ABC's New Fall Season

I went to a screening last night of several of ABC's new shows. Evidently TV budgets have shrunk so low that actual filming has been scuttled in lieu of People In India Who Know Photoshop. (Please, watch the first three minutes of "Pushing Daisies" and tell me that isn't half a boy and a dog's head floating over a field of flowers.) And no experience is required for the writing staff. Of the three-and-one-tenth programs I saw, all were torpedoed by bad writing.

Wacky quirks pass for character development. From "Samantha Who?" -- and warning, the dialog I quote isn't even close to the real thing, because I ain't no tape recorder: "If he really loved you, he'd know you adore Elvis Costello and you always sneeze three times."

Cutesy narrators drone on and on about cutesy details. In "Pushing Daisies" (I'm thinking they dropped the "Up" just so I wouldn't call it PUD) the narrator talked roughly ten times more than all the other characters combined, telling us wacky little facts like this:

NARRATOR: And then in an accident with dirty kitty litter, her aunt lost the sight in one eye!

By far the worst, though, was all the supposedly-intelligent people acting incredibly stupid to further the plot along -- what I call the "Oh, Okay!" school of writing. Take "Dirty Sexy Money," for instance:

Nick (Peter Krause) is an altruistic lawyer with a glass-walled office and closets full of expensive suits, but what he really wants is to open an orphanage in an impoverished nation. His father, a lawyer who worked for a shady, crazy, "royal" family, dies under mysterious circumstances. Nick confronts the patriarch of the clan, Tripp Darling (Donald Sutherland), at the funeral:

NICK: You bastard! You thief! I don't want anything to do with you or your family ever again!

TRIPP: Come work for me. I'll pay you five million dollar a year.

NICK: Oh. Okay!

In "Samantha Who?", Sam (Christina Applegate) is a naif surrounded by idiots and bitches. She got hit on the head, and now her memory is gone. What part does she play in all this? Could she -- shudder! -- be a bitch too? (There are flashbacks. She is.) How can she ever learn who she really is?

She confronts the wise old Tom-Waits-quoting black doorman. "If you want to know the end of the story," he says, "start at the beginning."

SAM: You mean --

WOTWQBD: Yes. Move back in with that ridiculously stupid family of yours.

SAM: Oh. Okay!

"Pushing Daisies" has more rules than Monopoly. Ned (some guy) has a busy childhood, making for a very busy narrator. He discovers early on that he can bring dead things back to life! Then he discovers that if these folks live more than sixty seconds, some innocent bystander will die! And then he discovers if he touches the people he brought back, they'll die again! This time for real! Forever!

He explains this phenomena to two different people.

BOTH: Oh. Okay.

On the plus side, each of these programs was oddly educational. Things I learned:

Amnesia makes you stupid. (SW: A friend reminds Sam she's an alcoholic, so Sam races straight to an AA meeting. Standing at the snack table and stuffing her mouth with lemon bars, she announces "Hi! I've never been here before!" Pause. "Oh, wait. Unless I have. Have I? Anybody recognize me? Hey, where are the donuts?")

Even magical piemakers never get a single customer. (PuD)

To get your crazy family's attention, break something big. (DSM.)

If you lose your memory, go live with the guy who says he's your boyfriend. (SW)

Having a parent die makes you stupid. (DSM: Nick goes to his father's funeral but waits outside, thinking he probably wasn't invited.)

If your second touch kills somebody forever, better keep a couple feet between you. (PuD)

Crazed smugglers stop strangling you if you pretend to stop breathing. (PuD)

Last, for everybody keeping track, we've hit a new low in terms of minority representation: Blacks are extras, sidekicks, and wise Tom Waits-quoting doormen. The GLBT world consists of one tranny hooker. And there are twice as many people with eyepatches than Hispanics.

Of course, only the former know the singular of "shrimps."