Winter Preview 2011 – The State of TV

 
If you haven’t noticed, Surfing SF has kind of trickled off as of late. I just got something sort of resembling real TV back for the first time in several months. In the meantime I’ve moved a couple times, gotten a very time-consuming job, and been wanting to spent a lot of time with my girlfriend. Thus, less Surfing for you, and I know that with the weather turning cold you may be wondering “What should I do with all this time I’m going to spending inside? What shows are good right now? How can I tell without my Surfing SF?” Well, here we are, riding to the rescue. Here are some of our current favorites that are sure to keep us talking all winter long.

 

 
A new show we liked at Surfing SF? How about Fox’s The New Girl, a sitcom about a nerdy girl played by Zooey Deschanel who catches her boyfriend cheating on her and then moves into an apartment with three male roommates. (She gets accepted after telling them “most of my friends are models.”) The show was a big hit in the ratings… and then got pulled for at least a month for no freakin’ reason. Awesome idea, FOX. Anyway, it’s basically a sitcom, but it has the awkward Ms. Deschanel at the center being admonished by her new roomies for making references to Lord of the Rings. When your girlfriend calls the main character of a show “basically a girl version of you”, you kind of have to cut it some slack every once in a while.

 

 
A new show we had some issues with at Surfing SF? How about Once Upon a Time, ABC’s series about a town full of fairy tale characters stuck in the modern world, which has oodles of potential since, well, it’s a blatant Fables knock-off, and Fables is pretty good. Structurally it’s sort of the new Lost, featuring preordained battles of good and evil and ongoing Flash-Sideways-es right off the bat. And it got great ratings, which probably means it’ll be around for a bit. And yet it’ll have to make me care about, well, any of these characters if it wants me to stick around. I generally like the actors, but the CGI is awful on a pretty epic scale. And that kid is going to get really annoying somewhere around episode 3.

 

 
A new show we got too busy to get around to checking out at Surfing SF? How about Fox’s much-hyped Terra Nova, which sort of arrived with a big thud and never really got much buzz going. Which is weird, because it’s got time travel, dinosaurs, and Stephen Lang. Is anybody here watching this? If so, what do you think?

 
But really, our favorite shows here at Surfing SF can be found among our returning favorites. This is the group that I really regret not having more time to talk about with all of you.

 

 
Supernatural’s seventh season has picked up right about where the sixth left off, by which I mean that things seem pegged at about the same level of quality as opposed to the same plot-lines continuing. The show has a new bunch of bad guys (“Leviathans”) with their own set of rules, a welcome breather from the heaven/hell plots of the last couple years. Annoyingly, the brothers are keeping secrets from each other yet again, secrets that will threaten the very foundations of their very relationship (not). When the show does lots and lots of angst, it seems to be working less and less (as in the episode “Defending Your Life”, which despite featuring Taran Fahir as the Egyptian God Osiris still somehow ended up a soppy mess), but thankfully it can still have fun when it wants to, as in the very cool “Shut Up, Dr. Phil”, which featured a bickering married witch couple wreaking havoc on the small town where they live (It helps the couple was played by Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters). In the end, Supernatural is still the only show on TV that would title an episode “Slash Fiction”, as we saw last week, and that’s gotta count for something.

 

 
Fringe’s fourth season has sometimes been frustrating and sometimes awesome. With last year’s “Peter never existed” cliffhanger, the show’s backstory, one of its biggest strengths, has become a little muddled. On the other hand, it’s been fun trying to spot the differences between this and the “old” universe. The show put up a couple great episodes and a couple so-so episodes, and then went on hiatus while Fox showed the World Series. The spectacular “both teams work together to fight a serial killer in the alternate universe” episode was kind of balanced out by the completely bizarre “giant psychic killer fungus” episode. But then in “Subject 13” Peter suddenly appeared, naked, in the middle of that lake. He remembers everything. Nobody remembers him.

 

 
I’m still kind of in love with Community. This season opened with a musical number, John Goodman joining the show, and Abed discovering the strangely familiar series Inspector Spacetime. Other highlights included “Intro to Chaos Theory”, featuring seven disparate alternate timelines (determined by which of our core group went to the door to get the pizza), and the recent Halloween installment “Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps”, in which the group tell scary stories while Britta tries to figure out which member of the group’s psych test indicated psychotic tendencies. The show’s ratings are still very, very small, but it sells well on DVD, and, well, what else is NBC gonna put on next year? Still, last I heard TV Guide was planning to feature the series on the cover of its “Save Our Show” issue. Don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

 

 
I’m not all the way caught up on Warehouse 13, which is partly because I was really unimpressed with a lot of what I did see. I’ve said for a while that when the show tries for high drama (outside of the Season 2 finale), it generally misses the mark. This tendency has only been amplified in Season 3. And many of the attempts at comedy have fallen flat, as well, something this show did not suffer from in the past… An episode ripping off The Hangover? An episode set inside the worst-looking video game of all time? I don’t even know what to say about this stuff. And yet, I somehow still care about Pete and Myka and, especially, Claudia, who is basically a girl version of our good friend Rob [Editor’s Note: Which is funny, because if I was born a girl, I was going to be named Claudia. Okay, I wasn’t, but I will need to see her in action now. --R]. I think it’s probably worth sticking around, especially after I was so enamored w/ Season 2.

 

 
Eureka is, well, still Eureka, and rather good at it too. There’s a space mission to Titan underway, which is fun, and Felicia Day’s joined the cast (I love Felicia Day… I kind of wish she’d play someone who wasn’t a Felicia Day expy once in a while… I bet she could). And the drama stuff’s still working better than usual, too, such as in a recent episode where Allison’s brain was controlled by an implant. I think I’m probably more into this series now than I ever have been in the past, which is weird because it kind of feels surprising that it’s even still on.

 

 
Archer was back for a three-episode “movie” that ran as special installments after It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and while it never really evolved into an all-time classic of television, it was still Archer, which means it was awesome, and Patrick Warburton and David Cross guest starred, which was even more awesome. I’m told the series will be back next year with a full season.

 

 
The Walking Dead had a tumultuous off-season that included firing Frank Darabont and the old writing staff and the hiring of a whole new one, but that didn’t seem to affect the ratings. The season 2 premiere set ratings records for AMC once again. However, three episodes into the season I’m not that impressed with where the show’s gone. After a kind-of-fun premiere involving a horde of zombies on a freeway, we’ve spent two entire episodes centered on the Sheriff’s kid getting shot. See, here’s the thing. I like zombies as much as the next geek, but you can’t just say “zombies!” and have a good TV show. You have to actually make a TV show, and I’m not sure that this series has succeeded on that front as of yet.

 
So those are some of the shows floating around on the Surfing SF radar this winter. And don’t forget the Geek show of the moment, Doctor Who, still floating around out there. There’s a Christmas special coming up, apparently set during World War II. Did we forget anything? What shows are you really looking forward to over the next few months? Let us know in the comments.