We watch... so you don't have to.
Upfront Quick Reaction: NBC
(
I am cautiously optimistic about 30 Rock (Tina Fey-created show about a thinly-disguised SNL backstage, with Alec Baldwin as a network executive and Tracy Morgan as a movie star, which is the part of the show that makes it fiction) and 20 Good Years (John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor as "mismatched buddies").
Kidnapped looks like a single episode of Without a Trace stretched out over a whole season. Well, it'll probably get cancelled before it gets a whole season, but you know what I mean. I like the idea of Heroes, but that's largely because I dig stupid sci-fi shows, and this one looks like it will be the perfect bridge between Deal or No Deal and Medium. And it's got Flying Adrian Pasdar!
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is the third show with digits in the title. Weird. It's also the second show about the "drama behind the humor of producing a popular, late-night comedy sketch show", so that's something. This one is by Aaron Sorkin, so I guess it'll be more dramatic than Tina Fey's (which is officially a "workplace comedy that takes viewers behind the scenes of a frenetic television variety show"). Normally when there are two shows with identical concepts, they're on different networks. I wonder if this means that the two fictional shows will be competitors, so Fey's showrunner (played by Fey) curses the show that's ahead of her in the ratings, she'll be talking about the show run by Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford.
For that matter, I guess Friday Night Lights and Sunday Night Football have similar focuses.
