It’s finally getting colder, the kids are back to school and the TV shows are on. Yes, autumn is here!
Even though making fun of broadcast television with smaller budgets, fewer stars and more tolerance for ridicule has become a mediocre title, it has its own kind of fun, even the best of the offering. It’s friendly, with filters that feel like family and long seasons that mean that virtually any show you throw at it, good, bad or indifferent, has a chance to make you grow. It’s not always realistic, but as it goes, it’s not realistic.
Enter four new streaming dramas joining the prime-time parade. The three main characters are geniuses; in the fourth, everyone is muscled and athletic, which, I suppose, is its own kind of genius. “Matlock” (CBS, premiering Sunday) features Kathy Bates in a kind of 1980s-90s legal drama; in “High Power” (ABC, Tuesday), Kaitlin Olson is a hip human computer at the Los Angeles Police Department; “Bright Minds” (premiering Monday on NBC) stars Zachary Quinto as a fictionalized version of neurologist Oliver Sacks; and “Survival: HI-Surf” (Fox, premiering Sundays, then moving to Mondays) is yet another version of “Baywatch.”
Of the four films, Matlock, directed by Jenny Snyder Urman (“Jane the Virgin”), is the one that’s gotten the most attention (it was even a joke at the Emmys) and features the biggest star, Emmy, Oscar and Golden Globe winner Bates. It also has a hook for reviving established intellectual property, and while it’s not exactly “Star Trek” — the original ran for nine years and is still being revived — it has a place in the collective’s glory.
The only thing the new “Matlok” has in common with the old one is its main character, though she is Matlok Mati; she is also a lawyer, elderly, and provides home cinema with a southern accent that masks her unusual arrogance. Here she comes out of retirement and manages to get off the street in the blink of an eye, say before lunch, and land a position in a big law firm through the kind of mechanical and psychological manipulation that usually comes with assuming responsibility. heist movies.
The firm is nominally run by Beau Bridges between the putts, with Jason Ritter as the boss’s son and Skye P. Marshall as Ritter’s alien legal eagle wife. The series tends to be light-hearted and fun, but the cases they discuss raise serious issues, giving Bates plenty of opportunities to dig much deeper as he convinces reluctant witnesses to come forward or uncovers wisdom that’s been hidden for years.
There are backstory secrets we don’t have to give away, but suffice it to say that each of these series involves a main character dealing with past trauma or unfinished business, as long arcs are built from there.
Caitlin Olson in High Potential.
(Nicole Weingart/Disney)
“High Potential” is a rollicking police procedural starring Olson as Morgan, an unconventional free spirit with an IQ of 160 who manages three kids on a shoestring budget and cleans the offices of the LAPD’s Major Crimes Division on weekdays — and a swashbuckling young woman who’s a bit of a swashbuckler. One fateful night, she dances at work, throws the file on the floor, mistakes its contents for a glance, walks up to the murder board, crosses out “suspect” and writes “victim” beneath a photograph.
One thing leads to another, and the police (Judy Reyes as the chief, Daniel Sunjata as the handsome, angry detective) bring him in for a reckoning. (Their threat to jail him for writing a single word on an erasable whiteboard is less likely than one might imagine.) Naturally, he saw what a group of professionals had missed, and the obvious value of having one. Sherlock Holmes gets results when he’s called in for a consulting job. Morgan knows the value of enlisting the department’s help in solving a mystery.
On crime scenes with short skirts, high boots and animal photos, as if the last five decades had never happened, she has bad authority, but she doesn’t have a good time. The show is legitimately funny and very entertaining, especially since both Olson and Morgan are having a great time. Fans of “Castle” should feel right at home here.
Zachary Quinto as Oliver Wolfe in Beautiful Minds.
(NBC/Peter Kramer/NBC)
The heaviest of these light-hearted entertainments is “Brilliant Minds,” with Quinto’s Oliver Wolfe about Oliver Sachs’s face blindness, his love of trucking, motorcycling, and swimming in New York City rivers, and his abiding interest in the mysteries of the brain. I suspect these cases are hysterical mass pregnancies—the loss of the ability to form memories or visualize one’s own body, suggested by Sacks’s own examples collected in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other works.
Expelled from a series of hospitals for erratic behavior and rule-breaking, he recently arrives at Bronx General, where his mother (Donna Murphy) is his boss and his old friend (Temberla Perry) is his other deputy; his usual irritation is certainly tempered by Wolfe’s eventual successes. He is visited by a variety of alumni, from the sweet to the suspicious to the caustic.
When Quinto plays him, he’s a warmer version of his onscreen Spock (his best friend is, apparently, a plant), and much of the humor is drawn from Wolf’s complete unfamiliarity with popular culture. In the context of the series, he’s like a sensitive, sympathetic version of Gregory House; like “House MD,” this is a medical show as a mystery, and like all such shows, investigators make mistakes before they get it right, and there are plenty of instances of sudden emergencies leading to commercials. And like most medical dramas, there are big questions about life and death that can be unsettling depending on one’s life and circumstances. Still, there is some solace to be had from Wolf’s waxing lyrical about a relevant element of the human condition.
Kekoa Kekumano, left, and Robbie Magasiva in Rescue: HI-Surf.
(Zach Dugan/FOX)
Set on the North Shore of Oahu, Rescue: HI-Surf delivers exactly what its title promises. Surf. Save. (Fox currently has two other rescue shows, “9-1-1” and “9 1-1: Lone Star,” whose final seasons begin this week.) Here again, that mix of lightly crafted on-the-job challenges, romantic complications and witty comedy found in nearly every broadcast — a formula that can keep viewers watching for years. Naturally, all conflict is put aside when lives are at stake, forcing periodic dips into the Pacific Ocean to help tourists who read posted warnings or follow the good advice of the lifeguard — as well as the unfortunate one.
Robbie Magasiva plays the captain of the Ocean Safety Team, who has nightmares and oversees a crew that matches the Hawaiian and Asian cast, if only slightly; Ariel Kebbel is his lieutenant and wants to become a captain himself. Adam Demos is his ex-lover, a talented Australian learning to be a firefighter, tough werewolf Kekoa Kekumano, rich kid Alex Aiono, whose politician father gets him on the team, and Zoe Cipri, a poor girl with more talent than the place he takes (though she doesn’t make it until the very end).
John Wells, of “The West Wing” (and “ER” and “Third Nights,” among others) fame, who worked with creator Matt Kester on “Animal Kingdom,” directs the first two episodes and draws out the action in a dizzying sequence. Camera angles and lenses, free-wheeling movements, drone shots, underwater and in-water shots, quickly stacked on top of other shots — the effect is akin to the impact of huge waves, which may be the desired effect, but it makes the crises and rescues more dramatic.
Instead of B-roll clips that flash between scenes, I’d like some boring local culture, but that’s just me. They’re all beautiful, the scenery is beautiful, the surf is beautiful. I see people tuning in. “Baywatch” was on for 11 years.
