SFist Watches: TV Premieres Tonight
Fall premiere week has officially begun and our TiVos are practically shivering in anticipation. (That would explain the fairly regular stop-and-start recordings we've been getting recently. Perhaps we should invest in one of those dual-tuner jobies? Sweet!)
Tonight's riiily big shew is, apparently, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," the first of two NBC shows loosely based on the backstage antics of a late night comedy show suspiciously like "Saturday Night Live." (This one's the drama; Tina Fey's sitcom version, "30 Rock," will premiere next month.) The series is getting a lot of press because it comes from the mind of Aaron Sorkin of "The West Wing" fame, and it features the return of Matthew "Chandler" Perry to the TV airwaves.
One's excitement about the show would probably depend a lot on one's fondness for "The West Wing" and Aaron Sorkin's dense dialogue. (Dense as in layered, not dumb. Most of the time.) "The West Wing" never really did it for us, so our excitement is muted, and wasn't raised too much after watching the pilot. For a series about the production of a comedy show, it sure was dour. There were a few laughs, mostly coming from Matthew Perry, but you could almost see him consciously trying to avoid his former sitcom delivery. He plays a comedy writer who is wooed back to the late night comedy show after its producer has an on-air breakdown. Amanda Peet is the executive who does the wooing, and Bradley Whitford (also of "West Wing" fame) is the fresh-out-of-rehab director who is also lured back to the show.
We're going to watch the pilot again, and probably set a season pass for it, but we have to admit we have our worries. That pilot felt sort of pretentious, with obvious nods to Network and all it had to say about the evils of television, and pretension alone is, obviously, tedious. So we're hoping for a little more of the funny in coming episodes.
CBS's other new series premiere is "The Class," which airs at 8 p.m. It's another ensemble sitcom that doesn't want to be compared to "Friends," even though it's from a former "Friends" creator, David Crane. In the pilot an eager fiancee, played by Jason Ritter, arranges a reunion of his third grade class as a surprise for his bride-to-be, who he met in third grade. Of course, this being a sitcom, more than three people actually do make it to the reunion, and the comedy and pathos comes in how much these people do and do not resemble their third-grade selves. At least, that's idea. Sometimes it works, like when a suicidal classmate's overdose is interrupted by the phone call about the reunion, and sometimes it really, really doesn't, like any time the "ambiguously gay" husband of one of the classmates is on screen. So, yeah, we did laugh a few times, and that's more than can be said about many sitcoms out there (::cough:: "Two and A Half Men" ::cough::), but we're just not sure we'd be willing to forgo "Prison Break" to watch it.
That dual-tuner TiVo is looking better and better.