#463. Alarming Sunday TV Developments

I am finding it a little difficult to watch the new fall TV season, thanks for asking.

I'm having to try a combination of live TV and Internet replays, and sometimes it's just not that easy.  For one thing, it takes a different kind of motivation to do the Internet replay.  And sometimes FOX makes it difficult by making me wait nine days (NINE DAYS! still counting!) to catch the season premiere of Fringe.

On Sunday I tried watching the season debut of Once Upon a Time, but I think it's become, alarmingly, a soap opera.  That's not was it was the last time I caught an episode.

So I watched more of The Simpsons, which seemed to have this weird voice-over thing that carried over to part of Bob's Burgers (and ended as inexplicably as it began; I'm not crazy, am I?).  The best part of the Cletus version of Zooey Deschanel was when she sang (but I love She & Him almost as much as I love Zooey Deschanel, so it figures).  It's also nice for The Simpsons to do some music, because that used to be a hallmark (I obsessively have all the CDs; yes, I still have CDs).

Bob's Burgers is an okay show, I guess, or maybe Sunday's was just an easy episode to watch.

Family Guy and American Dad both have creepily violent elements to their stories, but they're as good as they ever were.  But it's weird that they both had creepy violence.

666 Park Avenue is awesome.  Rachael Taylor is awesome.  Terry O'Quinn is awesome.  I'll be watching as much as possible.

On Monday I watched the CBS sitcom lineup.  How I Met Your Mother had a classic episode in which each of the relationships everyone was in at the moment is tested.  Partners followed.  Brandon Routh has become the new Rob Lowe.  2 Broke Girls may actually be watchable.  I know!  Shocking!  Mike & Molly was worth watching, mostly because it allowed Molly to do something Melissa McCarthy fans from Bridesmaids might actually care about.

Then Revolution.  Mark Pellegrino, who was Jacob in Lost, helped make a memorable episode of this freshman series, in which we learn more about the origins of the oppressive Monroe regime, which is run by David Lyons, who starred in The Cape (which I loved, and was another NBC genre failure, along with The Event, which I also loved).  I'm liking Revolution, partly because I think it has the chance to succeed where its predecessors failed, finding a genuine audience.

I finished watching FlashForward (I'll go ahead and capitalize that second "F" this time), it should be noted. I can't help but view it now as something of what Heroes (another NBC genre failure-of-sorts!) would have been like if it had ended after one season.  In the case of Heroes, everyone would be a lot happier.  By the time FlashForward debuted, viewers were even less forgiving of a TV show with an arc that lasted a full network season.  I think part of the reason that something like The Walking Dead has connected so well with viewers is because of its sporadic scheduling, which was originally seen as something of a potential kiss of death, especially after the long wait between the first and second seasons.  But that only seemed to help it.  Maybe network genre shows (as Lost did in later seasons) should also play by different scheduling rules, not so much out of season (part of the reason Defying Gravity failed miserably) but broken up a little from the rest of the pack.  Network genre viewers hate long breaks in a season, though.  So maybe that Lost model is better, the way the final three seasons had unbroken runs in the second half of the season.  Second half, first half, I don't think it matters (though a network could air two in a single season by running them in each half, the way NBC tried with The Event and The Cape, succeeding with neither because they literally bisected each other).

Anyway, just some additional thoughts.