Posted on: Friday, August 15, 2003

It's coming: TV season with brains

By Frazier Moore
Associated Press

A TV critic surveying the fall program landscape sometimes feels like an inspector looking for weapons of mass destruction. You never want to find bad shows, of course. Yet something seems amiss when you don't.

That is my dilemma, after previewing all 37 pilots from the six broadcast networks' prime-time crop.

In a nutshell, fellow viewers: We can look forward to an unusually promising bunch of new series, with — and this is the unsettling part — remarkably few stinkers.

If you throw the following back in my face later, I'll swear it was a typo, but here it is: This could be the best fall season in a decade.

Weird. But I can say that every year since 1992, I have finished my dog-days screening marathon in a state of weariness and dread, buoyed only by a handful of noteworthy newcomers (an "Everybody Loves Raymond" or "West Wing") that made the exercise eventually rewarding.

This year, by contrast, I enjoyed myself. Do I dare confess to this? I had fun!

Here are a few of the reasons:

I liked "Arrested Development," the Fox comedy about a squabbling family united by greed that is so matter-of-factly absurd I was laughing out loud alone in my living room.

I liked "The Lyon's Den," the new Rob Lowe lawyer drama on NBC, not because it's high-minded (which it is), but because it also has a deliciously sinister soapy undercurrent.

I liked Mark Harmon (more appealing the older and less pretty he gets) on CBS' spinoff of "JAG," "Navy NCIS."

ABC's "Married To the Kellys," which affectionately skewers Midwestern folkways, won me over with a scene where the family plays Taboo.

And, God help me, I was even tickled by the dumb-and-dumber duo of roofers on UPN's sitcom "The Mullets."

You think I'm getting soft? Losing my grip?

Well, I can assure you not every pilot hit a home run.

Fox's "The Ortegas" is a misbegotten talk-show-within-a-sitcom that had me scratching my head. NBC's "Whoopi," with the star as owner of a rundown Manhattan hotel, had me grinding my teeth. And ABC's "It's All Relative" (an unfortunate hybrid of "La Cage aux Folles" and "All in the Family") should be retitled "It's All Annoying."