New on TV Roundup

Quickish hits on three news shows I've been/just started watching.

Alcatraz is the one that most fits my interests. In 1963, the prison closed and the prisoners were transfered... except they weren't. They've been showing up in the present day - at the behest of whom it's not known - and doing the sorts of things that got them sent to the Rock in the first place.

Set against them is an unlikely pairing of a San Francisco cop and a comic book store-owning Ph.D. who is an expert on Alacatraz. They work, nominally, for a secretive federal agent who heads up a group that apparently expected the inmates to return and has been working to find them. He also has an assistant who appears to have also been a psychologist attached to the prison at the time of the vanishings. Confused yet?

For all the time traveling and whatnot, the show itself isn't that hard to sort out. The plots are split into the current time and an early '60s timeline when the prisoners were still in prison. That timeline includes appearances by the warden, a deputy warden (who didn't jump) and the prison doctor (who apparently did). Conceptually it makes sense, but in practice I think it's limiting, as the current day plot lines all seem to end out of the blue. Better that than a lot of exposition, I suppose.

Decent cast - Sam Neill plays the fed, Jorge Garcia gives us Lost fans a fix as the Ph.D., Parminder Nagra as the shrink, and Robert Forster as the cop's "uncle" - but they don't have enough to work with.

Ratings have been meh, and Fox is cranking through episodes in a way that guarantees it won't air during May sweeps. Still, now that House and Terra Nova are gone, there's a pretty large hole to plug on Mondays.

Theoretically, that hole could also be plugged by Touch, which was previewed a while ago and will start to air regularly later this month. It's the story of a man (played by Kiefer Sutherland) who has to parse the number-based clues brought to light by his son (who is autistic, or who has a condition similar to autism, it's still being sorted out). In the preview episode it led Keifer to delay a man from boarding a bus, which allowed him to be on site to save a bunch of kids from dying on a burning bus (it also turns out the guy used to be a fire fighter, and he had some sort of interaction with Keifer's wife, a 9/11 victim, on that day).

If this all sounds vaguely one-worldy mystical, it's because the show is from the mind of Tim Kring, who took a similar look using people with superpowers on Heroes. This isn't that sort of show at all, but there's a similarity of tone and feel, from the subplot involving a cell phone to the somewhat self-important opening narration (which is still light years less annoying than what Heroes used to throw at us).

Hard to say where this is going based on one episode, but without more substance to balance out the show's main gimmick I don't think it'll do well long-term.

Finally, I finally watched the first episode of Smash, NBC's Broadway drama, and I was pleasantly surprised. It has a good cast used well, from Debra Messing's slightly neurotic show writer to Anjelica Huston's imperious producer. The show also helps makes cosmic sense of Katherine McPhee's loss to Taylor Hicks on American Idol all those years ago. She plays the ingenue who is up for the lead in a new musical about Marilyn Monroe, squaring off against the long-time chorus girl played by Megan Hilty (a Broadway lead in her own right).

All of the characters fill some sort of stereotypical role, such as the lecherous but brilliant director and the alternatively supportive and put-upon husband, but the acting and writing is good enough to keep things fresh. I am not looking forward to the inevitable clashes from the adoption Messing's character and her husband are trying to finalize, though. I'd much prefer some garden-variety cheating.

A strong premiere has given way to middling ratings, it's getting some help now by airing right after The Voice. Even with average numbers, Smash benefits from airing on NBC, which has great yawning chasms on its schedule, especially where drama is concerned. And based on some of the pilots NBC is working with (including an hour-long dramatic take on The Munsters and a show which appears to be based on the educational computer game Oregon Trail), you'd have to think Smash will be back. I just hope NBC doesn't try to push it as their big hit drama. The show's not strong enough for that. It really needs to be treated as the sort of solid show that NBC can build upon. God knows they have a lot of building to do.