TV is the New Reading

New crop of fall premieres a disappointing harvest

In this topic, it’s harvest season for a disappointing crop of fall premieres.

NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles

To start with, I can no longer say I’ve never watched an entire episode of “NCIS” or, for that matter, “NCIS: Los Angeles.” I missed the season and series premieres, but managed to catch the follow-ups this week.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, I am informed by a Web site, is a unique, highly-trained and effective team of special agents, investigators, goth chicks, forensic experts, former hiphop artists, security specialists, pretty boys in eye makeup, analysts, a small bespectacled gnome who sees all and knows all, and support personnel: NCIS, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

NCIS is primarily responsible for investigating actual, suspected or alleged major criminal offenses involving the U.S. Department of the Navy, or Navy or Marine Corps personnel. In the course of these investigations, women agents somewhere on the spectrum walk into the gents washroom to share their life stories before they’re even confirmed as part of the team (although putting them in the opening credits kind of telegraphs it) and flirt with both Tommy and Timmy, although both of them seem a little too fabulous for her.

However true that is or isn’t, executive producer Shane Brennan has established a testosterone-fueled hut-hut alpha existence in an office setting. There’s nowhere for it to go so it comes out in mild embarrassments and bathroom humor. Mark Harmon is Gibbs, the wise sensei who knows all and is the unquestioned leader in any situation he encounters.

Trying to establish himself in that role on “NCIS: Los Angeles” is L.L. “My Hat is Like a Shark’s Fin” Cool J as Special Agent Sam Hanna. He’s a Navy SEAL and you can tell because he goes on and on about it to people who already know, and in the case I saw he’s generally disgusted that he has to investigate a fellow SEAL -- one he’d trained, even.

He’s got this unnecessarily adversarial relationship with Chris O’Donnell’s Agent Callen, who honest to God could be played by absolutely anyone pretty. There’s a young agent on the team who is painfully slow on the uptake, a couple of random functionaries who defy character development and hey, another gorgeous woman and then we have the Ducky of this series, Linda Hunt, as enigmatic operations manager Hetty Lange whose function appears to be confronting people bluntly about … anything that occurs to her.

Y’know what? Not every show is written for every audience and people are allowed to enjoy whatever it is they enjoy about these to me perfectly interchangeable shows. The CBS crime drama audience tends to enjoy watching young, athletic, pretty people with let’s call it a “range” of acting abilities take on disruptive drug dealers and dirty cops and gang bangers and hoodlums and ne’er-do-wells and basically solve the problems of the world in 42 minutes. They get a little thrill of emotional intensity, to tsk tsk about young people nowadays and what is the world coming to, then something blows up or L.L. Cool J. emerges from a water hazard in a wetsuit, guns blazing and then brooding about how it all went down. If that’s the show you enjoy, and ratings would suggest that’s the case, well, now there’s another one. New episodes air back to back starting at 7 p.m. on CBS.

Stargate: Universe

I’m not certain what I was expecting from “Stargate: Universe,” which premiered Friday night on Syfy, but I think I was expecting … more.

Dr. Reed, the quietly charismatic leader in this series, reminds me of a Dr. Balthar type character in what is still constructed as a military mission. The newest member of the team, young Eli, joined up not 100 percent by choice when Reed crowdsourced a difficult mathematical equation disguised as a video game and Eli cracked it. The equation was meant to unlock a ninth and final chevron in an ancient teleportation device that connects up -- never mind other points in our galaxy, but in fact intergalactic portals through an extraordinary curvature in spacetime called a wormhole.

Anyway, one of these portals is aboard a starship and a very random collection of people come through it when the ship carrying Dr. Reed, Eli and a different portal was destroyed, possibly to save Earth, possibly in the wake of the destruction of Earth, I wasn’t too clear on that -- there was some sort of alien attack on something somewhere, but there were also a lot of flashbacks going on and it was very confusing.

Essentially, a race of Ancients established these portals, they connect up with each other, but in this case, not to the extent that the crew will make its way back home. Instead, in something new they’ve come up with called a plot twist, the ship is going to determine what they need and then will open nearby portals accordingly. In that the ship was barely able to maintain life support for the all-human crew and one of them had to die to try fixing it, one wonders about the ship’s intuitive acuity, but hey, plot device -- humans aboard a mysterious ship, many megaparsecs from home and the ship is opening random doors here and there.

A grand adventure, to be sure, but when the only overarching theme is “Take us home” -- if there’s a home to get to … well, “Star Trek: Voyager” envisioned a crew in not dissimilar circumstances and that ran for seven seasons, so … “Stargate: Universe” airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on Syfy.

New comedies

Well, “Modern Family” premiered. There’s a couple with three kids and the oldest daughter is starting to bring boys home and mom is doing everything in her power not to freak out without much help from her "cool dad" husband. There’s the other couple, a gay couple, who has adopted a daughter. Then there’s the patriarch who married a gorgeous young Colombian woman and picked up a stepson, Manny, who to me had the only funny bit in the pilot episode when he had a picture taken of himself as Pancho Villa in a ridiculous mustache at a photo booth in the mall while declaring his love for the girl running it.

Otherwise it seemed to be a great excuse for whoever was writing this to highlight mild gay stereotypes specifically to fluster the uptight half of the gay couple. Otherwise, Cool Dad was the usual clueless male you find in these sitcoms and the laughs come from his general cluelessness ("I’m a cool dad, I text, I do texting. LOL, laugh out loud, OMG, oh my god, WTF, why the face"). Ultimately, it wasn’t that funny. OK, it was a little funny, but nothing I’m going to be seeking out.

Maybe exactly that funny was “The Middle,” basically ABC’s version of “Malcolm in the Middle” as told from the perspective of the mom, who is married to the janitor from “Scrubs” and has three kids, all of whom are disturbing in their own special way. She’s struggling to keep everything together as supermom -- even going so far as to wear a superhero costume for her younger son’s class project, and then showing up on the wrong day. Their daughter’s weirdness managed to destroy an entire swing choir. Hubby is barely any help and by the end of the pilot episode, she manages to get a car stolen from her. It may be the kind of show you watch to cheer yourself up, and to say “Well, at least my life’s not that bad,” but it’s not something I’d care to watch.

Keeping with the family disasters, ABC’s “Hank” arrived starring Kelsey Grammer as the fired CEO of a sporting goods conglomerate who somehow didn’t have a golden parachute lined up. This might be a genuine miscalculation on the part of ABC, but it’s hard these days to find a lot of sympathy for the fired CEO of a corporation right now, or to feel really bad for his having lost everything. Losing everything seems to translate to a three-bedroom fixer-upper in Virginia with a living room and a den and while the kids seem relatively unspoiled you’ve got your standard neurotic and resentful wife and the weird little son and every teenaged daughter ever written. At the center you’ve got another clueless patriarch out of touch with his family and at a loss as to what he’ll do next, but hey, at least you’ve got the wisecracking brother-in-law oh dear lord NEXT!

Next it’s Courtney Cox in ABC’s “Cougar Town.” I was finally able to catch the pilot episode and it was by far one of the funniest new shows in the lineup. The opening sequence is Courtney as divorcee Jules Keller, being disappointed in her 40-ish body. She and her younger real estate colleague Laurie determine that Jules should be dating again but she’s disgusted by the men her own age (like her neighbor, Grayson), who she says are all either broken, gay or -- as is the case with Grayson -- dating younger women.

She finds a younger man, Matt, (about her son Travis’s age) and at first she’s not sure it’s the right move but her neighbor and best friend, Ellie, sees him with his shirt off and says “Go do disgusting things to that boy!” Travis has to put up with his mom dating the kiddie pool and his underachieving dad who took a job landscaping at his school which -- which his dad mowing the lawn shirtless and rocking out to classic rock -- is exactly as embarrassing as he could’ve imagined. “Cougar Town” closes out ABC Wednesdays comedy lineup, starting at 7 p.m.

New to FOX’s Sunday night Animation Domination lineup including new episodes of “The Simpsons,” “Family Guy” and “American Dad” is “The Cleveland Show,” which is … well, it’s a spinoff from “The Family Guy,” centered on Cleveland, who leaves Spooner Street to hook up with his high school crush so if you enjoy “The Family Guy,” this show is even attempting to establish a black version of Stewie, so that should all seem wonderfully familiar (why is one of his neighbors a Russian bear?) “The Cleveland Show” airs at 7:30 p.m. on FOX.

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