P.C. Shannon

I recently downloaded pilots for some of this fall’s new tv shows from Amazon Unbox to watch on my TiVo. I’ve used the Amazon service before, so that’s a story for another time. But the shows I watched ran the gamut from the worst to the best of what television offers.

The Big Bang Theory

The description of The Bang Big Theory says it all:

Meet two brainiacs with a lot to learn. Leonard and Sheldon can tell their quarks from their quantum physics, but have no clue how women add up. Leave it to their pretty new neighbor, just off a messy breakup, to teach them a thing or two.

That’s such a horrible premise for a sitcom that I just had to check it out. I was not disappointed; the show was terrible. Of course, I’m not very fond of traditional sitcoms anyway.

The truly mind-boggling thing is that, as bad as this show is, there were pilots that were worse and didn’t make it to production. I’d be surprise if this one airs more than four episodes. On the other hand, apparently the number one comedy in America is something called Two and a Half Men. I thought that show, which I’ve never seen and about which I know nothing, had gone off the air years ago.

Chuck

I was vaguely aware of Chuck’s clever marketing campaign, so I had to give it a whirl. It was nothing great, but not too bad either. You have to get over the the sort of silly, cartoonish takes on the CIA and NSA, spies, and so on. But it helps that the stores are all clearly parallel to real ones but with clever tongue-in-cheek names: Best Buy is “Buy More,” Geek Squad is “Nerd Herd,” and Wal-Mart is… I forget what exactly but nicely parodied to say the least.

Now that I’m learning a bit more about the show, I can see that these touches are the work of Josh Schwartz, better known as the creator of The O.C. Josh is a comics guy and also has a good sense of humor, so there may be some hope for Chuck. The end of the pilot suggested there might be Bigger Things going on. If I had more free time, I would get a season pass for it.

The Bionic Woman

The pilot of The Bionic Woman was everything I wanted the new Flash Gordon to be: dark and foreboding, morally complex, and hinting at Bigger Things. In a word: awesome. The show is executive-produced by Battlestar Galactica XP David Eick and features BSG’s Katee Sackoff as one of the bad guys. Actually, “bad guys” is too strong of a word, since it’s unclear who the “good guys” are. Let’s just say that she has a fight with the protagonist. I never found her attractive as Starbuck (the character reads too butch for me), but she vamps it good here. Bionic Woman is definitely getting a season pass.