Her brother Ben (Josh Dallas, Once Upon A Time) get some great news: The leukemia that was almost certainly going to kill his young son is now possibly curable. But her cop fiance has married her best friend. Michaela (Melissa Roxburgh, not so convincing as a bloodless CIA operative in The CW's Valor last season but excellent as a confused and bitter cop here), gets her job with the NYPD with no problem. (The first episode doesn't even try to grapple with the meta-changes: Imagine Barack Obama was president when you got on a plane, and Donald Trump when you got off.)Īmong the victims caught in this temporal nutcracker is the Stone family. Parents died, leases expired, landlines disappeared, mortgages lapsed, careers ended, marriages crumbled, romances withered. During the time the passengers were missing and assumed dead, children grew up and, often, away. If that sounds weird but not particularly threatening, a few minutes of Manifest will change your mind. (Call the Reason switchboard to vote for which airline gets a punchline inserted here.) A plane takes off from an airport in the Caribbean one afternoon and, despite a little rough weather, arrives seemingly intact in New York … five and a half years later. The show that looks intriguing during the first big week of the rollout is NBC's Manifest, which is the epitome of what Hollywood calls high-concept story-telling. (Has nobody over there got a wooden stake?) Believe me, you'll have lost interest long before that. ![]() But the real action starts on Monday with a couple of dramas-one a remake, one interesting and yet with some elements that will terrify you, and not in a good way-and continue for a month, when The CW debuts the third, yes third, incarnation of its teen fangbanger drama The Vampire Diaries. Technically speaking, the new season got underway a couple of weeks ago when with the debut of Fox's ruined-life sitcom Rel. ![]() Overall, this is the worst lineup of new shows since 2008, when a long strike by the Writers Guild led to a schedule so dismal that when CBS canceled one ( The Ex List, in which a woman, on orders of her psychic, systematically re-dates all the guys she's dumped over the years) after four episodes, it went ahead and made six more because there was nothing to replace it with. Shows about neurotic moms and grumpy dads are not just clichés but clichés old enough to be closing in on Social Security. The really appalling thing about the 2018 fall season is how stupidly tepid most of it is. Hollywood has always robbed its own graveyards, of course, though rarely with such profligate abandon. There hasn't been such a mass uprising of the dead since Mayor Daley stopping overseeing Chicago elections. Of the 20 or so new shows (on six networks!), more than half are remakes, reboots or rapacious rip-offs. ![]() These days, the rollout feels more like the series finale of The Walking Dead, with rotting zombies sharing the screen with a handful of survivors so terrified and beaten down that they've lost their minds. A newspaper reporter who rooms with a secret Martian! A guy with a docile and very buxom female robot! The genetically groundbreaking concept of identical cousins! A dead mom who comes back as an antique car! (I said the ideas were dazzling, not necessarily good.) Thirty new shows (on just three networks!), a special issue of TV Guide, three times its usual size and stuffed with glamorous color studio photography of all the stars, and a dazzling array of novel ideas. The rollout of the fall broadcast TV season was, once upon a time, all glitter and gala.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |