TVSquad

There are so many pilots made each fall that I guess CBS didn't want to go with the show about zombies that come back from the dead and have sex with the living.

But that's pretty much what Babylon Fields was about. It starrred Kathy Baker (Picket Fences), Ray Stevenson (Rome), and Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia) and was a drama set in a small town. The dead came back to life and the living had to deal with various problems that ensued (though apparantly erecticle dysfunction wasn't one of them - that must be an odd episode). Oh, and it's also a crime drama, with the sheriff solving crimes each week!

(S01E10) Great to see that even an episode of a series about nuclear war and small town isolation can have a Thanksgiving episode! But it's not a "Very Special Episode" of Jericho, where everyone has a bake sale and learn a valuable lesson about...I don't know, bake sales or something, it's actually a rather fascinating episode about what the people of Jericho should do when boxes and boxes of food, medicine, fuel, and supplies are dropped from airplanes. Do you trust them? Are they poisoned? Is everything safe to touch? Confusing matters more is that the labels are in Chinese, and the planes were Russian.

At first I thought, yay, Chinese Food! That's what everyone eats when they're alone on the holidays, right? But then you have to think about who sent it (if they really did) and why.

(S01E09) Right now, this show is better than Lost. Yeah, I said it.

While Lost seems to be, well, lost because they've suddenly turned into a show about a prison and a love triangle, this show is doing almost everything right. Yeah, I know, that might not be fair, because this is only the ninth episode of Jericho and Lost is in the middle of its third season. But I sense good things to come from Jericho, and this season of Lost has only showed me that the very structure of the show that I loved that first season and a half has now become a giant weight that's starting to sink the show. But that's a whole other rant for another day.

Ravenwood finds out Eric's address from his jacket and comes to town...

(S01E08) A question for all you mothers and wives out there: if your husband was dying and needed medicine, would you send your only children out to the unknown, where they could be killed or lost or made sick? I would think that since you might lose your husband, you'd at least want one of your kids to stay behind. Maybe send out one of your sons and someone else from the town.

I ask this because Gail sends both Jake and Eric to Rogue River to get the medicine he needs or he'll die in 12 hours...

(S01E05) You know how NBC's Heroes does endings really well? Actually, they do everything really well, but their episode endings are particularly cool and intriguing.

Jericho is like that with their openings.

The power comes back on, and not only does an "Emergency Alert" sign come up on all televisions, but every home and business in Jericho gets a phone call from the Department of Homeland Security. It's a recording, telling them to stay where they are, help is on the way. This is an amazingly creepy, effective scene. You wonder if that's how it will be if anything like this really happens.

Tonight's plot of NBC's Friday Night Lights is described like this in my TV listings:

The town turns on Coach Taylor following a difficult loss.

See, I can tell already that I would dislike this show, even though I haven't seen an episode, because that sentence doesn't even make any sense to me. It's an incredibly foreign world.

Now, part of it is because, admittedly, I'm not a football fan (I'm a tennis and baseball guy), but an entire town turning on a football coach because a team isn't doing well? I mean, we're talking about high school football, right? Why would anyone give a shit about high school football, unless you have something to do with the school or have a kid who plays on it?

I know, I know, it's a Texas/southern thing, right? I just don't get it. It actually scares me a little, that non-players would put so much emphasis on a high school team.

(S01E03) "18 Hours After The Bombs."

That's sort of an odd phrase to use as an opening, "after the bombs." But I guess we know they were definitely bombs, and there were more than one. Sometimes I think we might be overthinking this show. Maybe we're supposed to understand that these were nuclear bombs directed at our cities, a war, and not (take your choice) an accident, aliens, a conspiracy, or something similar. I guess the mystery is in who did it, why, and how this small town will survive.

(S01E02) Can I first say that, even before I saw the title of tonight's episode, that I totally guessed it just from looking at the previews CBS has been showing? It was either very predictable or I had a Dionne Warwick Psychic Friends Network moment.

This second episode was good. This isn't groundbreaking television. It's really more like just an old-fashioned suspense drama, but so far it's working.

(S01E01) I think I can say without much hesitation that CBS is going for the Lost crowd here. An ongoing mystery involving a nuclear (?) explosion that happens outside of a small town, cutting off all communication between the small town and the outside world. What happened? Was it an accident, another country attacking the country, aliens? Something else completely? But a show like Lost, one that grabs the imagination and fan fervor at an incredible level, is a rare thing. Can Jericho do it too?

CBS has been heavily promoting this new drama (if you watched The U.S. Open, it was teased approximately 2000 times), and we gave our quick first impressions several weeks ago, but here's a little more about the show.

Basically, it's The Day After: The TV Show. A loner (Skeet Ulrich) goes back to his small hometown in Kansas, just to stay for the day, to finish some business, when some sort of nuclear (?) explosion happens in the distance, perhaps Denver. The town is completely cut off from the outside world. They can't communicate with anyone. But what worries is that one of the kids in the town was talking to his parents on the phone when the blast occurred. They were in Atlanta, and a blast happened there too. Or did it?

A new pilot called Aliens in America has been picked up by what will soon be known as the CW. The comedy will focus on a shy nerdy kid living in a small Wisconsin town whose mother invites an exchange student to live with the family. The mother hopes the new friend will help her son become more popular, but the exchange student turns out to be Muslim. Sounds like another wacky comedy about cultural differences. Right now there's just not enough information to get me too excited about this show, but who knows, it could be good. The best news to come from this, however, is that the show is being described as a possible companion to Everybody Hates Chris, meaning Chris Rock's sitcom may actually make the transition to the CW after all. Very cool, says I.