Autumn is here, which means many things. One of those things is New TV. Using my sources, I’ve found and viewed a few advance versions of TV pilots for this coming season.
Fringe (Fox — Premire: Tues Sep. 9) Heralded by some as “X-Files for the New Generation,” J. J. Abrams’ new show posits a world where a society of “Fringe” scientists decide to use the world as their laboratory, putting into action technologies/concepts like teleportation, cellular disintegration, telepathy, and others. The bad guys are the ones who are working to take the ‘pseudo’ out of pseudo-science, no matter what it takes. The shows’ lead is Anna Torv, playing Olivia Dunham, an FBI agent who gets dropped into a ‘special’ case and turns to Peter Bishop (Joshua “Pacey” Jackson), the son of brilliant-but-crazy scientist Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble) to solve the case.
Torv helps the show give us an honest-to-goodness strong female character in a tv show. And what I mean by this is a strong, cometant, believable character who happens to be female. Her strength isn’t about being an honorary male or a heavyhanded political gesture, just a solid character.
Jackson provides a nuanced view of a troubled genius too smart to fit in, who has massive daddy issues with regards to his Einstein-meets-Frankenstein father. The Bishop father-and-son dynamic is solid from the beginning, and will be one of the things to watch as the show develops. The doctors Bishop match the bad guys whacky science for whacky science, and another awesomeness of the show comes from the fact that we it seems likely to have a cow as an ongoing character — because of the need for a test-subject on hand.
We’ll undoubtedly have a metaplot to track behind the week-to-week weird situations with weirder science. Dunham gives us the layman’s POV to ground the doctors Bishop’s incomprehensively-brilliant technobabble. Certainly worth tuning in for–give it a shot. Let’s hope that Abrams has left enough structure and enough attention left to keep things going on LOST while he gets Fringe off the ground.
Leverage (TNT — December 2008) Hollywood-style pitch: Ocean’s Eleven meets Burn Notice. Nate Ford (Timothy Hutton), a former Insurance Fraud investigator assembles a team of a computer fraud expert (Aldis Hodge), a thug (Christopher Kane), a crazy thief (Beth Riesgraf), and a con-woman (Gina Bellman). After their first heist stealing back secrets an avionics company on behalf of the company they actually belong to, Ford and the team decide to take up tough-luck cases and set themselves up as do-gooder con-people for hire, using “alternative revenue streams”
Here’s a quote from Ford that encapuslates the team’s mission statement: “People like that, corporations like that — they have all the money, they have all the power, and they use it to make people like you go away. Right now, you’re suffering under an enormous weight. We provide…leverage”
The show is witty, sharp, has great twists and turns and double-crosses, with a cast of complicated untrustworthy compelling people. Undoubtedly we’ll learn about these people’s pasts, see them confronted with great ethical/moral choices, and get snarky smart geeky heist/capers along the way. Set your Tivo now, even though it doesn’t debut until December.
True Blood (HBO — September 7)
Brought to HBO by Alan “Six Feet Under” Ball, this show is an adaptation of the Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris.
Imporant note: This is not just Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight for the 20-something set. The series gives a fresh, or at least less-coffin-stale version of vampires, with the bloodsuckers having recently “Come out of the coffin” and joined mainstream society (or at least are trying). The vampire community has the advantage to do so as a result of the wide release of a Japanese cocktail called “Tru Blood” which provides for all of a vampire’s nutritional needs — the ultimate protein shake, so to speak.
The sociological laboratory for the effects of this attempted integration works at marrying two still-relevant civil rights issues by setting the show in small-town Louisiana. The Vampire-as-Other metaphor sometimes leans towards Vampire as GLBT, sometimes towards Vampire as black. Our POV into this world is Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin), a telepathic waitress (smart money says the telepathy is some kind of connection to the vampire world, which means she’s already a liminal figure, between humanity and the vampires. Folklorically speaking, it makes her a perfect mediator). Her Beauty-and-the-Beast counterpart is Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer), a loner-type vampire with dark soulful eyes that will doubtless send as many/more fangirls into a heart-flutter as Paquin will do for geekboys (each of course will also woo fans of any gender identity and biological configuration that makes them attracted to either gender/sex, obviously).
Sookie and Bill’s romance will serve as our case-study for Vampire-Human relations, with the supporting characters filling out various stereotypes about dating across lines of cultural difference while playing out their own interpesonal dramas. Such dramas include Sookie’s best friend, a mouthy african-american woman who can’t keep a job becaus she’s just too uppity (Huh?), Jason Stackhouse, Sookie’s womanizing trouble-magnet brother, and more. The Telepathy effect is interesting, but can sometimes make it as hard to sort out the important information as it must be for Sookie. I had to go back a couple of times to get the most important lines.
The preair I watched was missing a few bits, so I’ll have to re-watch now that it’s legitimately been shown.
All three of these shows get the 21st Century Geeks stamp of approval, ranging in enthusiasm from ‘check it out’ to ‘Made of Awesome.’