What's ahead? On to the show and tell

By ROBERT LLOYD

Sept. 20, 2009 12 AM PT

TELEVISION CRITIC

Hail to thee, fall season! Though someday you will be just a half-remembered bygone television ritual, subsumed in an already rising tide of series that premiere just any old time, you are for now still the biggest thing on the broadcast calendar, blowing in like spring in September (and October, and November) with new, baby TV shows.

What shall we say of you this year, fall season? You strike us as content, for the most part, to spin slight variations on the tried and true. (A season whose most experimental programming involves Jay Leno cannot truly be called innovative.) Fox revives “Melrose Place” and awards Seth McFarlane a third half-hour to scribble upon. CBS orders up another Ye Olde Three-Camera Comedy for its Monday yock-block and extends its “CSI” and “NCIS” franchises. NBC spreads Leno across five nights of prime time. The CW continues to tempt youth with youth. And ABC tries a little bit of everything -- one-camera sitcoms, a three-camera sitcom, a mockumentary, a mystery, a couple of sci-fi series (one a remake) -- to draw our inconstant love.

Already in progress

The Jay Leno Show

(NBC, weeknights, 10 p.m.)

From a programming standpoint, the Leno comedy strip is the year’s most radical notion, pushing late-night down into the 10 o’clock hour and filling it up with comedy -- a thing not seen, really, since “The Carol Burnett Show” went off the air three decades back. Unless the star has undergone a total personality makeover, the content itself will not be groundbreaking, but if enough people watch, it could remake the medium.

Melrose Place

(CW, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.)

Appropriately scheduled to follow the resuscitated “90210,” from whose earlier incarnation its own earlier incarnation was spun, “Melrose Place” once more fills the courtyard pool with operatic soap -- and, as traditional, a body. A pack of new damn kids overruns the old Mediterranean courtyard, while a few “MP 1.0” veterans make trouble within and without.

Glee

(Fox, Wednesdays, 9 p.m.)

“Nip/Tuck” creator Ryan Murphy (with Brad Falchuck and Ian Brennan) is behind this cheerily satirical, generally lovable small-town high school musical about students and teachers and the glory of pop. Obvious sometimes, ambitious most times, as corny as Kansas in August but also a little perverse, it makes up in spirit what it lacks in sense.

The Beautiful Life

(CW, Wednesdays, 9 p.m.)

TV’s ongoing thing for pathologically thin women gets a dramatic rationale in this youth-soap set in the world of New York high fashion. It’s rendered in the bright and shiny CW house style -- glamorous locations, hot young things, pop songs turned up loud -- and yet the pilot felt sewn together from old scraps. Mischa Barton plays a fading superstar, Sara Paxton the unspoiled (underfed) new gun in town, Ben Hollingsworth a naive hunk of Iowa beefcake.

Community

(NBC, Thursdays, 9:30 p.m.)

Old-fashioned institutional comedy set at a community college. Joel McHale is the unifying disruptive presence, a lawyer whose license has been revoked. (Surprised friend: “I thought you had a bachelor’s from Columbia.” McHale: “Now I have to get one from America.”) A Bill Murray movie, basically, with a hint of “Breakfast Club,” which the script preemptively acknowledges. And there’s Chevy Chase, besides. From Dan Harmon (“The Sarah Silverman Program”).

The Vampire Diaries

(CW, Thursdays, 8 p.m.)

I imagine a network executive holding up a DVD of “Twilight” and bellowing, “Get me one of these!” (I have no idea how the TV business actually works, mind you.) Another story of the living and undead in the halls of high school and the love that dares not stay up past dawn. (Although there is a magic ring for that, apparently.) Based on, though not strictly following, a series of YA novels whose publication preceded that of “Twilight” by a good 15 years.

Coming up

Today, Sept. 20

Bored to Death

(HBO, 9:30 p.m.)

Writer Jonathan Ames (“The Extra Man”) adapts his novella about a mentally disheveled Brooklyn writer (Jason Schwartzman), named “Jonathan Ames,” who impulsively advertises himself as a detective after his girlfriend moves out. One of fall’s freshest series, it puts an original spin on sitcom tropes. Ted Danson once again chooses well, as Schwartzman’s sybaritic editor; Zach Galifianakis is his very married friend.

Monday, Sept. 21

Accidentally on Purpose

8:30 p.m. (CBS)

Jenna Elfman is a film critic at a San Francisco newspaper -- this is somehow represented as glamorous -- who finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand with a dude young enough to be her much younger brother. It’s “Knocked Up” set to the ticking of a biological clock. Ashley Jensen does loose-living best-friend duty (see also: Busy Philipps in “Cougar Town”).

Tuesday, Sept. 22

The Forgotten

(ABC, 10 p.m.)

Amateur detectives, led by ex-cop Christian Slater, bring closure by identifying the remains of John and Jane Does in yet another moody procedural from producer Jerry Bruckheimer (“Cold Case,” “CSI: Whatever” and so on).

The Good Wife

(CBS, 10 p.m.)

Julianna Margulies stars in a solid drama as a woman who goes back to lawyering after her adulterous politico husband (Chris Noth) goes to jail. (He’s appealing -- the case, I mean.) The courtroom scenes are fine, but the show lives in the domestic details. (Margulies telling her son, to his annoyance, that he’s adorable, for example.) As a bonus, Christine Baranski is here.

NCIS: Los Angeles

(CBS, 9 p.m.)

Scheduled to follow its parent show “NCIS” -- that’s Naval Criminal Investigative Service, if you haven’t followed along -- also known as “Son of JAG.” Chris O’Donnell and LL Cool J star as agents in the Office of Special Projects, and you know what that means. It means they’ll work on special projects.

Wednesday, Sept. 23

Mercy

(NBC, 8 p.m.)

Nurse-centric medical drama that seems conceived as a kind of down-market “Grey’s Anatomy.” Taylor Schilling is a stressed Iraq war vet who can’t get doctors to listen to what she knows; Michelle Trachtenberg is the new girl who doesn’t know much of anything at all. James Tupper, heading south from “Men in Trees,” is the M.D. who complicates things for Schilling. Conceptually, a sort of cousin to “Trauma” (see below).

Modern Family

(ABC, 9 p.m.)

Ed O’Neill plays a man Ed O’Neill’s age, married to a hot-tempered young Colombian in this mockumentary about three wings of an extended family. Also includes a gay couple with a newly adopted baby and parents of three caught between youth and age. (He is a self-proclaimed “cool dad,” which means lots of adult-talking-like-a-teenager jokes.) Much friction, naturally, but ultimately it’s a big group hug.

Cougar Town

(ABC, 9:30 p.m.)

Courteney Cox gets back to comedy as a divorced 40-year-old with a poor sense of boundaries -- or is that the writers’ problem? -- and a body we are meant to take as both aging and attractive. (She’s this year’s sexy klutz, in for Christina Applegate.) She does good work, well supported by Busy Philipps and Christa Miller as twin consciences. Yet I nodded sympathetically at this: “Why don’t you ever laugh at my jokes,” Cox asks her son (Dan Byrd). “Because they make me sad,” he replies.

Eastwick

(ABC, 10 p.m.)

The first and very probably the last TV comedy to be based on a John Updike novel. (“Make Room for Rabbit,” anyone? Anyone?) Rebecca Romijn, mixing hot and wholesome, stars as the starriest of three women discovering their witchiness in a little New England town. Canada’s Paul Gross (“Slings & Arrows”) is the dreamy devil who comes to stir up the chowder.

Thursday, Sept. 24

FlashForward

(ABC, 8 p.m.)

The world blacks out for a couple of minutes and everyone awakens -- everyone who wasn’t, say, stepping out of the way of a bus at the moment -- having seen their lives six months hence. What does it all mean? Are those six months an optimistic or pessimistic view of the show’s chances? Joseph Fiennes and Courtney B. Vance are G-men on the case. Promoted as coming “from the network that brought you ‘Lost,’ ” but intriguing on its own.

Friday, Sept. 25

Brothers

(Fox, 8 p.m.)

Daryl “Chill” Mitchell (“Galaxy Quest”) and former football player Michael Strahan (as a former football player) play bickering siblings living with parents CCH Pounder and Carl Weathers, whose character appears to be in the early stages of dementia. (Hilarious.) There is talent, but this is a show begging to get past its strenuous pilot and relax.

Sunday, Sept. 27

The Cleveland Show

(Fox, 8:30 p.m.)

Black character from “The Family Guy” gets a spinoff, moves back home, remarries and -- family aside, is still surrounded by white people. He also has talking bears for neighbors, one of them voiced by Arianna Huffington. Fox Sunday cartoon block now three-quarters Seth McFarlane.

Monday, Sept. 28

Trauma

(NBC, 9 p.m.)

In this series about medical emergency workers in the photogenic city of San Francisco, “trauma” refers both to the victims and to the battered mental states of the people whose job is to keep them alive until they get to a hospital, where it becomes someone else’s job. Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights”) is executive producer. Conceptually, a sort of cousin to “Mercy” (see above).

Wednesday, Sept. 30

Hank

(ABC, 8 p.m.)

Kelsey Grammer plays a fired CEO who somehow forgot his golden parachute -- they might as well have made him a talking eggplant, as likely as that is -- and is forced to abandon the penthouse view he just adores for a dusty old place in Hooterville. I mean, River Bend, Va. As often happens, there is a young son who is a little strange and an older daughter who is a little snippy.

The Middle

(ABC, 8:30 p.m.)

“I told you we can’t put wet things in the dryer anymore,” harried Indiana mom and struggling car saleswoman Patricia Heaton warns her family in a promising one-camera comedy that takes a few cues from “Malcolm in the Middle.” Husband is a bit of a lunk, kids are different flavors of odd -- the youngest is described as “clinically quirky.” (See also: “Hank,” above.)

Friday, Oct. 2

Stargate Universe

(Syfy, 9 p.m.)

The latest installment in the 15-year-old “Stargate” franchise follows a group of soldiers and civilians stranded in a spaceship far from home -- which is to say that it smells a little (not necessarily in a bad way) of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Star Trek: Voyager.” Robert Carlyle (“The Full Monty”) and Lou Diamond Phillips are on board.

Sunday, Oct. 4

Three Rivers

(CBS, 9 p.m.)

The title of this drama about a transplant hospital refers to Pittsburgh, city of the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio, but also to the confluence of donor, doctor and recipient. I’ve seen only a brief preview, which was marred by hoary genre dialogue (“How long before I can play ball?”). But Alfre Woodard is in it, and I trust her.

Monday, Oct. 5

Sherri

(Lifetime, 7 p.m.; regular time, Tuesdays, 10 p.m.)

Sherri Shepherd, from “The View” and “30 Rock,” gets her own sitcom as a paralegal/actress/mother back in the dating pool after a divorce. (See also: “Cougar Town.”)

Friday, Oct. 23

White Collar

(USA, 10 p.m.)

Not for the first time will a handsome and talented criminal cross back from the dark side to use his talents for good, or else I’ve completely misunderstood the point of “It Takes a Thief,” “To Catch a Thief” and TNT’s “Leverage,” just for starters. Matt Bomer (Bryce in “Chuck”) is the felonious polymath who partners with a starchy FBI agent (Tim DeKay). Tiffani Thiessen (not forever Amber, apparently) is Mrs. FBI agent, Diahann Carroll the woman who takes Bomer into her mansion home.

Tuesday, Nov. 3

(ABC, 8 p.m.)

I suppose I should issue a spoiler alert here, but even if this effects-laden series about space lizards who put on human skin -- the better to trap and enslave us with -- hadn’t already been made 25 years ago, any schoolchild or moderately intelligent robot knows not to trust aliens bearing gifts. (Amusingly, these bring the gift of “universal healthcare.”) Elizabeth Mitchell, blown up at the end of “Lost” last year, lands here as an FBI agent.

Monday, Dec. 7

Men of a Certain Age

(TNT, 10 p.m.)

The cast is more exciting than the premise in this story of middle-aged friends on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a sports car purchase, a more flattering haircut, but the cast is definitely interesting: Ray Romano (the power behind the project, and one of its writers), Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula, measuring unrealized dreams against a contracting future.

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What’s ahead? On to the show and tell

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