Grid Effect

This is the last of our 2008 weekly night fall previews. We’ll probably do one more for Mondays, given that the one we did last week was littered with election specials that won’t ever see the airwaves again. But if you want to read the other four, go here, here, here & here. If you are a tad slow or too disinterested to think about it, those are linked chronologically.

NBC

8PM: The Biggest Loser

Every fetishists favorite reality series is coming attcha with a two hour block episode. We’ve never watched this show before, and people who do have actually explained to us that the contestants are appreciative. I am sure those who win whatever the cash prize is at the end of each season are, and that those who come up short are grateful to get the swift kick in the ass that they may or may not use as a motivator. But you know what would make those who lose even more grateful? If you didn’t put them on national fucking television. But yeah, I’m sure NBC producers are wholly committed to promoting good health without any ulterior motivations.

10PM: Law and Order: SVU

I’m not sure whether they ever put the subtitle into an acronym, but I’m doing it anyways since no one watches just one faction of the Law & Order franchise, do they? What is the draw to one and not the other? Does anyone actually make this appointment television? Given the lack of continuity from one episode to the next, couldn’t one just watch an episode whenever they feel inclined, abandon it for ten years and pick up right where he/she left off? So many inquiries over nothing.

ABC

8PM: Dancing With The Stars

Two hours tonight as a result of ABC hosting the CMA’s tomorrow, because their isn’t anything ABC will do that doesn’t piss me off. Giving us two hours of Dancing With The Stars on one night in favor of airing the CMA”s the other, is kinda like when you watch one of those torture porn movies, and the torturer brutalizes his victim with a meat clever and adds an extension to it before taking it to the torturee again, then later replacing it with a chainsaw. What I’m trying to say is I’m not going to tune in.

You have to love the subtle approach that the guy on the right is taking.

10PM: Eli Stone

Alright, so we finally took the time to read the “about” section on the show’s homepage. In short, its about someone who has an aneurysm, finds the strength to come out of his subsequent coma through a George Michael musical or something (the site at least seems to indicate that this is done satirically), then leads his life differently than he had pre-aneurysm. This sounds an awful lot like Samantha Who?, in that the protagonist is in the midst of “redsicovering” him/herself as a result of some medical crisis. Not a terrible concept, but how honest are these given that they’re on ABC?

FOX

8PM: House

We’ve already given a brief synopsis of every House episode that’s ever aired in the second link above. We’re not about to do it again.

9PM: Fringe

I’ve already read one too many show synopsis’ for one day, but from the episode description, “A strange parasite attaches itself to the internal organs of a dying FBI agent”, I think FOX has done it. They’ve managed to combine the overused crime genre with the overused medical genre into one, creating one bouliabase of cliched mediocrity. Huzzah! You can’t just find this sort of, well, I don’t know what to call it exactly. Creative apathy? I can just see the pitch meeting: “What’s that? We only have one hour to kill? Eh, lets just take a bunch of members from the executive and judicial branches and make them terminally ill with unknown diseases. That way, we can bring in a bunch of characters from the medical field and give them relationship problems.” “It’s perfect!”.

CBS

8PM: NCIS

There’s an article on msn.com attempting to explain how this is one of the more watched shows on television. The article does a better job of explaining it (and in a much more flattering way to its audience) than I ever could. Kudos, your the series of the four letter acronym. You saw a world out there peppered with three letter acronyms for television shows, and you said, “hey, one way to stand out is if we add another word to our title, but abbreviate it so it roles off the tongue a little easier after people heard it said 1,000 times watching football on Sundays”. That, my friends, is how business is done.

9PM: The Mentalist

On the website as “Mentalist, The” for some unexplainable fucking reason. CBS only airs 23 prime time shows, I think we could find it just fine without usage of technically correct alphabetization. Anyhow, it stars the guy best known as the dreamy fashion journalist that tempted the girl from Havoc away from Vince Chase in The Devil Wears Prada. Or at least that’s what I am assuming he is best known for, the only other thing I’ve seen him in is Something New, a movie about a wealthy black woman dating a middle class white man. Ooh, gender, race and socio-economic politics all at play all at once. It was hilarious.

10PM: Without A Trace

Are you guys serious? Three hours of crime drama in one night? Can’t we fucking spread this out a little? Shit, who am I kidding? We all know Anthony LaPaglia and Poppy Montgomery get what they want, when they want it. What they want is a 10PM time slot, and when they want it is apparently Tuesday. Hell hath no fury like the cumulative scorn of the older guy from Empire Records and the blond chick whose name I know but can’t recognize from anything.

To summarize: I hope you’re in a book club.