Mon, September 27, 2010

Premiere Week 2010 is done and, on balance, we have very little to show for it. It's hard to imagine anyone at the networks waiting with bated breath for one of these shows to usher in a breakthrough of unrivaled profits. (And it wasn't like we really needed them – last season had plenty of fine shows.) Miss Alli blames us for making the shows so bad, because we watch Two and a Half Men and Dancing with the Stars, discouraging the networks from producing anything more high-minded. (Not "you and me" us – we watch excellent television, and I see to it. I mean "us" as in "Americans," the same people who get blamed for everything, with the possible exception of assassinating Archduke Ferdinand.) I take issue with her conclusions a little. I think networks' itchy cancellation finger has something to do with it; I think their insistence on watering shows down before they reach air makes it harder for the "good" shows on the networks to be as good as the good cable shows; I think promotion and marketing would go a long way towards prepping audiences for new shows they've never heard of (as opposed to new shows they've seen a thousand times before); and I think TV habits are changing so drastically right now, networks can't expect people to hew to a "watch it here, watch it now, or forget it forever" mentality any more. With TiVo, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, and whatever else, it's important to have a little more patience and find out how shows are being discovered and watched.

Still, the week brought a few surprises...

I. Lone Star: A Prestige Show with Core Flaws

Lone Star, despite how well made and well written it is, remains a little challenging to watch. James Wolk is certainly a charmer (he's also the befuddled bridegroom at the center of You Again – I don't know if that helps or hurts). He plays a con man who's running a pyramid scheme to steal the meager savings of middle-class folks across suburban Texas, while simultaneously cozying up to his father-in-law, the head of a major oil company. Sure, he grows a conscience, and starts feeling bad about bilking the honest victims of his schemes – we watch him squirming under the thumb of his dad, who's been running scams with him all his life – but it almost feels too-little-too-late, and even if he does end up going Robin Hood and turning the long con around on his Pa, Lone Star is stuck between two undesirable heroes: the ponzi schemer or the oil conglomerate. Neither is likely to win over an audience in today's America. But Wolk truly is a charmer, and the show is written well. I absolutely welcome a little ambivalence and a few shades of grey into the network TV landscape. (And, needless to say, it's great to see Adrianne Palicki again. Even a little of her – too little – goes a long way.) I was just ready to like Lone Star more than I did, and by the end of the hour I was a little less certain of its prospects.

II. The Belushi Legal Drama is the Best of the Week

This one blew me away. I don't know how a person greenlights a lawyer show headlined by Jim Belushi unless he's got a gun to his head or he's just coming off a bender so insane that his cranium is 60% cocaine by weight. (Or both – let's not rule out the gun-to-the-coke-brain scenario.) But somehow The Defenders, in which Belush and Jerry O'Connell run a law practice with a big billboard on the Vegas strip, became a halfway decent run-of-the-mill courtroom drama. Don't get me wrong: it's definitely a laundry show – my classification for the kind of show you have on while folding laundry, paying bills online, whatever it is that keeps you from paying the kind of attention you need to devote to real shows like Dexter or even Modern Family where looking away means missing something pivotal (or funny). But Belushi comports himself ...seriously for some reason, and actually cares about his clients – there's not even a bunch of crazy Vegas antics! (At least I was hoping for footage of Belushi playing Hold 'Em so he might get dealt K9.) He and Jerry O'Connell actually make cases and think things through and find evidence and everything. Jurnee Smollett is also fiery and devoted as their new associate, and settles a bet I had with myself about whether she was the new black girl from the opening credits of Friday Night Lights last season or the new white girl. (I had my money on the former, because, I mean – Jurnee – but baby names being what they are today, you never can tell. But I was right! Goes to show you, it's worth it to be lazy and not look things up – it is way easier to just watch every single new show of the fall season in under a week.)

Of course, while 60% of the shock here is that the Belushi show manages to hold its own, I'm also astonished that The Whole Truth and Blue Bloods managed to be so resoundingly awful. Blue Bloods has a little bit going for it, because it handles its attempts to be "issuey" with a bit more grace (but not much), but it's still blatantly formulaic and riddled with pat, unidimensional characters we've seen a thousand times. (Plus, that irritating first-episode exposi-blitz that just feels like a third-grader wrote it: "Dad!" "Sis!" "Bro!" "We're engaged!" "But I'm still kind of sad about when our brother died!" "I can't believe you quit law school to become a cop!" "Ha ha, but you're still a D.A., sis!" I mean, do people feel like that's somehow cleverer than just using narration or a CNN-style text crawl to get the information across?) Not even the Tom Selleck gravitas can overcome a show as schlocky as this – or maybe Selleck explains it: with him on their side, everyone from the writers on down decided to phone it in. If so, it certainly explains the horror show that is The Whole Truth – with veterans like Rob Morrow and Maura Tierney anchoring it, Jerry Bruckheimer evidently figured he could just put the show's development in the hands of a lobotomized sea cucumber and let the chips fall where they may. The "hook" of the show is a nice dual-view format which switches between Tierney's prosecution prep and Morrow's defense in the run-up to trial, but that comes at the expense of the trial itself, which is presented as a series of quickie flash-fowards (complete with bloopy sound-effects, as though they're appearing in a chat window). Then it's all repeated again when the two present their summations (but, now the witness testimonies are flashbacks – bloop!). Worst of all, just when you think something unique is going to happen on television and a guy is going to be convicted on circumstantial evidence just for looking creepy – grey areas, hooray! – the show tacks on a preposterous gimme ending where his daughter finds the murder weapon just to soothe our conscience. Don't you worry... there will be no ambiguity in Bruckheimerland. Pitiful.

III. Fox Comedies – I Mean, What Do We Do, Here?

It seemed like the smart bet was Running Wilde, with Will Arnett and approximately 80% of the creative team behind Arrested Development (although, Fox did hang both of their last two shows out to dry). I know people who hold a grudge against Raising Hope creator Greg Garcia for how his previous show, My Name Is Earl went from charmingly hilarious to unwatchably awful (although, I blame an unsustainable premise – and Ethan Suplee's failure to keep Randy on the right side of a difficult cute/grating balancing act). (I mean, Garcia also created Yes, Dear, for fuck's sake – if you could watch a year of My Name Is Earl after knowing that, you can watch an episode or two of Raising Hope.) I ventured into both shows with a measure of trepidation, and they held their own. I won't say that either is the next Arrested Development or Ricky Gervais Office, but they're definitely my favorite shows of this year's crop. Running Wilde is a little bit more sitcommy (not yet sure whether that's a function of the first-episode setup, in which it's necessary to construct a reason for Keri Russell's arch-left environmentalist to move in with oil baron Arnett, her former teen sweetheart; or a little bit of Mitchell Hurwitz winking at the format; or just sloppiness). You can't really go wrong with Arnett playing a rich, arrogant, asshole – although, now that I think of it, I can't remember him playing anything else – and Wilde wrings some great comedy out of it. I was charmed from the start by the interplay between Wilde (Arnett) and his manservant Migo, who lives by Wilde's pampered detachment from real life. ("Did you want change? Because you asked for six diet sodas and you only gave me $100.") But so far, the competitive sparring with rich asshole-next-door Fa'ad has me rolling my eyes. But what I like about the show is how it treats Arnett and Russell with equal disdain (and equal begrudging affection). Hurwitz says he "wanted to paint both sides of the political argument into a corner and play with the ironies that emerge." Mike Judge did a great job sending up political values with King of the Hill, where he used a light touch and was often unpredictable (sometimes head-on, sometimes obliquely ironic – you never knew if Hank's lesson would be the moral of the episode or a negative example). Then he tried to spoof Hank's opposites with The Goode Family, well-meaning left-wingers you were supposed to love despite their foibles, but instead you just hated them to the core. Hurwitz will never be accused of using a light touch, but I think Wilde has the potential to split the difference nicely by skewering both characters head-on with equal relish. (At first it seems obvious she's more virtuous, but we see that she just uses that to make herself feel better – as Wilde says, "You've lorded having nothing over me since the day you found out I had everything!") Hurwitz's shows adroitly expose people's contradictions and weaknesses, and here he has a romantic pair, whose lives have led them to define themselves by really extreme principles that they cling to for no real reason except they're not sure what else they have. Their stubbornness – the refusal to drop the act and acknowledge the middle ground – is the thing they have most in common (with each other, and just about any talking head on cable) and if Running Wilde plays its cards right, it'll be a source of all kinds of fireworks.

Raising Hope has more laughs-per-minute – more everything per minute, in fact, packing a ton into the first episode. The working-class vibe will be familiar to Earl viewers, but most of the tone seemed sharper and a little more clever. There were a lot of nice little surprises, like when the main character, Jimmy, brings home a cute girl, and wakes up the next day to find his dad and cousin in the kitchen, staring at her and making noises like, "Mahooma... Mooomama..." But it turns out, instead of ogling her, they're amazed she can pronounce "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," and she's trying to teach them. Or later, when she's sentenced to death for murder, and she requests a McRib sandwich and Shamrock Shake for her last meal, effectively staying the execution because "those two are almost never available at the same limited time." All of this whips by at lightning speed – meeting the girl, hooking up with her, realizing she's murdered her past flings, turning her in, finding out she's having his kid – so that before the first commercial break, he's a single dad... well, he's becoming a single dad: the baby's in his lap in a prison observation room while the mom gets put to death on the other side of the glass. That's a sitcom with balls. From there, it's more of the same. Jimmy's a delight; the new girl he meets at the supermarket who's constantly pointing out what an ill-qualified moron father he is: even more of a delight; Martha Plimpton as his mom: surprisingly delightful, considering the sight of her normally turns my stomach. And Garret Dillahunt, whom I'm accustomed to watching torture Damien Lewis as a badass Russian mobster in Life or Jeffrey Donovan as a badass CIA assassin in Burn Notice or Lena Headey as a badass robot assassin in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles – and, I mean, he is excellent in all of those shows – it turns out he is even fucking better at goofy-ass middlebrow comedy! What a bonus!

Raising Hope grabbed me in the first 60 seconds, when Jimmy's cousin tells the story of the girl he went home with the night before, and shows off the tattoo she convinced him to get. It's just the kind of charming sight gag that starts things off right and tells me I'm going to enjoy the next half hour, and I did:

(I'm serious, people – in the history of the ATGoNFP, I've thrown its considerable weight behind two shows that I knew you really didn't want to watch: Veronica Mars and Pushing Daisies. I believe you thanked me. The Raising Hope pilot is online; watch it, and then decide. But at least watch it.)

Not As Surprising

I. Bad Ideas Make Bad Shows

Hawaii Five-O is just terrible. Ken Tucker tried to snooker me into expecting good things (and I'll admit Scott Caan is fine in it), but it's just awful. I think the problem is that Alex O'Laughlin just isn't any good at being in television shows. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but I think we have assembled a pretty solid case against his acting talents at this point. With Moonlight, the writing and the premise were so deeply flawed, it was easy to assume he wasn't responsible. I admit I barely paid attention to Three Rivers. But he's truly no good in this. Drama poison. TV Keanu. Not that the writing is altogether good. You've got lines like: "The new Chief of Police is fresh meat from the mainland, which means he has no idea how this island works." When so much was being made of Scott Caan improvising his lines, I felt a little bad for the writers – it reminded me of Joey Tribbiani ("Oh, I don't really need the writers.") – but now that I've seen it, I just feel bad for Caan. Even worse is Bruckheimer's U.S. Marshal show Chase, which I thought had a glimmer of potential for taking the procedural out of the lab and the precinct bullpen with the whiteboard and getting it on the road. But it turns out it's still pretty dull, and also laden with a bunch of tired clichés. To save time, I think I'll cut off any future new fall episode in which one cop character "reminds" another cop character to keep a suspect on the line a few more seconds in order to trace the call – especially if either cop expects the suspect to be stupid enough to stay on. Do they think that guy watches less TV than they do? 0-for-2 this fall, Bruckheimer. And he's got a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean filming – yikes.

II. Good Actors Can't Save Bad Writing

Shit My Dad Says and Better with You are buoyed by William Shatner and JoAnna Garcia (with help from Debra Jo Rupp, Kurt Fuller, and even Josh Cooke, amazingly enough), but it isn't enough to overcome some extremely uninspired writing. For one thing, they softened Shatner's edge way way too much, which seems to eliminate the whole bleeping point of his show. And then you've got the Will Sasso/Nicole Sullivan MadTV duo as the brother and sister-in-law of the main character (the guy whose Twitter feed the show is based on – and how it pains me to live in an era where we have to type such things). They're kooky, setup-pitching machines, firing barbs in all directions, and the whole thing is a mess. Although at least the scenes are longer than 40 seconds, which is more than can be said for Better with You. Cute moments here and there, but – hoo. Exhausting. Where are the people clamoring for new shows like this? With intricate, mile-a-minute setups? They've been dating eight weeks, suddenly they're getting engaged; her sister has been living with a guy for nine years, but they're the type that doesn't want to get married they want to "choose to be together every day"; Mom and Dad are hitched 35 years. Tonight's the big night the parents meet the new guy - rush, rush, rush! It makes Mike & Molly look fantastic by comparison, even though it doesn't make any sense, stages an Overeaters Anonymous meeting like an open mic night in order to work in enough one-liners to create a meet-cute between M&M, and includes classy lines like "My farts weigh three and a half pounds," or "Your father had to take a second job to afford that necklace, and I had to give him a third job to afford it." (Thanks again, Chuck Lorre, really.) The point is, it's just a story about a couple – two people, maybe a family member or two on either side – and the title is Mike & Molly, not Twenty Good Years or Cougar Town or We're Getting Married Friday!, just something simple that can last years if it has to (even if I personally hope it doesn't).

By the way, James Burrows directed all three of these pilots. That has to be a really interesting job. He directs a ton of pilots every year, which I assume means he has a reputation for helping get shows on their feet (or maybe he just sleeps on the studio lot, so it's easier when the networks are trying to get the things shot and make their pickup choices for fall). They say when you work at suicide hotlines you have to learn how to stay detached from the voice on the other end of the line. I bet it's the same thing with Burrows and the shows he directs every year.

III. Trying Not to Be Lost: A Good Way to Be Just Like Lost

Producers of The Event go out of their way to promise that they won't be holding a lot of secrets over our heads to make watching their show as unbearable as watching Lost turned out to be. And, in some ways, it wasn't. But in a lot of ways, it was similarly frustrating, with cutting all over the place, and establishing far too many story threads at one time. Also, in terms of slick, cinematic superficiality, it had a style that reminded me far too much of NBC's Surface from a few years ago – a show I loved, but a show which could never hold up to any sort of long-term global conspiracy-type intrigue. (It doesn't help that the two share an actor: Ian Anthony Dale, a flinty secret agent in both.) The show seems to skip across the surface of its own story, jumping in and out of the plot at the worst possible moments, and people (especially Laura Innes, who seems to know the most) say, "I can't tell you everything right now" at exactly the time when telling everything would be really fucking helpful. Man, that reminds me of watching Lost at the times when I most wanted to tear my hair out. Plus, there's flashbacks. Yeah, I kind of liked it on Monday, but already thinking back on it I can feel my blood boiling – okay, moving on...

Gallimaufry

I. My Generation: A Displaced CW Show

Kind of an interesting experiment, and definitely better constructed than Fox's Reunion from a few years back, but still kind of a hodgepodge. Like Reunion (and Harper's Island, come to think of it), it's far too incestuous. Why have these ten people stayed together far more closely than 90% of any other random group of high schoolers? Almost all of them have ended up married to one another, living with one another, dating one another, or parenting children together (intentionally or otherwise). The conceit of the show is that a documentary crew followed them for a week in 2000 (a year the show sums up by starting with Bill Clinton saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," which – I don't know – is that the sum total of 2000 for most people?) and now it's going to follow them around a bit more in 2010. Showing the disconnect between their anticipated trajectories and where they ended up creates an interesting deconstruction of the cliques that seem so permanent when we're in school, but it seems to me that it's an opportunity to also show how far these people go when their wings spread, rather than having them all end up together, just remixed like a shuffled deck of playing cards. The rest of it is just treacly uplifting tales or backstabbing melodrama – so, not everything was left in high school.

II. Detriot 187: I Honestly Do Not See The Point

I like Shaun Majumder a lot (he was on Fox's Unhitched with Craig Bierko and Rashida Jones) but the rest of this show – I mean we have a dozen CSIs and 65 Law & Orders (down one because NBC decided that nobody wanted to watch Law & Order any more, but up one because NBC decided America was clamoring for more Law & Order, so tune in Tuesday for Law & Order: Los Angeles!) – so I just don't see what the angle is that says why this show in particular is needed. Is it to point out how extremely high the murder rate in Detroit is? (So high that they had to change the style of the show to eliminate the documentary-camera feel because a real A&E documentary crew was following a Detroit homicide squad and a girl got killed? Which shouldn't really surprise anyone considering they're following a homicide squad, but whatever?) (So high that, in one very entertaining scene, detectives combing a scene for bullet casings keep tossing back the ones they find because they're the wrong caliber – meaning another five people were shot there before their guy?) The show has a rookie detective puking over a shooting victim on his first day; it has Michael Imperioli in a haircut only slightly less obnoxious than his gravelly accent; and it has suspects being bleeped when they say "fuck" in interrogations, but the saucy coroner who moonlights at roller derby explains the bruise on her jaw by saying that another derbier "c-blocked" her on the rink, the way no human person does or has, ever. Imperioli is a total loose cannon who will walk unarmed into a hostage situation while the whole S.W.A.T. team looks on in stunned silence (I know! On a cop show! God, why haven't they thought of that before?), and who's also a miracle savant who's the best detective among detectives and a better hostage negotiator than the negotiators. (But just to prove the show's edgy, right at the end, after the hostage guy has confessed and is being transferred to lockup, he grabs a gun and shoots Imperioli's rookie partner! Dead, right in the gut! Right as his wife is calling his cell to say she's headed to the delivery room. Ha ha, Motown!)

III. Undercovers: Needs Chemistry

Really excellent cinematography (longtime Alias/Lost DP Michael Bonvillian, whom I always imagine stroking a white Persian cat and wearing a monocle) and music by Michael Giacchino give the show a slick, cinematic feel. Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw are gorgeous to look at (and how can you not love a girl named Gugu?). Their cover identity, running a catering company, means they have a beautiful kitchen which looks like it was lifted right out of Ratatouille. The premise is enticing – obviously a guy who loves Mr. & Mrs. Smith as much as I do is going to like the idea of a husband and wife secret agent team out in the field – but so far, it falls pretty flat. Each of the principals is adorable and charismatic, but they need a lot more chemistry – just a sense of quickness and history together, in the dialogue as well as the field operations. Also, this being 2010, I think people should stop using the line, "Get a room!" in an unironic context.

For example:
Wrong: A couple, who are top secret spies, has just saved you from certain death. You are also a top secret spy, and you've known them, separately and together, for years. You spoke at their wedding. Danger averted, they reach to uncuff you, and – celebrating the fact that all are still alive – share a kiss. You, chuckling smugly, mutter, "Heh. Get a room."
Right: A couple, who are top secret spies, are holed up in a top secret spy safe house. They are prepping to go out and raid a bad guy's lair, possibly shooting bad guys and getting shot at by other bad guys. Just as they are about to lock and load, they lean in to share a "good luck" kiss. You, a slimy punk with an Uzi, come crashing through a wall, looking to do them harm. One of them, without breaking the kiss, jabs an elbow to your jaw, dropping you to the ground with a thwack. You look up, and trying to summon a little bravado, croak, "Get a room." The other turns to you and says, "We have a room. This is our room – you're the one who just broke our wall." And then she shoots you in the kneecap.

IV. Outsourced: Bad, But in a Sort of Harmless Way

If you try hard enough you can work yourself into a pretty good lather about how Outsourced is the most xenophobic, racist, evil show ever televised. (Which is absurd, of course. That show is Kate & Allie.) This reminds me of Seinfeld seeking counsel from Tim Whatley's former priest after Whatley converted to Judaism and started telling a bunch of jokes about Jewish people. The priest says, "This offends you as a Jewish person?" and Jerry says, "No, it offends me as a comedian!" You shouldn't have time to be offended by Outsourced on any grounds other than the fact that it's lazy comedy. There's no reason to think the Diedrich Bader character is there to make the Ben Rappaport character look less racist – he's there to allow the show to make "Ugly American" jokes, because there is such a thing as Ugly Americans, and that's a joke that people can laugh at. The fact that the show takes incredibly easy angles at those jokes is simply a matter of them being very lazy about it. Similarly, the fact that all the punch lines about India are about well-established stereotypes about India is due to the fact that Americans know very little about India. Cows are sacred; Indian food is spicy; the music is like nails on a chalkboard (nice job making that your theme song by the way – I'm sure 90% of TVs switched off right there). It's not necessarily a good thing that people don't know more about India than this, but it isn't the fault of Outsourced, and it would be pretty stupid for Outsourced to base its material on a hypothetical depth of cultural literacy that goes well beyond that, because those jokes are going to fall on deaf ears, and the show isn't likely to last very long in its current form, but in a form that expects Americans to know a lot about India (or worse, research India to get to the bottom of its punch lines), it's already dead.

What I enjoyed about it was that the American call center which has been outsourced to India to provide the basis for the show is a seller of cheaply made novelty goods (probably made in China, just up the way, although nothing is made of this). So, there's an additional culture clash element because the Indian employees can't fathom a culture that would purchase these bizarre items that have zero utility whatsoever. I don't suppose there's a lasting well of comedy there, but there were a couple of entertaining scenes as Rappaport had to explain the concept of gag gifts and a culture of excess to people who clearly hadn't pondered the idea of fake vomit or silicone breasts mounted on the wall like a trophy buck. Not a lot of laughs, but that was a clever concept, and I wasn't expecting any cleverness at all.

Monday

Chase
The Event
Hawaii Five-O
Lone Star
Mike & Molly

Tuesday

Detroit 187
Raising Hope
Running Wilde

Wednesday

Better with You
The Defenders
Undercovers
The Whole Truth

Thursday

My Generation
Outsourced
$#*! My Dad Says

Friday

Blue Bloods

Returning Shows

Castle steadily earned a Meloni or two over the course of last season by bungling the will they/won't they dynamic between Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic in the most aggravating possible way. I don't even think the show needs a romantic angle between the two, but if it has to be there, it certainly doesn't need to be in the form of both of them constantly pretending it isn't, and then getting jealous and petty each time the other makes eyes at anyone or goes on a date. But they shed their Meloni this week by doing a really ingenious dance in which Castle was a murder suspect at the same time Beckett was hurt that she hadn't heard from him all summer (and so were the other cops). Putting him across the interrogation table from her so she could take out her jealousy and ask about the murder was very clever, and gave the line "Why didn't you call?" a fun double meaning. How I Met Your Mother also shed a Meloni for a season premiere that brought back a lot of the fun things I remembered about previous seasons of the show – let's hope they can keep it going. Every episode of House in which Lisa Edelstein is not assassinated earns about 1/18 of a Meloni, so obviously this was not my favorite week, but I'm willing to see how things play out.

I'm giving Amy Ryan two weeks to show up on The Office and then I'm just going to count on one of you to e-mail me when she does and I'll TiVo that episode. Everything that's wrong with where the show headed last season could be summed up in the opening two minutes of this season's opener. Things didn't get much better from there, although at least Michael didn't take the office for a ride on a blimp or hire U2 to perform in the conference room. (Still, adding a cast member – even for a few scenes – is just what they don't need. Bringing Kathy Bates in – even for a second – is the last thing they need, unless it's to introduce Amy Ryan. And switching up the romances – dealing with the romances at all – is just nonsense, unless it's Amy Ryan. We need a string of at least six episodes that take place in the office or solely around the subject of office work or paper sales; that will restore my faith in this show.) Modern Family is brilliant. I haven't seen 30 Rock or Community yet because I had to watch the new shows first – so nobody say anything!

The Amazing Race
Castle
Community
CSI
Dexter
Eastbound & Down
The Good Guys
House
How I Met Your Mother
The Mentalist
Modern Family
The Office
Rules of Engagement
30 Rock

Premiering This Week

Greg Berlanti (who thinks Katherine Heigl would be sympathetic as a mom) says No Ordinary Family is "a heartfelt family show [...] with great comedic and dramatic possibilities with action." Star Michael Chiklis sees it "as a family show that has a police procedural and a superhero element wrapped around it." So, kind of four to six shows attempting to coexist in one show, with stunts and effects, on a weekly TV budget. I am dying to see this last six weeks. The amount of money it takes for Chiklis to lift a car could keep DWTS in sequins through 2050.

No Ordinary Family: ABC, Tuesday at 8:00
Law & Order: Los Angeles: NBC, Wednesday at 10:00
Todd Margaret: IFC, Friday at 10:00

Returning This Week

The Good Wife: CBS, Tuesday at 10:00
Human Target: Fox, Friday at 8:00
The Amazing Race: CBS, Sunday in its regular 8:00 time slot

Also New This Week

American Dad: Fox, Sunday at 9:30
CSI: Miami: CBS, Sunday at 10:00

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