The deluge of new fall shows continues this week, and once again there's far more than any one person (TV critics and shut-ins aside) could be expected to watch or keep track of. So why should you care? There must be a few reasons in here some place.
Start with the premiere of one of the season's best new shows, the Wonder Years-esque Everybody Hates Chris (UPN, Thursdays, 8 p.m.). Created and narrated by comedian Chris Rock, it follows his childhood in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, starting at age 13. Although Rock grew up in a poor area, he's got a solid and loving family, with a rare two-parent household. Like this season's other successful comedies (My Name is Earl, Kitchen Confidential), Chris pushes the envelope in some of its dialogue and situations, but has a warm heart at the center. It's one of the few genuine family shows not bogged down in excessive sap.
Unfortunately, UPN is following Chris with a parade of its typically lame sitcoms, including the new Love, Inc. (UPN, Thursdays, 8:30 p.m.). Starring Busy Phillips as a matchmaker whose own love life stinks, the show is a parade of clichés and bears an uncanny similarity to UPN's short-lived midseason sitcom, The Bad Girl's Guide. Phillips (who replaced Shannen Doherty after the pilot was picked up) even looks and acts remarkably like Bad Girl's star Jenny McCarthy. None of which matters, or makes the show remotely interesting or worth watching.
Stuck in fourth place, NBC is breaking out some desperate moves to improve its ratings, and one of those includes copying ABC's successful Extreme Makeover: Home Edition with its new Three Wishes (NBC, Fridays, 9 p.m.). Hosted by Christian-crossover singer Amy Grant, Wishes takes the feel-good premise of Home Edition and expands it to include more than just giving people with hard-luck stories new houses. Grant and her team set up shop in a different town every week, where they grant three "wishes" to deserving residents. In the pilot, they help a young girl who was in a car accident, a boy who wants to be adopted by his stepfather, and a cheerleading squad looking for a new field.
Like Home Edition, Wishes is shamelessly schmaltzy and manipulative, and raises questions about how much of its help stems from corporate greed on the part of its sponsors or the desire to be on TV on the part of its participants. At the same time, it's nice to see that one of only two new reality shows this season (the other is Martha Stewart's version of The Apprentice) doesn't involve humiliation or elimination, and ultimately has a net positive result, even if its motives remain suspect.
The wholesome tone of Three Wishes makes a nice companion to the similarly hokey Ghost Whisperer (CBS, Fridays, 9 p.m.), a show that at first looks to be capitalizing on the success of NBC's Medium, but really has more in common with corny fare such as Touched By an Angel (which was a hit on CBS for years). Jennifer Love Hewitt plays a woman who can talk to dead people, but unlike Medium's Allison DuBois, she doesn't use her ability to solve crimes. Instead, she helps the dead pass messages to their loved ones, making the show (which has hands down the stupidest title of the season) a three-hankie inspiration-fest. At least that's what it should be; it's so clunky and predictable that only people who cry at greeting-card commercials are likely to enjoy it. At least the sentimentality on Three Wishes is partly real.
Way on the opposite end of the spectrum is the grim crime drama Killer Instinct (Fox, Fridays, 9 p.m.), part of this season's disturbing trend of humorless, gruesome and lifeless procedurals that seem to think that the only way to up the ante in the crowded cop drama market is with ever more preposterous and grisly murders. Star Johnny Messner is ridiculously intense as a San Francisco cop who investigates deviant crimes, delivering his lines in a growly whisper that would border on camp if it weren't so downbeat. Like Fox's summer dud, The Inside, Killer Instinct is a Silence of the Lambs-aping drag.
After all the tiresome procedurals that clutter the airwaves, you have to give credit to Inconceivable (NBC, Fridays, 10 p.m.) for trying something unique. A drama set in a fertility clinic, Inconceivable combines elements of medical dramas with some soap-operatic plotting and moments of comedy, and while it's an admirable effort, it just doesn't work. The concept is certainly different, but there are only so many stories to tell about people who have trouble bearing children, and the show compensates by throwing in ludicrous plot twists and arch melodrama along with its more serious moments.
Commander in Chief (ABC, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.) is another drama with a striking concept that doesn't seem to know how to make its ideas work in practice. Geena Davis plays the first woman president in a series from Rod Lurie, who wrote and directed a movie about the first woman vice-president-to-be (The Contender). Although Commander in Chief wants to be the next West Wing, it spends too much time equivocating about getting Davis into office and hand-wringing about her gender. Instead of a show about the first president who happens to be a woman, it becomes a show about a woman who ends up being president almost by happenstance. When dealing with broader political situations, Commander in Chief shows signs of The West Wing's sophistication, but overall, it falls far short.
If political seriousness is not your thing, the best alternative to Commander in Chief is the trashy soap Sex, Love and Secrets (UPN, Tuesdays, 9 p.m.), which has been getting torn apart by most critics but is the season's best guilty pleasure. It's a potential heir to Melrose Place, although not quite as deliciously campy, with Denise Richards standing in for Heather Locklear as the resident manipulative bitch. If you can get past (or embrace) the wooden acting, silly twists and gratuitous sex scenes, you'll find some great, pure entertainment without any pesky, high-minded ambitions.
This week is bookended by a double dose of another grim, repetitive crime drama, Criminal Minds (CBS, Wednesdays, 9 p.m.; preview September 22 at 10 p.m.), which, like Killer Instinct, is Silence of the Lambs without the creativity (it even focuses on the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, as Silence did). At least Minds has Mandy Patinkin in the lead to lend it a little class, but the writing is formulaic and the stories repugnant. Can we put an end to this trend soon, please?