It's that time of year again!
Actually, it's well past this time of year.
Continuing the tradition started by Doctor Hmmm? back in 2010, and followed inconsistently since (2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023), here's a catchall thread about any and all shows debuting or returning this fall, with an emphasis on the shows that don't generate their own threads.
Once again, I am late in starting this thread, as the new season began about a month ago. All I can say is, life got in the way.
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I am as ever continuing on with Chicago Fire, and expect to the end, whenever that might be. Last season, Eamonn Walker, who played Deputy District Chief Wallace Boden, was the biggest of the cast departures. He's been replaced by Dermot Mulroney was Battalion Chief Dom Pascal, who was a Chicago firefighter who made it up the ranks to chief but then moved to Miami. After 10 years there, he's back in the Windy City, although there are intimations that he left under a cloud. This is information the viewer has that the characters in the firehouse don't.
The only new show we are watching this year is George and Mandy's First Marriage.
I gave a try to the new version of Matlock. It definitely isn't a revival, certainly isn't a sequel, and isn't really a reboot. Here, in the pilot episode, Madeline "Maddy" Matlock finagles her way into a high-powered New York law firm, spinning a tale of a dead husband who done her wrong and the need to make a living, despite the decidely inconvenient fact that she hasn't practiced law in a decade and a half or so.
But there's a twist! Actually, several!
She ain't broke -- in fact, she's loaded -- her husband isn't dead and he's not the louse she's made him out to be, and her name isn't Matlock! And she's on a mission! She's there to infiltrate the law firm because it defended the pharmaceutical company that made the medicines that her late daughter overdosed on. By Maddie's lights, had the law firm done the right thing, those drugs would have been off the market 10 years earlier. So her secret goal is to bring the lawyer who tried that case to justice.
So with the help of her husband and teenage grandson, who has the computer hacker/web designer skills to create the fake LinkedIn profile and career history that dazzled the law firm, Maddie does this secret skulduggery along with the case of the week.
Kathy Bates oozes Southern charm, and the show leans into the "Matlock" IP, with her telling everyone at every turn her name is ""Matlock,' like the TV show." (Naturally, the youngins at the law firm haven't heard of it.) Entertaining, but not enough for me to come back again.
I've watched a couple of episodes of Doctor Odyssey. It's about a ship's doctor and his two nurses on a high-end cruise ship that makes the Love Boat look like a broken down '69 Volkswagen bus.
Moreover, most of the guests on this ship are all fashion-model beautiful, or at least well-heeled. In the last episode I watched, Margo Martindale plays the mother of a bride who has rented the entire ship for her wedding!
Naturally, the bride is a Bridezilla. Unnaturally, the mother of the bridge gets a monstrous sunburn.
Worse, the bride gets an infection from the laxatives and other gunk she's been taking to lose weight to fit into her wedding dress. Still worse, the best man gets an odd skin infection, which prompts the medical team to worn him to tell all of his sexual partners. (Does he? Of course not.) Even more worse, the groom gets the same infection(!). And to add insult to injury, the bride gets it, too!
These matters are resolved in an unexpeced and rather dark way (at least, I didn't expect it). Usually, Doctor Odyssey is foamy escapism, and there's more than a few hints of sexual attraction between the doctor and the female nurse ... even though the male nurse is hot for her, too, and she seems .... receptive ... to their attentions.
This is a "turn your brain off and watch" kind of show. Sometimes, that's just what you need, so when you have that need, this will fit the bill.
Another standby I'm going to be with the the end is Grey's Anatomy. This season is continuing to follow the new crop of interns who were dumb enough brave enough to come aboard at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital after its accrediation was restored. Unfortunately, for the viewers, one of those actors, Midori Francis, is already leaving the show, in what is painted as a mutual parting of the ways. It's sad because she was easily the best of the bunch, passionate, quirky and always watchable.
They also wrote out Jake Borelli, who has been with the show for eight seasons, in what is said to be a storyline-dictated decision; i.e., budget cuts. He got a great sendoff -- his character, Levi Schmitt, moved from surgery to pediatrics, and got the opportunity to do a peds clinical trial in San Antonio ... just after he started hooking up with the new hot hospital chaplain. In a surprise -- to me at least -- said chaplain opts to quit his job and move to Texas with Schmitt. I was surprised because the chaptain had been in only four episodes and was introduced as if he was going to be around longer, not there to set up Schmitt's departure.
As for Midori Francis, she got the dramatic, cry-your-eyes out treatment. Her character, Mika Yasuda, brought her kid sister Chloe, who has advanced cancer, to the hospital. As Grey Sloan is the place where they take outlandish propositions and get impossible results, the charge was how to bombard Chloe with chemotherapy without destroying her ability to have children. How involves some medical mumbo-jumbo I don't understand, something about moving her eggs out of the uterus to inside some other organ and then moving them back later when the chemo is over.
Anyhoo, Yasuda's friends rallied around her, working shifts for her so she could just stay at Chloe's bedside through it all. Grateful, when Chloe got better, Yasuda started working shifts for the others in return. As one might expect, that made her bone tired. So on the day she drives Chloe home, Yasuda had worked a double shift ... and falls asleep at the wheel ... and crashes head-on into another car.
It's bad. Yasuda and Chloe survive, but just barely. Chloe has multiple fractures in both legs and is a risk of losing one of them; Yasuda's liver is punctured and dying and she's bleeding profusely. The team working on her can't agree what to do; Winston want to take out the liver so she won't bleed out but Altman argues doing so would be too traumatic on top of her other injuries. Chief Bailey comes up with an idea: remove the damaged parts of Yasuda's liver -- the only organ that can function with most of it gone, in this case 75 percent -- take out her spleen, and use the blood vessels from that to augment what's left of the liver.
Does it work? Yes. Do both sisters survive ... ?
No.
Three hankys, at least.
I also watched The English Teacher, but ithe first season was only eight epsiodes. Tracy bailed about half way through because she found it too "cringey." It has not yet been renewed for a second season.