Have you caught any of the new shows so far?  Last week I saw a few.

Berta and I watched Supernatural, and I talked to the guys on Saturday night about it. The show is about two brothers whose mother was immolated in a supernatural event when they were young.  Their father has apparently been hunting down supernatural things ever since, sometimes with their help.  The younger of the two brothers goes to college and is doing well outside of this life when his brother shows up and says that their dad has gone missing for an unusually long length of time.  Certain events unfold, and the two of them head out on a mission to find their dad.

The guys and I feel basically the same way.  The first show came off a little flat.  There were also some strange inconsistencies that I hope don't permeate the whole show.  For example,  did the one brother really expect to get away with showing a fake ID to the police and claiming he was with the FBI?  I hope that doesn't become a cliche, like it's his "special power" - impersonating authority.

It's been a long summer, and maybe I'm just expecting a little more from my TV than a good idea handed to $5/episode writers.  That's what I feel like I'm getting.  But what else does TV have to offer this season?  Let's see...

Bones isn't a bad show, but it has to hit its stride before it feels right.  It's got David Boreanaz from Angel, which is ok, but I don't feel the play between his character and Emily Deschanel's.  They're trying to exploit energy between the two of them, when I don't feel it.

The show is about an FBI agent who taps an anthropologist to help solve crimes by examining the dead bodies.  I wonder if in real life this would happen.  Probably not. 

The stories don't seem quite there yet, either.  I think letting the writers settle into a motif might help the show form itself.  Right now, it doesn't know if it's a very focused CSI or something else much more interesting.  I hope for the latter, of course.

Prison Break seemed a lot more interesting before I realized that I had missed the first episode.  One of the things that had impressed me most about it is that it dropped you right into the action without explicitly telling you exactly what was going on.  Of course, I missed the episode where they did exactly that.

Prison can't possibly be so easy to escape from.  One of the more interesting aspects of this show is that eventually it will end.  I mean, either he escapes from prison or he doesn't.  How many seasons can they possibly drag us through waiting for his escape to happen?  I like the idea of a finite story.  I think viewers would be pleased to have something concrete and complete to watch instead of the endless same-old-thing.

Still, I wish they spent a little more time on the tattoos.  He's got a whole body covered with them, it seems, so that's plenty of mysterious fodder to play with.

Threshold is a story about a woman who makes a profession out of writing up worst-case scenarios for the government.  And then aliens come to visit.

I admit that the aliens are kind of neat, and the idea of such a troubleshooter or "red team" sounds very interesting, but I'm not really impressed with this show outside of its obvious special effects budget.  One thing that really annoys me is when TV or movie writers latch onto a scientifically-sound idea mentally, and then they pervert and twist it either through their writing or the producer's implementation of the effects so that it's not science any more but fantasy.

Particularly with computers, I'm not easily able to suspend my disbelief.  Besides that, it's so easy to find weird and unexplained science to exploit so that the show is realistic, or to have supernatural forces at work so that the explanation is "you can't comprehend it", that there really isn't an excuse for a show to pervert science like that.

Anyhow, I don't know if the suspense and special effects will keep up with the pilot, and if they don't there really isn't a good reason to watch the show.  I'm getting to the point where I'm tired of shows leading me on by offering one weird unsolved thing after the next (see also: Lost).

I guess we'll get some of the returning shows tonight besides Gilmore Girls, which also wasn't stellar.  It's bugging me that Lorelai and Rory aren't speaking, and that I can't understand Emily's motivations.  Sometimes I think they want you to think that Emily just thinks differently than the common Lorelai, but other times she acts completely crazy, which really doesn't make sense to me for her character. 

So what's on TV tonight?  Lost and Invasion.