2012 Season Premieres – Monday

The months of September and October are generally when the new seasons starts for most network television. There’s always a huge pile of new shows that fit every demographic or niche. If you want a cop show, or a medical show, maybe a sitcom, you’ll be able to find something to watch. It’s a shame a lot of them will only last this one season. So for the 2012 fall season premieres we figured why not watch a bunch of shows, new and old and see what’s good and whats bad. Not every show on every day was watched that would be a little ridiculous, but there’s a pretty good collection of stuff here so lets get started. First up is Monday nights, CBS has a pretty good run of sitcoms and then I finish the night up with Fox and NBC. My viewing did require a DVR, but most of us have those now a days anyway, if not there’s always other ways. Make sure to check out our coverage for Tuesday & Wednesday nights, and Thursday and Friday nights!

How I Met Your Mother

Generally How I Met Your Mother is a pretty awesome show, the characters are fun and interesting. Unfortunately the 8th season opener missed something somewhere. The whole Ted/Victoria plot from last season’s ending just felt forced and predictable. I did however enjoy Thomas Lennon as Victoria’s left-at-the-altar fiance, but his minor scenes just weren’t enough to really make their part anything other than a “Ted needs to wait for the one” moment that we get all the time.

On the bright side of the episode was the bits where Lily and Marshall were so out of it and sleep deprived that they didn’t know what was happening. And of course Barney explaining the entire series in about 50 seconds. If the whole season plays out this way we’re in for what could be a pretty lackluster final outing for what was such a great show. I have hopes though that this is just their way of opening the series up. We know a lot of what will happen now, after last season we know the Barney and Quinn don’t stay together and that he probably marries Robin. At this point even that is kind of up in the air considering the situation Ted finds himself in shortly after the wedding.

And finally we’re closing in on meeting the mother, we’ve seen bits of her throughout the years, usually feet or that yellow umbrella. Now after 8 years, we finally get both at once! We actually see all of her, except her face which is conveniently hidden by a yellow umbrella. But at least we’re finally in a position where Ted and his future baby mama will be meeting, presumably anyway. If the series gets picked up for a 9th season this could end up being a red herring, since I’m sure there is more than 1 woman with a yellow umbrella in New York.

So for the most part it was a disappointing season opener, there were the funny moments usually not involving Ted, which is a shame since it’s his story. But really that’s been a theme of the show for quite a long time, the story with the largest portion of the gang is usually the best, or the one with the most Barney.

Partners

I was 12 when the show Will & Grace started, and have never seen a single episode of it. That said all I really knew about partners was that it had Bernard the Arch-Elf, Superman, and the slutty girl from One Tree Hill in it. The series plot is about 2 life long friends Joe (David Krumholtz) and Louise (Michael Urie) who are also partners in a business. Joe is the straight one who’s in a relationship with Ali (Sophia Bush) and Louise is the gay one in a relationship with Wyatt (Brandon Routh). They also have quite the bromance going on.

So with the back story setup just how was the show? Eh not all the interesting and fairly predictable. We’ve seen it hundreds of times, a couple is going to break up, but stays together, and a friend accidentally breaks the original break up news to one of the people. It’s really not new, or interesting at this point. Being the first episode this show didn’t really do much, and the whole “We’re not friends anymore” thing in a show about their friendship obviously wasn’t going to last.

On the bright side the cast is all actually pretty good, and I can see them being funny with the right script. Brandon Routh especially surprised me as I’ve only seen him as Superman and a super spy in Chuck having him be a gay, male nurse who seems a bit on the naive side is a huge change but he does it pretty well. I’m not so sure this is something you should go out of your way to watch, but if you’ve got nothing else to do at 8:30pm on a Monday why not. At least until mid-season when I’m sure something else will be on, on another channel.

2 Broke Girls

This was probably the highlight of the night for the CBS sitcoms. I didn’t follow the series last season, but I caught a good number of them as repeats over the summer. If you’re not familiar it’s about 2 girls, who don’t have much money. One of them use to be rich but her father was a white collar criminal and went to jail so she lost all of it too. The other grew up poor and is fairly jaded because of it. They work at a diner, live together, and are trying to start a cupcake business because the jaded one can bake real good. Oh they also use to have a horse.

It probably sounds pretty dumb, but the show is full of humor and some great side characters. I’ve got to say this episode was like 80% crude humor and it just works. It opens up with a mother breastfeeding her 8-11 year old son at the diner and everyone making comments about it. I get that might be a touchy subject for some, but frankly I thought it was pretty funny especially when our jaded girl (Max) asked if her son would like some coffee to go with the milk.

The episode was mostly about the girls trying to get a horse trophy from the former rich girls (Caroline) father’s estate sale. She didn’t want to show up as herself though so she wore a wig, and throughout the scenes was reference as various brunette actresses like Katie Holmes and Zooey Deschanel. It was funny and worked well for the show, though the highlight for me was learning that Caroline’s father is Steven Weber from Wings, because I grew up watching that show.

Out of the three comedy’s tonight I’d have to say this was definitely the best, and the one most worth watching weekly. Yea everyone is probably going to watch HIMYM anyway because they have so much time invested in it, but make sure to not let this one pass you buy.

Mob Doctor (episode 2)

I held off talking about this show last week, so I could talk about it with everything else. It’s probably a good thing because frankly I didn’t much like the first episode. It didn’t really have it’s own identity, It just felt like they were trying to include all the things people like about other shows. With episode two though it feels more like it’s own show. There are still moments where I was thinking how ridiculous it is, but it was at least more interesting than the pilot. It seems like every couple of years networks try and do a show about the mob, I don’t know if it’s because of the Sopranos or what, but they usually don’t seem to last. Which sometimes is a shame, I really like The Black Donnellys when that was on.

The Mob Doctor is something different though, I guess Fox is looking for a new medical drama with House being over. It’s full of actors and actresses you’ll recognize, but not know if that makes sense. Most of the cast feels familiar and I found myself Googling them to see where I knew them from. Mob Doctor might not be a show you sit down and watch every Monday while it’s on, but it’s probably worth following through OnDemand or DVR if you’ve got those available.

Revolution (episode 2)

This is probably the best new series of the season, Last Resort and Elementary are up there, we’ll have to see how things play out more with these three shows. Anyway Revolution is one of those post-apocalyptic future shows. The world went to shit and now people are living without power, or any of the comforts that we’re all use to.

It’s not a totally original idea in a broad sense, but the reasoning behind the collapse of society is pretty fresh and I’m looking forward to see how it develops and what we learn about the reasons. For anyone not familiar yet, all of the power in the world is gone, everything just turned off, batteries died, power went out, planes fell from the sky, everything just stopped. Now it’s 15 years later and the world is in a sort of military state run by a militia, almost like western or something of that nature.

We’re two episodes in and we’ve gotten this bits and pieces of back story and every episode something new is thrown at us to further our story, hopefully they can keep up with this pace. The actors are all pretty good, the main character Charlie played by Tracy Spiridakos is one of those determined to do things her way characters. They’re messing with her a bit as far as morals go though. In episode one she shoots a guy from behind, and in episode two they make a big deal of whether she’d be able to kill a man, like she hadn’t already done it. So far the best character though has been Billy Burke. If you’ve seen the Twilight movies he’s the Dad that’s a cop, and probably the only redeeming quality of the whole series. Regardless though he places Miles, Charles uncle and he’s quite the fighter and is actually kinda mean. I don’t want to spoil anything, but after episode 2 we’ve definitely got some interesting stories coming up for him.

Revolutions time slot is kind of a double edged sword for it, the show doesn’t start till 10pm EST, so most of the other big shows are done by that point. It’s also currently following The Voice which should get it some views. The downfall is that it’s 10pm on a Monday and a lot of people aren’t going to want to invest in an hour long show that late, they’ll probably DVR or catch it OnDemand, but that doesn’t help ratings so this could end up being a short lived show. Hopefully not though!

Chris talks a bunch on PodQuest each week. He's also been known to write about stuff from time to time. You can Email Chris or follow Chris on Twitter @Just_Cobb or Facebook

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