Television Is Back on Track

While programming for the spring 2008 television season was full of delays and changes due to the writer’s strike, this fall’s crop of new series is arriving on time. Two of the best new shows — “Fringe” and “True Blood” — are already underway, but there is plenty more to come. Quite a number of shows are either imports or adaptations of programs that first saw the dim light of evening abroad. But don’t worry: They’re still not as good as our homegrown versions.One import may be a cult hit. HBO’s “Little Britain USA” (September 28) is a parade of grotesques, ostensibly masquerading as inquiry into the differences and similarities between the colonialists and their former colonists. It begins somewhere in America with a paraplegic British tourist who isn’t paraplegic at all — he’s just lazy — getting out of his wheelchair and gleefully urinating in a hotel swimming pool full of appalled vacationers. It goes on from there to take in deranged astronauts, obscene talking dogs, absurdly muscled gym rats, gun nuts, fat people, a gay British prime minister desperately trying to seduce a (black) American president in the Oval Office and, in the time-honored British tradition, deep-voiced men masquerading as ludicrously unconvincing women. It would be churlish to pretend that this sketch show is never funny — it is — but like a lot of contemporary English comedy, it has to pile on the dirt to build the laughs. (What happened to understated wit?) When the jokes aren’t crude, they tend to be extremely broad. The talking dog, though, who insists that his owner take off her clothes in public and then claims not to belong to her when she is arrested, is an actor of genius. If there were an Emmy for facial expressions, the canine would win it.Another British show — one that’s receiving a full American makeover — is ABC’s “Life on Mars” (October 9). In it, a New York cop (Jason O’Mara) is run over by a car in 2008 and wakes up in 1973. I wasn’t a fan of the British original, but there’s something enticing about the thought of returning to the Big Apple of the “Mean Streets” and “French Connection” era, and you can be sure that, like other ongoing period pieces (“Swingtown,” “Mad Men”), ABC will pull out all the stops and props to bring our beloved rough-and-tumble city of old alive on-screen with a visceral intensity. Michael Imperioli, Harvey Keitel, Gretchen Mol, and Lisa Bonet are among the supporting cast. How bad can it be?Less intriguing, but watchable, is “The Ex List,” on CBS (October 3). In this remake of a popular Israeli series, a young woman named Bella (Elizabeth Reaser) is informed by a psychic that she has already dated the man of her dreams. She has one year to figure out which of her dozens (hundreds?) of ex-boyfriends he was. If she fails, she’ll end up a lonely old spinster darning socks. Thus, Bella has a lot of re-dating to do. The main ex-boyfriend on display in the pilot is an overly emotional rock ‘n’ roller who has never forgiven Bella for breaking up with him on his birthday. In fact, he’s written some nasty songs about her, and it’s quite amusing to watch Ms. Reaser listen to them, with a politely quizzical expression, as he performs them onstage. But “quite amusing” is about as good as it gets.Two more remakes of foreign shows are CBS’s adaptation of the British comedy series “Worst Week” (September 22), starring Kyle Bornheimer as an accident-prone everyman, and NBC’s “Kath and Kim” (October 9), which originated in the suburbs of Melbourne and has been transplanted to a suburb of Florida.“The Mentalist” on CBS (September 23) is of American creation, though the show is held together by the Australian actor Simon Baker. He play a former “psychic” (he wasn’t, really) who nonetheless has observational skills so acute they make the police he’s “assisting” look positively myopic. His quietly mesmerizing performance anchors what might otherwise have been a so-so variation on the “eccentric genius at work” procedural (see “House,” “Monk,” “Numb3rs,” and others). In the pilot episode, he also leaves the rest of the cast looking a bit humdrum, but no doubt the team he works with will come into focus as the series proceeds. “The Mentalist” would seem to be in a tight spot going up against “Fringe,” but it’s possible that Mr. Baker’s virtuoso one-man show will give J.J. Abrams’s ultra-mysterious thriller a run for its money.Other promising new homegrown fare includes the new spy drama, “My Own Worst Enemy,” on NBC (October 13), starring the resurrected 1990s star Christian Slater; CBS’s “Eleventh Hour” (October 9), which mines the same far-out scientific territory as “Fringe,” and “Crusoe” (October 17), the NBC retelling of Daniel Defoe’s tale of a castaway.As for returning shows, the good news is that NBC’s wonderfully quirky police procedural, “Life,” returns to the screen on September 29, as does the same channel’s delightful spy spoof, “Chuck.” Both look as good as ever, and there are new seasons of Showtime’s “Dexter” and “Californication” to look forward to at the end of the month. All in all, it could be a lot worse.

Television Is Back on Track

Television Is Back on Track

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