The weather’s finally turned cool, the kids are back in school and network television shows are premiering — yes, fall is here!
Though it has become the thing to mock broadcast television as sub-prestige with its lower budgets, less stellar stars and greater tolerance for ridiculousness, it has its own, even superior sorts of pleasure to offer. It’s companionable, with casts made to feel like family, and the long seasons mean that practically any show you throw in with, good, bad or indifferent, will have a chance to grow on you. It is not always lifelike, but in the way it goes on, it is not unlike life.
Enter four new broadcast dramas joining the prime time parade. Three feature main characters who are geniuses; in the fourth, everyone is buff and athletic, which is its own kind of genius, I suppose. “Matlock” (CBS, premiering Sunday) offers Kathy Bates in a reboot, sort of, of the 1980s to 1990s Andy Griffith legal drama; in “High Potential” (ABC, Tuesdays) Kaitlin Olson is a hot human computer freelancing with the Los Angeles Police Department; “Brilliant Minds” (premiering Monday on NBC) stars Zachary Quinto as a fictionalized version of neurologist Oliver Sacks; and “Rescue: HI-Surf” (Fox, premiering Sunday, then moving to Mondays) is a more respectable take on “Baywatch.”
Of the four, “Matlock,” developed by Jennie Snyder Urman (“Jane the Virgin”), has had the most advance notice — it was even a joke at the Emmy Awards — and features the biggest star, Emmy-, Oscar- and Golden Globe-winner Bates. It also boasts the hook of reviving proven IP, and though it’s not exactly “Star Trek,” the original ran for nine years and is rerunning still; it has a seat in the collective unconscious.
All the new “Matlock” has in common with the old is its main character, though this Matlock is a Matty; she too is a lawyer, a senior citizen, and delivers homespun homilies in a folksy Southern accent that mask her preternatural craftiness. Here she comes out of retirement and manages, in no time at all — like, before lunch — to walk off the street and into a position of responsibility at a big-deal law firm through the sort of clockwork planning and psychological manipulation usually associated with heist movies.
The firm is nominally run by Beau Bridges between putts, with Jason Ritter as the boss’ son and Skye P. Marshall as Ritter’s estranged legal eagle wife. The series trends cozy and comical, but the cases they argue bring up serious issues and give Bates plenty of opportunity to go dramatically deep as she convinces reluctant witnesses to come forward or imparts the wisdom her years have earned her.
There is a background mystery we’re not supposed to reveal, but suffice it to say that each of these series features a main character dealing with some past trauma or unfinished business, because that’s what long arcs are made of.
“High Potential” is a cheery police procedural that gallops along on the shoulders of Olson as Morgan, an unconventional free spirit with an IQ of 160, managing three kids on a shoestring budget and working nights cleaning the offices of an LAPD major crimes unit; one fateful night, dancing while she works, she knocks a file on the floor, slurps down its contents at a glance, goes to the murder board, crosses out “suspect” under one photo and writes “victim.”
One thing leads to another and she is brought in by the police (Judy Reyes as the chief, Daniel Sunjata as the handsome, grumpy lead detective) to account for herself. (Their threat to jail her for writing one word on an erasable board is not the least likely thing you’ll need to reckon with.) Naturally, she’s seen what a team of career professionals has missed, and the obvious value of having their own Sherlock Holmes on call results in a consultancy gig. Morgan sees the value of getting the department’s help solving a mystery of her own.
Buzzing about crime scenes in short skirts, high boots and animal prints as if the last five decades never happened, she’s averse to authority but not to a good time. The show is legitimately funny and quite delightful, not the least because both Olson and Morgan seem to be having a good time. “Castle” fans should feel at home here.
The heaviest of these light entertainments is “Brilliant Minds,” with Quinto’s Oliver Wolf sharing Oliver Sacks’ face-blindness, his love of power lifting, motorcycles and swimming in the rivers of New York City, and his abiding interest in the mysteries of the brain. I assume these cases — mass hysterical pregnancies; loss of the ability to form memories or to visualize one’s body — come from Sacks’ own case studies, as collected in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and other works.
Having been booted from a series of hospitals for his unorthodox, rule-ignoring ways, he has recently fetched up at Bronx General, where his mother (Donna Murphy) is his boss and old friend (Tamberla Perry) is his other, lower boss; their routine exasperation will be mitigated of course by Wolf’s eventual successes. A variety pack of interns attends him, striking poses from sweet to doubtful to caustic.
As Quinto plays him, he’s a warmer version of his big-screen Spock — his best friend, seemingly, is a plant — and much humor is mined from Wolf’s utter unfamiliarity with popular culture. In the context of the series, he’s similar to a sensitive, empathetic version of Gregory House; like “House M.D.,” this is the medical show as mystery, and as in all such shows, the investigators will get it wrong before they get it right, offering plenty of occasions for sudden emergencies that lead into commercials. And as in most medical dramas, there are big questions about life and death one might find disturbing depending on one’s own life and circumstances. However, some comfort may be drawn from Wolf waxing thoughtful on a relevant element of human condition.
Set on Oahu’s North Shore, “Rescue: HI-Surf” delivers just what its title promises. Surf. Rescues. (Fox is currently running two other rescue shows, “9-1-1” and “9 1-1: Lone Star,” whose final season begins this week.) Here again is that combination of lightly developed workplace issues, romantic complications and wisecracking banter one finds in most every broadcast procedural, a formula that can keep viewers watching for years. All conflicts are put aside, naturally, when lives are at stake, which here requires regular plunges into the Pacific in aid of tourists too dim to read the posted warnings or follow a lifeguard’s good advice, as well as the merely unlucky.
Robbie Magasiva plays the captain of the ocean safety team, who has bad dreams and oversees a crew leaning appropriately, if slightly, to Hawaiian and Asian actors; Arielle Kebbel is his lieutenant, who wants to be a captain herself. Adam Demos is her engaged ex, a laid-back Australian studying to be a firefighter, Kekoa Kekumano the hard-partying wolf, Alex Aiono the rich kid whose politician father weasels him a place on the team and Zoe Cipres the more talented poor girl whose place he takes (though she’ll get her own by the end of the pilot).
John Wells, of “The West Wing” fame (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, careening movements, drone shots, underwater shots and on-the-water shots, rapidly piled one upon another higgledy-piggledy; the effect is akin to being slammed by big waves, which might be the intended effect but makes the crises and the rescues seem more staged than not.
I would have liked a little boring local culture instead of the B-roll clips that speed by between scenes — lots of chickens — but that’s just me. Everybody’s pretty, the scenery’s nice, there’s some surfing. I can see people tuning in. “Baywatch” ran for 11 years.
