TBG TV: 2010 Fall Preview -- Tuesday

Shows I'm Already Watching: Nothing? What the hell kind of "Fall TV Preview" is this?! Truth be told, I had to check out my Tuesday TV preview post from last year to see what new show I had intended to watch. Aaaand…it seems I "totally planned" to watch ABC's remake of V…except I never did. After the first two episodes, m'man Daniels called it the "best new show of the [2009] season, so far." But…in last week's Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Scott Rosenbaum said that the first season "lacked mythology" and "didn't answer enough questions". That sure sounds like the retroactive admissions of a TV suit who's frantically trying to placate a skeptical fanbase.

New Show to TiVO: I've made the not-so-difficult decision to drop a certain long-running Wednesday night drama and a certain long-running Thursday night comedy from my DVR rotation. Consequently, I'm opening up Tuesday nights to three new shows. The premise of Raising Hope (FOX) has been done to death (ill-prepared slacker become an iller-prepared single father), but the reviews have been favorable and almost always include the words "dark" and "mean-spirited". Sold!

Will Arnett's Running Wilde (FOX) has me less enthused (an Odd Couple concept that puns its title from a character's surname? Why not call it Handle with Care?), but I'll give it a shot. Finally, Michael Chiklis gets another super-hero opportunity with No Ordinary Family (ABC). I admire how quickly everyone on planet Earth agreed to strike those awful Fantastic Four movies from existence, but it remains to be seen whether Chiklis can be anything other than a brooding, morally ambiguous chap wrapped in a leather jacket – a Dark Knight Danny Zuko, as it were.

New Show with No Chance: Good ol' TV and its never-ending quest to exploit the socioeconomically depressed. Never change! Not long after the Los Angeles riots in 1992, FOX green-lit the pandering, depressing and short-lived South Central. A decade later, FOX's K-Ville awkwardly brought the buddy-cop concept to post-Katrina New Orleans. This season, ABC has Detroit 1-8-7. The Motor City is universally regarded as the embodiment of America's failing economy AND boasts a real-life 21st century crime rate that the writers of Robocop depicted with 95 – 98% accuracy back in 1987. Using this as the backdrop for Nielsen-driven fiction seems unnecessary.