Fall is here, and that can only mean one thing.
No, I don’t mean cooler weather. We won’t be able to wear anything close to long sleeves and be able to stand it until long into November. And, no, I don’t mean fall foliage because the weather would have to be cool for the leaves to change.
And why do they call this the “fall semester” when we spend most of this semester in summer weather?
No, there’s only one thing that matters to us when fall, and especially September, approaches: the new fall TV lineup.
This Sunday, the Emmy awards will be looking back at all the shows we wasted hours on this past year. Now, we can move and look to more shows that will waste even more hours of our life.
Of course, we’re looking forward to some of out favorite old timewasters: “American Idol,” “Survivor” and the rest of the reality shows. We’ll see some of the same dramas and same performances with fresh new faces. There will be tears and yelling galore, and maybe we’ll start to realize that at least the hosts, if not the participants, are using the same scripts from two years ago.
Then there are the sitcoms and dramas that we’ll continue to watch. “The OC” will surely have crises and messed-up relationships that will top the last season. In “Smallville,” you’ll be able to overlook the overly cloying allusions to the Superman mythology by staring at Clark’s (or Lana’s, if you’re into that) hotness.
“Family Guy,” of course, has proven itself for a wonderful fourth season and will continue to pump out hilarious and irreverent humor as long as people watch Adult Swim.
But for the most part, we’ve lost most of the good shows and the networks are scrambling to replace everything. So we definitely can look for some fresh faces and storylines coming this fall.
For our dramas we have such things as “Prison Break,” “Threshold,” “Supernatural” and “Bones.”
“Prison Break,” which has already been on for a couple of weeks, seems to be a combination of “Oz” and “The Fugitive.” “Threshold” is a combination of science-fiction aliens and forensic crime-fighters with a sort of “X-Files” motif. Supernatural is the WB’s attempt to save itself by getting back the “Buffy”/ “Angel”/”Charmed” fans and returning to the supernatural teen drama (while also sounding a bit like the storyline “Fullmetal Alchemist,” an anime on Adult Swim).
And “Bones” is another forensic show. No matter how many times you say that it’s based on a novel series, I can’t help but feel that it’s an attempt to catch all the “Law and Order” fans and help save David Boreanaz’s career.
There’s also another trend I can’t stand in all the returning television shows. Why must some of them try to latch on to another show’s fame? How many shows are the creators of “Sex and the City” going to create?
Why do they do it? Because, despite popular opinion, people aren’t stupid.
“Sex and the City” was a wonderful comedy and a ground-breaking show, and people knew this. People knew that a show like that only came around once in a decade. They knew that they were watching something special. And now, unless you buy the DVDs, you can’t even see it in its original form.
Will “Kitchen Confidential” be any good? Probably not. But at least the network is reasonably assured that the pilot episode will have good viewership.
Among the fall lineup, I don’t really see any special shows. The old ones will keep pumping out that old magic that keeps us enthralled, and the new ones will mimic and parody them and try to keep the same thing on the television all the time.
At least it’s better than watching the news.