We sifted through the list of upcoming shows and tried to determine which ones might not
survive 2019.
Maybe it's a case of a bad premise, showrunners with awful track records, or just tired storylines.
Regardless, this group of programs may not be long for the televised world.
ABC is no stranger to genre thrillers based around supernatural events or characters that
have otherworldly powers.
In that vein, the Alphabet Network is bringing us Emergence, about a police chief who finds
a mysterious young girl near the site of a major accident.
That discovery leads to a vast conspiracy surrounding the child.
"I found a kid at the crash site I'm being told wasn't even on the plane."
Though the idea of superhuman kids on television is far from new, networks haven't had the
best success with the concept in recent years.
Fox dipped its toes into the Marvel universe in 2017 with The Gifted, a show about a family
that discovers its children have the mutant gene.
The show lasted two seasons before being canceled.
The network tried again two years later with The Passage, in which a federal agent protects
a young girl at the center of a series of top-secret government tests.
That show lasted ten episodes before getting the ax.
And when you realize that ABC has struggled with some of its other out-of-this-world sci-fi
shows like FlashForward or V, it seems Emergence could be headed for a relatively quick disappearance.
ABC has been riding a hot hand in recent years with the works of Shonda Rhimes.
From Grey's Anatomy, to Scandal, to How to Get Away With Murder, Shondaland is a world
of televised delights.
They're also all major hits.
Now, ABC is hoping to replicate the same magic with showrunner Kenya Barris, whose Black-ish
scored well enough on the parent network to earn a spin-off, Grown-ish, that airs on the
Disney-owned cable channel Freeform.
Now comes Mixed-ish, a prequel of sorts to Black-ish.
The series follows Rainbow Johnson as she recalls her childhood growing up in the 1980s
and the struggles of being a mixed-race child in a world that can't decide where she should
fit in.
But unlike Shonda Rhimes' shows, which all have vastly different premises and storylines,
Mixed-Ish seems kind of like a third version of the same story.
It's hard to imagine that viewers are interested enough in the Johnson family to want a third
series about them, especially one that seems to simply cover old ground.
"The world smacked you in the face today, didn't it.
You can tell me."
Fox is hoping for a winner with its family sitcom Outmatched.
The show stars Jason Biggs and Maggie Lawson as a working-class New Jersey family with
four kids.
Nothing remarkable there — except three of those kids happen to be geniuses.
"I will not be a Salieri in my own home!"
"I don't know what any of that means!"
Television has a storied history of giving us precocious children in sitcoms.
It's what helped make Joey Lawrence, the Olsen twins, and the kids from Modern Family household
names.
But it's a fine line that shows walk with young characters.
Everyone hopes to be Stewie Griffin.
Few want to be Steve Urkel.
The idea of smart-alecky, supergenius kids feels like an immediate turnoff — unless
you're a spinoff of The Big Bang Theory.
Stop us if you've heard this one: A hoity-toity type from a big city finds himself in a small
town where he has to absorb the culture shock and find a way to assimilate — or at least
tolerate — a completely new way of doing things.
This premise has worked to great success in a number of shows.
Now, NBC is hoping to find similar success with Perfect Harmony.
The single-camera sitcom stars Bradley Whitford, who's in the midst of a run on the highly-regarded
The Handmaid's Tale.
He also previously found big success on the Peacock Network as Josh Lyman on The West
Wing.
This time around, Whitford is a former Ivy League music professor who finds himself working
with the choir of a small-town church.
As you'd expect, there's a major clash of sensibilities between Arthur Cochran and his
new musical charges.
Behind the scenes, the hope is that Lesley Wake Webster and Jason Winer — two of the
forces behind CBS's Life in Pieces — can make the show a hit, but it will be a challenge
to see how they can make this pretty specific take on an old premise stick with TV audiences.
No one could ever accuse CBS of not giving their audiences what they want.
If there's one thing the Tiffany Network is chock full of, it's crime and courtroom dramas.
From the CSI and NCIS franchises to Bull and The Good Fight, CBS viewers probably have
a good idea of how scripted, dramatic jurisprudence works.
Yet for those television watchers tired of seeing shows about the inner workings of the
legal system, well, here's another show about the inner workings of the legal system.
All Rise follows the day-to-day challenges of judges and lawyers in Los Angeles as they
try to work within an inadequate system attempting to deliver justice, all while trying to make
sense of their own lives in the process.
It's one thing to find a winning formula and attempt to duplicate it.
It's another to continually reheat and rearrange the same ingredients and try to call it a
new dish.
CBS recently canceled The Code after just one season when that courtroom drama that
failed to gain any traction.
Will All Rise stand up and distinguish itself?
Or will it follow the same fate?
It's not uncommon for American television producers to look overseas to find inspiration
for domestic shows.
Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
Israeli television seems to have created a hit with The Baker and the Beauty, a show
about a humble baker who falls in love and begins dating an international supermodel.
The series was popular enough that Amazon picked up the show's first two seasons for
international streaming.
Around the same time, the show was reportedly being adapted by Universal Television for
American audiences and eventually ordered to series for the fall season.
In the American version, the setting moves to Miami, with the main characters being of
Cuban descent.
It's another in a string of ABC shows featuring Latinx actors and characters, similar to Ugly
Betty and Grand Hotel.
Yet while those other shows featured familiar faces and star power to potentially bring
viewers, The Baker and the Beauty stars a number of actors who might not be well-known
by a wide audience.
Can the power of this unlikely love story be enough to attract watchers, or is the American
version of this affair, supposedly debuting midseason, doomed to go up in smoke?
In the '90s, Fox scored big with The X-Files, a series about a science-minded FBI agent
paired with a wild-eyed believer in conspiracy theories as they chased fantastical cases
with a supernatural tinge.
While you couldn't exactly call Fox Mulder a religious zealot, his steadfast faith in
forces greater than mankind made for a compelling back-and-forth with the more staid and methodical
Dana Scully.
With Evil, CBS is attempting to resurrect a similar dynamic.
The show centers on a questioning female clinical psychologist who teams up with a priest-in-training
and a blue-collar carpenter to probe a backlog of the Church's unexplained phenomena.
"I know you believe in this stuff.
I don't."
If the premise feels more than a little X-Files-y to you, you're probably not alone.
The difference is that the CBS iteration is likely to have many more Biblical references
than its paranormal predecessor.
In and of itself, that's not a bad thing — the network had a long-running hit with Touched
by an Angel, and it's done fairly well with the series God Friended Me.
But it's worth wondering if there will be an audience for a show that pits science versus
religion in such a dramatic way, without a clear point of view to draw audiences in.
Religious beliefs tend to run a lot deeper than beliefs in UFOs, after all.
If the show tries to pay equal lip service to a doubter and a true believer, then it's
fair to wonder who the show will really be for.
Audiences might not find the show to be evil itself, but they might not think it's all
that good, either.
Networks are keen on building sitcoms around popular comedians, whether up-and-coming funny
people or venerable entertainers that audiences know after watching them for years.
Kenan Thompson falls squarely in the latter category.
The veteran funnyman broke onto the scene as a child actor in multiple Nickelodeon shows
before beginning his run on Saturday Night Live in 2003.
He currently holds the record as the show's longest-tenured cast member.
Some of the more successful series built around comedians draw from the performer's work,
life, or personality.
Some of the worst tend to stifle an actor's creativity in an effort to put them in a network-friendly
box.
NBC hopes to avoid that second category with The Kenan Show.
On the show, Thompson will play a widowed father of two dealing with an overbearing
father-in-law — a familiar premise, at least.
Nothing about the concept seems particularly awful.
But nothing about it seems all that compelling, either.
The idea of the harried single dad trying to balance work and home life has been done
plenty of times, and it hasn't felt particularly fresh since… maybe My Three Sons.
Part of what's made Thompson a stalwart on SNL for more than a decade-and-a-half has
been his ability to play hilarious and outrageous characters.
Now it seems like NBC is asking him to play a much more sedate persona in a format that's
been done to death.
The show's not even out yet, but it kind of already feels like a relic of the past.
The idea that robots or other forms of artificial intelligence will rise up and eventually signal
the destruction of mankind is an idea as old as science fiction itself.
Who hasn't seen the video of robots doing parkour and wondered if the nightmares they've
had about their own cyber-based demise were actually on the verge of coming true?
Who hasn't stood on a street corner, screaming that Skynet had become self-aware, and that
Terminators were coming for us all?
Just us?
Okay.
Anyway, Fox is hoping that you haven't tired of stories of dystopian digital futures with
its new show, neXt.
The futuristic thriller stars John Slattery as a tech entrepreneur who realizes that an
artificial intelligence application he created could eventually lead to the world's destruction.
In an era where we already have smart homes, our phones are always listening to us, and
companies and governments are doing who knows what with the data, it might be hard to get
viewers too worked up over the premise of the show.
Seriously, have you kept up with the news on this stuff?
This tech dystopia looks too familiar.
We want to see something with robots.
A son is being asked to follow in his father's footsteps.
The son rebels against being pigeonholed into a career that he doesn't want.
Reluctantly, that son eventually succumbs to his destiny, though it might be in a different
way than was originally envisioned.
Many an on-screen tale has told that story.
But this fall when you tune into Fox's Prodigal Son, you'll be asked to consider … what
if the family business was murder?
"Malcolm… my boy.
On the show, Tom Payne plays the son of a convicted serial killer asked to track down
other serial killers.
Imagine if Dexter's son eventually became a homicide detective.
The show is expected to have elements of dark comedy, which might work in its favor.
Otherwise, this could end up as another in a long line of homicidal maniac-themed mystery
shows that get bogged down in a premise that relies too heavily on a weird father-son relationship
and not enough about catching the bad guys.
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