Tuned In

Upfronts 2011: Fox Revives Dinosaurs, Flintstones, Simon Cowell [VIDEO]

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Fox may not look it, but it’s getting old; the network is celebrating its 25th anniversary next season. While it continues to do well with American Idol, that show is a venerable hit, now in its 10th edition. Like a lot of people getting older, Fox likes to tell itself it still thinks young—that it’s the network of attitude and innovation. But 2011–12 schedule it unveiled yesterday was heavy on familiar names, from Fox’s past and other networks’, including new shows from J.J. Abrams, Simon Cowell and Seth MacFarlane—and a “new” show that Fox unveiled a year ago.

Having American Idol does not mean Fox is without troubles. Its highest-of-profile shows, sci-fi/time-travel/dinosaur/conspiracy thriller Terra Nova—humans travel from a dying Earth in 2149 to the age of the dinosaurs—was announced this time last year with much hype, then pushed back twice to debut next fall. We hope. Fox brought it out again, with footage it had shown in trailers before but jazzed up special effects (above).

Those effects—looming sauropods, raging T-Rexes, the future cityscape, plus the natural wonders of the location shooting in Australia—made for a lot of eye candy, though it was hard to discern the outlines of plot or character from the trailer, designed for visual wow. But it did deliver that: this show may be every awesome TV entertainment rolled into one, or it may suck historically—but if the latter, it will look good doing it.

For Fox’s other high-profile fall launch, The X-Factor, it brought out Simon Cowell (who was surprisingly tame), Paula Abdul (surprisingly un-gaffe-making) and the rest of the panel (not yet able to surprise me). The twist for X-Factor, if you’re interested, is that it divides contestants into four groups: boys (under 25), girls (under 25), people too old and gross to even think about (over 25) and group acts (any age). The trailer of clips from auditions played up the high drama—people cried and agonized, to the drone of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”—but it’s hard to guess how well a reality show like this will do until executed.

In midseason, Fox launches J. J. Abrams’ Alcatraz, a show that is bound to generate Lost comparisons—a mysterious island and Jorge Garcia!—but whose core sci-fi concept is fairly straight-ahead. The closing of Alcatraz prison and the relocation of its prisoners in the early ’60s was a sham: what actually happened, the show tells us, is that the prisoners mysteriously vanished one day and the incident was covered up. Now they’re reappearing in the present, at the behest of sinister forces, who may or may not include Sam Neill. The trailer lacked the flashes of wit I usually associate with Abrams (and Garcia) but it’s intriguing:

Fox will also try to bolster its comedies next season. It’s always hard to judge sitcoms by trailers—terrible comedies can be funny in short clips and great ones can come off dull without context. But Fox will try to build its Sunday animation night with Allen Gregory, a comedy about a 7-year-old genius created and voiced by Jonah Hill, and an animated version of Napoleon Dynamite (which looks and sounds even more Beavis and Butt-Head-like in cartoon form):

Jaime Pressly comedy I Hate My Teenage Daughter looked dispiriting—but who knows?—while New Girl was promising, though that may have to do with my constitutional inability not to enjoy Zooey Deschanel. Those whose twee tolerance is lower (e.g., Mrs. Tuned In) may differ on this one:

The big comedy news, though, involves a show that won’t arrive until 2013: Fox has given Seth MacFarlane the greenlight to remake The Flintstones. Because we all thought he could really reach his potential someday if only he had the chance to do an animated show about a fat guy, his family and pets. We’ll see: when MacFarlane is funny, he can be very funny, and having two kids, I’ve actually watched the original Flintsones recently enough not to have any romantically inflated notions of its sacred quality.

Fox’s final announcement is for a show that will appear theoretically sooner, but for now is just as hypothetical. Kiefer Sutherland will star in Touch—to start shooting in June—a drama about the father of a severely autistic boy who has the ability to see the future by recognizing complex mathematical patterns.

We have nothing to go on here but the word of Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly that he loved the script, from Tim Kring (creator of Heroes, which I had, shall we say, issues with, but I don’t want to pre-judge). In any case, if Fox’s last theoretical big show, Terra Nova, is a guide, we can reconsider Touch when it’s announced again next year.