3 Short Paragraphs: Fall 2011 (pt 4)

Mixed bag this time with Terra Nova, Revenge and one sitcom Suburgatory that I was not even looking out for.

Conventional television specFic is not very good.  Sometimes it surpasses it's genre and becomes good drama, ala Battlestar Galactica, but usually it just falls into templates and formats and gets boring very quickly. Terra Nova is going to be one of those, I can just smell it like dinosaur poo.  The pilot was one of those rare two-hour premieres where we see the dark world of the future and are almost immediately tossed into the dinosaur & big bug filled past so humanity can "start again".  Luckily they cover the time-travel trope of "new timeline" so they don't step on any butterflies -- I commend them for addressing that. The annoying thing is that there has to be uppity teenagers and precocious kids and bad guys who saw The Road Warrior too many times. I will watch another few episodes, at least until it bores or annoys the hell out of me.

Then there is something I never thought I might watch again but... might... just... have... to.  It's Revenge, loosely based on the premise inside The Count of Monte Cristo, a premise I very much enjoy. Here we have a pretty girl returning to the Hamptons where nobody recognizes that she is the daughter of someone they destroyed years ago. She has a fortune given to her by an internet billionaire and connections every which way. The weird thing is that we are going to root for this pretty girl as she destroys lives and probably kills a few people. Its very standard but I am curious if it will get as dark as it could.

Suburgatory seems to be one of those out of the studio sitcoms based on a series of teen novels, but it isn't. It's narrated by our teenage girl lead who, along with her dad, has moved to the suburbs -- dad wants to give her a better life. I grew up in the suburbs of the 80s and they were not this idea of vast houses, boob jobs and plastic kids. And Jeremy Sisto is not the kind of guy I would expect playing a nice, schleppy dad who is a fish out of the pool around all the manicured and orange-tinted men of the burbs. But Alan Tudyk is in it, so it will warrant some more attention before the jaded daughter is converted into thinking every in the burbs is actually ok, afterall.