Fall TV continues with its new rollout of programming. Some will survive to be revived a second or third or fourth season. Some will have their plugs pulled before the first season is up for renewal. Some shows that are now terrible will survive against all odds and grow to become classics; others, well, the opposite of that thing I just said, whatever that is.
The day this time: Wednesday, the network: ABC. I put the television on 8:15/7:15 central, during The Goldbergs, whatever that is, in anticipation for Designated Survivor, which is the must-see Wednesday show this season.
Pilot for Speechless follows, though, which was actually one of the ones I wanted to catch, doing so here through almost sheer coincidence. Sitcom about Minnie Driver (playing a character) acting overbearing about her special-needs son, and gosh that sounds terrible, the way I'm describing it; um, it's a show that deals with, a family with a child, JJ, who has special needs, which is, definitely something that looked like it would interest me, the dynamics of how they'd deal with that, and how society deals with that, and everything. He's wheelchair-bound, uses a laser pointer attached to his head to communicate, pointing at words and letters on a card propped in front of him. The family moves, for like the 8th time, into this fixer-upper house in this nice neighborhood, where the school district would have an employee whose job it would be to read out the messages for everyone (it's implied that the mom keeps having them move, not for her son's sake, but for her own need to feel, powerful or whatever.) This year's school's model is relentlessly PC, applauding JJ just for existing (correcting themselves when they attempt a standing ovation, fearing it to be insensitive!) and changing their school mascot to a banana slug, because it has both male and female genitalia. Yeah. It's a sitcom?, that's about all I can say about it so far.
Modern Family, Blackish. Sit through those two too. Modern Family is really good; I'm not sure why I'm surprised by that. Blackish, season premiere they go to Disney World, but no performers there dressed as Zootopia characters, as far as I could see, which is really the only reason I also paid so much attention to that.
Designated Survivor, finally. And... dang. Bull was "fun," and it might go in interesting places and do interesting things with its interesting premise, but Designated Survivor was, right off the bat, one of the best things I've seen on television, ever.
Kiefer Sutherland is some obscure cabinet member (housing and development, if you must know,) not even that great or popular with his own president, but who is the one selected to be off-site at this year's State of the Union. Terrorist attack, and Kief's suddenly POTUS.
The way that 24 premiered immediately following 9/11, I feel that a show about a president who's definitely unqualified is totally topical in an election season where the major-party candidates are respectively a sock puppet and a banana.
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