9-1-1 is long in the tooth by now—but I ended up tapping in with a smattering of offerings on the network’s new slate to sample the shape of the TV season to come. And brothers and sisters, it is grim.
It’s funny: twenty years ago, this was the most exciting time of the year, when the TV programming schedule was democratized by sweeps (for the kids: an advertising surge when shows were incentivized to drop their biggest episodes and juiciest plot twists to capitalize), fall premieres, spring finales and summer vacations. To that last part, late September and early October was like watching a relay race. Four networks, plus The WB-then-CW, firing their best, brightest and sometimes most bemusing bets off at the same time, across five nights of programming. You were guaranteed at least six shows worth checking out in that crop, three that lived up to the promise, and one that succeeded to become the Next Big Hit.
It’s kind of a foregone conclusion that, in the aftermath of both the cable and the Streaming boom, the next Lost is not going to come out of ABC or one of its network peers. The platonic ideal is an Abbott Elementary—a new sitcom lovingly made in the mold of the classics, a new fun hang that feels very familiar. Abbott was previously my only real interaction with Net-World, mostly passively over the shoulder of my girlfriend (who’s obsessed to the point of syndicating it her damn self with multiple random re-watches). Judging from this new slate, that’s how things are going to stay.
At first I stayed in the Ryan Murphy cosmos, with Dr. Odyssey—the new show boasting the small screen mainstream returns of Joshua Jackson and Don Johnson. Murphy is a producer-savant seemingly eager to outdo and exceed the legends of Dick Wolf and Aaron Spelling; crafting a medical procedural that appeals to millennial and Gen X nostalgia, with the DNA of a Golden Age classic like The Love Boat, is strange alchemy that just might work. Add in trademark Murphy-perversion, and this could be good fast food, right? True to his impulses, Jackson, the titular cruise ship doctor, and his team of nurses are treating a broken erect penis by the fifteen-minute mark…but ultimately, banality wins. By the time Jackson and his foil were having a “Despacito” dance-off for the affections of their hot co-worker, I’d mentally checked out.
