CBS fall 2015 schedule thoughts

In the past two or three years, network television's quality has both declined and increased. I have The Walking Dead) being shown on AMC -- a cable channel.

seen a number of great ideas with an almost infinite amount of potential completely squandered and left to wither and die. I have also seen dreck and lowbrow, low-concept programs become middling hits. To find a hit nowadays, though, is a challenge as television viewing is more fragmented than ever before with the continuing rise of Netflix, Amazon becoming a player and the most popular series (

CBS (aka The Tiffany Network) had been able -- until the past year or two -- to avoid the sliding ratings and rarely had more than two series which turned out to be complete dogs. They continually churned out crime dramas which pulled in steady ratings and spawned spinoffs. On the comedy side, their multi-camera shows followed a formula of set-up, easy joke, laughter. It worked and they built on their Monday comedy success with a solidly watched Thursday comedy block. That new Thursday block quickly laid waste to NBC's once-popular Thursday comedy block.

But the success of the CBS Thursday comedy block came at a price. Failing to find a big hit after How I Met Your Mother began its decline and eventually ended its run, the two-hour Monday comedy block was scaled back to a mere hour for the 2014-15 season. The anchor 2 Broke Girls  failed to improve or even maintain its viewership levels.

The schedule for the fall 2015 season on CBS is the most disappointing and lackluster of all of the networks -- and that says a lot given the bottom-of-the-barrel crap NBC is rolling out.

CBS FALL 2015-16 SCHEDULE
(New programs in UPPER CASE; all times ET)
MONDAY
8-8:30 PM The Big Bang Theory
8:30-9 PM LIFE IN PIECES
8-9 PM SUPERGIRL (Starting in November)
9-10 PM Scorpion
10-11 PM NCIS: Los Angeles
TUESDAY
8-9 PM NCIS
9-10 PM NCIS: New Orleans
10-11 PM LIMITLESS
WEDNESDAY
8-9 PM Survivor
9-10 PM Criminal Minds
10-11 PM CODE BLACK
THURSDAY
8-11 PM, ET/ NFL Thursday Night Football (Premieres Sept. 17)
5-8 PM, PT
8-8:30 PM The Big Bang Theory (RTP) (Starting in November)
8:30-9 PM LIFE IN PIECES (Starting in November)
9-9:30 PM Mom (Starting in November)
9:30-10 PM ANGEL FROM HELL (Starting in November)
10-11 PM Elementary(Starting in November)
FRIDAY
8-9 PM The Amazing Race
9-10 PM Hawaii Five-O
10-11 PM Blue Bloods
SATURDAY
8-9 PM Crimetime Saturday
9-10 PM Crimetime Saturday
10-11 PM 48 Hours
SUNDAY
7-9 PM 60 Minutes
8-9 PM Madam Secretary
9-10 PM The Good Wife
10-11 PM CSI: CYBER

 The biggest shock is that beginning in November, CBS will have no comedies on it Monday night lineup for the first time in over 60 years. This is not just the end of an era, it also marks the continued slide of sitcoms on network television. There will be a mere 12 hours of comedies each week on network television when November rolls around. I am sure that the number has been far lower before but when spread across four major networks it is definitely a low point for televised comedies.

The one series that sticks out like a sore thumb for CBS is Supergirl. It's not geared towards the silver hair crowd. It features a female lead. It could also be the beginning of CBS actively trying to attract younger viewers with the cheesy but young-skewing Scorpion pairing well with Supergirl. Two hours of dramas which could actually appeal to people under 50 years old. Or Supergirl could be a complete failure and vanish by February. Just wait and see.

"The Blacklist" might be the best new drama of 2013

My DVR is doing a bit of heavy lifting this week as television shows debut on the major networks. Some will be gone before the first snow flies here in Minnesota but others will be the cornerstones of the television schedules for a few years to come. The best, so far, is "The Blacklist" on NBC which desperately needs a hit outside of "The Voice". The James Spader-starring "The Blacklist" is likely that hit. While it started off a bit dry and slow, it picked up steam if you managed to stick around after about 15 minutes.

It had the elements of a law enforcement procedural with what could be best defined, moving forward, as a criminal-of-the-week type show but it also has plenty of underlying and likely long-running questions which will keep viewers tuned in. What is the big secret that new FBI profiler chick's husband is hiding?

SPOILER ALERT: He had a lot of cash and an awful lot of different passports squirreled away in that well-hidden wooden box under the floor of the couple's dining room.

What does James Spader's character ultimately want with the FBI profiler whom he chose to surrender to? Why did he choose her first day on the job to surrender? What crimes landed Spader's character on the FBI's most-wanted list?

Whatever the case, check out "The Blacklist" Mondays at 9 PM c/t on NBC and watch the premiere episode below.

NBC new show video trailers

NBC’s New Show Trailers: ‘Dracula’, ‘Ironside’, ‘Michael J Fox’, ‘Sean Saves The World’, ‘Welcome To The Family’, 'The Blacklist'



















While the key art for the line-up of new NBC comedies looks straight-up God-awful and the preview for 'Michael J Fox' is simply dreadful, I have to wonder mostly why NBC dumped 'The New Normal' only to replace it a year later with a somewhat similarly-themed 'Sean Saves The World'. 'Dracula' looks to be a decent niche-type drama along the vein of FOX's now-canceled 'Fringe' in size of audience appeal and could very well be a showpiece for what the networks can do in terms of matching the quality of cable dramas like 'Mad Men' and 'The Walking Dead'. The rest of the dramas look to be rather bland as NBC seems to be holding their best drama offerings ('Crisis' and 'After Hours') for midseason or on standby for canceled programs. On the comedy side, again, I am more intrigued by a couple who are being re-tooled for midseason possibilities -- 'Brenda Forever' (starring 'The Office's Ellie Kemper) and 'Assistance' starring Krysten Ritter from ABC's canceled 'Don't Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23'. At least midseason comedy 'About A Boy' starring David Walton shows promise. 2013-14 looks to be yet another rebuilding year for NBC with one or two legitimate drama hits and another one or two comedy hits while 'Revolution' will ride out its move to Wednesdays with sinking ratings and be canceled by the end of the upcoming season.

Tracy Spiridakos - NBC's Revolution

Tonight marks the debut episode of NBC's high-concept drama Revolution. With a mostly unknown cast, the breakout character is Charlie (played by Canadian actress Tracy Spiridakos pictured below). A precocious and strong-willed young woman who, fifteen years after all forms of power in the world cease to exist, sets out from her home on the east coast of the Republic of Monroe (the former United States) on a quest to find her uncle (who supposedly knows about the mysterious blackout and possibly how to turn the power back on) in a now-decimated and crumbling Chicago only to be met by warlords and unsavory characters along the way on her journey. There is a kidnapping, murder, sword fights, a bow and arrow toting heroine (Charlie) and a multi-layered conspiracy of sorts which should make for a highly watchable series.

While I have only seen the pilot episode of Revolution which airs tonight at 9 PM Central on NBC, I can say that, already, Revolution has pacing issues. Tonight's pilot episode feels like it could have a feature length film instead of a 44 minute television episode. There is a ton of story packed into the first episode which hopefully sets up for equally entertaining and well-told future episodes instead of putting the brakes on the speed of the storytelling in an effort to fill an additional 12 episodes with a watered-down storyline.

Tonight's debut episode of Revolution is a must-see, though, because if the consistency of the storytelling stays at an entertaining level and continues to be fast-paced, you run the risk of trying to play catch-up later in the season. Unfortunately, I feel that Revolution will run through the meat of its story in one season where mysteries will be uncovered but there will be no resolutions. Regardless, it should be an entertaining ride while it lasts.

Tracy Spiridakos, starring as Charlie in NBC's new drama "Revolution" poses here for GQ in a suggesting that her covered but topless body is one of only a handful of reasons to watch the futuristic post-armageddon series.

Revolution - full episode premiere

While the first episode of the NBC drama Revolution won't premiere for over a week, the pilot episode of the sci-fi drama set fifteen years from now in a world where all forms of energy vanished, you guessed it, fifteen years ago; the first full episode is available below:




Ambitious in concept, I am curious whether or not Revolution will be this year's The Event or Terra Nova or if it will actually catch on given its post-The Voice 10 PM eastern/9 central time slot.

Don't let the fact that the lead character is a strong-willed female with a bow and arrow lead you to believe that this is a television version of The Hunger Games because this is as far from that particular movie as you can get.

Revolution and its multiple layers of conspiracies will either give NBC some much-needed recognition in a world where network television is regularly being eclipsed by equally well crafted cable dramas or this series will wither away by mid-November and slip from our memories.

I, for one, have strong hopes for what I think is either the strongest or second strongest drama to hit the networks this fall.

Awake might be NBC's best series this year

NBC has, since the demise of Seinfeld, Friends and E.R., been a network struggling to find a hit series and be a cornerstone for the network and "Awake" - beginning March 1 - may very well be that hit series to save NBC from being relegated to an over-the-air version of a lowly cable channel. "Awake" is a well-written and well-acted drama featuring a detective who, after a traumatic injury, is living dual realities in parallel worlds. Don't let the sci-fi angle of that description scare you off. At its heart, "Awake" is a solid police procedural that just happens to have a sci-fi twist. Think of this series like FOX's "Alcatraz" but better lit and on a network desperate to save itself.

While the series premiere is nearly two weeks off, NBC wants to share this rare gem of a series with the world early. Below is the pilot episode of "Awake".



"Awake" debuts Thursday, March 1st at 9 PM central on NBC.

One Tree Hill returned last night...

With a FUCKING CLIP SHOW! That is no way, after a months-long hiatus, to treat fans. Oh, sure, it wasn't actually a clip show but past clips from the show's previous seven season comprised the 18th episode of One Tree Hill's 8th season. With that one move it became painfully obvious that this needs to be the final season of the highly-rated (for The CW) but rather tired One Tree Hill. And I say this as a casually regular viewer of the show for 5 or 6 of the show's 8 seasons. I hope that the tired and thought-deprived writing team does the right thing and writes a proper final episode -- hopefully including as many of the huge cast of characters from the show's history and let it become some sort of historical marker of how not to drag a show on beyond its intended lifespan.

Chad Michael Murray and Hilarie Burton obviously saw the writing on the wall that the series had run its useful course and opted to leave (or were lowballed and left) after the sixth season but it's time to shut it down and move on.

ABC cans All My Children and One Life to Live

Chalk up another victory for piss-poor unscripted filler programming. ABC's decision to give two of their three daytime soaps the ax is yet another slit to the throat of scripted television. Think I'm wrong? Flip around next time you're home sick from work and see the sad excuses for programming that exist during the daytime hours. Outside of a few cartoons for the kids on a couple cable channels and the mostly decent offerings from PBS, the rest of the channels are tenth-run movies or talk shows.

Maybe we have Oprah Winfrey to blame for the proliferation of talk shows. After all, her's was the first barnburning success story in the daytime talk format but those that have copied and badly altered the format are the ones to truly blame. I get it, though. Daytime TV viewership is home to some pretty dismal numbers due to the fact that the stay-at-home mom crowd is about as large as the number of polar bears living in Iowa but even a mom who spends her days wrangling a gang of rugrats deserves to be entertained and that entertainment used to come in the form of scripted daytime dramas (soap operas) but now comes in the form of 4 hours of the Today show on NBC, an hour of local news, Rachel Ray cooking something and a couple hours of doctor-themed talk shows.

That seems recipe seems like an awful lot of the same ingredients. Take, for instance, local NBC affiliate KARE-TV. KARE-TV is home to one scripted hour of television outside of the 7-10 PM primetime block. The rest of the hours consist of local or network news/entertainment programming, Jeopardy! and many hours of talk shows which all seem to cover the same topics. I understand that a talk show costs far less to produce than an hour of scripted television but with ABC bringing shows entitled "The Chew" (a food/cooking show) and "The Revolution" (a weight loss series) it seems like, in an effort to cut costs, the networks are almost desperate to copy or even sink below their cable television competition.

With each passing day I lose more hope for the continued existence of over the air network television and while I'm no fan of daytime soaps, today's loss -- bringing the remaining total to four soaps across the big three networks -- seems to say that the networks will do whatever it takes to cut costs to the bone while still raking in the same amount of advertising dollars as always. Hell, none of the big three networks actually program new content on Saturday evenings and Friday evenings are mainly reality fare so it's only a matter of time until the big three networks take on The CW model and go five nights a week with only two hours each night.

I'm only half joking with that last prediction but it's time for the networks to get serious. Slashing costs and going the route of more unscripted content is not going to one-up their cable competition. Like any business, it's time for the suits to be held accountable and it's time for them to come up with real, long-term solutions because drivel like "The Chew" and "The Revolution" are nothing more than placeholders.

Body of Proof is a true corpse

As I settled in Tuesday night at 9 PM to watch Body of Proof on ABC, I had realistic hopes. Starring Dana Delany (Desperate Housewives) I figured that she wouldn't have signed on to just any show and that she had some sort of standards about the type of work she took on.

I was wrong.

Body of Proof felt, in the first five minutes, like a poorly crafted ripoff of FOX's Bones. The biggest difference is that Bones has likable characters and good writing. For a show centering around death and an excessively bitchy medical examiner who seems to almost loathe her job (aren't we in the era of just being happy to have a job?) the settings seemed to bright and sterile. Maybe I've been spoiled by the spot-on scenery from FOX's Bones but not even the mildly MILFy Dana Delany could save this tepid hour.

ABC obviously has little faith in it based on its late March premiere. If it were even half way decent it would have made the schedule in January and let's face it, ABC has plenty of openings on its schedule but they instead opted to give dead on arrival series like Detroit-187 and No Ordinary Family nearly full seasons and held on to this for when few would be watching it.

Unfortunately, the ratings of the first episode tell a different story. Approximately 14 million people stuck around after two hours of Dancing with the Stars to watch ABC's latest bomb. I don't know the true explanation for people accepting poorly crafted entertainment but maybe millions of people lost their remotes or maybe they simply fell asleep (I know I dozed off for five minutes of Proof, maybe I missed the good part). The true test for Body of Proof comes Sunday with a special airing of the show before it again settles in to its Tuesday, 9 PM C/T timeslot. Check it out if you hate your eyes but I recommend doing something better with your time like filling your eyes with broken glass.

Fringe coming back next year to FOX

Not only is Fringe, one of my favorite dramas on television, coming back for a ratehr unexpected fourth season to FOX this fall, it's doing so with a new character. Emily Meade, who was most recently on HBO's The Wire, will play a rookie FBI agent on the sci-fi drama in the show's season finale this May in what will likely be a recurring role.

The big one-two punch of a new possible lead character for Fringe coupled with the show getting a full fourth season order is surprising. Fringe has never been much in the way of a ratings blockbuster. It's been shuffled around the schedule by FOX and recently landed in the 8 PM C/T Friday night time slot. That's faily hideous treatment for a well produced drama that seems to be a dying breed on network television.

With police and medical procedurals being the norm, I didn't think that a lowly rated sci-fi drama about strange happenings and an alternate universe much like our own had a chance. With TV viewers far more interested in watching average schmucks be jackasses (Jersey Shore) and glorified karaoke contests like American Idol bringing in huge ratings and advertising dollars, I was beginning to doubt whether quality television which requires you to pay attention and think -- opening your mind to things that might possibly be real somewher ein the future -- had a place on the airwaves.

FOX has proven me wrong today. Let's hope that they follow through with the full season (22 episodes) in 2011-2012

What happened to "The Event"?

I watched, like a giddy six year-old, as the first moments of “The Event” played out on NBC last September. I had seen promos for about five months prior and knew that this show was either going to be huge or an immediate flop right out of the gate. The first episode was amazing. It felt like a half year’s worth of development had been packed in to 44 minutes of screen time. There were intriguing characters, intriguing happenings (a plane-swallowing wormhole?!?) and the promise of more to come.

Another item that gave me hope was a cast featuring relatively new faces on TV. Sure Jason Ritter (as Sean Walker) and Sarah Roemer (as Leila Buchanan) have had movie roles before but never in a straight-up starring role. The fresh faces, to me at least, allow me to more easily digest the roles these characters are portraying. I’m not remembering previous roles they had on other series and I find it easier to accept the story as a whole because I have no preconceived notions about this actors’ previous performances.

As I said, the first episode was epic. It proved that action and science-fiction still had a place in our relatively dumbed down television entertainment culture.

But then it started to go downhill. The show’s pace slowed. It got bogged down in details that seemed to matter little to the overall story. (Those fucking aliens are up to something!) Not to mention that there were plenty of elements (even for a sci-fi themed series) that were too far-fetched (and I was a die-hard “Lost” fan) to believe.

“The Event” rapidly lost its initial momentum. It’s almost like the writers had originally penned a two hour movie and now found themselves having to fill the time between parts one and two with an additional 20 hours of writing. They, not unlike me, seemed to have landed a television series without a firm plan on how to create captivating episodes to cover a season. It became obvious that the character lacked depth. The acting became almost painful and I was as close to throwing in the towel as ever. But after hanging on through most of November’s episodes I rationalized that I had committed too much time to “The Event” to give up at this point. The show eventually went on a three month hiatus and, as its return on Monday, March 7 proved, the writing staff had finally found their groove.

The action was back and the pace was fast. It was almost to the point that if you missed one scene you’d have some serious catching up to take care of. The alien story came back and sort of tied in those seemingly pointless details which seemed to be filler in previous episodes. But the rating seemed to indicate that a three month hiatus was too much for many viewers to take. “The Event” had been shedding viewers from the very first episode but when a “Spring premiere” fails to produce any sort of an increase, the writing’s on the wall.

I guess the one positive of watching a series whose cancellation seems to be a nearly sure thing is that it won’t drag on for endless seasons. Maybe that’s best for serialized dramas like “The Event”. In any case, “The Event” is back on my watch list but only because I have a lot of time invested and its end is near. If it was to drag on for even one more year I’d probably get off the couch and find a hobby.