Lynch is hilarious as the sociopathic cheerleading coach, but everything around them is falling apart.

Glee

On the comedy front, a couple of sitcoms have turned out to be reliable if not outstanding. Community (NBC, Thursdays, 8 p.m.) gets by on snarky humor and a solid ensemble, including The Soup host Joel McHale as a shady lawyer stuck back in community college after his credentials are deemed invalid, plus an effective comeback from Chevy Chase as one of the fellow students. It’s a little too lesson-learny at times, but makes up for it with rapid-fire jokes and funny characters.

Cougar Town

Cougar Town (ABC, Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m.) is the highlight of ABC’s new Wednesday-night comedy block, and while it’s not always hilarious, it is sharp and insightful about the perils of aging for both women (particularly Courteney Cox’s divorced mother) and men, and doesn’t handle sex or marriage or friendship in cutesy or clichéd ways. The far more critically acclaimed Modern Family (ABC, Wednesdays, 9 p.m.), despite its mockumentary format, does traffic in all sorts of boring family-sitcom clichés, and is consistently contrived and extremely hokey.

Of course, the real hits are not about singing high-schoolers or sexy cougars, but good old cops and lawyers. Aside from NCIS: LA, the season’s most popular new show is The Good Wife (CBS, Tuesdays, 10 p.m.), a slightly more nuanced version of the network’s standard procedural. Julianna Margulies is solid as a woman who returns to practicing law after her politician husband is caught fooling around with hookers and sent to prison. The situation has rich potential, but so far the show has been more interested in boilerplate court cases than character development. Naturally, it’s a big success.

Flash Forward, Glee, Cougar Town, Modern Family and The Good Wife have all been picked up for full seasons, and you can catch up with past episodes of all these shows at Hulu and their respective networks’ websites. But you might be better off waiting for DVD.