Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
For the 2018 fall season, I decided to try something I’ve never tried before: to watch every single pilot of the season and write a short review of each, with a rating of my interest level before and after viewing. I watched a lot of television with potential… I also watched a lot of absolutely terrible television.Part two below includes two dramas (including my favorite new show of the fall season) and four comedies. I struggled with most of the sitcoms this year, and I feel I am almost more critical of them than dramas. It seems like comedy should be easier, but when everyone’s idea of humor is different, it becomes apparent that comedy is, in fact, very hard. The shows below (comedy and drama alike) focus on some very controversial topics: suicide, racism, politics, and religion. Some do them with gentleness and consideration, some do them with blunt force. Some (I’m looking at you, Happy Together) don’t really seem concerned with anything at all.
What draws you to the shows below?
Interest Level Key:
1: Don’t wanna touch this with a ten foot pole.
2: I’ve never even heard of this.
3: Looks like shit.
4: Looks like shit but there’s one or two things I like.
5: Not my cup of tea but I can see the appeal for others.
6: Maybe. I’m giving it five episodes to prove itself though.
7: It has the potential to be good. I’m hopeful but cautious.
8: Bring it on. (a.k.a. I’m in for half a season at least.)
9: I am super stoked for this show; there’s maybe one thing I’m iffy about.
10: Have they renewed for season 2 yet?
A Million Little Things (ABC)
The 5-second Description: ABC’s answer to This Is Us sees a tight-knit group of friends come together when one of them suddenly commits suicide.
Interest Level Before Pilot: 9
Analysis: Easily the show I’m most excited about this fall, as one of its leads, James Roday, was the lead on Psych for 8+ years. I wondered how he would fare on a drama after over a decade playing such a whimsical character but he really brought his all to the table. Roday’s character, Gary, is among the 2% of men who suffer from breast cancer. But he’s making it work for him, hooking up with another survivor, Maggie (Allison Miller), from his cancer support group.
Rome (Romany Malco) is a struggling director with a loving wife (Christina Marie Moses) and he is preparing to kill himself the first time we meet him. Eddie (David Giuntoli) is a former musician and recovering alcoholic who feels stuck in his marriage to cold businesswoman Katherine (Grace Park) because they have a young child together. He also seems to be having an affair and is prepared to run away with the mistress. Finally, John (Ron Livingston) is a successful, charismatic businessman who has it all—wife and two kids, great job, close friends—until he jumps off his balcony to his death.
The pilot deals with the immediate aftermath of John’s suicide as his friends rally around his wife Delilah (Stephanie Szostak) and try to come to terms with what happened and how it could have gone unnoticed by all of them. Unlike fellow drama pilots Manifest and Magnum P.I., which also featured the death of a main character’s loved one, A Million Little Things actually gives its characters room to feel everything and project the emotional resonance that it needs. I feel like I am already getting a strong sense of who these characters are and I’m truly interested in seeing how they cope with this tragedy.
My only reservation about this show is David Giuntoli, whose acting turned me away from watching his last show, Grimm, even though I liked its supporting cast. I am confounded that this high-profile drama cast such a dud, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and presume that it was the direction and not the actor’s ability that killed his appeal for me. If worse comes to worst, I do not find his Million Little Things character sympathetic enough yet to care whether he’s bringing the acting chops. Since this show is much more of an ensemble drama, there are plenty of other characters to root for if Eddie fails to engage me.
ABC aired a suicide awareness message after the pilot featuring a few of the show’s stars and—to my surprise—Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington’s wife, Talinda. Despite my engagement with the pilot, I did not feel the impulse to cry until I saw those two on screen and the feels became all too real.
Interest Level After Pilot: 10 – You know, I was going to say 9, because I was surprised by how off-putting I found Grace Park’s character and I still have my doubts about Giuntoli, but you know what, it’s 10.
The Cool Kids (Fox)
The 5-second Description: The Cool Kids follows three men who rule the roost in a retirement community until their status is uprooted by the newest member of the community, a female rebel who is ready to challenge their place.
Interest Level Before Pilot: 1
Analysis: As soon as I saw Fox’s description of this sitcom—“It’s high school with 70 somethings!”—I knew I was going to hate it. I would have happily passed on it entirely if I had not committed to making this list. Fox’s decision to cancel Brooklyn 99 and pick up this will surely go down in history among Fox’s most boneheaded decisions.
The Cool Kids follows a trio of men, Hank (David Alan Grier), Charlie (Martin Mull), and Sid (Leslie Jordan) in a retirement community looking for a replacement for their recently-deceased buddy, Jerry. His seat at their cafeteria table is empty and they are looking to fill it with someone as ‘cool’ as they are. It should be mentioned at this point that no one seems to think Hank, Charlie, and Sid are cool. I suppose Jerry could have been the one everyone liked and the others picked up status by association, but it seems pretty obvious that the staff and even the other retirees couldn’t care less about the three. Nonetheless, Hank, the most crotchety of the three, puts up a holy fuss when the seat is casually taken by Margaret (Vicki Lawrence), an obstinate newcomer.
It should also be mentioned at this point that the premise of the show is an entire generation’s collective disbelief that women can be cool. “Back in the day, they wouldn’t have even let her in!” Hank wildly exclaims when talking about an exclusive club, then ignores Charlie when he points out that Hank, who is black, and Sid, who is openly gay, wouldn’t have been accepted either. But of course, this is sitcom world and, like an aging, less geeky version of CBS’s other sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, Margaret is cooler than all of the guys. The show can’t just let Margaret be cooler and more mature, though, not without taking a potshot at all women who dare to demand equality to men. In one scene, Sid (who is basically just continuing his character, Beverley Leslie, from Will and Grace) is instructed by surly Hank to attempt to woo Margaret away from their table. He has to do it, Hank explains, because “Only a gay man can hit on a woman these days. If I so much as bump into the side of a tata, I could end up in jail for six years.” There was no reason for the attempted seduction to be in this episode outside of creating the opportunity to make that ‘joke.’ It might have been funny if it weren’t calling attention to the reality that some men really don’t understand the difference between flirting and assault.
Martin Mull plays the moony, aging hippy character, who offers up wacky anecdotes and the occasional gem of wisdom and is the only one in the cast who didn’t annoy me. He’s also the only one in the cast who is actually in his 70s, as David Alan Grier and Leslie Jordan are both in their early 60s (which is younger than my parents, who are definitely not ready for a retirement community). What’s the matter, The Cool Kids? Couldn’t find any actual septuagenarians?
I made a comparison earlier to The Big Bang Theory and I’d like to expand on that. I watched Big Bang for four seasons and while it elicited some laughs, I dropped the show because I couldn’t stop feeling put off by it. The Big Bang Theory purports to be a show for geeks but it’s actually a show about geeks and for ‘normal’ people to laugh at them and their silly obsession with science fiction and awkwardness around women. I got a similar feeling from The Cool Kids because it feels more like I’m supposed to be laughing at these losers than with them. I’d be offended on the behalf of the Baby Boomers this show is lampooning, but they’d probably stubbornly insist that younger generations are too sensitive these days and keep on watching, completely oblivious to the fact that they are being mocked.
If I had to say anything good about this show, it would be that its stars have a firm grasp on the mechanics of classic sitcom humor, expertly setting up zingers so their costars can knock them down. And they look like they’re having fun while doing it, even if the entire show looks like it would be better suited to the mid-90s.
Interest Level After Pilot: 1 – If I had a zero rating, I’d consider it.
Murphy Brown (CBS)
The 5-second Description: A continuation of the CBS sitcom that picks up twenty years after the series went off the air. Candice Bergen’s Murphy is still a journalist, but one with her own talk show. A couple of new additions and plenty of returning stars come together to take on current events.
Interest Level Before Pilot: 7
Analysis: I never watched Murphy Brown growing up so I had zero expectations going into this. The new Murphy Brown feels very much like a 90s sitcom—canned laughter, set-em-up-knock-em-down style jokes, and a minor joke that escalates into a wacky payoff. Returning characters, Corky Sherwood (Faith Ford), Frank Fontana (Joe Regalbuto), and Miles Silverberg (Grant Shaud) are not elaborated on much but you can still get a feel for their characters. It did surprise me that the show avoided the raucous applause when popular fan favorites entered a scene for the first time. I felt this was a good sign that we’re meant to rely on the jokes coming out of the characters mouths instead of just Flanderizing characters until their mere appearance is funny.
Joining the cast is Jake McDorman, playing the adult version of Murphy’s son, Avery, who is now a journalist in his own right and has just scored his own talk show as the liberal voice on the “Wolf Network,” the show’s not so subtle stand-in for Fox News. Tyne Daly plays Phyllis, the no-nonsense (does Tyne Daly play any other kind of character?) proprietor of Phil’s Bar and sister of Phil (Pat Corley), who is said to have ‘sailed off around the world.’ In actuality, Corley passed away in 2006; although his character is ostensibly alive, an unspoken homage to his passing can be seen in the revival. Nik Dodani (Atypical) plays the tech guy on Murphy’s new talk show, Murphy in the Morning, which the titular character decides to start after she realizes she just can’t stay out of the game anymore, given the current political climate.
“You know, there’s such insanity out there that I became this nutjob, yelling at the TV,” Murphy tells her son. “I’d rather be on TV yelling out.”
This show will undoubtedly rustle more than a few feathers with its straightforward and outspoken condemnation of ‘conservative’ issues, particularly the president himself. In fact, the culmination of the first episode features a fake live tweeting between Murphy, who is just learning to use social media, and president Trump, who could probably use a few lessons in tweeting etiquette himself.
I was a little perplexed that the show would shy away from saying “Fox News” but was not shy in using Trump’s name outright and pasting it on a joke that conservatives will undoubtedly label ‘fake news’ (even though that much is obvious). That said, the fake tweets were hilariously accurate, if a bit over the top. I’m sure there are already angry right wingers (and a few Russian bots) calling for this show’s condemnation under the guise that politics don’t belong in comedy. Normally I might agree—if Murphy Brown were a family show. But if there’s one thing I know about this sitcom, it’s that it has always been notorious for pushing the envelope on political and social topics. If anyone over the age of 35 is surprised by this, it is feigned surprise to push an opposing agenda.
I wish Murphy Brown the best in its coy skewering of current events, but between the controversy and the first episode’s modest ratings, I wonder if it will survive. I am pulling for it, because it represents something that I think is sorely underrepresented on TV: the liberal Baby Boomer. This is a show out to prove that Baby Boomers still have a voice that can represent change, and not just nostalgic yearning for a time when America was supposedly ‘great’; it remains to be seen if this revival came too late to find its roots.
Interest Level After Pilot: 8 – Maybe watching this immediately after The Cool Kids caused me to look on it more favorably than I otherwise would, but it garnered enough genuine laughs from me to keep me on the hook. Besides, I like a good pot-stirring.
God Friended Me (CBS)
The 5-second Description: Miles (Brandon Michael Hall), an outspoken atheist, has his life turned upside down when God ‘friends’ him on Facebook and begins to direct Miles to help people around him improve their lives.
Interest Level Before Pilot: 7
Analysis: Until I watched the trailer for this show, I thought it was a comedy… because the title is that stupid. Which is a shame, because the show itself isn’t bad.
God Friended Me is a drama about Miles Finer, a young man with a struggling podcast in which he discusses faith—or more accurately, his lack thereof. Miles is a proud, outspoken atheist, and this has led him to be alienated from his Reverend father, Arthur (Joe Morton, of Eureka and Scandal fame). One day, he is ‘friended’ on Facebook by someone calling themselves God. Though Miles resists at first, dismissing it as a joke, he eventually accepts and is immediately sent a friend suggestion for a complete stranger. When that stranger passes Miles on the street and Miles later saves the man from committing suicide by subway train, he starts to realize something peculiar is going on.
The next friend suggestion leads him to Cara Bloom (Violett Beane), a journalist who has writer’s block. Initially, Miles believes Cara is in on a hoax, possibly with his sister or father, but the coincidences soon become too much to ignore. Miles and Cara investigate the “God account” and their search leads Cara to some heavy truths about her past that she must confront. By the end of the first episode, Miles and Cara have both made conscious choices to let people they have locked out back into their lives, seemingly for the better. Cara makes Miles promise to contact her if the God account contacts him again—which, of course, it does, thus setting the stage for a strange and spiritual journey for Miles and his newfound friend.
I will readily admit that I went into this pilot with a healthy dose of skepticism. As someone who questions faith themselves, I was interested to see an atheist depicted on TV—on CBS, no less. I was pleased to see that Miles and Cara—an agnostic but ‘spiritual’ character—were both very likable. I chalk some of this up to their portrayers, as both young actors really put their all in the pilot. My only complaint about God Friended Me is that Miles’ atheism had an ‘excuse,’ as a tragic incident from his past caused him to lose his faith, as opposed to just being a person who questions the existence of a higher being as a natural scientific reaction without an ulterior motive. I think it’s important to counteract the myth that atheists are bad or immoral people who are only looking out for themselves by unapologetically presenting an atheist in a leading role, but I’m also perfectly willing to admit that that is not this show’s endgame. It became immediately obvious watching the God Friended Me pilot that this is a show that wants you to believe, it wants you to know that God works in mysterious ways and exists in spite of your lack of belief. Normally this would cause me to lose interest, but I’m going to give the show a shot, because its message seems to echo most atheist’s beliefs: that we must be here for each other, we must help each other, because God isn’t going to step in.
On a side note, if you’re thinking of starting this show, do not watch the long promo on YouTube unless you want every plot point in the pilot spoiled from start to finish. I instantly regretted watching it the moment it ended.
Interest Level After Pilot: 7 – Ah, why not. It’s feel good television and if it gets too preachy, I can leave whenever I want. That is assuming CBS doesn’t cancel it first because no one can take the title seriously.
UPDATE: The show was picked up for a full season in mid-October, defying my expectations.
The Neighborhood (CBS)
The 5-second Description: Racial jokes abound in a sitcom about the “nicest guy in the midwest,” who moves his family into a tough L.A. neighborhood and clashes comically with his black neighbors.
Interest Level Before Pilot: 1
Analysis: Not even the presence of Max Greenfield (fresh off Fox’s New Girl) could pique my interest in this show, which looks like an offensive, divisive cringe-fest and vanity piece for star, Cedric the Entertainer.
Greenfield plays Dave Johnson, a relentlessly optimistic (and very white) guy who moves his family, wife, Gemma (Beth Behrs), and precocious son, Grover (Hank Greenspan), to a predominantly black neighborhood next door to Calvin Butler (Cedric the Entertainer). Calvin, who lives with his wife, Tina (Tichina Arnold) and his two adult sons (played by Sheaun McKinney and Marcel Spears), considers himself the neighborhood’s big kahuna and a proud ambassador of successful black families. In what is supposed to be the funniest gag of the pilot, his son, Malcolm (McKinney), tricks him into meeting Dave, believing the new neighbor to be another black man. When he meets the real Dave Johnson, Cal immediately loses interest and any sense of cordiality.
Dave is eager and over-friendly but he is not completely oblivious; though he catches on to Cal’s distaste, he believes it to be for innocuous reasons, and is soon eager to win Cal over. The wives bond and it’s not long before the new neighbors are invited to Cal’s neighborhood barbecue, much to the latter’s chagrin. A conversation between Malcolm and Dave late in the episode caught my eye. Dave cannot understand why Cal is averse to his presence in the neighborhood—he’s been nothing but friendly and Cal has been nothing but prickly, but that’s just the point, apparently. If Cal were not a black man, Malcolm explains, perhaps Dave wouldn’t be so eager to please. The fact that he tries repeatedly to appeal just demonstrates a different kind of racism—that Cal gets a ‘pass’ just because Dave is trying to prove he’s cool with black people.
I can’t say I entirely agreed with this sentiment. It seems like Dave is a person that lives to please—his career is in conflict resolution, no less—but the audience and thus Dave are led to believe that they are somehow in the wrong and must apologize for their intrinsic racism. I wish that Dave would have done what any self-respecting person would do and say, ‘I don’t care if you like me or not’ and force Cal to reevaluate his own prejudices, but that type of nuanced comedy is not what this show is about. The Neighborhood feeds off cringe humor. Perhaps in the future, Cal will learn the error of his ways and realize Dave really is just a super nice guy to everyone, but I suspect that—overwhelmingly—it will be fish-out-of-water Dave learning the lesson of the week.
Ultimately, these are sitcom characters and given how heavily the pilot relied on awkward humor, I don’t expect them to evolve too much so they can reset for next week. The humor alone makes this show not for me, but I do give the show kudos for introducing more layers about unconscious racist practices than I was expecting from such a silly premise. In a post-Get Out world, though, it’s hard to excuse juvenile humor passing for social commentary when I know we can do better.
Interest Level After Pilot: 4 – Strong cast with a penchant for good comedy, but I’m gonna pass.
Happy Together (CBS)
The 5-second Description: Jake and Claire, a 30-something couple leading a mundane life learn to reconnect with their younger, cooler selves when a young popstar moves into their suburban home for some reason.
Interest Level Before Pilot: 3
Analysis: I feel like I need an explanation for how this show came to be. Nothing about it makes sense and everything about it turns the cringe factor up to 11. Damon Wayans Jr. (New Girl, Happy Endings) is a funny guy but I wanted to throat punch him eight minutes into the pilot episode of Happy Together.
Jake (Wayans Jr.), an accountant, and Claire (Amber Stevens West), a restaurant designer, are a married couple in their early 30s, happily binging Netflix shows on a Saturday night when Jake’s client, Australian popstar Cooper James (Felix Mallard), bursts in. Cooper announces that he has split with his girlfriend and needs a place to crash for a few days to ‘get away from it all.’ Why here, at the small, suburban home of his accountant, you ask? Why not at a friend or relative’s house? Or a resort in the Bahamas? Or presumably the mansion he lives in because he’s a rising popstar with millions of dollars and people who work for him? Nobody knows, because the pilot doesn’t feel like you deserve this information. They aren’t interested in telling you and they certainly wish you would stop asking.
After all, Jake and Claire don’t seem to be asking the hard questions here; they just go along with this new development like it is perfectly normal behavior. They seem more concerned with looking cool for the 20-something popstar than they do with addressing the fact that it’s really inappropriate of this strange celebrity to just move in without really asking.
All of this might feel more natural if Cooper James were one of those outrageous 90s sitcom characters who is larger than life and spouts catchphrases every time he bursts onscreen to thunderous audience applause. But the show makes it clear in episode one that Cooper is a perfectly well-adjusted, polite young man (because it’s apparently polite to move into your accountant’s home unannounced). This isn’t really a show about an eccentric popstar who needs a place to stay. It’s about the average, older millennial couple settling into their ways and learning that they are actually super lame by comparing them to a Gen Z cultural icon. But all the jokes are written for people over 50.
I really struggle to figure out what anyone was thinking along every step of this production. Wayans Jr. and Amber Stevens West are cute and they’re trying, but Jake is an extremely annoying character who tries way too hard with zero shame. Cooper James should be an immediately iconic character, but he’s actually pretty boring, and more of a caricature of the modern popstar like Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift. Claire’s parents (played by Stephnie Weir and Victor Williams) are also regulars, for some reason, sweeping into the house unannounced and being painfully unfunny while acting like sycophants to the celebrity they are too old to be familiar with.
At some point I wondered if I missed a scene that explained why Cooper decided to come here, to Jake and Claire’s home, instead of… literally anywhere else. Maybe some scene where Jake is doing Cooper’s taxes and makes some offhanded joke about coming to crash at his place, not realizing the popstar took it to heart. But nope, this is happening and it’s pointless to go around trying to be sane about these things. There’s a lot of things I can excuse, especially in sitcom world, but a completely nonsensical premise is something I have always struggled to overlook (I’m looking at you, Castle).
Interest Level After Pilot: 1 – I even watched the second episode of this show in an attempt to see if it got any less stupid, but it’s still incomprehensibly bad, and I’m dumber for having given it the benefit of the doubt. Somebody free Damon Wayans Jr. so he can go take over his dad’s role on Lethal Weapon.
