New TV Show Roundup For Fall 2013

Do you wish there were more network shows about adults interacting with their wacky parents? Are your favorite Seth McFarlane jokes the ones that are so lazy and blatantly sexist/homophobic/racist that they couldn't POSSIBLY be sexist, homophobic, or racist? Please eat an entire set of silverware then crawl into a trash compactor.

So much sassiness, so little reason. Almost every character in Marvel's Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is quirky and quick to fire off witty(?) one-liners. In exactly the same way. They all exist to be cute and to barf out quips for no reason until a plot sort of happens near them.

Young Agent Guy is very upset about being on an elite task force with absolute freedom and access to tech from the future. Why? Because the story wants him to be. And because his gruffness makes him a target for paint-by-numbers emasculation jokes.

The show doesn't linger on anything long enough for the viewer to fully process or care about what's happening. The entire experience isn't unlike watching someone tell knock knock jokes for an hour, only the teller leaves out the knocks since blurting out the punchline seems more efficient. I don't know how this is possible, but there is even a scene with a flying car that somehow comes across as completely flat.

I enjoyed The Avengers. I'd like this series to work. Maybe the premiere was rushed (not that it tried to do too much, as it was pretty straightforward) and this show can find the balance between plot and character development and humor that Firefly was able to pull off in its first episode. For now, it's oddly insubstantial and grating.

Sleepy Hollow moves as quickly as Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., has a more ridiculous scale, and yet somehow it's far more watchable. This is a show with witches, headless horsemen with shotguns, wizard priests, small town conspiracies, the apocalypse, and a ballsy proclamation that the series will last seven seasons. In the first episode.

It's all completely ridiculous, but shot in a way that lets each scene breathe and establish a mood that fits within the dramatic arc of the show. Funny how rare that is. The two leads are likeable, have terrific chemistry, and go for broke delivering their insane lines.

David Spader is Amazing Bad Guy, who has been caught on purpose. David Spader is laconic as fuck. These statements are the basis for an entire show. HELL YES. That was not an ironic hell yes.

I don't know if actress Megan Boone is really amazing or if she's somehow horrible in a fascinating way, but I like her as the show's protagonist.

The humor is a little broad compared to something like Parks And Recreation, and without that show's good-natured spirit all that's left is annoying characters taking gags to their loudest, most obvious ends. Andre Braugher is easily the best part of the show, with his deadpan and earnest delivery of relatively subtle humor.

I'm a sucker for a good hostage movie. By good I don't mean plausible, just consistent with how little it regards reality and common sense.

The structure of a hostage story provides plenty of built-in tension. There's the setup, where the viewer's anticipation of the crime heightens their perception of character introductions and plot points. There are criminals, cops, innocents and reporters, and plenty of room for inversions and fakeouts within each group. If the whole thing is handled with the tiniest bit of craft, the result can be enjoyable even if it's set on Mars and everyone is a clone.

Hostages works because it takes its time reveling in fun Hollywood flourishes as it riffs on the genre's formula. Dylan McDermott is a federal agent who shoots and kills an apparent hostage just because he has a hunch it's actually a bad guy in disguise. He's right, of course, and no one seems to mind that the guy he blasted wasn't holding a gun. Because that wasn't the important part. The important part is that this agent guy is a badass and the camera is swooping towards him while panning up because he's larger than life.

If you're capable of playing along there's a lot of high grade cheese to be enjoyed.

This hasn't aired yet, but it seems redundant since Sleepy Hollow will probably have Dracula show up as a kung fu instructor midway through its first season.

Mostly subverts the sappy manipulation that you'd expect in a show featuring a main character with a serious disease. The comedy really lets the show down, though. Michael J. Fox is such an affable dude that you'll find yourself willing the jokes to connect like a bowler gesticulating wildly to will his ball away from a gutter.

Better than the ads made it out to be, nowhere near as good as Robin Williams and Louis C.K. chatting at a funeral and strip club.

Another show that hasn't aired yet. I'd just like to ask everyone involved not to screw this up. The universe owes Karl Urban for letting the wonderful Dredd fly under the radar. On my last birthday I wished for a sci-fi show about a cop and his android partner. The stars are aligned.

I was wrong about New Girl. My mind had been made up before I saw the first episode. It seemed like a series of toothless, forced jokes about how awkward a young woman was. That was very unfair of me. I did not realize that I am a soothsayer, and was actually describing a future show called Super Fun Night.

A run of the mill sitcom is more unsettling than just about any horror movie. Characters mimic human behavior but don't quite get it right. Gags follow the patterns of jokes and are followed by laughter, yet they lack actual humor.

Welcome to another Chuck Lorre show. It's like Two And A Half Men or The Big Bang Theory, but with an adult woman interacting with her wacky mother. Which means it's going to be the most popular show on television for the next eight years.

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)