Wed, 21 Oct 2009

Fall 2009 TV: Sunday

Sunday! Funny cars! Walnut! Okay, enough with the obscure in-jokes, time to start the actual reviews. I'll start with the traditional Western "first day of the week", Sunday. And since it's fall, I'll leave off with all the summer series, the basic-cable gems like The Closer, Burn Notice, Leverage, and so on, until they start up again in a few months. For now, it's just primetime broadcast stuff.

Sunday has apparently been a graveyard for TV schedules, where you put things that have a life of their own and don't need any help demographically. I won't pretend to understand the ins and outs of TV program scedules, but looking at the current Sunday lineup, I see reality shows, football, Fox's animation block, and a few actual "shows", things with plots and characters and so on. I'm not a football fan, and I make it a practice to avoid reality shows, which separates me from about 90% of the viewing public, so I really find very little to watch on Sundays.

I've never gotten into ABC's Desperate Housewives, being in a frame of mind that wouldn't let me enjoy it when it premiered and having pretty much avoided it ever since. And while I understand that their Brothers and Sisters is quite good, and I see that it has several actors whom I've liked in the past, I managed to stay unaware of it until recently, and am not about to pick it up now.

Which leaves me with just two dramas, both on CBS, one new and one returning.

Three Rivers is a new medical drama that just started this fall. It was pretty heavily promoted before its premiere, and I was all prepared from the ads to hate it. It was depicted as a soapy heartstring tugger, with all sorts of teary goodfeelings and weepy tragedy, exactly the kind of show I can do without, so I didn't make any effort to catch the pilot. But it comes on right before Cold Case, which I do watch, so I managed to catch the second episode.

And was pleasantly surprised. Maybe this second ep is an aberration, but I really liked it. Not at all maudlin, lots of tension, had me rooting for the players at several points, and was enough to convince me to give it another look next week. It's mainly about organ transplants, which is not something you'd ordinarily think of as good primetime TV fodder, but I did enjoy the way they managed to work in the viewpoints of the donors, the recipients, and the doctors all at once. I'll have more to say about it after I've seen a few more eps, but right now I'm positive about it. I'll give it a high "B".

Cold Case is entering its seventh season, and long may it reign. This is a show I started watching with its very first episode back in 2003, and have loved ever since. It is the very definition of a "formula" show, as rigid and stylized as Kabuki theater. And I should hasten to add, I know nothing about Kabuki, never seen it, never read about it, but it is the customary thing people use as an example of something that follows formal predefined patterns, so I cannot break from that tradition.

And within its formula, Cold Case manages to entertain and enthrall me time and time again. It doesn't hurt that I have a huge crush on Kathryn Morris, and enjoy watching all of the principals in action, but there's something more to it. It's nearly always done exactly the same way: Show a brief scene of the original victim, then switch to the present day and show the squad finding out something that draws them to the case to re-open it. Chase a lead, question them, flashback, rinse, repeat. The credits reflect this invariant structure: "Johnny (1966); Johnny (2009)". And they always do a fine job of finding actors to depict the "then" and "now" versions of the characters. I guess part of why I like it is that I love history, and each episode feels a little like a scrap of history, usually fictional though it is. I like the music, the production values are perfect for the show's needs, and I'll keep watching it until they decide to stop making it. Kudos to Meredith Stiehm and her crew for bringing us this jewel.

They've tried occasionally to bring some depth to the characters by showing some of their personal lives outside the job. On some shows that's vital, on others it's the death of the show. Cold Case does it, but doesn't get too pushy about it. I do get uncomfortable when Lily has men in her life, but that's just my own prejudices. She's a grown healthy woman and deserves to find love; my image of her as some sort of virginal goddess is just foolishness. I will admit, when I saw her playing a very bad girl in the movie Paycheck it just about broke my heart, but after enough episodes of Cold Case I was able to see her as Lily again, so that was okay.

So this has been an "A+" show for me ever since its premiere, and I don't know what I'll do if/when they end it.

Fox Animation shows round out the Sunday schedule, with the venerable The Simpsons, and Seth MacFarlane's trio of Family Guy, American Dad, and newcomer The Cleveland Show. I used to watch Simpsons religiously, starting with the short clips interspersed in The Tracy Ullman Show in the late 80s. Eventually, I started missing eps, and found that didn't bother me too much, and now pretty much all I watch are the Halloween specials, which are still quite a hoot. I gave each of MacFarlane's shows a shot when they first came out, and honestly, I really never cared for any of them—he has quite a bit of talent, and can put together a funny scene, but he has some sort of sensibility that I don't share.

Early on during the first run of Family Guy, for example, Peter hurts his leg, and spends the next forty-five seconds grabbing at it and expressing his pain. Made me distinctly uncomfortable after the first few seconds, and I later read on the Internet that that was the joke. Oh really? Whatever was supposed to be funny about that eluded me, and apparently a lot of other people, and yet that very sort of thing is what cemented it as a classic in a lot of other people's minds. So, good for them, they have something they enjoy.

I still watch each of them occasionally, even made sure to catch the pilot of Cleveland, but they're really not on my list of regular fare. I will admit, this season's premiere of Simpsons, where Homer gets cast as a movie superhero, was fairly cute, and that of Family Guy, another one of their "road movie" eps, was pretty darned good, as are all the road-movie eps, but after that they slumped back into mediocrity. I'm afraid I have to give all four shows a "C", with occasional flashes of "A" in there sometimes.

So that's fall primetime Sunday. Next up, Monday, one of my favorite TV-watching days of all!

Posted at: 06:04 | category: /Reviews | Comments (0)