After spending last season in a distant fourth place, ABC made a bit of a comeback earlier this season with their surprise hits, Lost and Desperate Housewives. Suddenly, other networks are clamoring to fill their schedules with quirky, unique dramas rather than quickie reality shows to replicate the ratings success of those two programs. This leaves ABC in the unfortunate position of having to build on its own slight success while battling other networks for the same type of content. They've got four new midseason shows, all of which are trying to be the next Lost or Desperate Housewives, but none of them quite have the originality or sharp writing to get there.
The two that have already premiered, Blind Justice (ABC, Tuesdays, 10 p.m.) and Jake in Progress (ABC, Thursdays, 8 p.m.) are just slight variations on other successful shows. Justice, premiering in the time slot of the departed NYPD Blue and co-created by Blue executive producer Steven Bochco, is obviously meant to fill the gritty, mature police-drama slot. But unlike Blue, whose only appeal was its gritty maturity, Justice is saddled with a truly terrible premise: Ron Eldard plays a police detective blinded in the line of duty who is somehow allowed to come back to work, investigating cases and even carrying a gun.
This is just a ridiculous idea, and the problem is that Bochco and his collaborators try to sell it straight, instead of going for some out-there superhero premise like Daredevil. In every other respect, this is your standard police drama, but it's hard to focus on that aspect when you can't get past the blind dude packing heat. Of course, if you could get past it, you'd realize that even as a police drama, the show offers nothing that the 800 other police dramas on the air don't have.
Jake in Progress features former Full House star John Stamos as a New York City publicist trying to make his way in the dating world. ABC isn't even trying to hide the fact that it's supposed to be a male version of Sex and the City, even using the advertising slogan, "Different sex, same city." A single-camera, laugh-track-free comedy, Jake gets the Sex style right but misses the content. It's still stuck with sitcom-level plotting and hamstrung by its presence on network TV when it's trying to emulate a cable show. Jake and his buddies talk about sex, but they have to use toned-down language to conform to broadcast standards and it just feels false.
The shows premiering this week offer only a slight improvement. The medical drama Grey's Anatomy (ABC, Sundays, 10 p.m.), which will be standing in for Boston Legal for four weeks, has an outstanding cast but suffers from grossly clichéd and predictable writing. Created by Shonda Rhimes, the mastermind behind the Britney Spears film, Crossroads, and The Princess Diaries 2, Anatomy is a lot like NBC's Scrubs, only not funny. Like Scrubs, it focuses on a group of young interns in their first year at a major urban hospital, in this case Seattle. The interns learn the ropes and bond with one another as they are mercilessly drilled by the senior medical professionals.
The cast, including Ellen Pompeo, Sandra Oh, Katherine Heigl and Patrick Dempsey, elevates Rhimes' trite and predictable drama above the mundane, but they can only do so much. With ER getting long in the tooth, ABC is hoping for Anatomy to fill the soapy medical drama void, but Scrubs beats it in the personality department, and Fox's House has more compelling medical mysteries.
The brightest spot in ABC's new lineup is Eyes (ABC, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.), a sassy show about private eyes from Fastlane and Profit co-creator John McNamara. Although it's not quite as lighthearted as it appears in the commercials, Eyes has plenty of snappy dialogue, mostly from main character Harlan Judd (Tim Daly), who runs an upscale, high-tech investigation firm. There's the same sort of slick sexiness that McNamara pushed to mixed effect in Fastlane, but there's also a dark undertone that makes the show more serious. The balance might not work in the long run, but for now it makes for a very entertaining show, and the only new offering on ABC that shows any real sign of life.