‘Reaper,’ 9/25: Remember those zippy, funny, butt-kicking fantasy shows that used to air on the old WB network, like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Charmed”? This is one of those shows, so “Buffy” fanatics, set your TiVos now. On his 21st birthday, a listless electronics-store drone named Sam (Bret Harrison) learns that his parents—oops—sold his soul to the Devil way back before he was born. Now Lucifer (Ray Wise, who played Laura Palmer’s killer dad on “Twin Peaks”) is here to collect, and he wants Sam to take on a second job as a kind of purgatorial bounty hunter: Sam’s task is to hunt down escapees from hell. “Reaper,” which will air on the CW, the channel created when the WB and UPN got smushed together, sounds like goofy teen fluff, but like “Buffy” before it, the show is stingingly funny and smarter than it appears.
‘Cane,’ 9/25: TV’s top network is desperate to be cool, not just popular—and “NCIS” is definitely not cool. So CBS’s new fall lineup is loaded with ambitious dramas, the best of which is this series about a Cuban-American family of rum magnates. Jimmy Smits is well cast as Alex Vega, the adopted son of Pancho Duque (Hector Elizondo) and the man charged with keeping the Duque empire rolling, no matter what it takes. Storytelling ambition is nice, but “Cane’s” biggest asset might be its drop-dead gorgeous, all-Latino cast. Even Rita Moreno looks hot, and she’s 75.
‘Journeyman,’ 9/24: This new NBC drama series about a man who travels through time, putting right what once went wrong, sounds a lot like “Quantum Leap,” NBC’s old drama series about the same thing. Only now, Scott Bakula has been replaced by Scotsman Kevin McKidd of HBO’s “Rome.” And with apologies to Bakula, McKidd is a marked improvement. You might even say a quantum leap.
‘Pushing Daisies,’ 10/3: Every year, TV critics join hands and fall in love with one pilot, usually something zany and visually arresting, something that screams “This is different! Look at me!” (The average life span of these shows, by the way, is about three episodes.) This year it’s ABC’s “Pushing Daisies,” a zany, visually arresting and, it must be said, quite adorable series about an unusually gifted man named Ned (Lee Pace), who can bring dead people back to life by touching them once—but a second touch kills them for good. He goes into business solving murders, and one of his first stiffs is his childhood sweetheart. He brings her back, they fall in love … and are doomed to a lifetime of unconsummated romance. Or maybe only three episodes.
‘Samantha Who?,’ 10/15: New sitcoms are so rare nowadays that the entire genre is applying for protection as an endangered species. But any savvy TV executive will tell you that viewers aren’t tired of sitcoms, they’re just tired of bad sitcoms. ABC’s “Samantha Who?"—which was originally titled “Sam I Am” until Dr. Seuss’s lawyers got wind of it—will put that theory to the test. This witty half-hour series stars Christina Applegate as a woman who wakes up from a coma with amnesia and gradually discovers that she’s actually a pretty rotten person.
‘Tin Man,’ 10/3: Typically, remakes are a cynical exercise in squeezing new money out of old tricks, but this six-hour mini-series—a wholesale reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz”—sounds like a fine idea. Why? For starters, the casting of criminally underused Zooey Deschanel as Dorothy, or “DG,” as she’s called in this version. The new Tin Man, played by Neal McDonough, is a bitter ex-cop who used to walk the beat in Oz. Also, the fact that “Tin Man” is on the Sci-Fi Channel—and not, say, Lifetime—suggests a bizarro take on a classic that’s sure to roil friends of Dorothy.
‘Back To You,’ 9/19: From “Mary Tyler Moore” to “Anchorman,” local TV news has always been an easy mark for laughs. The phony gravitas, the empty empathy, the chiseled helmets of moussed-up hair—it’s almost too easy. But not every sitcom needs to reinvent the form, and Fox’s “Back to You” is like comfort food: solid, dependable and built on ingredients that we already know we like. Sitcom titans Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton star as bickering co-anchors in Pittsburgh who are reunited behind the desk 10 years after Grammer’s Chuck Darling—no relation to the ABC clan, in case you were wondering—left town for bigger things and wound up crawling back home. We’d love to say it’s a show about humility, but let’s face it, in TV news, there’s no such thing.
‘Big Shots,’ 9/27: Everything that ABC got right with “Dirty Sexy Money”—its wit, its tone, its conceit—came out dreadfully wrong on “Big Shots,” the network’s other new series about the ultra-wealthy. Who thought a male version of “Sex and the City”—minus the sex, with a double scoop of the chitchat—was a good idea? And the biggest mystery of all: how did gifted TV actors Dylan McDermott and “Alias’s” Michael Vartan wind up diving into this Dumpster?
