Judging the Fall Season: NBC’s 3 New Shows
NBC will make its presentation of the network’s fall TV schedule on Monday, and the network has released trailers of its new shows. Let’s look at them with a critical eye. Note: All judgments are based solely on the clips and are not reviews of entire episodes, which are not yet available.
The Good Place:
It didn’t take long for Ted Danson to recover from the cancellation of CSI: Cyber, did it? (What, you didn’t know he was in CSI: Cyber? Congrats: You are part of the entire human race.) As you can gather by this clip, Kristen Bell stars as a not-very-nice person who, having died, is mistakenly admitted to a “good place” that’s a smart sitcom creator’s version of heaven (that creator here is Parks and Recreation’s Mike Schur). Her mentor — no one says “guardian angel” in the clip — is Danson’s Michael, who runs this Good Place.
Related: Cancellation Watch 2016: What’s Been Axed So Far
It’s always a good idea to cast Bell in a show — she radiates intelligence, cleverness, and playfulness, and is awfully appealing. And as we know from House of Lies and the red-band trailer for Bad Moms, she knows how to be naughty, if not downright raunchy and obstreperous. The risk with a sitcom based on a gimmick is that the premise becomes repetitive and, well, gimmicky. But I’m willing to bet Schur and his writers are able to build a “good” world that doesn’t become merely goody-goody.
This Is Us:
A show that’s apparently going to follow the lives of people who share the same birthday and — perhaps? somehow? — bring them together, This Is Us stars Mandy Moore, Milo Ventimiglia, Sterling K. Brown, and Justin Hartley as people at various turning points in their lives (the scenes we glimpse include people having babies, trying to lose weight, quitting jobs). The series is from Dan Fogelman, whose credits include the 2011 romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love. In highlighting key words — “family,” “forgiveness,” “love” — the show is clearly coming down on the side of positivity and affirmation, and I’m all for more of that on TV. It’s time to keep proving that quality television isn’t defined by gritty realism and hard-nosed cynicism. And so while I winced at a couple of the mawkish lines uttered by Gerald McRaney’s doctor here, I’m still interested to see how This Is Us intertwines its characters in ways that are not apparent in the trailer.
Timeless:
This thing sets off all sorts of warning bells in me. First of all, the subject matter — time travel, going back in history — is one of the easiest ones to make hokey and melodramatic. (Think, to take just one recent example, of Amazon’s heavy version of The Man in the High Castle). It can lead to portentous dialogue like, well, some of the lines you hear in this clip: “It could change history in ways we can’t possibly predict!” “I know what you’re really meant to be. You’re important in ways you can’t even imagine!”
But: Timeless was created by Eric Kripke (Supernatural) and Shawn Ryan (The Shield), two guys who’ve certainly made quality TV. It stars Abigail Spencer, who was mesmerizing in the Sundance channel’s Rectify. It co-stars ER’s Goran Visnjic and Malcolm Barrett, who I’ll always remember as Dr. Lem Hewitt in the great Better Off Ted, among other shows and movies. So maybe they’ll figure out a way to make mainstream America — which currently can’t see any further past our country’s history than Donald Trump’s last tweet — interested in a plot to save the Hindenburg from exploding in 1937. Or, I don’t know, make it explode. The trailer’s confusing.