Monday's New Lineup

We're on the back stretch of September, which means the TV networks are rolling out their new shows. I had a "veg out on the couch" night and sampled a handful of them. So a few snap comments:

Lone Star. This was billed as sort of "the new Dallas," a show in which a con man leads a double life both as a "simple man with a loving girlfriend," and an "up and coming presence in a big oil company." Most of the cast seemed likable enough, including Jon Voight as the owner of said oil company. But the pilot really left me wondering, "so what's the series here?"

This seems an inherently limited premise, with a very finite amount of stories that can be told before it's no longer plausible that the con man protagonist's house of cards won't crumble. Indeed, it's already crumbling a bit in the pilot episode. If the subject and setting in Texas didn't seem so inescapably American, I'd say this could only be a British TV series. It seems like the sort of thing you'd get one or two six-episode seasons out of, and then call it done. I'll probably be "calling it done" myself.

Hawaii Five-0. I probably wouldn't have bothered checking this show out at all, but the write-up in Entertainment Weekly suggested it was actually pretty good. I'd say that's maybe going a little far, but it wasn't half bad. There's a solid cast here (Alex O'Loughlin, Scott Caan, Lost's Daniel Dae Kim, and Battlestar Galactica's Grace Park). They seem to have a good rapport with each other.

And yet, it felt good in the same way "your USA network summer show of choice" is good. If you watch Psych, or Burn Notice, or Royal Pains, or Covert Affairs, you know what I mean. Those are the shows that are good enough to watch during the summer when there's nothing on. If they were competing at a time when any other big show was actually running new episodes, they wouldn't make the cut, you know? So it seemed to me with this Hawaii Five-0. By the end of the hour, there wasn't anything about this particular "they fight crime!" show to make me choose it over any of the dozens of other such shows on TV.

The Event. This show was simultaneously compelling and frustrating, exciting and tedious. This is the new "we want to be mysterious" show of the year, and boy, did they achieve that. The pilot episode jumps around in time (though at times, this comes off less like a narrative necessity than a way to shoot only 35 minutes of footage and replay it enough times to get 42 minutes of show time), all leading up to the end of the episode, where... well, I'm not sure. Was that "the event?"

There were some good action sequences, and some hints of interesting character relationships. And yet, there was a whole lot of meaningless dialogue that reminded me too much of the worst "conspiracy" episodes of The X-Files. You know, actors trying to lend ominous weight to dialogue they don't quite understand themselves. Characters being vague not because they would be in a situation, but because being vague is supposed to intrigue the audience. And yet... I sort of do feel like I might give it another episode or two to see if it actually might go somewhere.

So in all, no clear winner for me tonight. No "this is my new addiction for the season." Which I think might suit me fine, actually. I probably have more than enough appointment shows already.

But the week is just getting started, with more new shows ahead...