Tasty Television Teases

Kill Your Television - Ned's Atomic Dustbin (mp3)

God I love a good tease. The tease is, in fact, often exponentially better than the actual product.

Give me a taste. Give me a hint. Give me just enough of a sense of what is possible, and let me fill in all the ugly details with my own excitable imagination, and my instinctive need to be optimistic about all creative endeavors will elevate said event into a different stratosphere of experiential quality.

I’m talking here about television. And movies. And lots of other things, really. But for now, let’s just stick with television.

The Daily Beast put out a gallery called Upfronts 2011. It’s a collection of more than 40 trailers and previews for new upcoming fall (or midseason) TV shows. Yes, that’s right. More than 40 new shows will debut this fall, but Daily Beast just focused on shows from The Big Five. Didn't even try to include TNT, USA, AMC, F/X, and so on and so forth, even though more than half the shows I've watched in the past year came from those four cable channels.

Think back to 1984, the year The Cosby Show debuted on NBC. It was the golden age of The Big Three. “Primetime” was considered 8 - 11 p.m. Three hours. Seven days a week. A grand total of 22 new shows debuted (according to my questionable math skills), including Murder, She Wrote, Punky Brewster, Highway to Heaven, Who’s the Boss and Miami Vice.

Almost 30 years later, the fall sees twice that number. And more shows than ever debut mid-season or even for late spring and summer launches. It’s fair to guess that three times the number of new shows are churned out annually compared to my misspent television youth.

I’ve all but given up trying to follow television in the live stream anymore. There’s just too much good stuff, and too much bad stuff. And, as a television lover -- I love TV shows more now than maybe I ever have in my life -- I feel very much like someone forced me into a closet with a pack of cigarettes and said I couldn’t come out until I smoked all of them. The thought of all that great TV leaves me exhausted, despondent, sad.

But teasers and trailers make me happy! I can, for one brief shining stretch, try and digest all the great possibilities and potentials in these 40+ shows while doing my best to accept that I might only ever get to watch two or three of them! Below is my own quick take on the collection as compiled by The Daily Beast, but don’t hesitate to go to the link and take a look at the trailers for yourself! (I tried to ignore the mid-season stuff, even though some of those are really cool-looking too.)

Person of Interest: The brother of Christopher Nolan is the writer. Benjamin Linus from LOST is a central figure. J.J. Abrams is exec producer. I doubt it can totally wow me, but by God it deserves some attention. Teaser Excitement Level: B+

A Gifted Man: This reads like “Touched by an ER Angel.” I go for cheese, but I prefer a different kind. TEL: C

Unforgettable: My girls loved this book series called Cam Jansen. Someone took that idea and tried to mix it with CSI. I’m kinda played out on the detective gimmicks for a while. TEL: D+

Pan Am: This show should be called “Oh My Fucking God Why Did We Turn Down MAD MEN?!?” If this show had come out during the era of The Big Three, I might have been tempted. Too many good shows now. TEL: C+

Suburgatory (below): This could be good. Has a Freaks & Geeks vibe to it. I like smarmy oversmart teen-centric stuff. TEL: A-



Good Christian Belles: Another Desperate Housewives replacement attempt, but this has a Designing Women meets the 700 Club angle, and anytime the world of small-minded Christians gets mocked, I’m likely to give it a shot. TEL: B

The River: They’re trying to give it this LOST meets Anaconda but serious kind of feel. I really want to find this tempting, but it’s just not selling me. TEL: B-

Terra Nova: Holy cow how cool would it be if they could pull this off? A high-cost, cool-concept Stargate: Jurassic Park kind of show?? Sorry, the odds aren’t good, but the trailer is a lot of fun! TEL: B (It would be higher if I thought they could make it good.)

I Hate My Teenage Daugher (below): Yes, it’s because I’ll have two of them very soon, but not two that I’ll hate. Rather, this show just looks like a perfect kind of thing for my family to watch together. You know, the way Romans watched gladiators kill each other. As a perverse cautionary tale. I’m definitely gonna give this one a chance. TEL: A



Alcatraz: JJ Abrams, you had me at JJ. Another show I doubt will catch, but I’m willing to cross my fingers and wait for it to come out on DVD, because if it does indeed catch on, it’s the kind of show I’ll want to watch several in one sitting. TEL: B+

The Playboy Club: I like bunny outfits as much as the next fella, and several of these ladies are eye-poppingly adorable, but that’s just not enough to sell me. And if it’s trying to steal the vibe from MAD MEN, it won’t. TEL: B-

Grimm: ABC’s Once Upon a Time is mining a similar fairy tale vibe, but this is grittier and ickier and darker. More my speed, in other words. There’s about a hundred ways they can screw this up, but if it works, it could be a cool show. I’ll cross my fingers. TEL: B+

Up All Night: I swear to you, if they’d stopped this trailer after a minute, I’d be all about it, but the longer the trailer went, the less impressed I got. TEL: B-

Awake (below): Here’s a hint. If your friggin’ trailer can make me misty, it says (a) I’m off my frappin’ rocker and highly unstable, and (b) your show trailer gets my top grade, and I’m gonna DVR the hell out of you. This show is going to be good. I can just feel it in me weepy bones. It’s enough of an OMG gimmick to get me past my antipathy about gimmicky cop shows. TEL: A+



Nice Try, But No Cigar

• Once Upon A Time
• Revenge (Desperate Housewives meets Dirty Sexy Money)
• The New Girl
• Prime Suspect (even if I adore Maria Bello, it won’t go)

Not a Chance In Hell / Where’s Your F*#KING Imagination?!

• Charlie’s Angels
• H8R
• The 2-2
• Apartment 23

Can Men Get Dumber? Hells Yeah. (These will all suck.)

• How to Be a Gentleman
• Last Man Standing
• Man Up
• Work It

The Problem With Previews

Iris Dement--"Let The Mystery Be" (mp3)

I like to tease. I like to be teased. It's one of my favorite forms of social interactions, and maybe even the one I'm best at. Teasing, in any or all of its contexts, is an art form built around the idea that less can become more. Teasing says, I'll give you just enough to catch your interest; it will be up to you to decide whether or not you want to follow through.

And so, there was a time when I lived for previews. One of the real pleasures of getting to go to the movies in the theater came before the feature ever started--an endless string of teasers for new films that would cause us to look at each other or learn over and say, "I'm definitely seeing that one!" Back then, the perfect movie trailers gave us glimpses, but only glimpses. They set up the mystery, but they gave no indication of how it might be solved. They showed the crisis, but nothing of the resolution.

Then previews stopped teasing.

When did it happen? I don't really know. At first, there was that occasional movie where I kind of recoiled, wanting to cover my eyes and ears and scream, "No more! Don't tell me anymore." But then they all started doing it. If it was a prison escape movie, you found out from the previews that the escape occurred. If it was a romantic comedy about two families feuding over a wedding, you knew darn well that the marriage would indeed take place. You knew that the Kraken would be released. You knew that the "Perfect Storm" would capsize the boat. You knew, heck, these days, the trailer for The Usual Suspects would probably tell you who Kaiser Soze is!

It must work. That's the only thing that I can conclude. It must bring in millions and millions of extra dollars if you play out 80% of a film during its preview. Today's viewer must like knowing a pretty good bit of the plot. Because otherwise, why would trailer after trailer give away most of the movie?

I don't like it.

I don't care for the trend at all. Call me that old-fashioned person who enjoys a surprise, who likes walking into a movie without a full idea of what it's about, who doesn't necessarily get online to read a restaurant menu so that I can walk in the door already knowing what I'm going to order.

The last manifestation of this pattern involves music--new music, anticipated music, big name music, NPR music. Several of the most anticipated releases this fall have been available for pre-listening on public radio websites, where you very carefully cannot pre-own the imminent CD, but you can pre-hear it. Neil Young's Le Noise was on there, as were Dylan's earlydemos, and now Springsteen's outtakes from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, known as The Promise.

The latter comes out today. I will be going to a listening party tonight. I will not have heard a single note of the "new" songs, but for a 30-second preview of one that I heard on Itunes several weeks ago. I liked it.

Fully realizing how this goes against other descriptions I've offered of my modern music buying habits, I do take great pleasure in sitting down with a brand-new, unheard CD that I can listen to in its entirety on my own terms for the first time. And maybe the second, third, and fourth. Even if the whole thing doesn't live up to expectations, I like the ability to hear each song, not knowing what the one that follows will be, not knowing if it will be better, worse, or just different from what preceded it. In short, I like to familiarize myself with new music at my own pace.

And, perversely, I don't even mind getting burned once in awhile. Much as I like Neil Young's Le Noise, that Fork In The Road that he put out a year or so ago was something that I listened to (parts of) once and said, "Sorry, Neil, that one didn't click for me. Next time, buddy." Same for Bruce's Working On A Dream. But there are no hard feelings. It all goes with hanging with an artist. Not every song is a work of genius. Any longtime fan of Tom Petty's knows that, right?

In fact, I got the new Lloyd Cole CD, Broken Record, in the mail last weekend (the only way to get it) and built a night around eventually sitting down with a beer in the kitchen and letting it play. The first time, I thought, decent. The second time I played a couple of songs in the car on the way to meet my dad at Panera. Last night, I heard more of it, driving around in the rain, and I thought, this is a strong, mature CD from someone I've been listening to for 25 years, and its songs insinuate themselves slowly, but deeply. Each listen is more rewarding, at least at my pace.

So, no, I'm really not interested in a test drive, at least not in a CD from an artist I've listened to for a long time. I'm not interested in the website's efforts to be a part of the event. I'm not interested in it being there before I'm ready for it to be there. I'd rather just let the mystery be, and solve it on my own time when I'm good and ready. That's the way life usually works, isn't it?