Still Waiting for a Big Winner

The big TV premiere week is now half over. (Which means, for those of you not into such things, I'll be back to my regular random chatter soon enough.) Tonight, I sampled two new shows.

First up was the new incarnation of Bionic Woman, from producer David Eick. We the viewers are clearly meant to think of this "update" with the fondness we have for the other update he helps produce, Battlestar Galactica. It included two of Galactica's main cast members (and another who played a prominent guest role on the show). It had a musical score very evocative of the "Pegasus" motifs used on Galactica. It even used the same font for its credits that brings us "The Cylons Were Created By Man" every week.

But the show didn't measure up to Galactica, not by a long shot. Not that anything easily could, but hey -- they're the ones inviting the comparison. It wasn't really a bad show, but like all "superhero origin stories," this episode could hardly be an indicator of what to expect from later stories to come.

There are some threads woven in that could be interesting down the road. There are the many personal character connections -- Jamie and her sister, Jamie and Wells as lovers in this incarnation, Jamie and her new bionic nemesis, and the relationship that woman has in turn with a member of the project's staff. The show seemed to want to be dramatic and serious and moody, and that's promising too.

But I really can't claim to be more than "sort of entertained" by what I saw. Maybe my expectations were too high here. I plan to give it another shot, but I'm looking for more next time to pick up the show regularly.

The other show I sampled was Dirty Sexy Money, on the generally favorable word of mouth from critics, and the fact that it stars Peter Krause, whose television pedigree includes the excellent shows Six Feet Under and Sports Night.

In short, to me this series suffers from being too realistic. It's the story of a family man lawyer (Krause) thrust into the position of helping a ridiculously wealthy family through all their turmoils. The pilot episode bounced the poor lawyer around like a pinball from family member to family member, to handle one "crisis" after another. And it didn't feel like entertainment -- it felt at times like a tabloid, and at other times far too much like a real newspaper.

We had a politician and a priest each hiding a sex scandal. We had a drug addicted party animal spoiled rich kid. We had a serial marriage seeker. We had a talentless hack coasting on the family wealth.

We had ciphers for Paris Hilton, Larry Craig (or whatever other two-faced politician du jour you'd care to point the finger at), and more.

It's uninteresting and deplorable to me to see the real-life versions in the limelight so much. And I have no interest in watching these barely fictionalized versions of them on a weekly basis. It was escapist fluff without the escapism. However good or not Peter Krause was in it couldn't begin to rise above the rest of the whole. (But for the record, likeable though he remains, it's not like his role was giving him any of the kind of meat to work with that he had on his past series.)

So, with another mediocre reception and my first really bad reaction, I'm still basically lacking a new series to be totally excited about at this point. Which might suit me (and you?) just fine.