As we wade through the remaining dregs of the summer, all good couch potatoes are starting to look forward to the new TV season, which will start the end of next month. What exactly are we looking forward to, though?
With both Dancing with the Stars and a new, fall version of So You Think You Can Dance, my dance card (hee!) is pretty well filled. Throw in Survivor and The Amazing Race and that’s already more TV than I’m used to watching in any given week.
There are two new shows that I want to check out –Glee (the FOX show about a misfit glee club) and the Chris Noth/Julianna Margulies show about the disgraced politician and his wife – those are both actors I like, and I have enough prurient curiosity to watch at least the first couple of episodes. Not sure what they have in mind for a full season, should they get one.
I’m completely baffled as to how the premise of The Good Wife can be used for a weekly show. Does he cheat on her every week so she can slap him in some triumphent moment of empowerment at the end of every episode? I’ll pass.
But I am definitely looking forward to V and FlashForward out of new shows. What can I say, I’m a sucker for ongoing serialized shows, and if it involves aliens, all the better. I plan to go back to Dollhouse, Survivor and The Amazing Race so I’ll have plenty of TV to watch.
Of course, the final season of Lost trumps all of these shows, but I have to wait for Fenruary for that one.
I’m most excited about the CW’s new The Beautiful Life, but I’m also going to check out Glee (I never could get into Nip/Tuck, but I was a big fan of Ryan Murphy’s Popular, and hopefully this will be a return to that craziness), Flash Forward (though I think it would be better watched on DVD if it gets a chance at a full season) and Vampire Diaries (I’m hoping it’ll be good). I have Melrose Place on my list, but I’ll probably end up dropping it 15 minutes into the pilot like I did with the 90210 thing they did last season.
As for returning shows, I’ll be watching House (sounds like they’re changing things up again), Heroes (I’ll stick with it until the bitter end), Gossip Girl (my favourite show right now), The Big Bang Theory, Bones, Supernatural, The Mentalist, Dollhouse (I’m really excited to see what they’ll do with this), and Numb3rs.
It looks like Thursday will be the busiest time for me (and might be impossible, even with my DVR, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it), bucking the trend of Monday being the toughest to keep up with (although Monday still has a lot for me, with Prison Break gone and no good 3rd-hour prime time show on, it’ll be easier). It sounds like a lot but I’m sure I’ll be able to keep up.
There’s plenty of returning shows of course I’ll be watching. I’m particularly excited by HIMYM since the mother will be in the class (although they seem to still be threatening not to reveal her til the end of the series so I don’t know how this will work) and Lost since it’s the last season and the cliffhanger was a big ol WTF and how can the series continue moment.
New shows I’m looking forward to V and Flashforward. I was a fan of the old series and I read the book, but also they look good as shows in their own right and have a whole bunch of actors I like. I will probably check out Vampire Diaries but I don’t expect it to be any good. I like Glee but I don’t consider it a new show since an episode was already aired.
Something that bugs me already about Flash Forward:
The premise is that everybody sees themselves 6 months in the future for a short period of time. Naturally, they’re going to use this as a setup to find out how the future-visions come to pass.
Someone posits, “maybe we can change the future,” but I’m sure most people will act as if the future they saw is set in stone. However, it can’t be. If the future they saw is exactly what’s going to happen, inside their future visions everybody would just be saying “hey, this is what happened during my future vision 6 months ago!”. It’d be a future vision of yourself realizing you’re living out your future vision. It’s a feedback loop, like holding a mirror to a mirror.
So, by those rules, what they saw in the future isn’t what’s going to happen, it’s what would happen if they had never seen the future. By having seen the future, they’ve changed it.
I’m blanking on the name, but that new USA show about the criminal who’s let out of prison to help the cops could be good. The USA original series are usually worth a look.
Other than that, I’m looking forward to House, and the rest of the seasons for Psych and Burn Notice, but that won’t be until winter.
Nah I understand that. There’s several possibilities here:
This is the future that would have happened had the flash not occurred. No time travel related paradoxes in this scenario.
This is the first iteration. You can change things, but this will obviously change what the flash was for the next iteration, creating an alternative universe that we never see.
2a) Presumably this feedback loop keeps spwaning off new universes until such time as a stable time loop is created, one in which despite the future glimpse, no changes are made. This leads to:
Future is unchangeable, because glimpses are tricky or ambiguous. They often turn out to mean something different than you originally interpreted them as. This trope is used a lot in prophecy type episodes such as the DS9 one with the comets - the prophecy turned out to be literally true, just not as originally interpreted.
As in Lost - the future can be changed, but it’s very hard. Small apparent changes will get smoothed out and become inconsequential to later events, but a very large change could actually significantly change things down the line.
Whatever it turns out to be will be partly obvious in the first episode, and completely obvious by the time the foretold future moment comes to be (season finale). Option 3 seems the most likely choice if they plan on making one of the major focuses of the show about whether changes are possible. This is kind of delaying the inevitable though - eventually the show has to pick a model. Better just to pick a model from the beginning and explore that than create a meta mystery about it. I mean, it should be immediately obvious from putting together 6 billion flashes which model they exist in: If anyone who saw a flash is able to commit suicide then we know that things can be changed. And there’s got to be other unambiguous unalterable changes that could be made.
I suspect it will be a special corralary to number 4 - changes can be made, but only in a dramatic way at the very last minute.
Spoilers for novel: In the book, the flash is caused by some atom smashing experiment, and they are able to change the future. They also deliberately at the end start a second experiment (warning people obviously not to go out driving) to get another glimpse.
It’s my understanding that the season will end around the time of the future that the flash predicted, and that next season will have a new flash.
Right, which is nice that the initial flash forward is to April 2010. In April, we will have an episode containing the events of the initial flash forward, either changed or not.
I’m really not sure what to look forward. I’m still trying to catch up on LAST season. More 30 Rock, Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Flashpoint, and The Office is always a good thing though.
Community and Flash Forward sound promising, at least.
