Fall is the best. Football season (aka tailgating season), changing leaves, sweatshirt weather, and the rainy cold-ish weekends when it is totally socially acceptable to stay curled up on the couch and watch TV for 48 hours. While Netflix is still taking up entirely too much of my time – I recently discovered The IT Crowd and finally gave in to peer pressure and started watching Scandal – I have made time for some fall TV. Some of it I like, and some of it reminds me why I shouldn’t trust new things.
I’ll get the truly terrible out of the way first, and work my way up. I’m not proud of it, but I watched the premieres of both Selfie and Manhattan Love Story. I knew they weren’t going to be good, but apparently I did something bad in a past life and thought it was time to begin my punishment. The only “good” thing I can say is with DVR I only wasted about 42 minutes of my life on these gems. Unfortunately it felt more like 6 hours and I had to distract myself by paying bills online. Not good.
This next one is probably going to get me in a little bit of trouble, but I’m also not loving Gotham. I realize it was always going to be a little different than a typical “comic book show” and I thought I was ok with that, but really they’ve just taken out all of the fun. I usually love both Donal Logue and Ryan Atwood Ben McKenzie but even they haven’t saved this one for me. I just think it’s boring, and if you want me to spend an hour a week watching your show, you’re going to have to give me something to get excited about. For now I’ve given up on it, but who knows, maybe in the dead zone next summer I’ll get bored enough to give it another chance on Netflix.
Something I’m liking a bit more is Scorpion. I usually hate anything remotely procedural. With the exception of the occasional late night episode of Criminal Minds (because MORGAN) I can’t stand spending an hour watching a group of people solve a crime that will be completely forgotten by the next episode. And really that’s basically what Scorpion is. This group of geniuses saves the world every week by seeing things that no one else can, and yet by the beginning of the next episode the government is back to thinking they’re useless. It’s silly. But, I kind of like it. Maybe it’s because they’re all so quirky, or maybe it’s because it makes me google things like “do small hands really make a blackjack dealer lose money?”
Again, this goes a bit against my type, but I’m also enjoying How to Get Away with Murder. Viola Davis is obviously awesome, and there’s just something morbidly fun about rooting for this seemingly soulless lawyer as she does anything to help clearly guilty people get away with murder. Maybe I’m just on a Shonda Rhimes kick. (I did enjoy her guest spot on The Mindy Project this week. If you missed it because for some ridiculous reason you don’t watch Mindy, she was allowed to compete in the Dartmouth frat alumni beer pong tournament because she’s “successful like a man.” Great stuff.) While I detest the show that made Shonda Rhimes a household name, so much so that I refuse to mention it here, it turns out she can produce some pretty awesome stuff. Hence my newfound Scandal obsession.
But my absolute favorite show of the fall so far is The Flash. Really it’s everything Gotham isn’t. It’s bright, exciting, and fun. With as much as I love Arrow I expected to love The Flash, but it’s always refreshing when something actually lives up to expectations. Yes we’re only two episodes in, but for me the key was how well the second ep held up after the pilot. I have no reason to think they can’t keep that up. The CW has now built two pretty great shows around comic books. Maybe they can help some other networks figure out what the heck they’re doing so we can spread the fun around a little bit more?
Let me know what you think. Am I wrong about Gotham? Am I missing another new show that I should be watching?
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