Chicks Rule Fall TV, So Who Is the Queen Bee?

The big news about Fall TV: LADIES. They’re in. And everywhere.

There’s NEW GIRL, the first show to get a full season pickup. This comedy, which is basically a rehash of My Boys crossed with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, stars the #1 geek girl Zooey Deschanel as every role she’s played before and possibly several that Natalie Portman or Kirsten Dunst played instead. After a humiliating break-up, she moves in with three boys. They all try to deal, as if boys living with girls is a new experiment and wasn’t at all done before thirty years ago with Three’s Company. Nonetheless, the cast is charming and adept, and it is entirely watchable, if you haven’t hit your fill of indie rom-coms where characters occasionally burst into song.

Then there is the retro club: CHARLIE’S ANGELS, PAN AM and THE PLAYBOY CLUB, which are so retro that they make absolutely no new statements about anything. Just in case you forgot, women’s lib happened. PAN AM, the most stylish of the three, wins this by a well-placed hair, even if it is basically every sixties chick flick rehashed. As far as THE PLAYBOY CLUB goes, I’ve had it playing on my television twice but very rarely was enticed to actually watch. Seems I’m not the only one, since it’s already been canceled. The problem with this drama is that women wear leotards and have nothing between their ears except bunny ears, which doesn’t work in 2011 because they are not undressed enough for men to care and not smart and complicated enough for women to care.

On the flip side, we have two “relevant” comedies that deal with the contemporary woman from both ends of the economic scale — first, TWO BROKE GIRLS, a hit for CBS. It’s a 2011 show in that two financial crisis victims decide to start a business by pinching and saving their meager earnings as blue collar waitresses. Yet it’s also a 1960s show in that the two girls are basically just The Odd Couple with occasional lesbian undertones. Kat Dennings gets the good writing. Beth Behrs gets the good clothes. And somehow they fit a horse in. Because animals are funny when they poop on Chanel. I’m sure this show will be around for at least a full season and there have definitely been some funny moments so far, so it will be interesting to see if the characters fill out a little so they feel more real.

Secondly, we have UP ALL NIGHT (created by Emily Spivey), the thirtysomething comedy about parenthood with the wife (Christina Applegate) being the breadwinner and the husband (Will Arnett) being the primary caregiver. Smart, progressive, relatable, and already picked up for a full season. However, the wife is also the head producer of a cheesy low-brow talk show in which they do an entire episode around The Cleanse. So there’s that.

And there is WHITNEY, the modern relationship comedy led and written by Whitney Cummings, which has also been picked up for a full season. The premise of the show revolves around a couple who decide to live together but not get married, but bears the burden of being self-named after only one of them. The show is basically a classic sitcom featuring people who talk in bite-size jabs instead of actually conversing, so we may have all grown out of this type of jokey format. Even Mad About You had to evolve mid-show and that show ended in 1999.

Then we have PRIME SUSPECT, a retooling of the British series in which a smart, complicated female cop deals with sexism and her own personal demons… except they took all of that out and just made her belligerent and rude and put her in a fedora. They did give her Aidan Quinn, which almost balances it out. Overall, it’s well-made, but I’m still holding on to The Closer, which perfected the whole total-mess-of-a-woman-but-awesome-at-her-job thing, and Damages, which nailed the Fear-Me-Love-Me thing.

Then we’ve got the soaps: REVENGE, drama about a girl who seeks revenge against the schmucks who did her wrong, one by one, each episode. I hope a lot of people have pissed her off or she’s PMS’ing… A LOT, because otherwise that is a hard premise to sustain. (Unless it’s a comedy… and for that, check out the web series The Retributioners which already accomplished this in 2007.)

Lastly, there’s RINGER, the Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle, which opens with a drug-addicted-ex-stripper who is about to testify against a crime boss over a murder she witnessed, throws in an identical twin sister who lives like an heiress but inexplicably throws herself off a boat, and ends with one trying to kill the other because she killed her son years ago. You follow? Who cares, you’ll be addicted anyway. It is as if every cancelled daytime soap was rolled up into one over-the-top blatantly absurd roller coaster of things that would never ever remotely happen. Twins played by one actor, everyone murdering each other but not dying, unexpected pregnancies, secret bank accounts, sexy boys with accents, cops that linger constantly but always manage to miss the crimes, rich teens with drug and daddy problems! The show is worth watching for the body-disposal-at-cocktail-party scenes alone — because as any Hitchcock film will tell you, throwing a sheet over a body totally hides it from plain view and putting a decomposing corpse in a trunk during a cocktail party is a totally plausible way to manage being a socialite and a murderer. Then there is the boat scene which looks like it was shot in my bathtub with a green sheet taped to the wall and me holding my mini-fan in Sarah Michelle Gellar’s face.

So who wins? Ringer! Because the show is SO not trying to prove any point about women and what they can or can’t do. Maybe I’ve watched too much reality TV and have permanent brain damage, but to me, Ringer is just having fun and despite the total implausibility of pretty much every thing that happens in this show, the actors actually make it work. And like daytime soaps in their heyday and noir in the studio era, it’s kind of fun to see them do that.

And hey, regardless of any flaws in these shows, we should all be happy that scripted shows dominate this season. I mean, if you’re gonna feed your cast lines anyway, I, for one, prefer to see experienced actors say them.

DARYN

For some web original counterparts of the shows above, check out these series below!

GEEKY GIRL ROMANTIC COMEDY: Awkward Embraces

RETRO: Vampire Zombie Werewolf

REVENGE: The Retributioners

CONTEMPORARY MARRIAGE: Then We Got Help

CONTEMPORARY WOMEN: Fumbling Thru The Pieces