Thanks to COVID-19, the fall TV season is in a very odd shape, but shows have continued to trickle out over the last few weeks. A lot of stuff comes from the streamers (who apparently have a healthy backlog), but even the broadcast networks are trying to stay in the game as a few shows have come back. Here’s my take on a few new and returning shows that I’ve watched.

Star Trek: Discovery

While I have enjoyed this series so far, I found season two a bit difficult to stay with. Season three picks up right after the end of last season, when Michael Burnham and Discovery have jumped almost a thousand years further into the future. This was a pretty exciting concept for me. I looked forward to seeing how different and alien things will be in the far future. (If I do the math of our own history, 1000 years ago we were in pre-medieval times, and things have changed so much that by today many of the major empires and cities of that time have long been forgotten.) Watching the season premiere, I was disappointed in how familiar things looked and seemed. Burnham finds herself on a semi-barren planet after colliding with a ship in space (a huge coincidence that the ship’s pilot happens to be a human named Book). We soon learn that several major things have happened in the intervening millennium, including a cataclysm called “The Burn”, which made dilithium (the space-ship powering staple of the Star Trek universe) a rare and sought-after commodity. Plus, the United Federation of Planets, which was the interplanetary organization which Starfleet was created to serve, is a thin shadow of its former self. When Burnham and Book end up in a space-port full of assorted aliens, run by an alliance of Andorians and Orions (two races we are familiar with from the original series), it really feels like the universe has not come very far over all this time. Also, it makes Star Trek feel more like your run-of-the-mill space show or movie. Thankfully, things orient themselves a little better over the second and third episodes. When Discovery and its crew arrive in the far future as well, they need to get help from locals (who again seem like the typical salty, human, gang of space pirates, but whatever) on the planet where they crash. The third episode is when things start to really come together. Burnham and Discovery are reunited at that point (you knew it had to happen) and they set themselves on a quest back to Earth. I’m now more excited about the series, not so much as a series set in the far future (I’m going to pretend that it’s just some arbitrary time period where Discovery is alone — like Voyager in the Delta Quadrant — and I’m going to let go of the expectation that writers will come up with speculative concepts about the far future that will blow my mind). Instead I’m going to enjoy the show as a space adventure show where the heroes are on a space quest.

The Mandalorian

Probably one of the most anticipated shows of the fall, I thoroughly enjoyed the season premiere of this Star Wars TV series. We pick up with Mando continuing to take care of Baby Yoda (it’s a bit annoying how this show has so few actual names for its major characters) and looking for clues to help get the child back to others of its kind. Clues lead us back to the familiar planet of Tatooine, home of Jawas, Banthas and Tusken Raiders/Sand People. This show is essentially a western set in space, and that is very evident when Mando, seeking a fellow Mandalorian, ends up at a small town where he encounters the marshal (a Star Wars version of the classic western sheriff), played by the wonderfully understated Timothy Olyphant. The episode was incredibly cinematic (and made me long for seeing this kind of story on the big screen), as Mando and the Marshall team up to take out a monster that is terrorizing the town. As much as the overall story arc of Mando’s quest may be interesting, I love how this show has episodic adventures that are self-contained mini movies. The characters are fun and interesting, but you don’t need to get too deep into their backgrounds or psychology to understand them. It’s a well-paced, raucous sci-fi thrill. The visual effects were feature-film quality and impressive (not to mention some stunning and expansive desert scenery), and I can’t wait until the next episode.

This Is Us

The hit drama returned with a two-hour season premiere celebrating the 40th birthday of “the big three”. The show-runners decided to build in real-world realities into the show’s present-day scenes, including the coronavirus pandemic (i.e. quarantines, masks, and social distancing) as well as anti-racism protests and the societal reckoning on race after the killing of George Floyd. While those current events are the backdrop, the main focus naturally continues to be the relationships of the characters on the show. Last season ended with an intense blow-up between brothers Kevin and Randall, and the tension and resentment remains in the premiere (so much so that Randall does not join his siblings at the family cabin for their big birthday celebration). We also get to see more flashbacks to the day when the siblings were born, but this time more from the perspective of dad Jack, as well as more about the circumstances leading to Randall’s being abandoned at the fire station. We also get to connect the dots back to that scene from last season where mother Rebecca was lost and had to be escorted back to her family by the police. This episode did a great job of bringing us back into the Pearsons’ lives. It still frustrates me how obstinate and self-righteous Randall can be, and there’s also a major twist at the very end which I didn’t like (sort of came out of nowhere but will likely have a significant impact on subsequent storylines). Nevertheless, I think that we’re off to a great start with the only network drama that I still enjoy. And, I didn’t even cry once in this entire double-episode!

Connecting

While it’s interesting that This Is Us incorporated current events and real-world context into its storyline, there are some shows that are built on that concept, including the new sitcom Connecting. Set in 2020 USA, every episode is formatted as a group video call among a group of friends about stuff going on with them. Each episode has a date to set the current context in our 2020 timeline, and real-world topics like quarantine, COVID, and George Floyd’s death, are all over it. At first, I wasn’t sure I would enjoy a show that reminded me about what we’re currently living through. I thought I would prefer escape rather than reliving it. However, after three episodes, there’s actually something interesting about being able to look back at this year (even if it’s only looking back by a few months) and see these characters go through it (since it’s so familiar to us). Plus, the show is not overly heavy or depressing. There are still the usual sitcom romantic ups and downs (one of the female characters is struggling with telling one of the male friends that she has feelings for him), and family foibles (one character freaks out about not being a good enough father to his kids when he can’t get them the specific food that they want). Of course, on the flip side, there’s always something artificial and contrived about the sitcom version of life. Most of the characters are pretty likeable, but I find it hard to look past how obviously diverse this group of friends seems to be. That doesn’t really feel very realistic, and yet we’re expected to feel all the realism of the context that these episodes are set within. The “Zoom call” setup makes the show feel very stagey. It’s mostly just dialogue, since we don’t get to see the characters move around or do anything in the outside world. This also makes me wonder what kind of longevity this show has (probably not much), since it will have to be retooled once we are no longer in quarantine. Will it become a normal Friends-style show at that point? Or even before we get vaccines and get past COVID, how is the show going to stay up-to-the-minute, but not run past the present day? For better or worse, I’m probably more curious to find out how that’s all going to be handled than I am about the fate of the characters themselves.

American Housewife

When last we left the Otto family, they were heading to prom for eldest daughter Taylor’s senior year. The premiere takes us to graduation. Interestingly this show does not acknowledge the pandemic, and there’s a large group gathered (albeit outdoors on the lawn) for a normal pre-COVID style graduation. Even though Katie has quit being an event planner, she’s blackmailed into planning a wedding for Principal Ablin (don’t ask). In any case, a lot of the same beats that I’ve come to know and love about this show are still present. However, there’s a few big changes that happen to kick off the new season. The obvious one is that youngest daughter Anna-Kat has been recast. Replacing Julia Butters (whose career is taking off after her role in Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood) with Giselle Eisenberg (who I really enjoyed as the clever-for-her-age younger daughter on sitcom Life in Pieces), I’m curious to see what they have done about the character’s OCD. They didn’t really acknowledge it this episode, but it’s the whole reason the Otto family moved to Westport, so they can’t just drop it. I feel like this show has been rehashing the same jokes too long (especially for Katie’s storylines — How much more can she and the rich, pretentious housewives feud about?) so I hope they make some bigger changes this season that will keep the show fresh.

The Undoing

Speaking of rich, pretentious women, a new HBO show written by TV legend David E. Kelley, and starring Nicole Kidman, hopes to repeat the success of the pair’s last venture, Big Little Lies (which I only watched part of the first episode and should now probably revisit) which was also about the unraveling of the lives of rich, white mothers. Hugh Grant makes a surprisingly dramatic turn as Kidman’s husband, a super-successful cancer doctor named Jonathan Fraser (Who knew that treating cancer was so lucrative?) When one of the moms at their son’s private school is murdered, mysterious clues start pointing to the Fraser family and Grace (Kidman’s character) feels her life start to crumble. I’ve only watched the first episode, so I don’t know the secrets that are going to be revealed as the series goes on. I feel led to suspect that Jonathan and the murdered mom are somehow related (probably an affair) but who knows? I started watching this show because I missed Kelley’s great writing from shows like The Practice and Ally McBeal, but I don’t love this kind of tense, HBO drama which feels as taut and airless as actually going to one of those $1000 a plate charity dinners that they seem to have. I’m hoping that as the central mystery starts to bloom, I’ll find entertainment in being swept away by plot twists rather than in mere schadenfreude at the downfall of the 1%.

Ted Lasso

Finally, I want to recommend a show that actually came out in August, but if you haven’t watched it yet, it’s a fall series for you, right? It’s the only show on Apple TV+ that I genuinely love. Ted Lasso (played by Jason Sudeikis) is the American football coach who’s hired by a British soccer team to take over as their coach — even though he knows nothing about soccer. Unbeknownst to Lasso, he’s there because the owner wants to tank the team to make her ex-husband (the original owner) suffer. What takes everyone by surprise, is that Ted Lasso is a wonderfully kind and likeable person (and not in that naive, pollyanna way that Kimmy Schmidt was) and his positivity leads him to win over every character he meets, from the players (including some who are trying to sabotage him) to the owner (and her assistant, whose job it is to make sure that Lasso fails). For the most part, this series wins me on the character of Ted Lasso alone. He is so refreshing, especially in these times. On top of that, the show has that British rom-com flavour (even though it’s not really a romantic movie) that I love (think of Notting Hill, or Four Weddings and a Funeral, or Bridget Jones’s Diary). I binge-watched this show over a week, but the last episode hadn’t come out yet. When it did, I happened to be awake so I caught it right at midnight the day it was released. I am not typically fond of sports movies (and definitely not sports-themed TV), but I really enjoyed this show (and I’ll have to seriously consider whether to keep my Apple TV+ subscription after the free year just so I can watch the already-renewed next season). I can’t say enough good things about the show.

As most of us are still living through the second wave of this terrible pandemic, take heart that there is still TV programming being added to our channels in order to help us keep our minds off of it.