As it has every other year, the arrival of fall also sig­nals the arrival of new tv shows and new sea­sons of old favorites. This year, I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal about start­ing to watch any new shows. Last year, I watched two shows on NBC, Wind­fall and Kid­napped, and both were can­celed sud­denly. I was pretty frus­trated, because I liked them both and just when I was start­ing to fig­ure out who all the char­ac­ters were, the shows sud­denly disappeared.

From the pre­views, I thought that Life looked pretty good, but once it came on, I just wasn’t inter­ested. I “watched” a few episodes while I was asleep on the couch with A. The con­cept of the show is that the main char­ac­ter was a police­man who was framed for mul­ti­ple mur­ders. He went to jail for twelve years, and he was some­how found to be inno­cent while he was in jail. Now he’s out, and he’s a cop again even though he has a multi-million dol­lar set­tle­ment (I think). In between his cases, he is try­ing to fig­ure out who framed him, and every­one he knows is some­how involved. Not a bad premise, but I just couldn’t get into it. I still have four episodes on my TiVo, because I want to like the show, but I don’t really.

Also from the pre­views, I thought that Jour­ney­man looked a lit­tle lame and a lit­tle like Quan­tum Leap. When Life didn’t pan out as my great, new show of the sea­son, I decided to give Jour­ney­man a try. Sur­pris­ingly, I liked it. It’s a bit deeper than Quan­tum Leap in that not only is he a time trav­eler with mis­sions to com­plete and peo­ple to save, there is also quite a bit of story line revolv­ing around his fam­ily and how his time travel affects them.

I’m also lik­ing the show Push­ing Dasies about a man who is able to bring peo­ple back from the dead. The idea behind the show is a bit cooky, and so are the char­ac­ters and the set­tings. I think that it’s one of those shows that you will either love or hate. My dad said that he tried to watch it, but he couldn’t get into it. I can under­stand that. Even though I think it’s a good show, I can see how its audi­ence could be limited.