In July, the fall TV season seems a million years off. The networks are mainly reruns and there’s nary a pumpkin spice latte in sight. Returning from San Diego Comic-Con — or your other summertime con of choice — do you sometimes wonder how you can stand the wait for all the premieres that were teased or screened?
Having spent the past couple of weeks finally watching all the new fall shows, we can now talk about what they looked like without con goggles. Some lived up to the hype and some didn’t. But do you think your experience was colored by what you saw this summer?
I first saw part one Archer’s “Heart of Archness,” three-episode series at SDCC, and now it holds a special place in my heart as one of my favorite episodes of that show. There’s one joke (about punching a shark in the friggin’ face) where I can almost hear the crowd in the Indigo Ballroom laugh every time.
Not all of our con experiences pan out that way. Apparently, in 2010, I thought a show called Effin with Tonight was pretty funny , but I don’t even remember it now. In 2014 I left the con with high hopes for Constantine and significantly lower ones for The Flash. So much for that assessment. My heart still breaks a little at the memory of the Locke & Key pilot, but was it as good as I remember? We’ll never know. *sniff*
Minority Report was teased pretty heavily at SDCC, with a screening of the first 20 minutes of episode 1. If you saw that, what stood out in your mind about it? What I remembered most vividly was the scene where an extra uses a tiny wrist drone to take a selfie. Although I remember the show seeming really good, what stuck with me was the technology, not the characters or the dialog or the story. I didn’t even remember that Fez from That 70s Show (Wilmer Valderamma) was in it, and that seemed like a pretty big deal at the time.
Both Minority Report and Blindspot, when splintered by commercials and viewed from the couch, felt more like a formulaic cop dramas that they did at first. Despite each show’s twist on the genre, it was hard to ignore the set up for a murder-of-the-week solved by a cop and an unlikely partner with suspect social skills.
When it comes to new shows, perhaps we’re just more invested in whether they succeed. Once something is a hit and millions of fans are on board, you want to say that you got in on the ground floor. The immersive Fear the Walking Dead experience, inside the church, was something to tweet home about. Now, with the added knowledge about how that setting fit into the show’s first episode, it made Baby Johnny Depp just a little more relatable feeling that we had seen inside his world.
It’s not all new shows we’ve been waiting for. Marvel screened a behind-the-scenes Agents of SHIELD video this summer where they did a comic bit about what character would die in season 3. Even though it was a joke, I’m now fixated on who has an unplanned trip to TAHITI coming up.
What about you? What did you see while you were sleep deprived and high on overpriced pizza and caffeine that now looks different?