Pilot Plight: Where is the Next Heroes or Ugly Betty?

I have seen 23 of the 25 new scripted series set to debut at the start of the 2007-08 season, and it looks to me like the broadcast networks are in for tough times this fall.

With one exception -- ABC's romantic fantasy crime procedural Pushing Daisies -- there isn't a single pilot at any network that has me waiting with breathless anticipation for a second episode. And, as much as I like Daisies, it is so radically unique as far as broadcast programming goes that I think it is going to have a difficult time finding an audience.

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I am not a broadcast basher. I look forward to the arrival of each new broadcast season with the same eagerness and enthusiasm that I felt when I was a kid, way back in the pre-cable era. I feel there are far too many critics, analysts and "industry observers" who routinely dismiss the networks' new fall fare as "more of the same" or "cookie cutter" or "crap." Pay no attention to such bilious prognosticators. Every broadcast network currently offers a number of shows that are more entertaining and more thoughtfully conceived than anything you are going to find at the local multiplex, and they show no signs of changing.

That said, most of their fall pilots failed to tweak my interest, and none of them entertained me as thoroughly as recent episodes of TNT's The Closer and FX' Rescue Me. The season two premiere of USA Network's Psych (scheduled for July 13) and the premiere episode of FX' legal drama Damages (set for July 24) are similarly superior to round one of the broadcasters' fall offerings, as far as entertainment value is concerned.

For me, this is a decidedly different response from recent years, when the process of plowing through pilots has yielded a number of gems, some of them destined to be noteworthy hits, others doomed to be noble failures. In 2004 the parade of pilots included Lost, Desperate Housewives, Veronica Mars and Jack and Bobby. (The 2004-05 season also introduced Boston Legal as a spin-off of The Practice and, at midseason, Grey's Anatomy.) Fall 2005 pilots included Commander in Chief, Everybody Hates Chris, My Name is Earl, Prison Break, How I Met Your Mother and Supernatural. Last year at this time, everybody was talking about Ugly Betty, The Nine, Friday Night Lights, Heroes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Class and 30 Rock.

Indeed, it was at this time last year that I wrote a column naming Ugly Betty the best new series of the 2006-07 season. Betty was a thrilling discovery. This summer, after watching 23 new shows, I'm still waiting for that same thrill. I don't think it's going to come from either of the two pilots that have not yet been made available to the press (CBS' Moonlight and NBC's Lipstick Jungle).

The news isn't entirely bad. In addition to Pushing Daisies, CBS' Big Bang Theory and Cane and NBC's Chuck and Bionic Woman are not without entertainment potential. ABC's Dirty Sexy Money and Big Shots could evolve into guilty pleasure successes. The dazzling star power of Fox' Back to You, with Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton and Fred Willard, might keep viewers interested long enough for the show's writers to deliver better dialogue worthy of their comic talents. (The pilots for Fox' midseason dramas The Sarah Conner Chronicles and Canterbury's Law, by the way, were more exciting than any of its fall shows.) Given the popularity of its source material, The CW's slick and sassy Gossip Girl could be an easy hit with tween and teen girls. Critics are already at full buzz about the same network's supernatural comedy-thriller Reaper and there is early positive talk about Aliens in America.

But I don't see a Housewives, Heroes or Betty in the bunch.

As always at this time of year, it is important to note that the pilots provided to the press are intended for background use and are specifically labeled "not for review." Many will remain exactly as they are now, but others will undergo significant changes before their fall premieres. Critics are asked not to write formal reviews or go into too much detail when writing about them. So it must be understood that nothing is final at this early date, and everyone's opinions, including my own, may change.

In other words, my early take on the first wave of 2007-08 pilots should not be regarded as my final word on the fall season. But, like it or not, reviewers' picks and pans are going to begin influencing public opinion next week when television critics from across the U.S. and Canada assemble in Los Angeles for the annual Television Critics Association summer tour. The July TCA event is the first time critics are able to meet face to face after viewing fall pilots and it is always filled with lively ongoing debates about the best and the worst shows to come. Right from the start their thoughts and opinions about the networks' fall shows will begin to leak out in their blogs, on their Web sites and in their newspaper columns. By week two of this three-week marathon of press conferences and interviews the floodgates will open. Daily reporting from the tour will make clear the critics' collective favorites as well as those the press has marked for early deletion.

While there will be no holding back this tsunami of critical response, it must be remembered that TCA attendees don't always get it right, and the public doesn't always pay attention. Last July The Nine and Studio 60 were the pick hits of this esteemed group, while Heroes was largely dismissed as a series doomed by its creative team's lack of narrative focus.