What's Unavoidable, Unmissable and Uncovered This Fall

(3 of 6)

"It's not going to be a very good show tonight. And I think you should change the channel." That does not sound like an auspicious beginning for a TV series, but it's part of the opening scene of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a drama that aims to give late-night comedy the West Wing treatment. After Wes Mendell (Judd Hirsch), the producer of a sketch show (also called Studio 60), is forced to kill a controversial skit, he lets loose a live on-camera rant. "We're all being lobotomized," he says, "by this country's most influential medium." He is fired and replaced by two former Studio 60 writers (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford) with a history of painkiller and cocaine problems. Can they turn the show around while keeping their noses, so to speak, clean?

You would not expect a network to showcase a series whose premise is that broadcast TV needs to be saved. You would not expect that network to be NBC, which still airs Saturday Night Live. And finally you would not expect that network to debut a second show about a sketch-comedy series. (Tina Fey's comedy within a comedy, 30 Rock, debuts in October.) But when you're in fourth place, you'll try anything--twice--and NBC and producers insist that Studio 60 is about not SNL but a fictional lame sketch show. Studio 60 is from West Wing producers Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme, and the show's style is West Coast Wing: the same banter, high-pressure setting and speechiness. But Hollywood-insider stories are a notoriously tough sell to big TV audiences, which may have a hard time granting censors and ratings wars the same earnest dramatic weight as terrorists and shooting wars. What may interest viewers more are the show's real-life parallels. Perry had a Vicodin problem while starring in Friends, and Sorkin has had well-publicized drug issues and network run-ins. (He left Wing in 2003 after problems with production delays.) Now they're doing a show that says talent can redeem a checkered past. Let's see if their lives can imitate their art.

Rockin' Robbery: It's a Gas, Gas, Gas UNMISSABLE

This sitcom about a band of down-and-outers planning to burglarize the Rolling Stones' front man used to be called, with Snakes on a Plane directness, Let's Rob Mick Jagger. The folks at ABC changed the title to Let's Rob ..., then to the head-scratching The Knights of Prosperity. At some point, one suspects, they will redub it Please Don't Watch This Sitcom, but don't listen to them. This blue-collar heist comedy is a riot by any name.

Eugene Gurkin (Donal Logue) is a janitor with a big ambition. All right, a medium-size one: to open a bar whose signature drink would be the gin Eugene, "a pint glass of nice, cheap room-temperature gin." Lacking the start-up scratch for his business, he hatches a plan when he sees Jagger, who will do cameos throughout the series, on an E! celebrity-home show. He recruits a motley band of burglars--including a lawyer turned cabbie, a security guard and a bombshell waitress with a shady past--and christens them the Knights of the title. "Issue one," says one of his recruits. "That name sucks."