TV is the New Reading

Don’t call it a comeback: ‘October Road,’ ‘Notes From the Underbelly’ are least anticipated fall returns

I’m not going to spend another column discussing why “October Road” is a disappointing show – especially when a couple few paragraphs will do it.

Last year’s coming-of-age wish-fulfillment “drama” explored the lives of the people who talent and relevance forgot when a “writer” went on a two-week vacation to New York following graduation and then never came back to his hometown once in the course of 10 years.

Instead, he wrote a “wildly successful novel” that unloaded two barrels of snob on everyone he grew up with. Then – what luck! – he finds himself not only visiting, but (heck, why not?) living and working once again in Podunk, Noplace.

People who didn’t like him then don’t like him now, and what friends he has left are pointless schlubs who may or may not have left the house since he left 10 years before. And his girlfriend from back in the day turns up with a 10-year-old child who she says – gasp! – isn’t his! (what are the odds?)

Everyone’s sort of ambivalent toward him, but oh, that charm and personal charisma he’s got oozing out his every pore makes him so irresistible that people are just drawn to him and forgiving him his towering stupidity and they’ve stopped beating him up in bars and some are even considering leaving their husbands for — wait for it ... other people — because that’s just how compelling he is.

It’s quite clear the writer of this show, at least, finds a certain resonance with this character. One imagines a lot of hometown wedgies and the routine theft of his lunch money and some “I’ll show them” teeth-grinding through the writing process.

‘Underbelly’

I don’t need to spend all my time on this unwatchable show because ABC has paired it with another failed attempt at humor, “Notes From the Underbelly,” a situation comedy that focuses on pregnancy. Yep, all the fun and foibles of pregnancy. Yessiree, that shrill gestational jesting just keeps a-flowin’ through zany madcap ...

Y’know, there’s a reason both of these shows vanished from the grid last season entirely without notice or fanfare. They weren’t good. Everyone knew it. And no one was watching them.

Their fateful reappearance now – regardless of how many “Record this!” icons TVGUIDE throws at them – can only signal that ABC execs at least believe that writers’ strike is going to last a while and they want to save at least a few episodes of acceptable programming for when their real shows come off winter hiatus.

And for the three or four dozen people altogether who started secretly cutting themselves when “October Road” and “Notes From the Underbelly” went off the air, you can ... stop now.

“October Road” returns today at 9 p.m. on ABC and assumes its regular timeslot behind “Underbelly’s” “second season premiere” at 8:30 p.m. on Monday.

And good programming may resume in those timeslots when the writers resume their work, perhaps as early as next year.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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