Fox

I Wanna Marry Harry Is The Epitome of Trash TV

I Wanna Marry Harry: Tuesdays at 9 Eastern on Fox

One of the perks of this Olympics-distorted television season is that the schedules became scrambled to the point where the late spring/early summer dumping ground was somewhat diffuse (many networks ran their six and eight episode pickups back in the winter) compared to previous years. This means that inexplicably enough, the last time the schedule was so sparse that I was looking at something that had potential to be pure dreck was three long months ago. Luckily, the fine folks at Fox returned to their classic trash TV sensibilities with Tuesday night’s offering.

I Wanna Marry Harry comes from the same formula of reality shows that brought us The Joe Schmo Show and Joe Millionaire a decade ago: find some willing marks, mislead them, and throw them on TV for their confusion and our entertainment. This time around, the con involves confusing twelve American women that they are being flown to England to compete for the heart of British royalty. However, this Harry is a commoner whom merely happens to resemble Prince Harry.

So my first and foremost impression? I Wanna Marry Harry is the most painfully mean-spirited show I’ve seen in a while. We never really get to see the positive aspects of any of our suitors, who are all portrayed universally as ditzy party girls with no real depth and a bunch of gold-digging tendencies. Our fake “Harry” is introduced in a montage that involves him being completely inept at playing the role or on the verge of a nervous breakdown at the idea of having to deceive these suitors (about the only thing he gets right is the con artistry).

The reason that much of the show feels so mean-spirited, is that when it doesn’t feel mean, it instead feels empty and vapid. Much of the conversation between the girls is reduced to mildly catty discussion, when they aren’t trying to jam the word “Prince”, “Harry” or “Fairy Tale” into every last sentence uttered on the show. This extends out to the show’s filler, which often focuses on slow-motion walks or unmaskings of people whom we already know the identity of (They devoted a full minute to the twelve contestants unmasking, cutting to an ad break for “Harry’s” unmasking).

Equally frustrating is the basic execution of some simple aspects of I Wanna Marry Harry. There are poorly lit cutaways, the transition shot is often little more than a dizzying pan across the top floor of the castle, and there are times where it felt like the show clearly blended two different confessional interviews into one sound bite (each cutaway had the suitor in question wearing something different and with a different hairstyle). In many ways it felt like the show spent all of it’s money on the accouterments to try and fool the girls, because the difference between the level of detail at the set and what the viewer sees at home is stark.

The Final Verdict: There are so many things wrong with I Wanna Marry Harry, but I think the simplest way to describe it is as this: it goes to these elaborate lengths to try and fool it’s bachelorettes, but comes off very slipshod in how it presents the show to it’s viewers. It hides it’s vapidness with meanness and it tries to make it’s con man it’s sympathetic character. Skip this one, it adds literally nothing to a sub-genre of shows that were played out a decade ago.

Checking in at Mid-Season: Fox and NBC

by Michael Tyminski

Source: Wikipedia

After a quick glance over at Netflix for some new House of Cards, let’s resume our mid-season look at the state of TV. Today we’ll be examining Fox and NBC, and we’ll wrap this series up with some thoughts on other places around the dial later in the week.

Fox: In the last couple of years (and in an even more pronounced fashion this year), Fox has seemed to turn into NBC of the mid-2000’s: A network with a ton of critically acclaimed shows that no one really happens to be watching. This is a shame for a number of reasons, the most notable of which is that it seems to be putting out consistently better shows than the other major networks.

What’s Working: It’s been a strong season in terms of debuts for Fox. Sleepy Hollow became a sleeper hit right off the bat and Brooklyn Nine-Nine took home a pair of Golden Globes. Even their B-tier debuts, like Enlisted (a show that really needs to find it’s way to Tuesdays as soon as possible because it truly deserves a larger audience). Fox has also managed to find a Tuesday comedy lineup that is Fox’s strongest ever (Dads excluded).

Finally, Fox still finds strength in the perpetual motion machine that is it’s Sunday night block. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers all saw renewals in the fall and American Dad will find a second life on TBS, as no conglomerate loves their Seth McFarlane reruns quite like the folks at Turner.

What’s Not Working: First and foremost, Dads was a total train wreck despite the network putting a ton of effort into advertising it, a pretty star studded main cast, and giving it the lead-off slot in said Tuesday comedy lineup. However, Fox’s real problem is actually the opposite of CBS: It’s older shows seem to be tailing off. This is particularly notable on Wednesday and Thursday, as The X-Factor met it’s maker earlier this month, while American Idol now lacks the cache it used to have as a TV powerhouse.

Another problem Fox did not see coming was the nosedive in the ratings The Following took. This is an issue as one could probably guess that The Following is one of Fox’s most expensive shows, yet it’s ratings have been on a downward trajectory from minute one this season as the show’s writing has only gotten worse over time.

Overall Prognosis: Fox is actually in a pretty decent place for the future and could very easily carry the next decade or so under Kevin Reilly’s leadership when the rest of TV reality comes crashing in on CBS and many of it’s flagship shows age out. Additionally, it’s the network least affected by CBS’s Thursday Night Football deal, as Fox’s schedule has been regularly disrupted for over a decade now courtesy of the MLB playoffs, so all it takes is some mild shuffling and a reserving the now open Thursdays (due to the end of the X-Factor) as it’s designated big November premiere night.

NBC: This year seems to be the year that NBC slowly corrected their ship. They’ve figured out how to leverage their trademark properties best, and the one-two punch of Sunday Night Football and The Voice are not only keeping them afloat, but helping to ensure the network doesn’t always stay a punchline.

What’s Working: I mentioned this before in the open but because they are so central to the network’s success, let me reiterate them again: football and The Voice. Almost everything the network does right comes from those two spokes, and unsurprisingly, the further away you get from them the weaker the schedule looks. NBC also managed to find a hit drama in the form of The Blacklist.

NBC has also quietly steadied the ship on Wednesday nights with Dick Wolf coming to the rescue and a strong block of cop procedurals from 9 to 11. Revolution’s survival is still a toss up, but considering the amount of effort the network is going to have to put into fixing Thursday it would require an insanely strong new drama to unseat it.

Finally, NBC has figured out another way to expand an event lineup that currently tends to be very sports-centric: The return of the musical special. The Sound of Music Live! pulled in an astronomical amount of viewers on it’s December 5^th showing, and it’s not implausible to see NBC go to this trick two to three times a year in order to boost ratings.

What’s not working: NBC has done well with The Voice and it’s dramas, but it’s comedy block has fallen into near complete disrepair. After a year in which not a single comedy got picked up for a second season, NBC is perilously close to duplicating that feat for the second year in a row. A large part of this seems to be due to Bob Greenblatt copying the one network even more mismanaged than his: ABC. Family comedies are not working on the peacock, and the complete and utter failures of The Michael J. Fox Show, Sean Saves the World, and Welcome to the Family are certain proof.

NBC is still very low rated all around, and Sundays still seem to be a lost cause when football is not in season, often relying on a mix of Dateline and spackle to fill the lineup. Thursdays are a mess too, (mostly because of the comedy debacle) but I could see a resuscitation if they find two more passable comedies and anchor around Hannibal.

Overall Prognosis: NBC is in a very weird place. For half their lineup, they seem to be doing all the right things, and for the other half the peacock looks like a barren wasteland that seems to only succeed in padding the episode count of Community and Parks and Recreation (I like both of those shows but it says a lot about NBC’s ability to develop comedies in a post 30 Rock, post Office world that the two shows the network keeps trying to kill keep living on).

Next Time: We hop around the dial, looking at the CW and anything on cable worth my attention.

Rake Is The Strongest Show of A Weak January

by Michael Tyminski

Rake: Thursdays at 9 Eastern on FOX

It’s been a pretty dismal January for the big four, with unhealthy amounts of mediocrity being strewn around the major networks. I think that a large part of this is that shows that seem like they would traditionally drop in mid to late spring (such as the eight episode The Assets and Killer Women) are being thrown under the Olympic bus in favor for a packed slate of late February and early March debuts. The one network that has seemed to buck this trend is Fox, which put out the surprisingly good Enlisted (it kills me a little inside that Dads is still leading into Brooklyn Nine-Nine over this) and seems to put a lot of ad time (doubly so if you tend to watch a lot of FoxNOW or Fox on Demand) towards it’s newest legal drama: Rake.

Rake follows criminal defense attorney Keegan Deane (Greg Kinnear), a man seemingly as immoral as the people he defends. Keegan is a womanizer, a habitual gambler (to the extent that he gets a tab from his bookie), and the IRS is going after him for tax evasion. To make matters worse, his ex-wife (to whom he owes alimony) doubles as his therapist. Behind all of that chaos, however, is a brilliant defense attorney willing to take on the cases that no one else has the gumption to take.

Rake is surprisingly funny for a drama, with tons of levity and witty one liners. Almost every character and every scene in the show (up until the climactic arc) is punched up, regardless of whether a scene is supposed to be funny (like Deane and Leanne trying to sell a tuna to a sushi restaurant), sexy (like Deane’s dealings with his prostitute), or dramatic (such as the mayor’s interrogation of his police chief), and lands with it’s jokes more often than not.

Where the show doesn’t work is as a procedural. The pilot seemed to treat it’s case (in which Deene defends a serial killer in what should have been an easy “guilty” plea) as something on the side. Instead we get what seems like a series of anecdotes of Deane’s life being completely out of whack with a little bit of lawyering on the side. These anecdotes however, often also fall flat from a dramatic perspective, as the stakes of Deane’s dysfunctional lifestyle always seem to inexplicably be skirted (such as the beating from Roy he is destined to receive at the end of the episode).

At times it seems like Greg Kinnear is called on to carry the entire show, and Kinnear succeeds in that regard, as the hyper-charismatic Deane. Unfortunately, Rake reduces everyone else to bit-player status, whether it’s his favorite prostitute, his ex-wife, his friend’s wife/housemate, the killer of the week, or Roy (his loan shark’s muscle). Part of this comes from the seemingly disconnected structure of the pilot, as the show spends it’s time bouncing from story to story with even it’s A and B plots often seeing no more than three or four beats over the course of an episode.

The Final Verdict: Rake is immensely entertaining but seems to struggle in finding it’s natural niche, having equal parts personal drama, legal drama, and comedy. The premiere seemed to overemphasize the comedy to a degree, making for a show that often fell into a sort of plot quicksand up until the show’s third act. Despite my seeming negativity, I’d probably recommend checking it out, as it’s up against fairly weak competition (and is strictly funnier than what CBS and NBC are calling comedy in the Thursday 9pm hour) and with some minor tweaks easily become one of the better shows on network TV.

Almost Human Will Grow On You

by Michael Tyminski

Almost Human: Mondays at 8 Eastern on FOX

When I was growing up throughout the 1990’s, one of the more prevalent themes seen throughout pop culture was a generally futuristic vibe, whether it was cyberpunk (The Matrix), 21^st century what-ifs (the much mocked MLB “Turn ahead the clock” promotion), or a pretty large amount of sci-fi on your TV screens (Star Trek: TNG, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Seaquest). However, as the new millennium progressed, many of these things dropped like flies from pop culture consciousness. Fox is banking on the notion that what’s old pretending to be new will be new again by dipping back into that well with it’s newest big show which debuted Sunday and Monday night.

Almost Human takes a look forward into the alarmingly crime-riddled future of 2048. In this world, police work has gotten so incredibly dangerous that the police force is forced to use robotic partners in order to perform their duties. So when John Kennex (Karl Urban) is brought back onto the force two years after getting ambushed by a shadowy crime syndicate, he is forced to adjust and deal with the robots he has learned to loathe after their rationality killed his partner. After killing his first robot partner, he gets paired up with a Dorian model (played by Michael Ealy) who was deemed too human for police work, and the two go off to fight crime in the city.

Courtesy of FOX turning this premiere into a two-night event, I’m taking the opportunity to catch both episodes before putting out this review. More stock will be put into Monday’s episode if only because second episodes tend to be more representative of what the series will resemble episodically as opposed to pilots which tend to devote time to exposition and origin stories.

Almost Human has some bright spots Michael Ealy shines as Dorian, a difficult task considering he has to come off more human than the bland MX units that were later assigned to the cops and still just uncanny enough that it’s clear you’re aware he’s a robot. Continuing a subtle trend this year of comedic actors occupying the science labs of our new crime shows Mackenzie Crook (The Office UK) gets the privilege of being a perfect fit as the very socially-awkward Rudy, the resident’s lab technician. Unfortunately, many of the other peripheral characters seem to get short shrift in terms of story and could use some further development.

I also appreciated that in a TV landscape full of cop and detective shows, Almost Human sets itself apart by being closer to Die Hard and Lethal Weapon as opposed to functioning like yet another Law and Order or CSI clone. The action sequences themselves are pretty cool looking, using tight camera angles and wide open palate to maximum effect.

Where the second episode truly seems to benefit over the pilot is that the show added moments of levity to counterbalance the grimness that pervades much of the series. The show definitely borrows a lot from the Blade Runner universe, with it’s seedy city underbellies, pervasive crime, and generally dystopian balance of power.. The pilot did it’s job unloading the ton of exposition that is essential for world-building fantasy worlds, but got a little dull at points and definitely would have lost my attention had the same ultra-serious tone remained for the full series.

The Final Verdict: Once you get past the wall of exposition and stereotypical hero origin-story pilot, Almost Human turns the corner into a refreshing different take on the cop drama with it’s shoot first- ask questions later mentality. While there are some obvious tweaks the show could use (most notably in developing it’s side characters and making Kennex a little less one-dimensional), there’s enough good in the first two episodes to justify Fox’s hype. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for an action fix on Mondays, a night where only Fox really has cop dramas on the broadcast dial.

Fall Premieres Bring Mixed Results To The Big 4

by Michael Tyminski

With fall premieres winding down (we’re down to the CW’s Reign, NBC’s Dracula, and whatever FOX has saved for after baseball), let’s take a moment and see how the major networks fared in a fall where every network (even CBS had question marks).

So how did the major networks fare this fall? Well it was mixed to say the least with each network having some success on their schedule, but also with a number of unanswered question marks in the schedule remaining that way, this will become quite apparent as we break things down network by network.

ABC: ABC seemed to have one of the more ambitious strategies for the new fall season, blowing up it’s Dancing with the Stars and Extreme Makeover Tuesdays in order to pave the way for new scripted material. The anchor show on that night, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been a success, holding down the number three drama slot in the ratings. The rest of the night, however, has been an unmitigated disaster with the comedy hour struggling, and Lucky 7 registering so nonexistently on everyone’s radar that the show got the dubious honor of being the first show axed of the year (two episodes in, typically reserved for the Do No Harms of the world). I wonder if part of this is scheduling related, as it seems weird to pair up a show that will likely do well with males 18-49 with a two family comedies and a slice of life drama and expect audiences to stay from your massively hyped lead in. Elsewhere on the schedule, ABC has had a number of flops including Once Upon A Time in Wonderland (doing horribly in the ratings) and Super Fun Night.

CBS: The last remaining network juggernaut maintains that position for another year, and does so again on the back of it’s veteran series. However, it too struggled with it’s newer offerings (almost all of which were comedies this year). We Are Men also received a two-and-out, The Crazy Ones is bleeding viewers week to week, and Mom’s numbers have not been particularly successful. There has been one new success story for CBS, however, and it comes in the form of the Will Arnett vehicle The Millers, which takes full advantage of its’ Big Bang Theory lead in. While the Tiffany network seems in very strong shape in the short term, it can not be pleased with its’ long term picture.

FOX: Fox continues what seems to be a major trend across all four networks this year: success on the drama front, with serious questions on the comedy side of the schedule. While Sundays continue to chug along with the Animation Domination block, we can already see that Seth McFarlane’s cache is starting to run out of steam with the network. American Dad is being scuttled off to TBS, The Cleveland Show saw the cancellation ax last year, and his new offering Dads feels like an unmitigated disaster. Unfortunately, that poison has run all the way through Fox’s Tuesday comedy block, as freshman Brooklyn Nine-Nine and sophomore The Mindy Project both also have sagging ratings on Tuesdays (this is a shame, as I particularly like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and feel it got hurt by drawing Agents as direct competition). However, Fox has succeeded in shoring up its’ dramas, adding Sleepy Hollow as a success story as it has already been renewed for a second season (no back-order however in order to make room for The Following).

NBC: Last year, NBC looked for success by following a strong two prong strategy: using The Voice to set up successful dramas, and making it’s comedy as lifeless and watered down as possible in order to reboot the line-up. The drama prong, succeeded, while the comedy side ended with every new show getting canceled and the network relying on decidedly not generic Community and Parks and Recreation to hold the fort for another year. This year, they went back to the same well– with the same results. The Blacklist, which followed The Voice on Mondays scored the first back-order of the year while the comedy block is once again in shambles. Parks and Recreation, thrown to the wolves against the Big Bang Goliath is down in the ratings, while The Michael J. Fox show is the only other show averaging above a 1.0. The biggest hole however, is at 8:30, where Welcome to the Family failed to be welcomed into America’s homes and is effectively on death watch until NBC can pull Community (which has quickly turned into NBC’s Rules of Engagement as a show that solely gets renewed to plug holes) from the bench to stabilize ratings. Regardless, after the past two years, I wouldn’t be surprised to see NBC try something new next year, possibly swapping it’s comedy Thursday with it’s drama Wednesday to hold the fort, because this is not a sustainable business model for the peacock.

The CW: It seems weird that the network I have to most to say positively about is the CW. While this may in fact be because they do not have a single comedy on their fall schedule (did I mention this has been a particularly atrocious year for comedy?), I think it’s predominantly because they know what they’re aiming for and one of the stronger premieres of the season in The Tomorrow People. Their other big debut, Reign hits Thursday (i’ll be reviewing it here at Manhattan Digest, likely will be up Friday afternoon), so theoretically the CW gets an incomplete, but is already miles ahead of where they were last spring when they stuck us with Cult.

Dads Might Be the Worst New Show of the Season

by Michael Tyminski

Dads: Tuesdays at 8 p.m. On FOX

Normally, when I look at a show, I open with a little context about the TV landscape it’s coming into. I do this normally to give not only a little context, but to highlight trends in new TV so you know what’s competing for the eyeballs and attention of a given market segment (there’s a lot of TV out there and precious little time after all. While this show is one of many comedies built this year around adults and their parents cohabiting as the end result of a stagnant economy, (and I’ll discuss this more next week when I look at CBS’s Mom) I think the best place to start any discussion of Fox’s new sitcom Dads is with the negative buzz that has surrounded this show.

Simply put, many of the critics who have seen advance screenings of Dads have found the show to be complete and utter dreck, both unfunny and morally reprehensible (particularly in matters of race, but I defy you to find a Seth McFarlane show that believes in holding back). Fox in turn, has started an ad campaign telling America to ignore these fine people who get paid to watch TV and to watch their controversial new show. Needless to say, for the purposes of this one show, with as much vigor as I try to answer the question “Should I watch this show?”, I’m also going to try to answer “Did this show deserve the heat it got from critics in screenings?” (By the way, I feel like some marketing guy at Fox is going to completely take that last question out of context).

That being said, Dads follows the lives of two best friends: Warner, played by Giovani Ribisi and Eli , played by the hardest working man in McFarland: Seth Green. Their lives are simple and straight forward until their dads, played by Martin Mull and Peter Reigert unexpectedly move in. From there, hilarious hijinks ensue as generations clash under one roof!

So, is it as bad as those who got to screen this at the TCA’s claim it is? In one word: Yes, just yes. Dads is the sort of tired, hacky, TV that takes the worst elements of every sitcom you’ve ever seen and churned them into a blender of pure unfunny the likes of which I’ve never seen. Warner and Eli’s dynamic is ripped straight from The Odd Couple without any of the heart. The jokes, are hacky, cliché, and stretched past the point of any credibility, and delivered with excessive mugging and an almost playground bully-esque cadence (seriously, try plugging in “Smooth Moves, Ex-Lax into any line delivered by any lead in the show, and you’ll probably laugh harder). Making matters worse is the omnipresent laugh track that laughs at every. single. line. The end result is the sort of show that looks and feels like a sketch from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, down to the very cringing you’ll be doing while watching it.

As for the racism and sexism, it’s not nearly as atrocious as people hype it up to be, but the fact that they went for the most base, lowbrow, and least innovative way to address the topic is revolting. Worse yet, any potential irony or opportunity to leverage the joke as a function of someone’s ignorance is erased by the (even more moronic) laugh track. With no seeming hypocrisy, subtlety, or even something as simple as a generational divide (a golden example in using the mechanism of turning the joke back on the oppressor is Pierce Hawthorne) the race jokes feel empty and more like cheap shots than they probably would anywhere else, particularly when it is established immediately that our younger leads are no more enlightened than their fathers on the topic. The end result are jokes that are more like **ha ha, [insert group here]**, which is the sort of sensibility that leads to this sort of sociological criticism of Dads, even if the jokes themselves seem way too dumb and unfunny to actually do real damage.

The Final Verdict: Dads is the sort of show that seems like it would show up inside another show as a parody of a cliché, trite show. It definitely takes a sloppy hand with the racial humor and sexist humor, but it’s not nearly as morally reprehensible or mean spirited as it was initially perceived– just mind numbingly ignorant. Skip at all costs, this show is the sort of soul crushing utter garbage that should it ever get a fan base, they will be about as reviled as Juggalos.

Next Time: This Sunday is the Emmy Awards! I’ll be here on Manhattan providing live coverage!

Sleepy Hollow Is Fun If You Just Stop Thinking

by Michael Tyminski

Sleepy Hollow: Mondays at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Fox

After a couple of weeks of false starts and some minor premieres on cable, the fall premiere season kicks into full gear tonight. First up is some new television from Fox, who provides us with an offering that jumbles up period pieces and modern crime dramas in it’s newest show: Sleepy Hollow.

Sleepy Hollow mostly takes place in the present day, when law enforcement resurrects Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) in order to help solve mysteries in the titular town on the Hudson that are believed to have a supernatural bent (due to a certain Headless Horseman). He is teamed up with current cop, Abbie Mills (Nicole Beharie) who also happens to have personal experiences with the paranormal. During these mysteries, we flash back in time to look in on 1776, where the horsemen is believed to have come from and learn more about Crane’s past including his wife Katrina (Katia Winter).

So how is this new offering? Well uneven (as one would expect from a pilot of a fairly complicated drama) on every account. Visually, the show looks pretty good, with the Headless Horseman being suitably intimidating, and opening on a pretty awesome revolutionary war battle scene. However, for every scene that looks awesome, we get hokey special effects, such as the obviously wax modeled sheriff’s head and the background effects during Ichabod’s dream sequence. Finally, I hope you love the fish eye lens, because this show is completely infatuated with it.

This unevenness also affects the writing. While the show tends to master keeping it’s exposition brief, to the point, and in a manner that doesn’t feel redundant (not like it truly can because this is decidedly NOT Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane), it also tends to float all over the place in a manner that will leave you scratching your head. For example, there was one point where a priest that we at that point twice in passing is dueling with our headless horseman in a manner that would be more befitting of Harry Potter or Dragon Ball Z than modern day Hudson Valley monsignor vs. supernatural being of death incarnate. Similar logic seems to make one question the major mid-episode twist that Lt. Mills could have a complete demon launched nervous breakdown and be well adjusted enough to pass not only a local police but FBI psychological exam.

Speaking of Mills, she is however the sort of protagonist that we do not see enough of on TV, being a strong female who does not devolve into a caricature, with bonus kudos to Beharie’s performance, which sanded down some potential rough edges of the character (as cop banter potentially could play into some unfortunate consequences). Orlando Jordan does a surprisingly strong job playing the no-nonsense police captain, while John Cho’s minor character Officer Brooks being equally entertaining (especially in the closing moments). Really the only character, I thought was off was Crane, whom aside from being really dissonant from the traditional version seemed really hammy at points, especially early on.

The Final Verdict: Sleepy Hollow is an incredibly uneven show, however, that doesn’t show the whole picture. What Sleepy Hollow is in actuality is the sort of show that becomes exponentially better if you’re willing to turn your brain off for an hour, sit back, and let the ridiculousness watch over you while the headless horseman runs around with a machine gun and Ichabod Crane is less nebbish professor and more revolutionary war bad ass who happens to have a cute witch wife and runs around sounding like Dr. Orpheus. Check it out if you can turn your brain off, but if you’re the sort of person whose going to worry about things like logic and consistency wait and see.

Fall Preview: FOX

by Michael Tyminski

Source: Wikipedia

Last Season: Last season was a mess for Fox, having suffered massive ratings erosion, particularly in it’s key demographic of 18-49 year olds. The network managed to fall back into a tie with ABC for second place overall, a particularly bad sign for a network that up until a couple of years ago had most of the hottest properties on TV.

This Season: Fox seems intent on staying the course all around, not taking many risks in particular, and the end result is a schedule that seems blocked out exactly the same as last year.

The X-Factor (9/17 and 9/18) continues to dominate the scheduling, maintaining it’s three hours of Fox’s primetime a week, taking up the entire Wednesday slate (Fox only schedules two hours of prime-time on weeknights) as well as the first hour of it’s Thursday run. As with last year, we see the results hour of Fox’s singing shows followed up by veteran comedy Glee, which faces stiff competition from the other major network’s offerings.

Even it’s newer shows tend to hew the course to Fox’s typical offerings, as it’s MasterChef gets a spin-off in the form of MasterChef Juniors which will air on Friday nights starting September 20th. This lineup will get bolstered by the returningRaising Hope and the family/Military comedy Enlisted after the World Series.

Speaking of comedies, Tuesday remains Fox’s big comedy night, pairing tentpole New Girl, and returning The Mindy Project with Andy Samberg vehicle Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Seth McFarlane’s newest project Dads, which if reviews for the pilot are correct, clearly was done as an act of appeasement for canceling The Cleveland Show. This lineup debuts on September 17^th.

Mondays remain the primary drama night for Fox, and it is the home to Fox’s most hyped new show: Sleepy Hollow (9/16). The thriller will be paired with veteran procedural Bones (9/16) for it’s initial push until fellow fantasy show Almost Human debuts in November.

Additionally, Fox stays the course with it’s dominant Sunday Animation Domination lineup, which debuts on 9/29. No real changes to this night, as we continue to see the lineup of The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, and (the likely best of the four) Bob’s Burgers. My guess is we’ll see repeats of those shows on the weeks that football ends early or your market only receives a 1pm game.

Fox tends to be affected more by sports in the fall than other networks due to its’ coverage of the MLB playoffs, it’s NFL football coverage (which creeps later than CBS’s as a general rule) and its’ College Football package that airs Saturday nights. This means that as usual, we can expect Fox to hold back a couple of shows until November, and this year it does that with dramas Almost Human (11/4) and Enlisted (11/8).

Tomorrow: NBC had a lot of changes it had to make coming into this year, how did it fare?

Fox’s New Block Will Rock Your Socks Off

by Michael Tyminski

Axe Cop/High School USA – 11:00pm and 11:15pm Eastern Saturday Nights on FOX

It’s been a couple of years since Saturday Night Live has had any credible competition in the Saturday late-night time slot. The network that feels the most comfortable filling that void, oddly enough has been Fox, a network that runs less prime time than other networks and with the exception of sports programming avoids all other hours at all costs. While Fox’s last attempt at this slot fought fire with fire in the long running and painfully unfunny sketch comedy MadTV, it’s newest late-night strategy instead seems lifted from the Adult Swim playbook, putting two 15-minute animated shows into one half hour.

The first show in this block, Axe Cop, is derived from a web-comic of the same name written by Ethan Nicolle. The series follows the adventures of the titular Axe Cop (voiced by Nick Offerman) and his partner in crime-fighting Flute Cop (voiced by The State alum Ken Marino), as they deal with otherworldly issues that fall outside of the line of standard issue police work.

The second, High School USA!, is the latest creation from Morel Orel creator and Community writer, Dino Stamatopoulos. It follows a group of cheery young Millenials through the standard high school experience, if your high school was full of the hypersensitive types that say “Totally!” a lot.

Seeing how these shows are half-length in nature, I’m going to do away with a plot synopsis and do something similar to what I did with The Following and aim for quick thoughts on both new shows.

Axe Cop: This show is hilarious, in large part because of it’s juxtapositions. This is both because it routinely mixes mundane with AWESOME! (A key plot point of our first episode involves the costs of renting a dinosaur horn and Axe Cop trying to avoid late fees). This conflation is possible because it mixes the storytelling of a five year old (Nicolle’s grade school aged brother writes the major arcs) with references no five year old should ever get and some comically hypocritical humor. Additionally, the voice cast does an excellent job selling the fact that a five year old is telling a story without going into intentional bad acting mode.

High School USA! This show exhibits a lot of traits with it’s predecessor, though while Morel Orel ripped apart fundamentalism, High School USA sends up the modern day high school experience. It does so using the same broken Aesops and hypocritical authority figures (the best line in the show comes when the teacher who kicked out a student for bullying mentions that he can “compromise his values for a little music”). While it’s weird to see the Archie meets Happy Days vibe hit a contemporary target, watching Marsh whip up a twisted version of what constitutes bullying through sheer good intentions brings you back into familiar territory for Stamatopoulos.

The Final Verdict: Fox has a winner on its’ hands with it’s new animation block. While not as creatively adventurous, it’s a breath of fresh air to see the manic nature of Adult Swim played out on broadcast TV. Axe Cop in particular espouses this energy, as every time you turn around the show throws another twist at you that is equal parts ridiculous and awesome, but conveys the wonderment of the eight year old who lays out the story arcs. High School USA also exhibits that same energy by fearlessly committing to it’s subversion and satire of surface level morality (which mirror a more real moral about acceptance). Check both out when you have time, whether its from being stuck in on a Saturday night or online at Fox’s new Animation Domination High Def site.

Looking for something to check out this Summer? Try Goodwin Games

by Michael Tyminski

JT Miller, Becky Nelson, and Scott Foley (Source: Wikipedia) — JT Miller, Becky Newton, and Scott Foley (Source: FOX)

The Goodwin Games: Mondays at 8:30 Eastern on FOX

With this week’s final string of season finales on ABC (notably Dancing with the Stars and Modern Family), it is safe to say that we are headed into that vast television wasteland known as the summer season. Acting under the assumption that people are less likely to stay home and watch TV when it’s nice out (and can you blame them?) our benevolent overlords at the big four use this time to bury their cheapest shows and test out what they feel are unproven entities (though admittedly two little comedies you may not have heard of called The Office and Parks and Recreation both had short late spring-early summer seasons). FOX in particular seems to be fond of stretching the TV year (it doesn’t hurt that it has fewer prime-time slots than its’ major network competition) and continues that experiment tonight with it’s newest show, The Goodwin Games.

The Goodwin Games is built around the story of three siblings whom reconvene after the death of their father, only to discover that he had a secret $20 million dollar fortune in his estate. However, their father (played in the pilot by Beau Bridges) has a twist: feeling like he’s made some errors in parenting over the span of his kids’ lives, he has created a number of hoops for his three children to jump through in order to get a piece of the estate.

We open with the passing of Ben (played by Beau Bridges) who died literally moments after finishing his elaborate video will and the reactions of his three children: Smug surgeon Henry (Scott Foley), vain actress Chloe (Becky Newton), and kleptomaniac Jimmy (J.T. Miller). They reunite at the funeral where they run into Henry’s-ex Lucinda. They then are summoned to April (Gabriella Tsang), his executor’s office, where they are introduced to “the game”.

Each key character then splits off, dealing with unsavory remnants of their past, including April and Chloe’s falling out, Henry and Lucinda running into each other at the bar, and Jimmy’s daughter, whom knows everything about Jimmy’s troubles. The next morning they return to the office, only to find out that they are forced to play a game of Trivial Pursuit, where the topics all revolve around their lives, and are introduced to a wild-card named Elijah. After the game ends in an argument, they return to April to find out that Elijah gets a cool million, the kids get 50 bucks, and the rest was being given somewhere else. The kids ultimately go their separate ways, until Chloe makes them play a game of Trivial Pursuit in the bar, only to find that the next step of the game requires them all to move home.

As with most sitcoms, you often have to view shows not only through the lens of a pilot, but what the show could be. Sitcom pilots are often faced to bear the burden of establishing most of the conceit, and the game concept is clearly a very heavy one (the pilots leans very hard on this). However, I could see it’s later episodes not leaning on the game conceit nearly as hard, especially now that the heavy lifting of bringing the three disparate characters together has been done.

When you get to those moments in between the conceit, you get a pretty solid mixture of funny (especially in the flashback cutaways that were commonplace through the pilot) and heartwarming (Jimmy’s relationship with his daughter). Miller in particular steals his scenes as Jimmy, whether through his lack of understanding of subtext and sarcasm, or his apparently chronic kleptomania (he steals April’s pen twice but only gets caught once). Unfortunately, those moments seem cramped tonight (I wonder if they had to shave minutes from the original pilot to get it to fit into 22 minutes for tonight’s premiere), but could increase over time, since most sitcoms tend to lean less on their conceptual structure as time wears on.

Visually and tonally, the show is very much how one would envision a single-camera How I Met Your Mother, which makes complete sense given both shows being created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

The Final Verdict: The Goodwin Games is a fairly refreshing new show to have during a time of the year where television offerings tend to be lacking. While it tends to lean very heavily on its’ conceit in the pilot (as many pilots do), you can see the potential of the show in the very human moments where its’ characters interact. My one fear is that with the very short season order (six episodes) on a network that traditionally has been very quick pulling the plug on struggling shows (FOX) that it may be doomed before it ever gets off the ground (especially since it takes about a half a season before many sitcoms hit their groove. I do recommend checking this one out though if you like How I Met Your Mother as they share the same broad and occasionally bawdy humor.

Fox

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