It’s always tough to know which new shows to watch, to give chances to. I usually pick my favourite genres (e.g. sitcoms, sci-fi, and lawyer shows). Sadly there was little new sci-fi this fall — and we’ve been in a pretty long slump of sci-fi flops, except for Star Trek, of course. Lawyer shows have also not been making many waves lately — Suits and The Good Wife were probably the last big ones that I watched. Sitcoms, are much easier to watch (and maybe easier to make) but there’s been very few standouts recently amidst a sea of reboots and copycats. I try to be open-minded with new shows, but without getting my hopes up.

mixed-ish

I was not a big fan of black-ish‘s first spin-off grown-ish (when eldest Johnson daughter Zoe graduated high school and went off to “a different world” of college). However, I did really love the Big Bang prequel series Young Sheldon, so I decided to give a chance to this prequel series, featuring Johnson matriarch Rainbow as a girl. Growing up in the 80s, she was one of three children born to a black mom and white dad, who were also former hippies (apparently there were still hippies living in cults in the 80s). After leaving the commune, Bow and her family find it even more challenging to be fish out of water in suburban USA. I confess that the show has not grown on me (after one episode). The strengh of Young Sheldon is the main actor as well as the supporting cast. Unfortunately, so far, Bow has been a fairly bland character. The other two siblings have potential, but so far they seem more like punchlines (since they decided to lean into the 80s trends with their style and attitudes). The peacenik father is played by a horribly-miscast Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zack from Saved By the Bell is now playing an aging hippie!). The one saving grace is Gary Cole, who plays the grandfather as another 80s caricature. He’s a “Greed is good”, Wall Street stereotype, and his look reminds me a lot of his boss character from the movie Office Space. Cole is pretty funny in the show, but his character is too one-note to carry the series (he’s a lot like Ruby on black-ish that way).

Sunnyside

While we’re talking about stereotypes, Kal Penn (Kumar of Harold and Kumar fame) stars in this odd sitcom that struggles with racial stereotypes while trying very hard to defy them. Penn’s character is a disgraced politician who hits rock bottom and hires himself for people to gawk at his infamy. However, he finds renewed purpose when he is hired by a group of immigrants who want his help (and connections) to speed up their citizenship process. As you might imagine, the group itself is a diverse mix of stereotypes, but you can feel how the show’s trying its best to defy the cliches. There is a Latinx woman who is extremely hard working (the running gag is that everywhere the scene ends up, she is working there as one of her many jobs); an African cabbie (who of course used to be a surgeon in his home country — and in what seems to be a play on the “Nigerian prince” scam, he is very gullible); a very Americanized Eastern European man who grew up in the US, but didn’t realize that he wasn’t a citizen because his mother had never legally emigrated; and finally my faves of the show, I both love and hate a pair of super-rich, Asian, trust-fund kids who know all about brands and trends, but are clueless about normal things because they have grown up sheltered and wealthy. The show is not that funny, and there’s too much of a “let’s prove we’re not losers” vibe. Community showed that a diverse cast can be hilarious with good writing and good performances. I think Sunnyside will need a lot more of everything to get there.

Carol’s Second Act

Medical sitcoms are not easy. I think Scrubs did it best, but typically they turn themselves into workplace sitcoms with higher emotional stakes. Carol’s Second Act bring Patricia Heaton (from Everybody Loves Raymond) back as a mature mom, and former teacher, who makes a career change and becomes a doctor after middle-age. The gist of the show is that everyone thinks she’s too old to be any good, but her life-experience proves useful and defies the naysayers. I didn’t find the first episode funny or very moving either. On Raymond, Heaton played the uptight wife opposite the goofy husband. This time around she’s meant to play opposite the other younger interns, but I don’t think it really works (at least not in a way that is funny). I don’t really have much interest in continuing to watch this show. (Darnit! Why did I think of Scrubs? Now I have the piano melody of JD’s theme playing in my head!)

Perfect Harmony

Picking up on the musical competition theme, post-Glee, this show is clearly trying to gain some momentum from associating itself to the Pitch Perfect movies (by borrowing not only a word from their titles, but also one of the stars). In Perfect Harmony, Anna Camp stars opposite Bradley Whitford as a choir leader in a small American town church. Whitford plays an Ivy League music professor who hits rock bottom after his wife dies, and he ends up helping this choir to beat the local megachurch in a choral competition. The characters seem kind of fun, and I always love a good musical competish, but I’m not really sure where this show is going to go. The premise seems more like a movie plot than an ongoing series, but I guess if there was a show about a UFO abductee support group (it was called People of Earth, on TBS) then I have to assume this show has got a shot.

The Unicorn

Voted “Most pleasant surprise” by me, I did not have any plans to watch a show called The Unicorn, starring Justified‘s Walton Goggins as a middle-aged widower who goes back on the dating scene to find that he is the magically-rare object of women’s attention. This show’s premise was of almost no interest but after I watched it, I found the script was well-written and fresh, the characters authentic, and the performances by Goggins (I really liked him after one episode) and the rest of the cast were likeable and genuine as well. I wonder if I’ll continue to be interested in the story of this man (and his family and friends). I predict that I will get to know and love these characters quite a bit — especially the smart and precocious daughters.

All Rise

On to the legal dramas, the first one I watched was called All Rise (which I find too on-the-nose for a show about a rookie judge, because the bailiff is shown saying those two words repeatedly every episode!). It focuses on a youngish black woman named Lola Carmichael, who starts her first day as a judge. Around her are her new assistant — an experienced clerk who takes her job very seriously and expects to butt heads with Carmichael; a scrappy Latinx defense attorney who fights really hard for her downtrodden clients; and Mark Callen, a slick, good-looking prosecutor (a close friend and former colleague of Carmichael’s). It’s definitely a case-by-case show, and each episode so far has Carmichael and others trying to help people find justice in Trump’s America. It’s not a bad show, but it also seems like a pastiche of past legal shows (especially how Carmichael and Callen’s dynamic closely resembles Jessica and Harvey on Suits). However, because there aren’t so many lawyer shows anymore, I’m going to give All Rise more of a chance

Bluff City Law

On the other hand, I’m not keen on continuing to watch this series, which stars Jimmy Smits and Caitlin McGee as an estranged father and daughter pair of attorneys. She left to go defend big corporations while her father stayed behind to run a prestigious local law firm in Memphis known for fighting those big corporations. After the death of Smits’s character’s wife brings his daughter, Sydney, back to the firm (and fold), they work together to fight the good fight. While this show is also not too bad, I don’t love all the personal history and baggage being mixed in with the legal storylines. I assume eventually the characters will work out all this family drama, but I would prefer less of it. Also, I don’t love McGee as hotshot attorney Sydney. I find her hard and unrelatable. Lastly, Smits may have a history with legal shows as Victor Sifuentes on the seminal series LA Law, but he’s not a great fit on this show either.

Sadly this season does not look promising for new shows. Hopefully there will be other new shows that turn out to be really good that I might pick up later. Nevertheless, I am dying to see Star Trek: Picard in less than two months!