It’s uncommon when a broadcast community launches a completely new evening of unique programming, as NBC is making an attempt on Sunday nights, in order that alone is trigger for applause, although we’ll save the true ovation for when one thing extra unique comes alongside.
Even the dazzling new nature sequence The Americas (premieres Sunday with back-to-back episodes at 7/6c and eight/7c) performs to method, with folksy narrator Tom Hanks serving up vignettes of telegenic wildlife on land, sky, and sea. There’s little doubt that nature followers will deservedly eat it up. (A complete sequence might be made about these resilient raccoons dwelling in Central Park on the outskirts of a metropolis.)
An animal of an much more acquainted selection — species: spinoff — anchors NBC’s new lineup, with the closely promoted premiere of Fits LA, which owes its existence to the unique USA Community sequence’ sudden renaissance on Netflix (with the added zing of a solid member marrying right into a sure royal household). The tailor-made wardrobe is as spiffy as ever within the “blue sky” setting of Los Angeles and the company towers of Century Metropolis, the place leisure attorneys and different slick attorneys ply their commerce. It’s the storytelling that feels a bit threadbare and second-hand.
Stephen Amell (Arrow) makes his overdue major-network leading-man debut, swaggering in type as Ted Black, a former New York federal prosecutor who left beneath a cloud of tragedy and has spent the final 15 years constructing a profitable enterprise along with his boutique Black Lane agency, repping (so we’re instructed) high-profile Hollywood varieties. He woos a potential consumer described as Warner Bros. latest motion star by boasting, “I took on the worst mobs in New York. I beat all of them, I did it with out batting an eye fixed.” He goes on to declare, “I can stroll away from any deal at any time — which is the place the facility on this world comes from.”
Seems like somebody who must be taken down a peg or three, no? Which is precisely what occurs in a pilot episode full of betrayals and back-stabbings, all of which could have had extra affect if we had a greater thought of the folks inhabiting these designer duds. (Flashbacks, which shortly grow to be a staple of the sequence, assist flesh out Ted’s and others’ backstories, which are typically extra compelling than the present-day intrigue.)
As his finest good friend/prison lawyer Stuart and earnest protégé Rick, The Strolling Useless‘s Josh McDermitt and One Tree Hill alum Bryan Greenberg are sidelined too quickly by a serious plot twist that turns Ted from L.A.’s prime canine to underdog. Lex Scott Davis embodies the least enviable function, as Erica, Rick’s competitors for head of the agency’s leisure division, regardless of the absurd indisputable fact that she has no obvious grasp of movie or TV historical past. It’s revealed she is even clueless about Cheers. On an NBC sequence? For disgrace.
Missing the fake-lawyer hook that made the unique Fits stand out, Fits LA tries to conjure drama by depicting Ted making a reluctant pivot to a sort of regulation he despises, with Kevin Weisman (Alias) his exasperatingly sketchy consumer. Efficient cameos by real-life celebs, together with the late John Amos (in a poignant cameo) and The Workplace‘s Brian Baumgartner as variations of themselves, recommend the sequence may need been higher suited, so to talk, if it had stayed true to the creator’s unique intent of constructing a sequence round Hollywood brokers.
SEEDS OF INTRIGUE: Inexperienced thumbs are muddied by the sticky fingers of scandal in Grosse Pointe Backyard Society, an enjoyably seriocomic melodrama that provides off Huge Little Lies vibes from the opening scene, when 4 members of a hoity-toity Michigan backyard membership frantically bury a physique beneath the moonlight. However whose is it?
That’s the sudsy premise, because the baroque plotting seeded with gardening metaphors provides every of the primary characters an adversary price placing six toes beneath. The newcomer to the group, wacky and narcissistic Birdie (Brooklyn 9-9‘s Melissa Fumero), is a camp bouquet of ridiculous extra, upsetting the pure steadiness established by winsome schoolteacher Alice (AnnaSophia Robb), her divorced finest good friend Brett (Ben Rappaport), and high-end realtor Catherine (Aja Naomi King).
They’re unlikely conspirators in a messy cover-up that, if uncovered, might trigger them damage of their snooty suburb. In case you pine for the times when ABC’s Determined Housewives dominated on Sundays, that is your present.
Fits LA, Sequence Premiere, Sunday, February 23, 9/8c, NBC (two and a half stars)
Grosse Pointe Backyard Society, Sequence Premiere, Sunday, February 23, 10/9c, NBC (three and a half stars)