Thu, September 8, 2005

Like Katrina, the one good thing about the fall TV season is we have some advance warning. On Friday, the "Entertainment Weekly" fall TV preview arrived – which is like the bible for the Annual TiVo Gauntlet of New Fall Programming. Needless to say, I immediately devoured its grids and re-combined them into a more useful format. (EW grids out the new lineup for each individual day, which makes it hard to get a week-at-a-glance view; also, they continue the maddening tradition of printing the debut date as far away from the grid as possible.)

As usual, I must create a series of documents to assist with the ATGoNFP, because there's a fair amount of shuffling involved to be able to TiVo all the new shows so that I can make fun of them and assign them an arbitrary 1-to-5 star rating. You saw last year's grid: a printed framework with handwritten show information in the appropriate time slots. This year I decided to lay it all out in print, so that things would fit better.

And, of course, since I was creating it anyway, there's no reason not to share it with you. The following downloadable PDF files will be the blueprint for this year's ATGoNFP, and you're welcome to use them, too.

The first one is a chronological list of important start dates, to be used as the TiVo scheduling guide. For me, this includes all the new shows plus the season premieres of returning shows I watch. If your returning show slate is different, this won't be a complete guide; but it's what I have, enjoy it if it's helpful to you.

2005 Schedule of Premieres [95k PDF]

The other document is a weekly grid indicating the time slots and starting dates of all the new shows. This gives a nice idea of what conflicts with what. For fans of the ATGoNFP, there's also a "rated" version, including entirely preliminary ratings for each new show. This ridiculously superficial score indicates how much I expect to like the new show based on what little I know about it: its cast, its premise, or – in most cases – the billboard I saw on the way to work. (I skimmed the EW guide for release dates; I still know next to nothing about most of these shows, except I think Alyson Hannigan is in one of them.)

2005 Guide to Fall Premieres [108k PDF]
2005 Guide to Fall Premieres – with ratings [116k PDF]

Enjoy! And don't forget:

Premiering This Week

Reunion: Fox, Thursday (tonight!) at 9:00

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