Everything You Need To Know About This Season’s New Teevee

Now, the networks are horribly pissed off that all their pre-air premiere episodes are leaking onto the intersphere via Bittorrent. (Unofficial motto of mightygodking.com: “it’s not my fault if somebody in your organization leaks shit.”) But their loss is your gain, because now you can figure out if you want to watch these shows before you ever have to check a TV Guide (no longer published, apparently) to figure out when to couch-potate and when to just sleep the blissful sleep of the tele-ignorant.

SHOW: Flash Gordon
CONCEPT: “Let’s take a classic property and remake it on next to no budget!”
STARRING: The boring guy who got fired from Smallville as Flash Gordon, which tells you all you really need to know
WELL?: I gave it about forty minutes before completely giving up on it; this is a show that aggressively underestimates its audience (to the point where they actually explain what the word “portage” means) - but then again, considering this show is the brainchild of Robert Halmi Sr. and Jr. (behind such shitfests as Merlin, The 10th Kingdom and Dinotopia), we should not be surprised. The show is charmless, stupid and uninteresting in just about every way it’s possible for a show to be; it’s not even entertainingly bad, just boring, boring, boring
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You didn’t know what the word “portage” meant

SHOW: Pushing Daisies
CONCEPT: Guy can touch dead people, and bring them back to life - but A) if he touches them again, they die for good; B) if he doesn’t touch them again within sixty seconds, somebody else dies to “take their place”; C) he solves murders for reward money with a private detective buddy by touching dead people and asking them how they died; D) he has brought back his dog to life, so he can’t pet his dog; and E) he’s also brought back his childhood crush and intended soul mate from the dead and can’t touch her either
STARRING: Lee Pace as touching-dead-people guy, Anna Friel as dead (not-dead) soulmate, the always awesome Chi McBride as private detective buddy, Kristin Chenoweth as waitress at the pie shop guy runs
WELL?: There are so many reasons this show should not work: the incredibly contrived backstory and storytelling engine for the show, the fey British narrator pointedly interjecting commentary throughout, the continued use of repetition as a thematic device, the presence of dedicated show-killer Swoosie Kurtz, the generally cutesy tone - but despite all of that, the show works absolutely perfectly. It’s funny, intelligent, charming, and occasionally profound, and I have no idea if they can keep it up for an entire season much less future seasons, and I think it will likely get steamrollered by the network audiences opting to watch CSI or something else that isn’t for all intents and purposes a hour-length weekly fairytale, but for now it’s goddamn good TV
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You enjoy jokes about pie and necrophilia within the same five-minute span

SHOW: Cavemen
CONCEPT: It’s that show based on the Geico commercials where there are cavemen. Also, the cavemen are metaphors for black people. Let me put it this way: they call each other “magger” (and then the uptight caveman says “I hate that word” and the rebellious caveman says “it’s okay when we use it”). This is how clever the writing is
STARRING: A bunch of people you have never heard of and who will fade back into obscurity once this is over
WELL?: I’m not sure which is worse - the fact that racial sensitivity in American entertainment has grown so sharp that in order to talk about even the most basic race issues you have to use cavemen as a metaphor, or the fact that if this was a show about black people it would be tediously dull at the best of times, or the fact that they developed a sitcom from a fucking insurance commercial, or… jeez I could go on
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You really feel there’s a need for a television show where they make jokes about people saying “nigger” without actually using the word “nigger”

SHOW: Aliens In America
CONCEPT: Normal whitebread family’s life disrupted when they take on Pakistani Muslim high school exchange student
STARRING: A few character actors you’ll recognize and a lot of younger actors you won’t
WELL?: For a comedy, the pilot episode isn’t that outright funny, but the acting is good and the characters fully realized in a single episode; it may not be the laugh out loud spectacle one might hope for, but it’s entertaining enough already
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You are willing to consider Muslims not the de facto enemies of America

SHOW: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
CONCEPT: It’s the intervening time in between Terminator movies, or possibly an alternate history - man, time travel screws everything up
STARRING: Lena Headey as Sarah Connor, Thomas Dekker as John Connor, and Summer Glau as cute girl Terminator sent to protect them
WELL?: The pilot’s certainly not bad, but it’s not much more than a B-minus; there’s room for improvement on all fronts. Still, if you loved Serenity because you loved watching River kick ass, then you’ll probably think highly of it, and certainly the action is very solid in that regard
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: I think I just said that part

SHOW: The Big Bang Theory
CONCEPT: There are these nerds, and… that’s pretty much it
STARRING: The guy who played Darlene’s boyfriend on Roseanne and a bunch of other people
WELL?: The writing is occasionally pretty sharp, but the show’s poorly thought through (like, the show opens cold with a brilliant bit about selling sperm to afford high-speed internet - then they go back to their enormous beautiful apartment and are revealed to work at a nearby university as researchers). Still, the performances are pretty solid and there’s potential for a really good sitcom if they dial down the nerd stereotypes to, say, a solid 8 rather than the 22 they’re at now
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You often say things like “Revenge of the Nerds had a great concept, but man, it didn’t push the envelope enough”

SHOW: Chuck
CONCEPT: Friendly, well-meaning dork gets entire contents of government classified intelligence database downloaded into his brain; becomes secret agent as result
STARRING: Zachary Levi as Chuck, Yvonne Strzechowski as hot sexy secret agent girl with a past who handles Chuck, Adam Baldwin as scary stone-cold-killer secret agent guy who also handles Chuck, Joshua Gomez as Chuck’s even-bigger-loser best friend
WELL?: It’s an amusing premise and the cast is whip-smart. The dialogue is very, very funny indeed, the action sequences are exciting, the storyline has room to grow and evolve; the entire tone suggests something in between Alias and Freaks and Geeks, and if that doesn’t sell you I don’t know what would
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: The idea of Adam Baldwin as Jayne-but-smarter going undercover as a salesman at Best Buy is something you find genuinely intriguing

SHOW: Lipstick Jungle
CONCEPT: Powerful businesswomen? Cry and need cupcake days too! I know! Who would have thought?
STARRING: Brooke Shields as mother of three/movie production company CEO/”the nice one,” Kim Raver as unsatisfied married woman/magazine editor/”the bitch,” Lindsay Price as single woman/fashion designer/”the crier”
WELL?: Retreads the same subversively misogynist ground all these shows tread, because there’s nothing quite so satisfying to certain individuals as seeing powerful women shown to be inept, weak, childish, or just in need of a good strong man
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You simply don’t have enough time to watch both Designing Women and Sex In The City, and require a show that combines the two into one horrible living mass

SHOW: Bionic Woman
CONCEPT: “Hey, resurrecting Battlestar Galactica turned out to be great. Let’s try another old corny 70s sci-fi show and see what we can do with it”
STARRING: Michelle Ryan as bionic woman, Katee Sackhoff as insane first-model bionic woman, Matt Shepherd as sexy male scientist boyfriend, and Miguel Ferrer as awesome old-school shadowy military guy
WELL?: It’s not bad, but it’s very, very uneven; performances are erratic, the effects vary from awesome to cheesy, and the dialogue goes from crackling to flat with depressing regularity. If the good parts dominate the show post-pilot it will be decent; if the bad, it will be dogshit. I doubt there’s a middle ground with this one
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You really, really need to satisfy your Starbuck fix

SHOW: Cane
CONCEPT: Dallas, but in Florida, and with sugar instead of oil, and with Latinos instead of white people
STARRING: Hector Elizondo as family patriarch, Jimmy Smits as adopted heir apparent, Nestor Carbonell as jealous firstborn son, Jonathan Trent as playboy youngest son, Rita Moreno as fierce matriarch and Paola Turbay as sexy wife of Smits
WELL?: Reasonably solid dramatic entry, not very soapish at all, and you can do worse for a gameplan then “let’s get all the best Latino actors we can find and put them in a show together”
YOU WILL LIKE THIS SHOW IF: You love it when people pronounce Cuba “Koo-bah”