Fall TV: Sundays

Sunday night in the fall is Football Night in most households. At least, that is, the households who like watching grown men dressed in tight outfits run around like children chasing after a pigskin.

That does not leave much for the rest of us on network television, and Fall 2015 does not look like it will be any different on that front, although some networks not named NBC are giving it a fair shot.

With NBC otherwise occupied, and The CW not airing anything at all, CBS is playing it ultra-safe. They are brining back their low-rated but critically-valued slate of Madam Secretary and The Good Wife. Both dramas are at least partly political and bring affluent audiences to the network for an hour. I would have tried to keep up with MS last fall, but football overruns made its start times too unpredictable. Rounding out the night for the network is CSI: Cyber, the roundly criticized attempt to keep the CSI franchise going by giving it a more cloud-based hook that didn’t really work this spring but is coming back anyway.

Fox, too, is keeping its Spring schedule into the Fall. That gives us an evening of The Simpsons (still going strong well after its 25th anniversary), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (the adorkable cop comedy starring Andy Samberg), Family Guy, and Last Man on Earth. LMoE was funny at times, but grew increasingly formulaic and the protagonist highly infuriating – so the writers’ solution in the first season finale was to have him abandon the small colony of survivors he had created so he can be alone with Carol. Like New Girl this season, I don’t know how much of LMoE I can continue to watch next season.

Lastly, ABC and my favorite show of the night, Once Upon a Time. The serial drama involves fairytale characters who have a complicated family tree and periodically face outsider-villains against which they must band together. In its 5th season, it is expected that Emma Swan, the supposed Savior of this clan, will become The Dark One and possibly the season’s main villain now that Rumpelstiltskin is out of the job. Following that show is Blood & Oil, a drama about North Dakota’s oil boom, and Quantico, which I previously talked about back on TV Tuesdays. (Since I made the post, ABC announced a schedule switch, with Tuesdays at 10pm remaining vacant for now.)

Verdict

Continuing shows I will watch: Once Upon a Time, Brooklyn Nine Nine
Continuing shows I might watch: Last Man on Earth
New shows I might watch: Quantico