At this very moment, in a hotel in sunny Pasadena, Calif., broadcast TV suits are rhapsodizing about the can’t-miss-ed-ness of the new series they’re going to unveil for midseason — which, in rough numbers, means “between now and late May” — while a crowd of TV critics beams upon them as if they were bringing good news from a distant land.
Look — Kiefer Sutherland’s back!
Set 10 years after Grisham’s novel, show starts strong but lacks focus.
Showtime dramedy about corporate consultants follows the morally bankrupt cable show formula.
Return of PBS drama should be the TV highlight of the new year, but something’s definitely out of sorts.
Guess what “GCB” stands for — tee-hee!
We’ve got “Glee” — for adults!
Yes, the critics seem to have completely forgotten these same suits assured them just six months ago that this was The TV Season of Simon Cowell — and the season of time traveling to an age when Steven Spielberg’s dinosaurs tore up the landscape and Hugh Hefner was young and virile.
Only, as it turned out, this is not The TV Season of Simon Cowell, creator and star of Fox’s new singing competition “The X Factor.” It’s The TV Season of Ashton Kutcher, savior of the country’s most popular comedy, “Two and a Half Men.”
And, while they got it right about viewers longing to travel back in time, they were all wet about the dinosaurs and Hef. Viewers longed for an age when Rumpelstiltskin and Little Red Riding Hood roamed the Earth, when Prince Charming cavorted with Snow White rather than Playboy bunnies, and when Tim Allen was a big sitcom star on ABC.
And yet, at the hotel in sunny Pasadena, undeterred broadcast execs are, right now, decanting all their midseason enthusiasms, and TV critics are inhaling it by the snootful.
Here’s what they’re taking in:
If time travel was the rage for fall, missing people is the trend for “midseason” — at least, ABC thinks so. The network has scheduled two missing-persons dramas for midseason.
Early next month, ABC will unveil “The River,” about a nature-show star who goes up the Amazon and vanishes. Six months later, his family finally decides to go looking for him — aided by the sexy and resourceful Lena, the loyal mechanic Emilio, a lethal bodyguard named Captain Kurt Brynildson — and Dad’s producer, who’s going to shoot the whole thing documentary-style. This one’s got Comic-Con monster hit written all over it.
Then, in March, ABC will trot out “Missing,” starring Ashley Judd (it’s a bad day for foreign kidnappers who take her son, not realizing she’s former CIA).
But ABChasn’t given up entirely on time travel. Just the other day, it debuted a midseason sitcom straight out of the ’80s, called “Work It.” The show, as described by ABC, is about “two unrepentant guy’s guys who, desperate to find work in a tough economy, dress as women to get jobs.”
Before its premiere, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation had already derided it as “archaic,” “caricaturish” and lacking the “smart level of social commentary” of ’80s sitcom “Bosom Buddies.” Yes, that’s right “Bosom Buddies,” in which Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari played two single guys who dressed as chicks so they could live in a women-only residence hotel, was smart social commentary.
Meanwhile, other groups have got their undies in a bunch over the name of ABC chief programmer Paul Lee’s midseason prime-time soap — this one based on the 2008 book “Good Christian B-------.” The network changed the name — first to “Good Christian Belles,” when they were selling it to advertisers. Then, presumably because that name was entirely irony-free and irony is, you know, kind of the point of the show, ABC changed it again to “GCB” — and are counting on fans of the book, and those knicker-knotted special-interest groups, to spread the word as to what it stands for. Anyway, it’s about a reformed high school mean girl who is now a divorced mom and heading back to her home town of Dallas to become the target of former schoolmates she once tormented.
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