The Only Fall TV Preview You'll Need to Read - Monday

Shows I'm Already Watching: It might be time to add some more meat to my Mondays. Only the CW's Everybody Hates Chris is on my first-day-of-the-work-week radar. They enter their third season with an October 1 premiere and the hope here is that the writing can return to its Season One roots. Last year, the show became a standard Black sitcom with broadly-drawn caricatures (Tichina Arnold's braying "Rochelle" was the most annoying) and a loss of focus on the familial elements.

When Everybody Hates… first debuted, it was a breath of fresh air and the most realistic depiction of working-class African-Americans that I'd seen in recent memory. Now that Chris Rock's film career is effectively dead and buried, he should devote every waking hour to getting this show back on track. Seriously, how many more cinematic opportunities is Hollywood gonna give this guy? Did you not see Rock's Head of State? It was a feature-length film with Nate Dogg hooks, for God's sake!

And, for the record, I've managed to avoid Monday night fan favorite shows Heroes and Prison Break to this point. Both first seasons are on the Netflix queue, though and it wouldn't be the first time I discovered a great show after everyone else did. In fact, I'm pretty sure I was the LAST person to get on board the Arrested Development bandwagon. First saw it in September 2006. I am not proud of this.

The One New Show That Will be TiVo-ed (for at least one week): I hope no one whose opinion I value is reading what I'm about to write. Y'see, I'm passing over the early acclaim of Aliens in America and the geeky, pocket-protector potential of Chuck and Journeyman for…K-Ville.

It's up against Heroes and Two and a Half Men, so there's no way it lasts more than two weeks in its timeslot, but I'm curious to see if Fox lets the writing run wild with the social, political and economic issues that have enveloped post-Katrina New Orleans. I'm not optimistic, but then I'm probably the only one of you who watched every episode of New York Undercover. Where have you gone, Malik Yoba and the bug-eyed Puerto Rican guy who played his partner?

The One New Show I Ain't EVER Watching: Umm, yeah…so, here's the thing about Christina Applegate. I commend her for somehow, someway successfully escaping the "Kelly Bundy" typecast. Show of hands: who amongst thought she'd still be working 10 years after Married…With Children went off the air? LIARS! It's just that the premise of her new show, Samantha Who?, about an amnesiac biiatch who has forgotten how biiatchy she was sounds more like "mid-season replacement" than "years and years of viewer investment". ABC obviously agrees as they've given Samantha Who? the choice timeslot in between the vapid Dancing with the Stars and vacant The Bachelor in an attempt to manufacture ratings.

Boo, ABC!