TV: Fall into Fox

Network gets a head start on the new season

Josh Bell

It seems as if only several pages ago, I was looking into the coming fall season and now it's already starting, with Fox leading the charge by premiering four new shows this week. Since it will take a break of up to four weeks in October for the World Series, it's smart for Fox to establish a foothold with new shows, rather than just waste time with cheap reality programming as it did last season. It's already opened strongly with Prison Break, a heavily-hyped drama that more or less delivers and has been garnering high ratings.


This week's premieres are a mixed bag, and none are likely to have the same ratings or critical impact of Prison Break. The best of the bunch is Head Cases (Wednesdays, 9 p.m.), a quirky legal show from Bill Chais, former producer of another quirky legal show, The Practice. It stars Chris O'Donnell as a high-powered lawyer who has a nervous breakdown and spends two months in a mental institution. When he gets out, he's been blacklisted by his old firm and is saddled with a sort of mental-health "buddy" in the manic, short-tempered Shultz (Adam Goldberg), a fellow lawyer who specializes in low-rent lawsuits.


It's obvious that the two will bicker and then bond, and by the end of the first episode, they've already decided to team up and form their own firm. The cases they handle are nothing new for a legal show, but the show gets by on the two characters, with O'Donnell showing surprising depth and Goldberg adding a good deal of humor. Whether it can continue to succeed without any sort of compelling plot remains to be seen, but for now it's enough.


It's all downhill for the rest of the week's Fox premieres. It's especially disappointing that Reunion (Thursdays, 9 p.m.), which has a premise as intriguing as Prison Break's, is so poorly executed. The show follows a group of six friends over the course of 20 years, with each episode representing a single year. The flashbacks are framed by sequences set in the present day, in which one friend has been murdered. With all of its potential for mystery and intrigue, it's a shame Reunion is as poorly written as any bad melodrama, with predictable plot twists and terrible dialogue. It's enough to make you want to fire all the writers and hire new people who know how to mine the inherent potential in the show's concept.


At least it has a concept with potential, unlike The War at Home (Sundays, 8:30 p.m.) or Bones (Tuesdays, 8 p.m.), both of which tread familiar territory. Home is a typical domestic sitcom with meager laughs and a half-assed gimmick (characters talking to the camera) that does little to add to its stale execution. Bones is yet another police procedural, this one with a forensic anthropologist (Emily Deschanel) tagging along with an FBI agent (David Boreanaz). Deschanel and Boreanaz have enough chemistry to make the show mildly amusing, but in every other way, it's just another clone of CSI.


Things are mostly quiet elsewhere on the network front this week, with the only other notable premiere being Supernatural (The WB, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.), the first in what's set to be a barrage of supernatural-themed shows hitting the airwaves this fall in response to the success of ABC's Lost. Since it's on the WB, Supernatural features two hot young actors (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles), playing a pair of brothers who crisscross the country solving supernatural mysteries and searching for their lost dad. The show is surprisingly dark for the WB, and at times pretty scary, but its effort at building a mythology is weak, and the grim tone is sometimes at odds with the leads' goofy presence. As far as the fall shows about the unexplained go, it lands squarely in the middle.

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