Each year when I do my initial predictions, I try to do them as “sight unseen”. I look at the description, the so-called log line, and decide, “If I was an executive, would I have greenlit this premise?”. But it is hard to stay completely in the dark about all the shows. Some are talked about on radio, where one DJ will ask another, “Did you see blah blah blah last night? It was awesome!” or a friend wanting to talk to me about shows because they know I’m big on TV and serialized storytelling.

And then there are the ads. I can’t avoid all of them, and the one that has been the bane of my existence this year has been for New Amsterdam. Over and over and over, I have heard the same tired dialogue…”I want to get rid of the waiting room. Done”; “Let’s be doctors again.”; “You know they’re not going to just let you help people? Well, let’s see how many we can help before they figure out what we’re doing.”. Sanctimonious claptrap, big medicine is all bad, but the “human” will set them back to their true roots. Melodramatic, over the top, blather. And so, while I try to keep an open mind, I was fully prepared to hate this show.

Now, I had two strikes against me going in. First, while I am not attracted to Grey’s Anatomy, House, Scrubs, ER, etc., I did watch St. Elsewhere back in the day. So if they stay out of the sheets and don’t give me a nutbar as the lead character, it might work. Second, the lead actor is Ryan Eggold as Dr. Max, the new Medical Director for New Amsterdam who is willing to make lots of changes (including firing the entire heart surgery team the first day).

Eggold was Tom, Elizabeth Keen’s husband, on The Blacklist and even starred in The Blacklist: Redemption. I thought the spinoff was an ill-conceived ripoff of a bunch of shows, including Mission: Impossible and Covert Affairs, but I like watching Eggold do his thing on-screen whether he is bashful Tom or cold, calculating Tom. Here he is closer to nice, bashful Tom, and he is fun to watch.

His full ongoing supporting cast is hard to tell from just the pilot, but some faces popped out. Janet Montgomery was good back when she was on Human Target, and a strong interesting force in the hospital as Dr. Lauren, willing to take chances; Jocko Sims as Dr. Floyd, a heart surgeon who is fired and unfired on the first day because he was part of a group but not like the group that was fired; Anupam Kher as Dr. Vijay, the old but wise doctor; Freema Agyeman as Dr. Helen, a rockstar for the media circuit, willing to return to actual medicine to be a doctor again, and she looks very different from her Torchwood / Martha Jones days; Tyler Labine as psychologist Dr. Iggy, and I confess I had no idea where I recognized him from, and would NEVER have come up with Reaper / Sock from 11 years ago; and Lisa O’Hare as Max’s pregnant but estranged wife, Georgia.

Sure, it’s an ensemble cast, but I was surprised that they all got some decent airtime in the opening episode. Dr. Floyd and Dr. Lauren are sort of an item but he’s not sure he wants to date her anymore because, while fun, she’s not black and he wants a black partner for life; Dr. Vijay seems old and slow but he goes slow with a patient and finds out what is really wrong with her, not making a snap diagnosis; Dr. Helen is spending all of her time running around doing media stuff because she was becoming immune to patients; and Dr. Iggy is trying to help a psych patient who keeps coming back, and he doesn’t know how to help her with her life outside of the hospital.

In short, there’s a lot going on, and while it is the first episode so they spent a lot of extra time getting it right, it was indeed right. It rang all the right bells, it hit all the right notes, and I fully enjoyed 90% of the show. There are two parts I didn’t enjoy, and I’ll give you a spoiler alert right now for the next two paragraphs.

The first element is that Max’s wife is pregnant and they’re estranged because of his work, etc. He’s promising to be different, to be more present, to help more, etc. And then she calls because she’s bleeding out of the uterus, and she thinks something is wrong with the baby. Fast forward to the scene in the hospital where they’re examining, trying to assess what is happening, Mom and Dad to be are losing their shit slowly, and then the writers ramp it up. The nurse can’t find the heartbeat of the baby and the tension goes to 11. I couldn’t watch. Not because it wasn’t good, but because my wife and I experienced EXACTLY that scene. My wife’s water broke at 26 weeks, a partial premature rupture of the membrane (PPROM), and we were in the hospital room while they searched for a very elusive heartbeat. I had to skip ahead, I couldn’t watch the scene, way too intense for me. Flashback city, and it is NOT a good memory, even if my son is now a healthy 9 year old.

The second element is that Dr. Max has a bit of a secret. He’s sick. Something is happening, not sure what. At the end of the episode, the big secret is revealed, he has cancer. So it explains why he’s different, why he’s so driven, why he’s willing to take risks, why he is focusing on “what matters”. Except he’s only had suspicions, and symptoms, for 6 weeks. And it is such a cliché that if I was scoring, I’d be deducting marks.

Neither are enough to stop me from watching though. When I did my original prediction, sight unseen but perhaps slightly biased by the ads, I said “Hospital story about idealism = CANCELLED”. Afterwards, I have to say that while they did an awesome job, I don’t think it will be enough to grab an audience and get renewed, not enough grit. I’m disappointingly sticking with my CANCELLED prediction, but I’ll watch it to the bitter end.

CBS has rebooted Murphy Brown with the old cast coming back — Candice Bergen as Murphy, Faith Ford as Corky, Joe Regalbuto as Frank, Grant Shaud as Miles, and just for fun, Jake McDorman as son Avery. Phil is gone, Eldon is gone, sure, but the rest are there.

What isn’t there is any feeling of edgy chemistry. Back in the day, there was a sense that the team of Murphy/Frank/Corky/Miles were doing something resembling news, the fourth estate that was holding politicians accountable. It had some edgy bits, and while I wasn’t a regular watcher, I did watch occasionally and I liked it. There were always some good one liners too.

The 2018 version has almost none of that.

Murphy wants to get back in the game, mostly to provide a factual counter-balance to Trump’s fake news claims. She brings Frank and Corky along too, and both are one-dimensional caricatures, as they often were. But whereas it seemed funny when they were young and spry, it seems cliché and tired now they are, well, old and tired. Similarly for Miles, he was always just a little stress ball, but now he’s mocking his own insecurities and a nervous breakdown. I don’t know if his weak mental health was somehow supposed to be funny, but it went nowhere.

Sure, she’s back. Sure, she’s interviewing Hillary Clinton to be her secretary with lots of little “in” jokes about managing emails. She’s having a tweet war with the President. There’s no sense of real honour, she just seems like a mean old woman who wants to brag about the good old days and how now that she’s back, there will be “real news” again based on truth and facts.

There is one small bright spot in the show, and that’s her son, Avery. Played, as I said, by Jake McDorman, I absolutely loved him in Limitless a few years ago. He really grew on me in the show, and seeing him here was very welcome. And I like his character. He’s going head-to-head with his Mom for ratings, although his news show is talking to real Americans, and *spoiler alert*, both him and his mom are surprised when his real journalism showloses to her glib show in the ratings war. There’s lots of real gold to mine in their relationship, as long as the writers don’t insist upon giving her the last word of wisdom. It just falls flat.

When I did my predictions, sight unseen, I thought it would get RENEWAL. I don’t think it actually deserves RENEWAL, but I’ll keep the pick there. Hopefully they find their ground, but I won’t be watching. I’m signing off after just one episode.

I feel bad that I don’t like NBC’s new show, I Feel Bad. So here’s the premise — mom of three kids who works in a video game company running project teams has Mom guilt about lots of things. Each episode therefore will be her starting off “I feel bad about…” something as she goes through the day.

The show stars Sarayu Blue as Emet, the daughter of a stereotypical Indian family — the mother is overbearing, the father is mentally absent, but they’re available for childcare, so they’re relatively close. Her husband is aware enough to spot a question as a trap but not aware enough to be really part of what’s going on in the pilot. She has four male coworkers at the office and one good female friend, and she consults them all about her problems of the day. Which likely is going to continue to revolve around her kids. In the opening, it is about her daughter being quite young but wanting to be on a highly sexualized dance team. Emet is afraid she’s turning into her mother, so she wants to be the cool hip supportive mom even though she hates the dance style.

So why do I feel bad? Emet’s mom is so bad as to border on farcical, almost Corner Gas style and I hate Corner Gas. She’s so passive aggressive it feels like they’re parodying mother-in-laws when in fact she’s the mother/grandmother. I don’t know her previous work, but her husband Brian George is a perennial Indian character actor, often in comedies, and most recognizable lately as Raj’s gynecologist dad on The Big Bang Theory (hard to believe he’s only been in 15 episodes in the last 11 years, he seems more regular than that) although older fans will recognize him as Babu from Seinfeld. Not for nothing, the guy has 283 credits since 1976. He keeps busy. But he has never been more than a bit player to me and he has almost no role in the first episode.

Husband David is played by Paul Adelstein, who has been in multiple shows in recent years, but nothing I saw him in, and as I said, he’s not very well-developed in Episode 1. Throw in the four coworkers, kids, and the female best friend, and you don’t get much of an impression (although the coworkers do cover a bit of ground — almost like if you put them all together, you would have a functional person to talk to at work).

Which therefore leaves the show, as always, squarely on the main character’s head, and the reason I feel bad is I just don’t care what happens to her. I didn’t like her when she was Lalita Gupta, Raj’s would be girlfriend on The Big Bang Theory, but that’s probably not relevant at this point. You see her right from the start in the middle of chaos, so there’s no time to bond with her, she’s just in it. She narrates the episode, which is another problem we’ll come to in a second, so you think it would feel almost intimate. You know her, you’re in her head, instant bond. Not so much. The narration might be the problem…rather than showing us her reactions to various things, the episode just tells us what she’s thinking. And while it is slightly deep, her actual behaviour with coworkers is ludicrously shallow and naive. I have no reason to root for her in any of this, nor care to watch her.

Which brings me to the plot device of the narration. There is no real plot to the episode, and instead it is her saying “here’s something” and then “here’s something else”. More like a disjointed set of skits rather than an actual script joined together in any way other than sequence of scenes. Add to it that her solution to her problem is to be a horrible, manipulative person to fake her daughter out, and I REALLY don’t care about the show with no structure or likable characters.

I read a review by someone who said they’re Indian and could totally relate to the mother and the main character. Good news, as a friend likes to say, there are over a billion Indian people and someone is related to all of them, so maybe the show will find a home. Not with me, cuz I’m out. I didn’t laugh once in the entire episode.

When I did my initial prediction sight unseen, I said, “Oh, look a story about a mom with lame plot ideas each week = CANCELLED”. I didn’t re-read that before I watched the episode, trying to keep it unbiased as I start, but I would stick with the same review afterwards, as well as the prediction. CANCELLED.

NBC has a new show called Manifest i.e., a small play on words for both a passenger manifest on a plane and a supernatural phenomenon manifesting itself in the real world. In the opening episode, you have a plane from Montego Bay to JFK that takes off normally, hits some pretty rough turbulence in the air, recovers, and tries to land at JFK. But the air traffic controllers re-route it to a small airport outside the city instead. Why? Because the plane has been missing for over five years, with everyone assumed to be missing and presumed dead.

It is a pretty great premise, not the least of which is that unlike Lost being out in the deserted wilderness, everyone is back to their regular lives in NYC. Except their old lives don’t exist anymore for some. For others, it’ll be a bit, well, different.

I also love the main character. A police officer dealing with guilt from the death of someone in a car crash (she was driving, the other person died), had a boyfriend / near fiancé when she left for the trip, and five years later, he’s married to her old best friend. Melissa Roxburgh plays Michaela, and I have seen Roxburgh over the years in a few guest star roles (Arrow, The Tomorrow People, DC Legends of Tomorrow, Travelers) and last year’s Valor. I knew she looked familiar, but had trouble placing her. But what I love about her character i.e., police officer, is that the writers have a natural hook for her to investigate, well, things. And while a lot of shows struggle in pilots for actors to find their character, she inhabits the role perfectly.

Equally, her brother, Ben, is played by Josh Dallas just coming off of 7 years as Prince Charming on Once Upon A Time. He can rock the odd side of scripts and just go with it, and he seems to have no trouble adjusting to his new character. Not even when Michaela and him start hearing their own voice in their head telling them to go to a specific building in NYC and “set them free”. They think the voice means the dogs guarding the building site; spoiler alert, it means set two little girls free who were abducted and are being kept in the building. Michaela frees them, they realize these voices are not simple hallucinations, and this sh** is starting to get real.

There are other stories going on too, mostly to do with Ben and Michaela’s extended family. Ben’s son has leukemia, and was given just six months to live before the flight. Now, there’s a new protocol available to treat it that looks pretty promising, and it is based on research from a doctor that was on the flight too. Ben’s daughter is now five years older, Ben’s wife has some sort of secret person texting her (I’m betting it’s a woman lover, not a man), and the son is connected to all of it.

And then at the end of the episode, they realize they’re not the only two people on the plane who were affected.

When I read the description, I thought it sounded too much like Lost, not to mention too many links to shows like The Returned. Lost went long, others usually don’t. It is so hard to get enough weird to hook people and keep them coming back but not so much weird that they can’t suspend their disbelief or they give up completely. So I predicted CANCELLED, sight unseen.

Now that I have watched the pilot, I’m going to upgrade it to RENEWED, primarily based on Michaela and Ben’s characters. It’s a nice hook. I’m not entirely convinced it will catch fire, but I’m watching whether it does or not.

One of the things I like to do when I’m making my prediction is simply rely on the descriptions of the shows. I don’t care if the lead is someone famous or not, because that is sometimes a hindrance as much as a help. Executives may be swayed by it, but I am a lover of stories, not single actors, when predicting the likelihood of success. For FBI, the descriptions were pretty basic. Hey, look, a story about the FBI. And based on that little info, my reaction was that there was no hook. And if the best they could do was “something something FBI something something”, I predicted CANCELLED.

If I had dug deeper, I would have seen some of the cast’s pedigree. The lead actress is Missy Peregrym, of Rookie Blue fame. I thought she was fine as a rookie cop, but she has almost no presence to me. And she was Serious Missy for this first episode, with little range or anything to offer worth watching.

She’s partnered with Zeeko Zaki, who is, well, nobody. A few roles, nothing outstanding to co-anchor a show. But in the episode, he has serious presence. More than Missy, that’s for sure. Ebonee Noel plays a hot CSI-type technical analyst / field operator (hard to pin down her role), but not much for her to do.

But the bosses have presence. Jeremy Sisto plays the assistant SAC for the NYC office, and I really liked him as Lupo on Law and Order back in the day. His boss is played by Connie Nielsen in the pilot, and she too has a L&O:SVU background for at least a partial season. From the looks of IMDB though, it appears she might have been recast for episode 2, and replaced with Sela Ward (Sisters, CSI:NY). A good supporting cast, but not enough to draw me in and keep me watching.

So remember how I said above that it was “something something FBI something something”? Well, now I’ve watched the episode, and I still have NO IDEA what the show is about. Is it about the FBI field office in NYC? Is it going to be simple case of the week? Will they really be able to have HIGH INTENSITY CRISIS EVERY WEEK? I don’t know, because the show never bothers to tell me what the show is about.

Cancelled? Absolutely. The real question is, “What the hell was the pitch?”