Friday Night Lights on Friday?
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It looks like I don’t have to track down the TV Guide blogger. Both “Scrubs” and “Friday Night Lights” were safely on the NBC schedule. However, FNL has been moved to Fridays.
NBC is spinning the move as bowing to customer complaints that the show wasn’t on Friday (was that really a big deal?). At first I was disappointed because Friday is a dead night for network TV and when an established show is moved to Friday night it usually means the end is near. However, the NBC spin is that they are much more willing to let a show continue with much lower ratings on Friday night than they are on Wednesday night because it is traditionally a dead night.
That might be really good for FNL. Because the show has a fanatical audience, they will likely follow to Fridays much like the Scrubs fans have followed that show from night to night (it actually wasn’t moved which is a miracle).
The new shows don’t exactly grab me and also reek of unoriginal concepts. First is the remake of “The Bionic Woman” (come on, it was crap thirty years ago it’s still crap now), which is one of two ways that NBC hopes to cash in on “Heroes”. The other is a six episode mini-series that will introduce characters that fans can vote on to include in the next season of the show. I can just see the pitch as “‘Heroes’ meets ‘American Idol’”.
The other shows at least change the name of the innocent show being ripped off. “Journeyman” sounds suspiciously like “Quantum Leap”. “Chuck” seems like a ripoff of that accountant-cum-PI show on ABC. And “Lipstick Jungle” should just be renamed “The Devil Wears Lipstick”.
The only innovative new show is even a rerun of an earlier success. Jerry Seinfeld is back with a show about, get this, mini episodes of his life. Gee, where did they get that idea?
Retreads aren’t going to get NBC out of the basement. While I’m happy that NBC kept my two favorite shows, it doesn’t seem like they are trying very hard to be different. It’s almost like they didn’t get the network exec jokes on Studio 60.
It looks like another banner season for NBC.