Mid-Week Poll: Which New Fall 2013 TV Dramas Do You Look Forward To?

It’s September, and time to send your kids (if you have any) back to school. More than that, this month also marks the start of the fall TV season, when all of the major broadcast networks and several cable nets will fight to grab your attention with a mix of returning favorite series and brand new shows. Of the latter, are you looking forward to any new dramas coming up this fall? Vote in our poll.

In the interest of focusing our attention, I’ve tried to limit the following poll to only new drama series. It should have no comedies, no Reality shows, and no returning programs that had already been on for a season or more. You may vote for as many options as you’d like. If I’ve missed anything interesting, be sure to vote “Other” and tell us in the Comments.

Which Fall 2013 TV Dramas Interest You?

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Knowing our readership, I expect that ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’, Marvel’s TV spin-off from its hugely-successful comic book superhero franchise (which encompasses all of the ‘Iron Man’, ‘Captain America’, ‘Thor’, ‘Incredible Hulk’ and ‘Avengers’ movies) will probably garner the most votes here. I’m intrigued to see it as well, though I’m a little skeptical of how much involvement executive producer Joss Whedon will really have, given that he’s deep in development of ‘The Avengers 2’ right now.

Beyond that, honestly, this is perhaps the least exciting fall line-up for new TV in recent memory. Admittedly, some of these shows are still a ways out, so I’ll reserve judgment until more details come in. (The descriptions of ‘Almost Human’, ‘Mob City’ and ‘Masters of Sex’ seem to have potential.) But most of these shows that I’ve seen previews for look cheesy as hell.

While I’ll probably still give at least their pilot episodes a shot, I fully expect ‘The Blacklist’, ‘Ironside’ and ‘Dracula’ to be terrible. (Is it a coincidence that those are all on NBC?) ‘Hostages’ looks incredibly generic, and I question how its premise could be dragged out for even a whole TV season, much less multiple seasons. ‘Betrayal’ appears to be a cross between ABC’s ‘Revenge’ and the Richard Gere movie ‘Unfaithful’, neither of which did much for me.

Oddly, I may actually look forward to ‘Sleepy Hollow’. The plot set-up (which transports Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman through time to the modern day) sounds almost insanely stupid, and the series is backed by hack screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, as well as hack director Len Wiseman. It seems to have just about everything working against it – and that likely fuels my perverse desire to see it for myself even more.

I will try to approach at least some of these with an open mind. After all, I was incredibly skeptical of ‘Hannibal’ last year, and that turned out to be amazing.

Which of these new shows will you check out when they premiere?

15 comments

  1. William Henley

    I don’t watch much television – I think television over the past several years has focused too much on tried-and-tired formats. Shows that seem interesting with good plots have gotten crap writing. Pan Am, Terra Nova, Knight Rider, Charlies Angels and Hawaii Five-O are just a couple of shows that had great potential and turned out to be crap shows. I just finished the second episode of Under The Dome and think I am going to give it one more episode – I am bored to tears by it.

    The only new shows I have liked over the past couple of years are Once Upon A Time, Grimm, Dance Moms (not Miami – that spinoff was horrible)Sherlock and Downton Abbey.

    Out of the new shows, I am going to give the following a shot:

    ‘Once Upon a Time in Wonderland’
    ‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’
    ‘Sleepy Hollow’
    ‘Dracula’
    ‘Witches of East End’

      • William Henley

        I think my issue is that it reminds me too much of Stargate Universe – stick a bunch of mental people in an enclosed area with no contact with the outside world and detereorating conditions on the inside, and let’s see what happens. Both shows then ended up from having a great sci-fi concept to turning into a crappy soap opera.

  2. Yeah those Hacks Orci and Kurtzman have only had their hands in some of the best shows of the past 15 years, Fringe and Alias, what do they know.

    Not to mention movies like MI3, and the Star Trek Reboots, while you may not like certain things about them you can’t simply dismiss them as failures or the result of Hack writing.

    Some time you make no sense Josh.

    • Josh Zyber
      Author

      Tim, look at the direction that both Alias and Fringe took in their later seasons and then reconsider that argument. These are also the guys who wrote Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

      Yeah, they’re hacks. I stand by that statement. 🙂

      • I stand by Fringe, even with the huge shift in the last season the writing wasn’t awful. And they were involved in Fringe from the beginning so while you may not have liked how it finished you can’t say they didn’t write some great TV.

        The same can be said of Alias.

        As for Transformers, I won’t defend Orci’s writing on that but the movie did make nearly a Billion worldwide. And it could have been worse, he could have written TF2.

        • Josh Zyber
          Author

          Orci and Kurtzman wrote both of the first two Transformers movies. They are prominently featured in the supplements on the TF2 Blu-ray.

          Unless you meant to say TF3 (written by Ehren Kruger), which was also quite bad, but somewhat less so than TF2.

          • Didn’t know they were directly responsible for TF1 and 2. By comparison the Trek reboot is way better in my opinion. The only thing they got right in the first two TF movies were Optimus’ voice being done by Peter Cullen.

            Must have misread it earlier. I still stand by Fringe and Alias though, I loved both shows and even with their weaker endings they were worth watching.

            And while I am a Trek Fan dating back to watching the originals on WPIX back in New York back in the 70’s all the way through Enterprise. I was able to enjoy the new movies for what they were. Though the forced and ham fisted usage of ST:TWOK lines was unnecessary and could have been left out entirely.

      • William Henley

        Gotta agree with Josh here. Especially in the past 5 years, this team I think just started smoking pot. Haven’t seen Alias, but Fringe annoyed me (although that may be because someone tried to introduce me to it midseason).

        Their movies are AWFUL!

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