It’s that rite of fall: Leaves change, football arrives and the new TV season begins. You don’t even have to travel or buy a ticket. All you need are batteries for your remote.
Hollywood Reporter NBC’s international crime thriller “The Blacklist” will be the newcomer to beat on fall TV, the Hollywood Reporter predicts, getting a boost out of the gate from the appearance of James Spader. Indeed, the mag expects it to prevail over CBS’s “Hostages,” despite rave reviews of the pilot depicting high-level crime in Washington. “This arguably was the best pilot of the fall,” says critic Tim Goodman, noting that “Hostages” begins with an FBI agent pressing a doctor to kill the president during surgery. Another favorite is Fox’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” a rare cop comedy starring Andy Samberg.
Entertainment Weekly’s Fall TV special, a double issue, is thick with suspense. Yes, there are the Emmy predictions, but that’s not what we mean. In its countdown to the season’s best, we couldn’t help but notice that either TV has gotten really dark, the EW editors have a penchant for such fare, or their readers (and TV viewers) are adolescent Goths. What are the big shows they profile? “The Walking Dead,” “American Horror Story” (with Jessica Lange, no less), “Scandal” and “Dracula” get top billing. A full page on the new season of “Homeland” gave us hope, and what’s this drama about Masters and Johnson? Surely, it will be more satisfying than the bedroom indecisions on “The Good Wife.” Oh, yes, there is a comedy. About a recovering alcoholic single mom and her recovering drug addict mom. We can’t wait to plop down in front of the tube. It’s a safer addiction.
TV Guide doesn’t seem to know that cable exists. Thin as it is, the magazine is mostly full of double-spread ads for the very network shows it is pumping up. This is your family fare mag, with the “Michael J. Fox Show” preview guaranteed to make you choke up and laugh at the same time. And perhaps the interviews with celebrities are there to remind you how insipid these people really are. Malin Akerman, the star of “Trophy Wife” — yes, that’s a new show with no irony intended — says she doesn’t want to play someone “who looks good but has no brain or is only in it to gold-dig.” No, this character is a “good person” who wants to “change her ways.” It’s hard to believe this show will be a keeper. Reading the promos is a good reminder that whatever their promise, very few TV shows match the hype. Robin Williams in “The Crazy One”? Don’t hold your breath.
For its style issue, the New Yorker profiles Gotham fashion magnate Andy Rosen, who has been lobbying to save the Garment District from the clutches of developers who want to turn it into more lofts for zillionaires. Rosen, a co-founder of Theory, says he’s worried about “the next generation of our industry” and tells a local factory owner, “You have to give [workers] an opportunity to have a better life.” Interesting, as financial columnist James Surowiecki elsewhere declares that, “Unfortunately, no New York mayor can do much to counter the forces that have eroded the middle class.”
New York’s Jonathan Chait adopts a serene, wizened tone as he paints the Republican bid to block ObamaCare as a “desperate” form of “madness.” In a spectacular show of wishful thinking and self-delusion, he likens opposition to “hallucinatory attacks by Cold War conservatives like Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society.” One might argue that it’s Chait who is the hallucinatory one here, as there are plenty of signs that the Affordable Care Act is, indeed, headed for a train wreck as it looks to sign up millions of young people across the nation next month, most of whom have no idea what ObamaCare actually is.
Time’s Rick Stengel is reportedly ending his seven-year stint as top editor to become a top State Department official. Which, of course, causes one to reflect to what degree he’s been carrying water for the Obama administration in his current position. The answer: no more or less than one would expect. This week’s issue carries a few barbs for the White House, including a cover story on “How Wall Street Won” that warns a market crash “could happen again.” Columnist Joe Klein says Obama’s dithering on Syria has “damaged his ability to get his way with the Chinese, the Iranians and even the Israelis.”