Fire/Water (and more)

Fall is now here officially, as you would know from the suddenly cold and rainy weather this evening here in Denver... or from the blast of new TV shows that started up tonight. Of course, the former made it all the more inviting to stay inside and observe the latter.

It kicked off with what I found to be a fairly striking episode of Prison Break. It's not necessarily that I thought it was one of their finest hours of the show, but I was really surprised by the pace of it all. They covered more plot ground in this single hour than I expected would be traversed for the next several episodes.

I had somehow expected it would be weeks before Scofield coaxed his new target Whistler out of the walls, or before Mahone got wise to what Scofield was really in there to do. Instead, the writers vaulted right through the whole issue of trying to rescue a man marked for death even within the prison. I was entertained, but still surprised that things are moving along so quickly.

Oh, I'm sure there's plenty more story to be told in the weeks ahead, but in a way it feels like exactly the opposite sort of reaction than the one I had to last week's premiere. Before, I felt like things were a bit slow, laying track for the thrill ride to come. Here, I thought I'd made it to the top of the first hill and was ready for a big drop, but instead got twisted and corkscrewed off in another direction. But I'm eager to see where things go next. (Particularly for Sucre. Now that he's finally let the Maricruz plotline go, I wonder how his formerly rather one-note character will figure into the story.)

Meanwhile, NBC was rolling out two new shows tonight -- Chuck and Journeyman. Neither one of them blew me away, but I found enough in both to get me to sample another episode or two.

Chuck was fun enough. The whole thing sort of felt like its heart and spirit were in the right place, but the actual delivery was a little off the mark. The whole take on "nerd-dom" felt too much like the Hollywood cliche of what people who know nothing about how actual geeks behave think geeks act like. Bandages on the fingers from playing too much XBox? Worries over who gets to drive the company Volkswagen? No way. Over the top, and frankly just slightly insulting. Before the writers create any more episodes, somebody should strap them into chairs and force them to watch Free Enterprise for a better, more realistic take on how geeks actually talk and act.

As I said, though, it did kind of feel like their heart was in the right place. They were trying to be fun and whimsical, and sometimes it worked. And I love seeing Adam Baldwin in just about anything. But is it wrong that I found myself more wishing that the show had been about this super-agent that got killed in the opening five minutes than about the actual protagonist and his friends and family?

Then there was Journeyman. It more or less hit the right intellectual beats. The Macguffin of what exactly Our Hero was doing in repeatedly intersecting with this one man's life at different points in the past? That worked. The twist at the end of it all having been about his son instead... also interesting.

But the emotional beats fell rather flat. It wasn't remotely interesting to watch the people around the main character worry about whether he was crazy or drugged up or what-not. We the audience knew he wasn't. And we also knew there wouldn't be any lasting consequences (like being locked up in a psych hospital or something), because then there wouldn't be a series. It was all just devoid of tension, dramatically speaking, and the actors weren't able to inject enough emotion into it in just these brief 42 minutes to overcome that.

So, perhaps both these new shows will iron out their flaws and make it into my "appointment book." I'm willing to give them a few more chances. But they've got some work to do.

In the meantime, I'll just keep looking forward to Prison Break.