Jason Ritter in The Event. / NBC
“Just 13 more shows to go,” joked NBC executive Jeff Gaspin, as the network wrapped up introducing around a dozen new shows (depending how you count them) for next season. The network, after The Jay Leno Show, is emphasizing its commitment to quality scripted drama. Or, judging from the clips Gaspin and programming chief Angela Bromstad unveiled, at least to the scripted part.
My usual disclaimer: all we see at upfronts (with a few exceptions) are trailers, so any show may prove better or worse than what I’ve seen this week. That said, I would feel especially lousy this morning if I was the maker of one of the shows that NBC didn’t pick up to fill its challenged schedule, because it doesn’t seem there was that high a bar to clear.
It’s not so much that the trailers were awful, though some—notably Outsourced and Outlaw (see the pattern?)—did not look good at all. But most of the rest, drama and comedy alike, just seemed middling and unmemorable, without distinctive voices. Conspiracy saga The Event intrigues me, but more for the plot than for it’s generic TV-thriller look and sound; J.J. Abrams’ Undercovers had more spark but I’m skeptical of the spy-caper of the week premise. (Really, what I want is for J.J. Abrams to make The Event.)
One show that NBC is purportedly high on is romantic-comedy anthology Love Bites—so much so that the network screened an entire, roughly 15-minute story from the pilot. But the excerpt (in which Greg Grunberg plays a married man who finds himself on an airplane with a woman from the “celebrity exemption” list, Jennifer Love Hewitt) was chuckle-producing at best, not exactly the bring-down-the-house riot that ABC’s screening of Modern Family was last year.
I am terrible at picking hits, and I’m not going to start now, but the trailers didn’t paint NBC’s strategy this season in the best light. It’s not rebounding from Leno with ambitious pilots that aim to change the game; it’s just trying to put on anything, everything, aiming at the solid middle of broadcast TV and hoping a few things hit anyway. Might it work? Sure. Am I eager to see any of them ASAP? Not especially. I’m not a big David E. Kelley fan, and yet the best-looking trailer may have been for his Harry’s Law, with Kathy Bates; I don’t know if that says more about Kelley or the other shows.
That’s my first impression, anyway, and as I said, it’s possible—and I hope—that these shows will prove better than they looked. I get the feeling that NBC expects that it will reap thanks from Hollywood and critics this season for putting on any scripted TV, just so it’s not Jay Leno. But as far as I’m concerned, as a TV viewer, a mediocre scripted show is no better than Leno—either one is a show I’m not going to watch, anyway.
But I’m hoping NBC proves my pessimism wrong. With all this new material, one of these shows has to, right?