Mike’s Fall TV Preview: Fridays

Friday nights are a different breed of television. You can usually find some obscure, offbeat show on that night that doesn’t seem to fit elsewhere. Firefly, The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, Ghost Whisperer, Moonlight and others are some examples.

Those shows lean more towards my kind of tastes in our house, and it’s always made Friday nights fun for me. You could go out, see a movie, have dinner, see some friends yet still know when you get home, be it 10, 11 or midnight, you have BSG or The X-Files waiting patiently for your return.

Grab a giant slice of pie, a big glass of milk, sit back and enjoy. I love Friday nights.

Fall TV Preview – Fridays

The list below is broken up into Mike’s Season Passes, Pilots I Like and  The Rest. The Rest will include current shows and new pilots that I don’t have any real intentions of watching.

The premiere date and network will be noted next to each in parenthesis. It doesn’t get much easier than that!

Mike’s Season Passes

The only bad thing about Friday nights is that the amount of good shows available is pretty scarce. Thus it’s always that much sweeter to find something great.

Life (September 29th, NBC)

While this show doesn’t fit the bill of being obscure or of the science fiction genre, Life is still a series that is fun and different in its own way, and great for Friday nights. The only worry on my end is that ugly fact that it moved from Wednesdays to Fridays, which is the kiss of death in most cases.

Damien Lewis is a fantastic actor and is the single reason Life works. Charlie Crews (Lewis) has unique style of solving crimes with a Zen attitude (sometimes), which was refreshing amongst the staleness of procedural dramas. I also loved his partner Dani Reese, who is beautiful but doesn’t act like it. She has some serious flaws she’s working through, and it’s done in a more realistic way than other shows.

This season the series adds comic Donal Logue from Grounded for Life.

A PROGRAMMING NOTE: Life will start off for two weeks on MONDAY NIGHTS and will then move to FRIDAYS. Of course, if you have a DVR, it will remember this for you.

Pilots I Like

Crusoe (October 17th, NBC)

Now here is a perfect Friday night show. Not science fiction, but definitely a show with a unique premise. The main concern from me is wondering where they take the series?

As a teenager, I loved reading Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. The idea of being lost on a deserted island (although Treasure Island was a bit different) has always been intriguing to me. More recently we got to see Cast Away, which was another great tale in this genre.

But do any of them make you think of a television series with multiple seasons? Where can they take Crusoe? Will this be a serialized show like Lost, with a large spanning story arc? Or is this more of “The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe?”

The Rest

Returning Shows

• Every Hates Chris (Oct 3, The CW)
• Ghost Whisperer (Oct 3, CBS)
• Numbers (Oct 3, CBS)
• The Game (Oct 3, The CW)

New Shows

• The Ex List (Oct 3, CBS) – The girl from Grey’s Anatomy who played Ava (Elizabeth Reeser), stars in this dramedy about a woman who finds out from a psychic that she has a year to find her true love…AND it’s someone she’s already dated. There’s a writer on it from Veronica Mars, Diane Ruggiero, which actually makes it sound somewhat promising. It does come from an Israeli series which only went 11 episodes, and considering she just has a year to get the job done, how much life does the show honestly have?

Here’s a preview of The Ex List below for your enjoyment.

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