Miscellaneous TV Musings

So what have you been watching on television lately?

I've only seen two new shows this season, one an ABC hit, the other an NBC flop. Get used to that pattern.

The hit series on ABC is "Better With You," a sitcom starring Jennifer Finnigan and "Reba" alumna Joanna Garcia as sisters who follow different relationships. Garcia plays Mia Putney, the younger sister, who is on the verge of marrying a man she's only known for seven weeks - the less than bright Casey (played by Jake Lacy) even as Finnigan's Maddie has been living together for nine years with her uptight boyfriend Ben (Josh Cooke) without getting married and is content with that arrangement. Oh yeah, Mia is also pregnant by Casey. The sisters's parents approve of Mia and Casey's union because it involves marriage, approving less so of Maddie and Ben's because it doesn't. The parents, Joel and Vicky (Kurt Fuller and Debra Jo Rupp, respectively) have their own issues after being married for 35 years.

"Better With You" suggests another sitcom with female characters as earthly saints and male characters as doofuses, but the relationships between the six characters are more complicated than that. The Putney sisters and their mom aren't always perfect (Ma Putney is actually something of a mess) and their male counterparts aren't always wrong. Sometimes the roles get reversed, to considerable comic effect. It's a decent show on its way to becoming very good, and it's pulling in pretty good ratings being between "The Middle" and "Modern Family." I sometimes wonder, though, if I would have discovered this sitcom - or even been interested in it - if not for its 8:30 ET Wednesday time slot. It pretty much fills the time in between the other two sitcoms, both of which I got hooked on last season.

One show I discovered that same night was NBC's "Undercovers," which, after underperforming in the Nieslens under the radar, just plain went under; it was canceled last month. The series involved a rather attractive black couple, Steven and Samantha Bloom (respectively played by Boris Kodjoe and British actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who open a catering business after leaving the Central Intelligence Agency only to be called back into active duty by their old boss. They spent a lot of time on secret missions with a pair of agents who knew them in their earlier spy careers. Called a modern "Hart to Hart," "Undercovers" was produced by J.J. Abrams, who created "Lost" for ABC, but the series never became the topic of water cooler discussion that "Lost" had been.

Although many observers blamed Middle America's refusal to accept a pair of black actors (especially one with a name like "Gugu Mbatha-Raw") as a latter-day Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers, I blame its hour-long time slot - Wednesdays at 8 PM ET, opposite "The Middle" and "Better With You" on ABC. There was no way a spy drama series - especially a sexy spy series like this one - was ever going to succeed against a pair of sitcoms in an hour normally reserved for such fare. I myself didn't see "Undercovers" until ABC showed reruns one Wednesday night, and I only saw it twice.

The failure of "Undercovers" only underscores (no pun intended there) what dire straits NBC is in after six years in Nielsen hell. Even their most earnest efforts at airing quality programming can't do much for the network, as that strategy did back in the eighties when Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff were running things. There's simply too much else on these days. NBC's most successful shows of the past six years, like "The Office," have been qualified hits at best, and even a couple of those are already off the air ("My Name Is Earl," for example). Which brings me to "Parenthood," a qualified NBC Tuesday night hit that may have too many qualifiers to stay on the air for long.

After debuting as a mid-season replacement earlier this year and gaining respectable ratings, "Parenthood" has only had modest ratings at best some weeks; other weeks, they've been pretty disappointing. So NBC placed "Parenthood" on "winter hiatus" for five weeks, without even any reruns. It returns on January 4, which likely means there won't be a Christmas episode. (As the show debuted this past March, there obviously hasn't been a Christmas episode yet.) It gets worse. Rumor has it that "Parenthood" will move to Mondays this coming March. Mondays? CBS owns that night! To place anything against any of CBS's Monday night shows, especially the new version of "Hawaii Five-O" at 10 PM ET ("Parenthood" holds the same time slot on Tuesdays), is the surest way to kill a series. Which NBC must be trying to do, if only to find an honorable way out of a deal with producer Ron Howard.

Here, I suspect cultural issues might be a factor. One of the storylines in the extended Braverman family, who are white, involves the younger son Crosby involved with a black woman who is the mother of his illegitimate child and is now his fiancée. Many viewers might bristle at an interracial couple, and an unmarried one at that. But now a new storyline has been developed involving Crosby's teenage niece Haddie getting romantically involved with a black teenage boy at a homeless shelter she's a volunteer for. Not only is this a second interracial pairing - and a black male/white female pairing at that - but it involves teenagers. True, the show is set in Berkeley, California, where relationships of this sort probably bloom like azaleas in May, but most of the country isn't like Berkeley, a city so liberal the whole place is considered an un-American activity.

"Parenthood," for the most part, isn't the hippest show on TV, and it doesn't pretend to be. I can't think of any other series on television now that would refer to Ray Lamontagne, a folk-rock singer-songwriter who likely sells one CD for every one thousand CDs Lady Gaga sells. And an accompanying soundtrack record available features artists that even the most die-hard urban folk radio listeners wouldn't recognize. But you'd think a show that has Lauren Graham in it would be doing much better. I hope NBC finds enough of a reason to keep it on the air and give it time to cultivate an audience, like Grant Tinker would have done, but if NBC's bosses think they can do better with a less accomplished drama, I wouldn't bet on that happening. NBC is known for short-term payoff strategies rather than gradual brand building - which, as the Jay Leno-Conan O'Brien fiasco proved, have only done the network more harm than good. It's getting to the point where NBC's sister cable news channels are carrying the weight of the NBC/Universal empire that Comcast is hoping to take over.

Meanwhile, CBS's "Two And a Half Men" looks like it will outlast the war in Afghanistan and other great atrocities. I still don't get the appeal of two brothers, a creep and a nerd, trying to deal with each other and the nerdy brother's half-witted son, but something is keeping its ratings high, which is enough for CBS president Leslie Moonves to keep caving to star Charlie Sheen's blackmails for more money - which he apparently needs to pay off kidnapped girlfriends and angry hotel managers, when he's not negotiating with his local dealer. (I ain't talkin' 'bout no car salesman!)

And, if any of my favorite TV shows get canceled, that only means I'll have plenty more time to keep blogging right here. :-D