AFT #136: Upfronts, ‘Louie’, ‘Maron’, Horrific Sights on ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Last Week Tonight’ and More

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http://antennafree.tv/podcasts/Antenna_Free_TV_Podcast_136.mp3

It’s upfronts week, so things are a little crazy around AFT HQ. We go over all the fall schedules, but first talk about the new show from the guy we thought might join us this week:

• We start by talking about Bill Lawrence’s new sitcom, Undateable, and what a good multi-cam needs to do, even early on. Don’t worry; this show does it (Bill will be with us eventually… we promise) (00:00 – 09:15),
• Then we talk about the upfronts, starting with NBC. Is it wise for them to kill the Thursday comedy block? Is Marry Me just the new Happy Endings? Will anyone ever watch A to Z? And is anyone going to buy Katherine Heigl as a counterterrorism expert? We also talk about the midseason move of The Blacklist from Mondays to Thursdays (09:15 – 26:35),
• Before we start in on CBS, we talk about their surprising thumbs-down to the How I Met Your Dad pilot, and whether the show will be picked up by some other network (our guess is yes) (26:35 – 30:10),
• Then we move on to CBS, and talk about how their shows are actually getting a little more ambitious (besides the NCIS and CSI spinoffs). We figure out whether we’ll like Scorpion, and if Tea Leoni makes a believable Secretary of State. We also discuss the temporary move of The Big Bang Theory to Mondays as CBS airs 8 weeks of football on Thursdays (30:10 – 40:40),
• We take a brief respite to talk about some of TNT and TBS’s new shows, and Joel blows a gasket when he realizes that Richard Dreyfuss is a supporting player on a TBS sitcom (40:40 – 43:00),
• Then we talk about ABC’s new schedule, the Shonda Rhimes Thursday block and if people will sit through all three shows, how ambitious shows like American Crime are, all the shifting around of current shows, and the 30 seconds we got to figure out just what the hell Christela is. As we talk about Black-ish, we discuss how Larry Wilmore, who was going to run that show, had to leave to take the post Daily Show slot on Comedy Central (43:00 – 1:06:10),
• Then we move on to FOX, who isn’t rolling out most of their shows until later. But we really can’t wait to see Gotham, have no idea what Red Band Society is, are hoping that Mulaney is as good as FOX thinks it is, talk about the end of Animation Domination, and whether Gracepoint will be anywhere near as good as Broadchurch (1:06:10 – 1:18:10),
• We then close out upfronts talk by discussing a couple of midseason shows we forgot: the creepy show The Whispers on ABC and Backstrom (think Rainn Wilson playing Gregory House as a CSI investigator) on FOX. Then we go over the CW’s schedule, how it’s not really for young women anymore, the fun genre shows like The Flash, and how much we want to see iZombie, even though it’s a midseason show. We then go over the entire slate of new shows and try to dig out some trends. One trend: women can’t just be tough; they have to be nurturing, too (1:18:10 – 1:28:00),
• Then we move to some quick talk about some of the more horrifying things we saw on TV this week. We discussed what scared us more: what Ginsburg did on Mad Men or that picture of the old wrinkly penis on Last Week Tonight. Then we talked about how fun the premiere of Maron was, especially because we both knew all the Walking Dead references (1:28:00 – 1:36:50),
• Finally, we discuss the episode of Louie where Sarah Baker makes a great speech about what it’s like for chubby girls to get judged by schlubby guys. We both liked the speech, though Joel thought it had a few hiccups. We wonder how much this will help Baker’s career, considering we loved her in Go On (odd that the same day she was being praised for the role, it was announced that she was being recast on The Odd Couple) (1:36:50 – 1:44:39).

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