Grade:  C +

God, the WB lives.  Its teen-centric programming philosophy rises again in the form of Gossip Girl, a nighttime soap (based on a YA book series) about fabulously rich New York City teenagers who don’t get along, or have just met.  The hive’s former queen is Serena Van Der Woodsen, a (reformed?) bad girl who ran away to boarding school in Connecticut after sleeping with:  Nate, the boyfriend since kindergarten of Serena’s (now ex-) best friend:  Blair, the crowd’s reigning queen who is possibly opening her orbit to include:  Jen, the school’s new girl, daughter of a grunge-era rocker, and sister to:  Dan, who gets a crush on Serena at first sight.  Also featured:  Chuck.  Every show about high school has an obligatory psychotic jackass.  He’s this one’s.

The hook of this show is Gossip Girl, a faceless, nameless blogger who chronicles the main characters’ angst and posturing.  Gossip Girl is voiced by Veronica Mars herself, Kristen Bell, which is why I bothered tuning in, and now I can knowledgeably say it:  Bell’s talents are wasted here.  Gossip Girl had maybe ten lines, and though Bell gave it her all (check out her intonation on the show’s title if you care), it’s still barely a legitimate paycheck.

The rest of the show is just 09ers being 09ers, and though the writers try to give them some depth, I keep thinking of Paris Hilton.  Gossip Girl would probably be more interesting if its characters were in their twenties—a little more mature, capable of greater responsibility, and part of a social circle that didn’t exist just because they all went to the same school.  There’s some serious stuff here, including a sibling’s attempted suicide and not one but two near-rapes, but it’s all safely ensconced within the realm of spoiled-teen melodrama.  I like the idea of Gossip Girl’s meticulously blogging each power clash and petty victory as if they were regional defense pacts, but I’d like it more if those victories had consequences beyond a better seat at the lunch table.  Pass.

Grade:  B

I hardly needed to watch Back to You to know what I thought.  Assembled on set from parts made elsewhere, this is the sitcom that unites Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as themselves…I mean, as a pompous local-news anchor who returns to his old station in disgrace, and a brittle local-news anchor who doesn’t like having her turf invaded.  (Respectively.)  The marketing pitch was probably “You know what you’re getting into.”

I was surprised, though, that I liked it.  Or at least I was entertained.  It’s kind of like Ron Howard’s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code:  though it’s not very original and a lot of it is preposterous, it moves along with confidence and efficiency.  I could see the jokes coming about ten seconds ahead of delivery, but the fact that they always arrived on cue was impressive by itself.

Maybe I’ve just lowered my standards since watching K-Ville.

Anyway, the twist, which producers apparently asked TV writers not to reveal ahead of time, is not that Grammer and Heaton—I’m not even going to bother with the names of their “characters”—had sex, but that their one-night stand bore fruit in the form of a daughter.  I caught this one ten seconds ahead of delivery, but really, that’s slow on the uptake.  What else could it have been?  The chemistry that local-news anchors are required to feign with each other was always going to be the motherlode for this show, so it’s not surprising that Back to You wants to literalize that chemistry in the form of a moppet.  Grammer (or at least his character) meets the girl for the first time on the day of his return broadcast, and it looks like the revelation throws him for a loop.

It’s nice that Back to You wants to show the softer side of its unpleasant leads.  On the other hand—well, I’m with Entertainment Weekly:  there’s so much to be said about local-news hell that I’d rather the show skip the well-trod avenues of parental travails.  Still, the fact that I want this show to do anything at all besides leave the air as soon as possible?  A bit of a surprise.  Not a replacement Veronica Mars—oh, hell no—but if it makes it to syndication, I’d admit to watching an episode here and there.

Grade: C -

Now that Veronica Mars is off the air, I have to rebuild my TV-viewing slate from scratch. What better way to do that than sampling all of this fall’s new series? And what better way to alleviate my pain—because, come on, most of those shows are going to suck—than by warning other hapless viewers away from the networks’ lesser offerings?

First up is K-Ville. Premiering September 17 on Fox, this procedural (strike one! Like we need to see any more from that genre) concerns the efforts of the New Orleans police to maintain law and order post-Katrina. Marlin Boulet (Anthony Anderson) saw his partner Charlie Pratt (Derek Webster) run off amid rescue efforts, and his wife and daughter decamp to Atlanta in the midst of rebuilding. Boulet is out to clean up his city, he’s determined to win his wife back, and he won’t let his new, attitudinal partner Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser) or overbearing supervisor (John Carroll Lynch) slow him down.

If I could select one police procedural to represent that television genre to aliens from another galaxy…K-Ville would not be it. New Orleans circa 2007 is a topic that could carry a show on its own—no he’s-a-cop-on-the-edge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-who-doesn’t-play-by-the-rules bullshit required—but the pilot is so packed with information that the city’s history, culture, and current state of devastation are relegated to references of comic-book depth. (Boulet really likes gumbo.) Jonathan Lisco, the show’s writer-creator, must have taken the crash-and-burn of last year’s serialized dramas to heart; he refuses to defer any information beyond hour’s end. This makes it hard to get invested in the characters. From the start, Boulet suspects Cobb of lying about his past; by episode’s end, Cobb’s past is revealed, and while I won’t spoil the surprise, I’ll bet we can count on him to deliver cynical one-liners and self-lacerating judgments, which I’d rather just supply myself. Anderson and Hauser are okay actors (probably), but the writing is so flat (and the direction so ADHD) that they can’t invest these guys with any depth; they’re reduced to marks-and-cue-cards acting, which is probably all that K-Ville wants of them anyway.

Really, K-Ville (it’s short for “Katrina-ville”) is less a procedural than a shoot-em-up, but the action is awful. In the first of two car chases, the show cuts directly from Boulet and Cobb, roaring down the street after the guy who shot Boulet’s neighbor, to the scene where they find the shooter’s vehicle crashed and overturned. The whole point of a car chase is to see the vehicles crash and overturn; if you don’t have the budget to do your crash right, spend it elsewhere. Like, try pretending you’re serious about your New Orleans setting and investing some script dollars accordingly. This isn’t a keeper.

Now that I work at home full-time, our cat, Hank, saves me a lot of eyestrain by standing directly in front of my laptop screen when I’m working, sort of a furry anti-glare coating on my life.

Sometimes, I try to work around him, stretching my neck up, up and resting my chin on his back, or leaning way off to the side, sliding out of my chair, still hanging on to the keyboard trying to type, before I snap out of it. Hey! I think. I have opposable thumbs and he doesn’t. Then I use those thumbs to operate the squirt bottle mechanism that never fails to sweep him off my desk. For at least thirty seconds or so.

I’ve read that cats and dogs can help improve your health, and owning a pet can help drop your cholesterol and blood pressure. With Hank, it seemed a simple enough equation. Work is stressful, so he keeps me from that stressor. Take it easy, he seems to say. Don’t work so hard. Here, I’ll stand right in front of your face, this will help you relax.

It’s really a wash, though, since his other pastime, lurking about and sinking his teeth into my feet, tends to raise my blood pressure a bit. Nothing like that surge of adrenaline from the bite of a sharp-toothed fiend to really wake you up and get you going in the morning.