I have a comment on a ...
Question: I have a comment on a topic that I've never seen you address, and I could be the only one who feels this way. With so many new shows in the fall, it's really hard sometimes to keep them all straight, and the names of the shows often make this more difficult. They're not very distinctive! Last season, there were three sci-fi shows premiering, and they all had one-word names:
Invasion,
Threshold and
Surface. I could never keep straight which one was on which network, and even though I had read your reviews and knew that you endorsed one especially, I could never remember which one. For this coming fall I've counted eight new series with one-word titles, and none of them are very distinguishable (
Vanished, Standoff, Justice, Smith, Jericho, Shark, Traveler, Kidnapped). Just a note to the networks: If I need a visual aid to remember which shows I want to check out, I'm not likely to watch — unless they become hits and the name is repeated enough to remind me. Not a very good strategy for any of those shows. For as much as its title was ridiculed,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer never had this particular problem! Thanks for letting me vent.
Answer: It's an excellent point, although as you point out, if any of these shows connect with the public, what now seems like a generic title will enter the vernacular in such a way that we won't see it like that any longer. A simple title can look genius in retrospect:
24.
ER.
House.
Survivor.
Friends.
Seinfeld. Best not to judge a show by its title, but you're absolutely right that it looked like the networks hardly even tried to come up with catchy ones this year. (I've seen the pilot, and I'm still trying to figure out why CBS called its show about thieves
Smith.)
