Megorious

Wednesday night doesn’t look like much now but in a few weeks it will look a lot better.

ABC has yet another hour of Dancing with the Stars (that’s five hours total for those counting) followed by a two-hour David Blaine extravaganza. ABC’s real Wednesday night lineup of Pushing Daisies — last season’s best new show, Grey’s Anatomy spinoff Private Practice, and the (somewhat) promising Dirty Sexy Money does’t launch until Wednesday, October 1. All three shows had their first seasons cut short due to the writer’s strike, so ABC doesn’t know how they’ll preform or even if viewers will remember them.

CBS tries again to launch a second night of laughter with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in The New Adventures of Old Christine and Gary: Unmarried, a show about, you got it, a single guy called Gary. Following all the yucks, CBS has crime time with Criminal Minds and CSI: New York.

NBC apparently didn’t learn anything from the failed revival of Bionic Woman, hence their re-imagining of Knight Rider. Deal or No Deal returns in a couple of weeks but until then Jerry Springer insists America’s Got Talent. Capping off the night is the returning Lipstick Jungle. And no, it’s not a show about Sarah Palin.

FOX has new episodes of the underrated drama Bones followed by an hour of “comedy” with ‘Til Death and the new Jerry O’Connell bomb Do Not Disturb. Apparently the latter is so bad the producers have apologized to viewers and begged critics to give them a second chance “for being the perpetrators of such bad television.”

Sadly, Fox canceled last season’s promising Back to You just as it was starting to find its voice. Kelsey Grammer was so shocked by the news that he suffered a heart attack back in June.

The CW has America’s Next Top Model and more 90210.

I watched something last night that I haven’t watched in ages: a multi-camera, laugh-track tricked-out sitcom. Fox’s Back to You is a return to the roots of the kooky sitcom. All of the major networks, with the exception of CBS’ dreadful Monday night lineup, have single camera, laugh-track free comedies nowadays. While I still prefer the style of Arrested Development to that of Seinfeld, it was kind of nice to be prompted when to laugh, as long as they don’t go overboard with the canned laughter. I actually enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I even LOLed several times.

Back to You is not in the same league as The Office or 30 Rock but it does have considerable potential. It has a highly talented crew, both behind and in front of the camera, with Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, and Fred Williard as the standout performers. Most of the jokes were one-liners and many didn’t work, but it’s what did work that will make me tune in again. Towards the end of the pilot episode, after all of the kookiness subsided, there was a warm, heartfelt plot twist that possesses the greatest potential: Chuck Darling (Grammer) finds out that he is the father of Kelly Carr’s (Heaton) daughter.

I’m not going to say that Back to You is the next great sitcom, at this moment it isn’t even close, but if it shows improvement it could spark a resurgence of the classic TV sitcom template that has been fairly dormant for the last decade. As cheesy as those sitcoms were, the right one could have viewers tuning-in in droves. A lot of people in America love to be told what to do, even when it comes to laughing. C+