"Ringer," "H8R," "Up All Night" – This Week's Fall Season Premieres - Ed Martin

The 2011-12 television season kicks off next Monday, and with it will come a crop of brand new broadcast shows that are widely regarded as collectively better than last year's bunch. That isn't saying much, but it's something. Meantime, five fragile freshmen are bravely making their premieres a few days early. One is already a media favorite, one is a reality toss-up and the others look to be the first fails of the fall. Read on and check back next week for more brief reviews.

Ringer– The CW, Premieres Sept. 13

Not terrible, but not nearly as entertaining as all the media buzz would have you believe. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays identical twins on very different life paths – one a junkie in recovery on the run from the mob, the other a New York City socialite with grave issues of her own. The rich one disappears and is presumed dead, the other improbably (and way too easily) takes her place, and perpetual complications follow, some with potentially fatal consequences. The first-class supporting cast includes Ioan Gruffudd, Nestor Carbonnell and Kristoffer Polaha. How this works as an ongoing series is anyone's guess, but one thing's for sure: Ringer will have to pick up its sluggish pace if it's going to compete. For a far better take on the whole one-twin-takes-the-other's-place thing, seek out the similarly titled 1964 Bette Davis thriller Dead Ringer.

H8R – The CW, Premieres Sept. 14

The always agreeable Mario Lopez hosts this silly little thing about the meeting of annoying C-list celebrities and Internet-empowered civilians who have spent way too much time online hating at them. Once they're brought together the fame-whores try to win over the regular folks, because they just can't handle the fact that someone doesn't like them, I guess. H8R could be a fun little time-waster, but basic cable is full of such things – so why is a broadcast network with only ten primetime hours to call its own wasting one of them on this?

Up All Night – NBC, Premieres Sept. 14

The original premise of this utterly laugh-challenged sitcom focused on a married couple coping with the exhaustive demands of caring for their brand new baby, but someone must have figured out that once the kid is a year or so old said premise might begin to fall apart. So now it's the story of a working mom who is more harried than most because she works for a wacky talk show host but luckier than many because her unemployed husband can take care of the kid. If your mind wanders count the beeped F-words, which are supposed to be funny, even in excess. Up All Night is up the creek – a total sinker despite the appeal of series leads Christina Applegate, Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph.

Free Agents – NBC, Premieres Sept. 14

This remake of a successful British rom-com, which lost its rom and its com in the transition, is a charm-free dud about the tentative romance between a weepy, newly divorced publicity executive (Hank Azaria) and his recently widowed colleague (Kathryn Hahn). Give NBC credit for trying to make a sophisticated adult comedy about actual grown-ups navigating the relationship challenges that come with middle age. Too bad they screwed up so badly. Among its many other problems, Free Agents has some of the worst work place sequences to cripple a sitcom in years. They seem to have been cobbled together by people who live in TV land and have never stepped foot in a real office.

The Secret Circle – The CW, Premieres Sept. 15

The low-energy pilot suggests that this supernatural thriller about teenage witches and warlocks coping with the demands of their particularly harrowing adolescence needs a bit of work, but generally speaking there is no reason to believe that The Secret Circle won’t develop into a fitting companion to its finely tuned lead-in, The Vampire Diaries. It certainly helps that both shows are based on popular young adult novel series by the same author (L.J. Smith) and are shaped by the same executive producer (Kevin Williamson). Having such appealing young actors as Britt Robertson (Life Unexpected) and Thomas Dekker (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) in the cast doesn’t hurt, either.

More to come next week …