Previously: We bravely rated The Penguin pilot lower than the Baywatch wannabe. And we’d do it again, bop bop.
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Brilliant Minds on NBC
Recapped: Zachary Quinto returns to network TV as a brilliant doctor with face blindness who just cares too much for his patients.
What Mari thinks: If you’ve been listening to any of our most recent podcast episodes, you may have heard Nicole and I waxing poetic about how much we miss full-episode seasons and filler episodes and space and time to grow with characters. Listen, I still feel that way, but starting off our third round of pilot reactions, I am starting to remember how samey some of these network TV shows can be. Here, we have a maverick doctor who is better than everyone else at medicine but worse than average at people. Quinto is a good actor, and it’s easy to get swept up in this show’s familiarity and sentimentality. That said, I can’t remember anything specific about any of the characters or give you a reason why this stands out not only amongst its genre predecessors but also in this fall season.
D
What Nicole thinks: There’s a lot of nostalgia bait in this batch of episodes. It’s a little different than the “Look at that cast!” shows in that they hinge much more on how much you love that guy from that thing several years back. I was a diehard Heroes girlie back in the day (though I never watched the final season or the reboot because they truly lost the plot). I do come to this with a bit of the “aww, Zachary Quinto, I remember that guy!” that the show is relying on. Unfortunately, the show then proceeded to give me absolutely nothing else to work with, and I haven’t really missed Zachary Quinto. Certainly not as much as this show requires me to have missed him.
I mentioned last time that with some of these shows, I feel like I’m trying to separately ask, “What’s this show doing?” and “Did it do it well?” We’ve had a few where the “what” was pretty stupid—and I think this is true for the very same-y stuff on network TV, but that’s fine when the “how” is strong enough. This show takes a hollow and overdone format and adds nothing of particular merit to its approach. There is simply not enough wit or charm here to make me root for the deranged medical malpractice and shlocky character backstory.
F
Overall Grade: D-
Murder in a Small Town on Fox
Recapped: The new police chief in town is also on a dating app.
What Mari thinks: It is unclear to me at this point how much murder is going to figure in Murder in a Small Town. I guessed, thanks to that title, that this would have a big, season-long mystery we would solve about a murder that shakes up a small town. In actuality, in the pilot episode, we meet our bearded, integrous police chief and spend just as much time on his newly blossoming love life as we do with him solving the murder. (And it does indeed get solved in the one episode. And the killer is indeed the guy you think it is.) I kind of get it, too, because this man met Kristin Kreuk on a dating app, which feels like something to talk about.
Still… How much murder is going to happen in this small town? I’m not walking away from this experience feeling like this pilot taught me anything about what this show is supposed to be. If I’m honest, though, I’m going to watch episode 2.
D+, and some of that is for the stupid name of the show.
What Nicole thinks: I feel like one of the things I’m gonna do here today is challenge Mari’s reputation as a hater by being a bigger hater. I didn’t find this as upsettingly bad as the last one—this was just very, very boring. Something about the lead actor’s delivery reminded me of the Sleep With Me Podcast— a show whose only purpose is to help you fall asleep. I also do not understand how much murder this small town expects to face or what the point of this show even was? The mystery was not very mysterious, and the romance was not very romantic, and on the whole, I was pretty eager for the episode to end.
Per the nostalgia theme of this post, Kristen Kreuk was there, and she is very, very pretty. That is the only nice thing I have to say about this painfully dull experience.
D-
Overall Grade: D
Penelope on Netflix
Recapped: 16-year-old Penelope follows the feminine urge to escape into the woods.
What Mari thinks: I can understand why this pilot may not work for everyone. I can also see where the show itself might lose steam or go off the rails, but this was a beautiful pilot. I enjoyed how economical it felt, doing lots of work and set-up through minimal dialogue and a beautiful, expressive performance by Megan Stott. There was an earnestness here that I loved and a call to my own teenage crises of self that was not cheapened for being on the nose: the opening shot is a heartbeat that morphs into a musical beat as Penelope attends a silent dance party, and the final shot is Penelope hugging a tree as the heartbeat plays again. Not everything has to be nuanced, though. Sometimes, you just want to hug a tree.
A
What Nicole thinks: This is truly the “one of these things is not like the others” of this list and not just because it doesn’t have the nostalgia-bait of the others. This slow, slightly dreamy show is the sort of thing that could truly only exist in the streamer era. Megan Stott is so sweet and charming, and I’m truly rooting for her to have her little Wild journey. (Sidebar: Megan Stott is actually about the age that Cheryl Strayed was when that memoir takes place, and seeing Stott here kind of highlights what I always found so odd about casting a nearly 40-year-old woman in that role, but I DIGRESS.)
My one quibble is that this pilot didn’t quite convince me that there’s a whole season’s worth of story to follow this up with, but it was a very charming and lovely 30 minutes that certainly convinced me to find out.
A
Overall Grade: A
Doctor Odyssey on ABC
Recapped: Ryan Murphy’s take on the Love Boat starring Joshua Jackson, Phillipa Soo, and Don Johnson.
What Mari thinks: Hey, so, I used to have the biggest crush on Joshua Jackson as Pacey on Dawson’s Creek and seated for Doctor Odyssey, that crush was like, “HEY, REMEMBER ME?” Wow, bestie, I do remember you, and thankfully for you, Joshua Jackson looked great in the pilot. Sure, the episode laid it on pretty thick with the whole Don Lothario, exceptional doctor, patient zero of COVID bit, and sure, seeing an older Jackson made me despair of the inevitable passage of time, but did I mention he looked great? What else can I say for this show? It felt very pilot-y. There was a way the Doc was being moved around the set, and the various medical emergencies that he was facing that felt strained. While they introduced our pieces well enough, I’m not sure the episode did a good enough job establishing a solid through-line for the series. I suppose that only matters if you need a reason to tune in next week, which isn’t Joshua Jackson, Phillipa Soo, or the kind of popcorn, head-empty, soapy experience this show will surely deliver.
C
What Nicole thinks: I wasn’t a very big Dawson’s Creek girl, but Joshua Jackson was in heavy rotation in my house thanks to The Mighty Ducks. Charlie Conway will always be famous to me. I agree that Joshua Jackson is still looking amazing, but the hot nurse man is also hot, and of course, there’s Phillipa Soo. “Put a bunch of hot people on a boat” is a tried and true formula. I watched this last night, and I have already forgotten what happened, but that doesn’t feel like a violation of this show’s artistic vision. I don’t think this show cares if you remember anything from one episode to the next besides the fact that the hot people are on the boat, and various combinations of the hot people want to be fucking.
The fact that they are on a boat means that they can be a little silly with the medical problems (too much shrimp! broken penis!), which serves the show well. I found the show’s manner of including COVID to be just deeply weird. I am not a “leave COVID out of my shows” person— I’m actually of the opinion that more media should actually acknowledge the global trauma we all experienced— but this was such a WEIRD way to go about it. The murky flashbacks and the way getting COVID was his call to live a fuller life??? Just narratively a mess. I probably won’t watch more of this show on purpose, but I might find myself turning it on unconsciously one day when I am desperately trying to escape my own thoughts.
C
Overall Grade: C
Nobody Wants This on Netflix
Recapped: Veronica Mars and Seth Cohen fall in love, but he’s a rabbi, and she’s a podcaster.
What Mari thinks: It’s hard for me not to immediately love anything Kristen Bell is in. I love her screen presence, even if she mostly plays a slight variation of herself in everything she’s in. Here, her charm is well matched by Adam Brody’s in a rom-com where the progression felt familiar and the jokes landed well. This pilot had the work of making us believe these two people could fall in love, and it did that.
B+
What Nicole thinks: While Mari’s got extensive stock in Joshua Jackson, I am a longtime investor in Adam Brody. I think I mentioned this somewhere in our recaps of The O.C., but when I first saw trailers for that show, I was hooked immediately because of that Phantom Planet song and because I recognized Adam Brody not only from Gilmore Girls but also from MTV’s Undressed, a show I probably should not have been watching. And Veronica Mars used to be my whole personality. If 18-year-old Nicole knew that these two would one day be in a romcom together, honestly, it might be a sort of reverse 13th reason. I dedicated half my review to this backstory to say: this show had so much prior goodwill that only a spectacular fuck up could have made me dislike this.
A romcom lives and dies by the chemistry between its leads, and these two are adorable together. Their meet-cute was delightful and charming, and I was sold immediately. They’ve both been typecast in the sort of way where if you gave my teenage self a Mad Libs version of their characters, she probably would have gotten most of the blanks right (“What the fuck is a podcast?” being the most likely miss.) This is the first thing on this list that I watched, and I actually binged the whole thing all in one go. Having seen the whole season, I do have some notes, but based on the first episode alone, my stance was firmly “no notes.”
A
Overall Grade: A-
Let us know in the comments which of these pilots you’ve seen and what you would grade them!
Next time: Joan, Last Days of the Space Age and The Franchise.
