the class

And then there was one. Now that CBS has picked up Jericho and Shark for full seasons, and canceled Smith, they are left with just one more new show to make a decision on. The Class hasn't made the decision easy. They had a slow start that led to the shuffling of timeslots in the Monday comedy block. While the show has performed better since it started following How I Met Your Mother, it's not quite good enough to get picked up, yet. CBS has ordered four more scripts for the show which gives it a little more time to impress.

I'd like to see the show get a full season. After a pilot that I didn't think was very good at all, the show has really turned a corner. The Duncan/Nicole part of the story is a little dull at times, but the rest of the pairings are working out well. Lizzy Caplan (Kat) is fantastic, while Sean Maguire (Kyle) and Cristian de la Fuente (Aaron) have had some of the funniest scenes in the show. I've even been pulled in to the strange Richie's wife plot. My guess is that the show will eventually make it to a full season.

(S01E06) For a fleeting second, I thought The Class was just going to concentrate on two stories this week. For the first act, it looked like all we'd see was Richie, Duncan and Yonk in Atlantic City and Holly's adventures at the petting zoo. Yes, one of the storylines would be a Holly storyline, but I was glad that the writers decided to smarten up and rotate out one storyline per week, leaving more room for silly things like effective jokes and character development.

But then I saw Lina in an FDR costume and Kat being Kat, and I just went, "oh crap."

Well, this is very good news.

Heroes, the surprise NBC hit (and I say "surprise" not based on quality - it's very good - just based on how most networks succeed with sci-fi, especially on Monday nights), beat CSI: Miami last night in the all-important 18-49 demographic. CSI: Miami was a close second.

I'm not a fan of the CSI shows - any of them - so I'm really happy about this. And it's not like Heroes is a sub-par show. Somehow, NBC is doing a comic book show right on the money. It feels and looks like a comic book, but also has characters and situations that are a lot deeper than you usually see in a show like this. Each plot is kicking along on all cylinders; there are no dead spots on the show, though I'd like to see more of Greg Grunberg.

Deal Or No Deal did really well, Studio 60 so-so again, and the CBS comedies were strong as well.

(S01E05) This review is not going to be pretty, boys and girls, because I'm starting to lose my patience with The Class. There's too many stories and not enough laughs. Right now, the only storyline that has any redeeming qualities, the constant efforts of Kat to bring Ethan out of his nice guy shell, really is just being used as a goofy side-story to all of the other, more emotional stories. But the problem is, those stories are becoming less entertaining by the week, and the "complications" that the writers are throwing in are just distractions.

(S01E04) This show is really shaping up to be a soap opera, isn't it? I mean, even the structure is the same: we spend a few minutes with one group, then we switch to another group. After a couple of more minutes we switch to another, and so on. It gets to the point where we see scenes during each of the four storylines during each act of the show. I'm not really sure this really works here, though; in this episode, we only get glimpses of each story, but not much else. Things don't move along as quickly as they should, and when you really want to follow one storyline -- like anything involving Richie -- an annoying storyline comes up and kills the momentum -- like anything involving Holly.

Beginning next week, CBS is swapping time slots for How I Met Your Mother and The Class. Instead of airing at 8 pm on Mondays, The Class will move to 8:30 and vice versa for Mother. The reason behind the swap is a bit of a no-brainer. How I Met Your Mother has 20% higher ratings than The Class, so CBS is going to use it as a lead-in and hope to keep its viewers for the new show.

In other CBS comedy news, the network has ordered a full season of The New Adventures of Old Christine. Initially, CBS committed to half a season but things are looking good for the Julia Louis-Dreyfus comedy so they've picking up the whole season.

*Wait! There's more! Cynopsis also reports that ABC has put Knights of Prosperity is on hold indefinitely. It was supposed to premiere on October 17th, now there's no air date. Knights is about a group of blue collar workers who decide to rob Mick Jagger. It can't be good when your show is bumped before it even airs. Yowza.

(S01E03) I saw a rough-cut version of this episode about a week ago; it was so rough that the video time stamp was sitting not only in the corner of the screen, but in the corner of the TV picture Kyle and Aaron were watching. But no matter; the jokes were the same. It's sort of ironic that, in this episode, the storyline that had the least amount of plot -- Kyle and Aaron watching Holly do one of those "poor schmuck reporter in a hurricane" reports -- had the most laughs. I mean, who didn't laugh when Holly got knocked cold by a stop sign?

Anyway, the rest of the episode shows that The Class is going in a funny direction. It also shows that it's willing to take some time and figure out which stories work and which don't.

I tend to have very little patience with new television programs. I usually give them two or three episodes and then I tune out. I did that for Desperate Housewives during season one and I still don't regret canceling my Season Pass to that show. And now, this fall, I am doing it once again. I get all giddy over new shows that I think have a great premise, and then I get bored quickly. Apparently I can't handle more than 5 seconds of bad television. Here are The Five: New shows that are already getting old:

(S01E02) For those of you who were trying to figure out how eight relative strangers, thrown together in a kind of a convoluted fashion, was going to constitute a sitcom, this episode shows you what the formula is going to be.

And what is that formula? Three parallel storylines that are not designed to intersect for some time in the future. You've got sappy Ethan's brewing friendship with the cynical Kat and Richie's accident-prone flirtation with Kat's twin Lina (how convenient is it that Kat and Lina are twins? That ensures that two of the pairs of strangers will stay connected); you have Nicole and Duncan's affair; and you have Kyle and Holly, who are still rebuilding their friendship after he came out of the closet at their prom ten years ago.

(S01E01) I'm not going to put a full review of The Class's pilot here, since I did one last week in an "early look" post. But I'll just tell you one thing: hold on. Like I said in the early review, the pilot is underwhelming, mainly because trying to establish relationships between eight unrelated characters in the span of 22 minutes is next to impossible. But based on the second and thrid episodes, these relationships will get stronger (and they won't try to intermix all eight people for now; individual storylines will develop, which you can see happening in the pilot); I genuinely laughed out loud a number of times during the second and third episodes, which is the hallmark of a comedy I'll stick with.

Anwyay, if you want more info on the show, look at the early review. Full reviews will return starting with episode two.

Every fall, I look at the TV schedule in front of me, and I think that between new shows and returning shows, I'll never have enough time to watch everything. But when push comes to shove, there are shows that, no matter how good I think the pilot was or how good they look on paper, I'll just never, ever watch them. So, after the jump, you'll see the TV-watching schedule I'm going to try to keep this fall. It still has gaps, because there are places where there isn't anything that's compelling enough for me to make an appointment to watch; maybe something will catch my eye there, or maybe I'll just watch my Seinfeld DVDs. Not sure.

By the way, I'm not including late-night shows. Let's just say I'll be watching The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Letterman, and Craig or Conan (whoever's funnier), and SNL if they get their shit together. Oh, and when Scrubs comes back, that show will be slotted into the schedule, wherever NBC decides to put it.

When I previewed rough-cut pilot of The Class (premieres Monday, Sept. 18 at 8 PM ET) back in June, I had my doubts about whether the loose association of the characters in the show would be able to withstand the rigors of a long-term series. The finished pilot didn't change my mind. But CBS was nice enough to include the second episode on the same screener as the pilot, and I'll tell you this: the show has potential. It seems an especially good companion for How I Met Your Mother, which it will preceed on Mondays, since both cater to the same late-20s crowd. But The Class does so without the cutsiness that can sometimes seep into HIMYM.