Utopia - series premiere

Billed as innovative and experimental, Fox’s UTOPIA is little more than a tired BIG BROTHER retread of strangers living together and filmed for twenty-four hours.  The series is meant to last a year, but there was so little of interest in the first two hours that I can’t imagine this series will last even a month on the air.  The cast of fifteen men and women are obnoxious made-for-reality-TV stereotypes and each play their boxed-in roles predictably.  Unsurprisingly, the producers of this show provided booze for their cast in an attempt to prod some drunken drama, but half of the episode seemed to concern whether some morons will stay in the Utopia community or depart.  Who could possibly care?

The Mindy Project - season 2 premiere - "All My Problems Solved Forever..."

THE MINDY PROJECT is amiable and pleasant, if not terribly funny. The sitcom speak is a bit less obtrusive than in worse shows, but the dialogue still occasionally betrays the situations and characters for unnatural comic lines. Not as distrustful of the audience as a laugh-track sitcom, it utilizes the single-camera alternative: cutting to close up, mugging comic reactions from the actors, an elbow in the viewer’s side, nudgingly pleading for acknowledgement of the jokes, “Get it, get it.” You know in an early scene with Mindy and her beau seated precariously on a tree branch they will fall off it, and they do. Outside of the appealing lead, the cast is bland and forgettable.

Dads - pilot episode

The pilot episode of DADS could almost play like a satire of every bad Fox sitcom from the mid-1990s if its creators were cleverer. Instead, it just seems a continuation of that brain-dead legacy. Do “audiences” really still hoot and howl when an attractive actress enters a scene wearing a “sexy” getup? Perhaps due to network standards, its misogyny and racism do not raise offense, but shrugs, the show is impish rather than transgressive. What it never is is funny.