("Crap, our ratings are awful. Maybe we should try making shows that... aren't just about white people? Look, I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work!")
Previously: FOX and NBC.
How to Get Away With Murder
Look, guys, it's Dean Thomas from the Harry Potter movies! Also Bennett the prison guard from Orange is the New Black, but I care about that less than I care about Dean Thomas: Adorable Dork and Potential Moral Center to Viola Davis's Stunning Genius Calculating Lawyer-Professor. (Although if this is anything like Scandal, I wouldn't bet on any one character's sense of right or wrong lasting unscathed for more than half a season.) (Also: was that three seconds of Canon Queer Characters?!)It looks like an unholy fusion of a legal drama and a university show, which ought to be great for Shonda because she can mine both the criminal aspects and dubious ethics of the former as well as the political maneuvering and young-adults-having-screwed-up-young-adult-drama of the latter. Also, apparently there's going to be a dead body? My bet's on that being a bait-and-switch, although even if it is: guys, take a forensic anthropology class. It takes way higher temperatures than that to burn a body.
Anyway, I'm here for it — as long as I can take it, at least. I had to quit out of Scandal in the middle of the third season, and not just because I hated Fitz so much. I have to give props, though; Thursday night is going to be the Night of Shonda, which is both impressive and pretty amazing.
Selfie
KAREN GILLAN. JOHN CHO. MY FAIR LADY.
Don't get me wrong, I can already tell that this show is going to hit my secondhand embarrassment buttons in all sorts of hideously cringe-inducing ways. And yet! Somehow I am going to have to buoy myself through it on the utter charm of the lead characters and also on the fact that they cast an Asian guy as the suave romantic lead. Here for it.
My main concern is that it's going to fall into the super-obnoxious critiques of selfie culture, which always manage to end up being technophobic and bashing millennials, and are often quite misogynistic in a veiled, toxic way. Like. God. People want to take photos of themselves at important times. Yes, how... horrible that they want to be able to look back on this moment later and remember it? You're right, I will absolutely not want to look back at silly photos of myself and my friends twenty years from now. Sure.
Guys, we've seen this. It's New Amsterdam, except with the guy from Hornblower. (Yes, I know he was also Reed Richards in Fantastic Four, but A] I haven't seen Fantastic Four, and B] eight hours of Ioan Gruffudd in period clothing on a boat is way more memorable. Also, did you know that Jaime Lannister was the star of New Amsterdam? Man, I did not remember that at all.)
Oh, wait, sorry, it's New Amsterdam but with Horatio Hornblower and also with embarrassing post-death naked walks back through the city. I do not have high hopes for this one's survival. Sorry, Horatio.
So when I heard that ABC was going to be doing a sitcom about assimilation and being upper-class and black, I figured it would end up being either really interesting or a hot mess. Because I don't have very much faith in TV, I was leaning towards the latter — although to be fair, this was before I knew that this was the show that Larry Wilmore was supposed to be showrunning before he withdrew in order to take over Colbert's late-night slot. (Which: yay.)
So fingers crossed for me being totally wrong, basically! Also this trailer has made me remember just how much I love Laurence Fishburne. I think I imprinted on him back when I watched The Matrix as a tiny young thing.
So apparently all this footage is going to get reshot, because this was a pilot presentation reel and not an actual pilot... which probably means that I can't really judge it yet. Which is great, because I can't really judge anything with a laugh track. They're like my TV kryptonite or something.
But hey, the lead actress looks adorable.
This reminds me of that scene in Buffy where Buffy can suddenly read everyone's minds, which might actually be why I'm so amused by this trailer. Positive associations? A love of hearing everybody's really weird and often super-shallow thoughts, even if the characters seem too annoying to actually get emotionally invested in? ("She likes purses! He likes boobs!" Nope.)
Aaaaaand yet the blurb describes it as being about "the differences between men and women," which is not so much a red flag as a battalion of red flags. An explosion of red flags, maybe.
I have no idea how anyone watched this trailer and managed to get past the full ten seconds of Timothy Hutton sobbing in a bathroom. I'm actually a little embarrassed for the trailer editor right now. Also, having Leverage flashbacks.
What is this, Crash for TV? Yeah, this looks like one of those shows that tries to make a claim for prestige TV because of its edgy subject matter. And they made sure to mention that the dead woman probably got sexually assaulted, and I'm really sick of rape being used as a plot device to up the stakes. Plus? Ten seconds of Timothy Hutton ugly-crying in a bathroom. Uninterested.
Roommate Katie and I turned to each other after watching this promo with mutual expressions of surprised delight. I like to think of them as the "Hey, this seems delightful and also not racist!" faces. (I told you: for people who like TV as much as we do, we don't have very much faith in TV.) Also based on a memoir, which is a good sign. I have hope for this one. (Cautious interest and enthusiasm?)
For the record, I would have screamed bloody murder if someone had tried to move me from DC to Orlando when I was a kid.
Creepy white kids straight out of a horror movie, except with aliens instead of demonic spirits or whatever. Nope.
This was just two and a half straight minutes of Ryan Philippe emoting and Juliette Lewis looking like she smelled something gross.
While I acknowledge that it's useful to have single-crime shows as a reverse of episodic cop shows, to remind us that criminal investigations last longer than forty-seven minutes and have ramifications that aren't just erased between episodes, I'm never really entirely sure about their prospects for longevity. Also, I don't care. I'm pretty sure that the only single-crime show I'm actually interested in watching is Twin Peaks, and that's mainly because it seems waaaay less generic than this one.
Roommate Katie can vouch that my first reaction to this trailer was, "...Were they high?" This was not so much a criticism as a serious question. Someone actually came up with the idea to make a comedy musical fairytale TV show and then pitched it to ABC execs while everybody was completely sober? Really?
The best way I can think of to describe this is Once Upon a Time meets Glee meets Enchanted, with the sense of humor of Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Which, you know, I'm down to watch. Actually, there's not a chance in hell that I wouldn't watch it; even if it's a trainwreck, it's going to be an ambitious one. This sort of nuttiness requires a metric ton of chutzpah.
Here's hoping that it's purposefully-campy fun and not a trainwreck, though. First half-season of Glee, rather than third season of Glee. Also, it's nice that not everybody in their pseudo-European fantasy world is white, too. Dare I to hope that not everybody will be straight, or is that too much to ask, do we think?
The only new ABC show without a trailer is Agent Carter, which is annoying, because Agent Carter also happens to be the show I'm most excited about for the new season. So it goes.
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