Coming Attractions
Dark Angel or regular Angel? Let our fall TV preview help you decide.
      by Kay Reindl

WHAT YOU WON'T BE WATCHING

This is the place where I get to rant about all the shows that deserved to be picked up, but weren't. Again, bear in mind that I haven't seen all the pilots, so maybe they turned out just awful. These aren't all genre projects.

Bailey's Mistake (Oliver Goldstick/ABC)
Oliver Goldstick spent last year writing for Popular. He wrote the good stuff. I can tell, because this script is remarkable. It's about a woman whose husband dies, so she takes her kids to the remote island where her husband grew up and discovers he was born a gypsy. This description does not do this script justice. At all. It's well written magic realism, something you rarely see on TV and something ABC kinda wants you to see... but not really. The pilot has been shot as a two-hour movie. If they don't air it, I'll know the reason why.

Elementary (Josh Friedman/ABC)
Elementary is Sherlock Holmes, set in modern-day San Francisco. And boy, is this one cool, moody script! The series, if it had been picked up, was going to consist of updated Conan Doyle adaptations. Because ABC has chosen to saturate the market with Regis Philbin, Elementary got dumped. It's a shame, because the writing's wonderful and the writer has done something unique here. He introduces Holmes, who has vanished, through Watson. It's delicious fun and ABC will get theirs. Mark my words.

Third Coast star Paula Marshall.

Third Coast(Rob Thomas/ABC)
Another ABC casualty, this smart, clever fish-out-of-water comedy from Rob Thomas (Cupid) is really just the kind of thing networks should be looking for. Great characters in a well realized small town, and a hockey team living in a motel. What else do you need? God help us if Rob Thomas gets discouraged and stops creating this stuff. ABC will get theirs -- er, I already said that...

The Learning Curve (John Gatins/WB)
John Gatins and director Brian Robbins teamed up for the well-received Varsity Blues and are back again (or would be, if the WB had picked this up) with The Learning Curve. Beautifully produced, wonderfully cast and acted, this show should have gotten on the schedule. If the testing wasn't good, I want to know what brain-dead morons they marched into the testing room. Eric Mabius is a star in this pilot about a college kid teaching high school. The cast is uniformly excellent, from John C. McGinley as a radical teacher to Debbie Morgan as the even-keeled principal. The kids even look like kids, which is probably why the image-conscious WB wasn't interested. With all their talk about wanting to appeal to people over the age of twelve, they blew it by dumping The Learning Curve. There's not a weak link in this pilot and I hope to God that Gatins and Robbins maintain this standard of excellence. TV needs it.

WHAT YOU'RE HAPPY YOU WON'T BE WATCHING

Day One producer Michael Piller.

Day One (Michael Piller/WB)
Michael Piller (Star Trek) based this pilot on the British miniseries The Last Train, about a train car full of people that is somehow flung into the future after a nuclear event. Now, do we even want to compare this to the post-apocalyptic Dark Angel? Day One is loaded with characters but not one of them is very interesting. The stereotypes are fairly evident from page one, as is the fact that this story is stuck in the past, not the future. It feels old and antiquated. The post-apocalyptic elements are nonsensical (a pterodactyl? Excuse me?). Given how expensive this pilot was to produce, I'm a little surprised the WB decided to shoot it.

Sherman's March (John Scott Shepherd/NBC)
Shepherd is a feature writer with a startling ability to sell anything he writes. This ability followed him to TV, where he signed a big deal with 20th TV and promptly got to shoot this pilot about a New York ad exec who's sent to a Southern town to take over a local ad agency. What I would like to know is, how did he rope Scott Winant in to direct this? The script reads like a feature and a banal, trite one at that. There isn't even a hope in hell that this could work as a series. Last year, feature writer Roger Kumble adapted his film Cruel Intentions into the pilot, Manchester Prep. He clearly understood the difference between a movie and a pilot. Shepherd does not. I threw two scripts across the room this year. This was one of them.

The Only Living Boy in New York (Bart Freundlich/Fox)
Freundlich wrote and directed the mysteriously-named Myth of Fingerprints. Why oh why won't people who don't get TV just stay in features? If they have to cross over, TV's readily accessible, right? You can turn it on and see what a TV show looks like. You can even go to the TV museum and see pilots. GO SEE PILOTS, PEOPLE! STOP SUBJECTING US TO THIS CRAP!

I am going to stop there before a rant ensues. I hope everyone enjoys the new shows, and don't come crying to me if you don't.

Kay Reindl co-wrote some of Millennium's most acclaimed episodes, including "Midnight of the Century". This is her second article for 11th Hour.

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