The weather has finally turned cool, the kids are back in school, and new TV shows are starting on the air – yes, fall has arrived!
Though it has become a go-to for mocking broadcast television as mediocre, with lower budgets, fewer star power and a higher tolerance for ridicule, it has its own, even higher, kind of pleasure to offer. It's an enjoyable series, with casts that feel like part of a family, and the long seasons mean that virtually any show you watch — good, bad or indifferent — will have a chance to grow on you. It's not always realistic, but the way it plays out, it's not all that different from real life.
Four new TV dramas are joining the prime-time parade. Three of them feature lead characters who are geniuses; in the fourth, everyone is muscled and athletic, which is a kind of genius in itself, I suppose. “Matlock” (CBS, premiering Sunday) features Kathy Bates in a kind of reboot of Andy Griffith’s 1980s-’90s legal drama; “High Potential” (ABC, Tuesday) features Kaitlin Olson as a sexy human computer working freelance with the Los Angeles Police Department; “Brilliant Minds” (premiering Monday on NBC) stars Zachary Quinto as a fictionalized version of neurologist Oliver Sacks; and “Rescue: HI-Surf” (Fox, premiering Sunday, then moving to Mondays) is a more respectable take on “Baywatch.”
Of the four, “Matlock,” developed by Jennie Snyder Urman (“Jane the Virgin”), has gotten the most attention (it was even a joke at the Emmys) and features the biggest star, Bates, an Emmy, Oscar and Golden Globe winner. It also has the appeal of reviving a proven intellectual property, and while it’s not exactly “Star Trek” — the original ran for nine years and is still airing — it has a place in the collective unconscious.
The only thing the new Matlock has in common with the old is its main character, though this Matlock is a Matty; she too is a lawyer, a senior citizen, and delivers straightforward homilies in a folksy Southern drawl that masks her preternatural cunning. Here she comes out of retirement and manages, in the blink of an eye (roughly before lunch), to get off the street and into a top job at a major law firm by the kind of mechanical planning and psychological manipulation usually associated with heist movies.
The firm is nominally run by Beau Bridges between putts, with Jason Ritter as the boss’s son and Skye P. Marshall as Ritter’s estranged legal wife. The series tends to be cozy and comedic, but the cases they discuss raise serious issues and give Bates plenty of opportunities to delve dramatically as he convinces reluctant witnesses to come forward or imparts the wisdom his years have earned him.
There's an underlying mystery that we shouldn't spoil, but suffice it to say that each of these series features a main character dealing with some past trauma or unfinished business, because that's what long arcs are made of.
Kaitlin Olson in “High Potential.”
(Nicole Weingart/Disney)
“High Potential” is a rollicking police procedural that rides on the shoulders of Olson as Morgan, an unconventional free spirit with an IQ of 160, who cares for three kids on a shoestring budget and works nights cleaning the offices of a LAPD major crimes unit; one fateful night, dancing while working, she knocks a file onto the floor, slurps up its contents at a glance, goes to the murder board, crosses out “suspect” under a photo and writes “victim.”
One thing leads to another and the police (Judy Reyes as the chief, Daniel Sunjata as the handsome, grumpy lead detective) bring her to account. (Their threat to jail her for writing a word on an erasable whiteboard isn't the least likely thing you'll have to reckon with.) Naturally, she's seen what a team of career professionals has missed, and the obvious value of having her own Sherlock Holmes on call results in a consulting gig. Morgan sees the value in enlisting the department's help in solving a mystery of her own.
Talking about crime scenes in miniskirts, thigh-high boots and animal prints as if the last five decades never happened, she has an aversion to authority, but not to having a good time. The show is legitimately funny and quite enjoyable, especially since both Olson and Morgan seem to be having a good time. “Castle” fans should feel right at home here.
Zachary Quinto as Oliver Wolf in “Beautiful Minds.”
(NBC/Peter Kramer/NBC)
The heaviest of these light entertainments is “Brilliant Minds,” in which Oliver Wolf (Quinto) shares with Oliver Sacks his facial blindness, his love of weightlifting, motorcycles and swimming in New York City rivers, and his abiding interest in the mysteries of the brain. I assume these cases (mass hysterical pregnancies, loss of the ability to form memories or visualize one’s own body) come from Sacks’s own case studies, collected in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and other works.
Having been kicked out of a series of hospitals for his unorthodox and disobedient behavior, he has just arrived at Bronx General, where his mother (Donna Murphy) is his boss and an old friend (Tamberla Perry) is his other, lower-ranking boss; his usual exasperation is mitigated, of course, by the successes Wolf eventually has. A motley crew of interns attend to him, striking poses ranging from sweet to dubious and caustic.
As Quinto, he’s a warmer version of his big-screen Spock (his best friend, apparently, is a plant), and much of the humor is mined from Wolf’s utter unfamiliarity with popular culture. In the context of the series, he’s akin to a sensitive, empathetic version of Gregory House; like “House MD,” this is the medical show as mystery, and like all shows of this ilk, investigators will get it wrong before they get it right, offering plenty of occasions for sudden emergencies that lead to commercials. And like most medical dramas, there are big questions about life and death that one might find unsettling depending on one’s life and circumstances. However, some solace can be drawn from Wolf’s pondering a relevant element of the human condition.
Kekoa Kekumano, left, and Robbie Magasiva in “Rescue: HI-Surf.”
(Zach Dugan/FOX)
Set on the North Shore of Oahu, “Rescue: HI-Surf” delivers just what its title promises: surfing. Rescues. (Fox is currently airing two other rescue shows, “9-1-1” and “9 1-1: Lone Star,” the final season of which begins this week.) Here we again find that combination of underdeveloped workplace issues, romantic complications and witty banter one finds on nearly every broadcast procedural show — a formula that can keep viewers watching for years. All conflicts are naturally set aside when lives are at stake, which here requires regular plunges into the Pacific to help tourists too dumb to read posted warnings or follow a lifeguard’s good advice, as well as those simply unlucky enough to be caught in a boat.
Robbie Magasiva plays the nightmare-ridden captain of the ocean safety team who oversees a crew that appropriately, if slightly, leans toward Hawaiian and Asian actors; Arielle Kebbel is his lieutenant, who wants to be captain; Adam Demos is her ex-fiancé, a laid-back Aussie studying to be a firefighter; Kekoa Kekumano is the hard-partying wolf; Alex Aiono is the rich kid whose politician father gets him a spot on the team; and Zoe Cipres is the most talented poor girl whose spot he takes (though she gets hers by the end of the pilot).
John Wells, of “The West Wing” (and “ER” and “Third Watch” and elsewhere), who worked with creator Matt Kester on “Animal Kingdom,” directs the first two episodes and films the action in a dizzying array of camera angles and lenses, breakneck pans, drone shots, underwater shots and in-water shots, quickly stacked on top of each other in a haphazard fashion; the effect is akin to being buffeted by huge waves, which may be the desired effect but it makes the crises and rescues seem more prepared than not.
I wish there had been some boring local culture instead of the B-roll clips that flash by between scenes (lots of chickens), but that's just my opinion. Everyone is cute, the scenery is nice, there's some surfing. I can see people tuning in. Baywatch was on the air for 11 years.
