On Screen & Online
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

With the increasing migration of television online, you’d think you could use the Internet to get a sense of the upcoming fall season — a kind of Cliff Notes version to be digested in an evening and then rattled off at cocktail parties. After all, on the network Web sites you can watch clips of the shows, listen to interviews with actors, and, once in a while, even see an episode in its entirety. What better way to decide which of the dozens of programs barreling toward you might possibly pique your interest?
That, at least, was the idea on paper. How would it be online? To find out, I opened my laptop, typed in abc.com (which became abc.go.com), and the home page came up instantly. Then, over the pulse of excited, upbeat electric guitar chords, the computer started talking to me. I recognized the voice immediately: It was the sound of American advertising — cool, knowing, white, masculine, amoral, and borderline post-human.
“Anytime, anywhere, at home, on the go…” it began over flashing snippets of familiar ABC programs delivered on a variety of gadgets ranging from a regular television to something you could fit in your hip pocket.
‘Seriously?’ put in another male voice.
‘Seriously,’ answered a female one.
Whereupon the original Voiceover Man continued: “Your favorite shows —” only to be interrupted again, this time by Ugly Betty, whose face popped up on screen (“This is so cool!”) — “Wherever (offstage scream), whenever — start with us.”
And then the soundtrack emerged from the background and soared into an REM-like chorus: “I’m watching, I’m watching, I’m watching, American television (woo hoo hoo!).”
“Hop on board,” said a female voice.
“I love you,” said someone else. “Anytime, anywhere, ABC — start here,” the segment concluded.
It wasn’t a good start. In fact, it was a nauseating one. I decided to click on the box that said “Fall First Look.” This was better. There was no voice-over, and 11 programs were listed, neatly laid out against a black backdrop embellished with silvery bubbles. I clicked on the one that’s been getting the most attention — “Dirty Sexy Money,” about a New York family “so absurdly wealthy, they put the ‘Upper’ in Upper East Side” — and sat through what was essentially a miniaturized 90-second movie trailer. This was followed by a series of cast interviews. “You may be on the new hottest show ever,” an interviewer told cast member Natalia Zea. “That’s what I’m hearing,” she replied.
Things got slightly more substantive when Patrick Stinson had a sit-down with stars Peter Krause and Samaire Armstrong. “I wrote down some of the themes of the show,” Stinson said, playing the good student. “Murder, greed, power, drugs, and transsexual hookers.” (Welcome to prime time!) More interviews followed, and that seemed to be the format for all of the new series at abc.com: a quick trailer, followed by promotional blabber. Far more informative, ironically, were the long prose descriptions of each series, most likely written by an intern. Okay, what about nbc.com/Fall_Preview/? A series of stills, rather like those in a high school yearbook, only with couples and geezers thrown in, confronted me. I double-clicked on “Bionic Woman.” “Find out more,” it said at the bottom of the picture — needlessly, since that’s why I clicked on it. There were two trailers, each lasting about 20 seconds, and both virtually useless. However, things got better with “Journeyman,” a show about a print journalist in San Francisco (Keven McKidd of “Rome”) who time travels 20 years into the past, probably in pursuit of work. Though the clips only lasted a minute or so, there were enough of them, touching on disparate aspects of the series, to provide a sense of the whole. And you know what? It didn’t look bad at all.
On cbs.com, I clicked on “Shows” to go to the “2007 CBS Fall Showcase,” which sounded like a collection of overly varnished furniture. I tried the already controversial reality show “Kid Nation,” in which 40 children, aged 8-15, have 40 days to get an abandoned mining town in New Mexico up and running. The theme song for the trailer was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and tween- and teen-empowerment seemed to be the order of the day as the young guns struggled with everything from cooking to leadership issues. It looked gruesome. “Cane,” in which Jimmy Smits heads up a Cuban rum-producing family in Miami, and “Viva Laughlin,” a murder mystery which nudges Dennis Potter territory (the characters sing along to pop standards), looked better.
I tried “Moonlight,” about a vampire/private eye, but first came a commercial for American Express. Not very Anne Rice. A lengthy trailer (almost three minutes) followed, but I couldn’t really get a sense of whether the show was worthwhile. “Swingtown,” a mid-season series preceded by an ad for Fantasy Football, took us back to 1976, when everyone was relaxed and groovin’ on Quaaludes and multiple sex partners, and when passenger pilots felt relaxed enough (apparently) to make out with stewardesses before landing the plane. Again, impossible to say how the series will play over time, but if someone quizzed me on it, I’d probably give a much better answer than if I’d just read about it in the paper. Furthermore, the opinion would be my own, rather than a regurgitation of someone else’s.
FOX.com took a straightforward approach, offering one meaty trailer per show and nothing else. It worked quite well, particularly with standard-issue sitcoms such as “Back To You,” in which Kelsey Grammer plays a local news anchor whose career goes into a tailspin when he rails against a colleague without realizing he’s still on the air. After watching exactly three minutes and 37 seconds of highlights, it was pretty obvious this was a show that was going to work along well-established comedic lines.
In the case of a slightly kookier concoction — the Farrelly brothers’ “Unhitched,” a sitcom which includes apes, extremely diminutive men, and women so emotionally overheated their cigarettes explode when they light them — it was a bit harder to tell what you were in for.
The CW (cwtv.com), aimed at a younger demographic, not surprisingly delivers the online goods. There were so many clips for “Reaper,” a new sitcom directed by Kevin Smith about a slacker who discovers that his new boss is Satan himself, I think I could have taken an exam on it. I certainly had enough information, anyway, to know I didn’t want to watch it.