The weather has finally cooled down, the kids are back in school, and network TV shows are premiering — yes, autumn is here!
Although television has become a subject of ridicule, with its smaller budgets, less talented stars and greater tolerance for ridicule, it has its own pleasures to offer, perhaps even greater ones. It is convivial, with actors who feel like family, and the long seasons mean that almost any show you watch, good, bad or indifferent, has a chance of pleasing you. It is not always realistic, but in the way it unfolds it is not unlike life.
Four new TV series have joined the prime-time parade. Three of them have geniuses as their main characters; in the fourth, everyone is muscular and athletic, which is a kind of genius, I suppose. “Matlock” (CBS, premiering Sunday) offers Kathy Bates a kind of reboot of the 1980s and ’90s. Andy Griffith legal drama; in “High Potential” (ABC, Tuesday), Kaitlin Olson is a sexy human computer who freelances with the Los Angeles Police Department; “Brilliant Minds” (premiering Monday on NBC) stars Zachary Quinto as a fictionalized version of a neurologist Olivier Sacks; and “Rescue: HI-Surf” (Fox, airing Sundays, then Mondays) is a more respectable version of “Baywatch.”
Of the four, “Matlock,” developed by Jennie Snyder Urman (“Jane the Virgin”), was the most talked-about film up front—it was even a joke at the Emmy Awards—and features the biggest star, Emmy, Oscar and Golden Globe winner Bates. It also boasts a revival of a tried-and-true intellectual property, and while it’s not exactly “Star Trek” The original aired for nine years and is still being re-aired; it has a place in the collective unconscious.
The new “Matlock” shares with the old one its main character, though this Matlock is a Matty; she too is a lawyer, an elderly one, and delivers simple sermons in a Southern accent that masks her preternatural cunning. Here, she emerges from retirement and manages, in no time at all—before lunch—to get off the streets and into a top job at a big law firm through the kind of careful planning and psychological manipulation usually associated with heist movies.
The firm is run by Beau Bridges between putts, with Jason Ritter as the boss’s son and Skye P. Marshall as Ritter’s wife, a lawyer and Ritter’s ex-wife. The series tends to be warm and comedic, but the cases they defend raise serious issues and give Bates plenty of opportunities to get to the bottom of things as she convinces reluctant witnesses to come forward or imparts the wisdom her years have given her.
There’s a backstory we’re not supposed to reveal, but suffice it to say that each of these series features a main character dealing with past trauma or unfinished business, because that’s what long arcs are made of.
Kaitlin Olson in “High Potential.”
(Nicole Weingart/Disney)
“High Potential” is a lighthearted police procedural that unfolds on the shoulders of Olson as Morgan, an unconventional free spirit with an IQ of 160, managing three children on a tight budget and working nights cleaning the offices of an LAPD major crimes unit; one fateful night, dancing as she works, she drops a file on the floor, swallows its contents in one glance, goes to the murder board, crosses out “suspect” under a photo and writes “victim.”
One thing leads to another, and she’s brought to justice by the police (Judy Reyes as the chief, Daniel Sunjata as the handsome, grumpy lead detective). (The threat of jail time for writing a note on a dry erase board isn’t the least likely thing you’ll face.) Naturally, she’s seen what a team of career professionals missed, and the obvious value of having her own Sherlock Holmes on hand translates into consulting work. Morgan sees the value in getting the department’s help to solve a mystery of her own.
In a short skirt, high boots and animal prints, she roams crime scenes as if the last five decades had never happened. She is hostile to authority, but not at the right times. The series is thoroughly funny and thoroughly enjoyable, not least because Olson and Morgan both seem to be having a good time. “Castle” fans should feel right at home here.
Zachary Quinto as Oliver Wolf in “Brilliant Minds.”
(NBC/Peter Kramer/NBC)
The heaviest of these light diversions is “Brilliant Minds,” with Quinto’s Oliver Wolf sharing Sacks’s face blindness, his love of powerlifting, motorcycling, and swimming in New York rivers, and his abiding interest in the mysteries of the brain. I suspect that these cases—mass hysterical pregnancies; loss of the ability to form memories or visualize one’s body—are drawn from Sacks’s own case studies, as collected in “The man who mistook his wife for a hat” and other works.
After being fired from a series of hospitals for his unorthodox ways and disregard for rules, he’s recently hired at Bronx General, where his mother (Donna Murphy) is his boss and his old friend (Tamberla Perry) is his other superior; their usual exasperation will of course be tempered by Wolf’s eventual successes. A diverse group of interns tend to him, striking poses ranging from sweet to questionable to caustic.
As Quinto plays it, it is a warmer version of his Spock on the big screen —his best friend, it seems, is a plant—and much of the humor comes from Wolf’s complete ignorance of popular culture. In the context of the show, he seems like a sensitive, empathetic version of Gregory House; as “House doctor,” This is a medical drama as a mystery, and like all such dramas, the investigators make mistakes before they succeed, which provides plenty of opportunities for sudden emergencies that lead to commercials. And like most medical dramas, there are big questions about life and death that one might find disturbing based on one’s own life and circumstances. However, there is some comfort in the fact that Wolf is reflecting on a relevant element of the human condition.
Kekoa Kekumano, left, and Robbie Magasiva in “Rescue: HI-Surf.”
(Zach Dugan/FOX)
The show is set on Oahu’s North Shore and delivers on all its promises. Surfing. Rescue. (Fox currently has two other rescue shows, “9-1-1” and “9 1-1: Lone Star,” which premieres its final season this week.) It has the combination of underdeveloped professional problems, romantic complications and sarcastic banter that you find in most procedurals, a formula that can keep viewers busy for years. All conflicts are naturally put aside when lives are at stake, which here requires regular dives into the Pacific to rescue tourists too stupid to read posted warnings or follow a lifeguard’s advice, as well as the simply unlucky.
Robbie Magasiva plays the captain of the offshore safety team, who has bad dreams and oversees a crew that leans, appropriately, toward Hawaiian and Asian actors; Arielle Kebbel is his lieutenant, who wants to be a captain herself; Adam Demos is his ex-fiancé, a laid-back Australian studying to be a firefighter; Kekoa Kekumano is the party-loving wolf; Alex Aiono is the rich kid whose politician father gets him a spot on the team; and Zoe Cipres is the more talented poor girl whose spot he takes (although she gets her own by the end of the pilot).
John Wellsknown for “The West Wing” (and “ER” and “Third Watch” and so on), who worked with creator Matt Kester on “Animal Kingdom,“directs the first two episodes and shoots the action in a dizzying array of camera angles and lenses, skidding movements, drone shots, underwater shots and water shots, quickly stacked on top of each other in a jumble; the effect is akin to being hit by big waves, which might be the intended effect but makes the crises and rescues seem more staged than not.
I would have preferred some boring local culture instead of the B-roll that flashes between scenes – lots of chickens – but that’s just my opinion. Everyone is beautiful, the scenery is beautiful, there’s surfing. I see people connecting. “Baywatch” was on for 11 years.
