This new show from Amy Sherman-Palladino, beloved as the creator of Gilmore Girls, forgotten as creator of The Return of Jezebel James, premieres June 11, but a sneak peek of episode 1.1 was briefly available online.

It begins by introducing a Las Vegas showgirl, Michelle, played by Tony winner Sutton Foster but soon takes us from the glam of the strip to a humdrum California town without so much as a movie theater.

You have to make a decision early on about whether you can sympathize with Michelle as a protagonist. She is introduced in a conversation where she and another scantily clad dancer trash talk the topless dancers. (It’s the old Showgirls conflict all over again.) So we’re taught that Michelle has some standards. Then she sidesteps a date with a backstage suitor, Hummel, played by Alan Ruck of Cameron Frye fame. So, still. Standards. She’s trying to make it into legit theatre — she has an audition for the musical Chicago. Staaannndards… okay. Then she gets turned down at the audition based solely on her looks — admittedly painful — and the next thing we know she’s getting drunk and marrying Cameron Frye. If you can accept that, you can continue on her journey.

Then we find ourselves in a dance studio, where young girls are executing their barre work to the barked commands of an unseen but stereotypical ballet instructor. If the instructor’s voice sounds familiar it will spoil the big reveal when you see who it is: the formidable Kelly Bishop. Her character is Emily Gilmore with more eye makeup and less money, i.e., she’s fabulous. Turns out she has a Broadway background, getting her break as Sheila in A Chorus Line in the 70s. Who knew?

Cameron (I’m just going to call him that) lives in a big, cluttered house in a small town on the ocean. He shows up with his new bride, who is dumbstruck to learn that he lives with his mother. ”Wait you live with your mother, like a serial killer?” (How Gilmore Girls is that line?)

Spoiler alert. The mother is Kelly Bishop. Her name is Fanny Flowers. (Ugh.) She runs the studio, which is behind her house. Somehow Michelle never noticed the dance studio sign beside the front walk. This is one of a few really annoying plot holes, like why didn’t Michelle pack any clothes when she moved to California?

Four young dancers are introduced, ala the four gymnasts in Make It or Break It. While all white, pretty and thin, they represent a range of body types, and in ballet, seemingly small differences can be a big deal. Natch, the most talented girl is mouthy and ungrateful; while the least accomplished one is plucky and tenacious. We’re set up to see Michelle become a friend and hero to these girls as they struggle with adolescence in general and double pirouettes en pointe in particular.

There are definitely shades of Gilmore throughout. Michelle sounds a lot like Lorelei when she snaps at a waiter, “Keep ‘em coming was not a euphemism.”  Another gem, on hearing how her new mother-in-law quit dancing when she got pregnant: “How very turning point.” There’s a self-referential layer, too, where Fanny continually points out Michelle’s ability to banter wittily.

The ending of the episode may take you by surprise and a show that can surprise is one worth hanging with for at least a couple of episodes. Hopefully there will be plenty of dancing, too. On Make It or Break It, the gymnastics is front and center, so I’m  hoping this show will do the same with ballet. Plus, there’s the Sherman-Palladino pedigree and some solid star power. (The most recognizable actor on M.I.O.B.I. was a former Full House cast member, for pete’s sake.)  Though I have to say, I’ve been involved with dance in some capacity for most of my life and I have never once heard of ballet dancers called “bunheads,” but I guess I’ll go with it.

Glee wouldn’t be the first show to start off strong and then squander audience goodwill in a sea of contrivances and guest stars (Chuck, anyone?) And actually, it is still hugely popular and considered a success by many measures. The cast has sold more records than The Beatles. Maybe I’m the only one who hates it. Well, I can’t be the only one, as evidenced by this blog, Glee Sucks. Yes, you really have to compare the Glee of the pilot to — let’s call it post-Gwyneth Glee — to appreciate the magnitude of its decline.

The pilot was no less than groundbreaking. It aired after the Superbowl, months before the show would officially premiere. It was so wacky and in-your-face and, dare I say, life-affirming. I still have the New Directions rendition of “Don’t Stop Believing” on my iPod.

Here are the top 5 (but by no means only) ways that Glee has let us down since its pilot:

1. Geekery. We don’t want cool geeks. We want geeky geeks. And geeky gleeks. The decision to put football players and cheerleaders in the glee club was good, because it set up tension between the two groups. But then they just became one homogenized, pretty blob complaining about how they’re such outcasts. Tina even lost her stutter. Because she was faking it. She was faking something that would make her an outcast. Then when she wanted it gone, voila! How are we supposed to sympathize with that?

2. Sue. She’s evil, she’s good, no wait she’s evil again, oh but her sister died, blah, blah, blah. They should have left her evil. Jane Lynch had some of the funniest lines in the pilot and shouted with a megaphone that this show was going to be different.

3. Hold on to 16… This is a problem inherent to any show about high school kids, that they grow up, but as a show’s creator you have to see this coming. At least That 70s Show had the foresight to stretch out each calendar year over a couple of seasons. The fact that the actors playing these kids were already in their 20s doesn’t help. But it’s not just how they look that strains belief. In the last episode I caught, Finn and Rachel were engaged. Please. We know these kids are drama queens but isn’t planning a wedding between homeroom and social studies a little over the top, even in Ohio? (I’m from Ohio, I can say that.) In the beginning the adults were there to entertain us with adult problems — marriage, divorce, infertility, career choices — that was all in there. We could leave it to the kids to focus on glee club, football, and cheerleading, making the show’s teen pregnancy a major deal.

4. Crazy Wife. I never remember her name, so I just think of her as Crazy Wife. The character of Will’s not-really-pregnant wife was freaking hilarious. She reminded us that neurosis is not the sovereign domain of teenagers. And the love triangle set up among Will, his wife, and Emma, was adorably compelling. No one wants to see a marriage fall apart, but we also wanted to see Will and Emma get together. They did… too fast. We could have savored the tension a lot longer.

5. Journey. Or rather, the lack thereof. Glee teased us with the promise of nostalgia-producing classic rock for the listening pleasure for those of us in the age range of McKinley’ High School’s teachers. Then it actually made fun of itself for doing Journey songs, like, “oh, ha ha, what were we thinking,” and made it seem like it was all Will’s fault for being a stodgy old guy that the kids weren’t winning competitions. But, ya know what? The KIDS picked “Don’t Stop Believing.” All on their own. Finn got the inspiration from the memory of his mom’s old boyfriend, a mullet-sporting metalhead from the 80s. Yeah, remember that? It was a great f-ing scene in the pilot. There was also a healthy dose of musical theatre music – seemingly important for a show that claims to support arts education. Over the ensuing weeks and months we were subjected to a set list ever more clogged with the likes of Beyonce, Celo Green, and Katy Perry. It’s like a jukebox for music that is already over-played and unoriginal. They’re even plugging Lady Gaga’s foundation.

And that’s what’s wrong with these kids today.

P.S. As much fun as it is to trash, I still have to hand it to Glee for trying to do some good in the world, speaking out about bullying, gay teenagers, and other issues that are normally glossed over, if they’re mentioned at all, on network TV. It has do doubt been a beacon of hope to a few outcasts out there…

What stands out most about this pilot is its somber tone and relatively slow pace. It’s actually a TV movie running almost two hours, similar to the Wonder Woman pilot of the same era. The pace is impossibly slow by today’s standards. There are long stretches with no dialogue at all and we meet only four major characters. Much effort has gone into creating a mood through visual effects and music.

David’s back story is relayed in a five-minute montage of him and his wife. Through a Vaseline lens we see shots of the couple living the Hallmark moments of their marriage until they are in a car crash. The car rolls over, David is thrown from it, then struggles helplessly to open the door and save his beloved wife from encroaching flames.

In the next scene a middle-aged woman tells her story, recounting almost the exact same events we have just watched. Her story, however, ends happily and heroically, as she summons super-human strength to free her young son from the car. By having the writers first show us the experience, then listening to this character tell us down to the smallest detail what we have just seen, we feel David’s frustration building. Why was this woman able to do what he couldn’t? His rising emotions provide the basis for the episode’s journey.

As David and his colleague Elaina (Susan Sullivan, aka Castle’s mom) continue to interview people who have performed incredible feats of strength in emergency situations, they look for connections. You have to put aside their superficial explanations of mitochondria and DNA and lightening fast research and go with them on the ride. This being two decades before the decoding of the genome, their observance of a DNA strand must have seemed impossibly cool if not plain impossible. The idea that they’re able to increase the magnification to the degree that they can catalog individual genes, all thanks to some resident genius’ tinkering with the equipment… well it’s best not to think about it. The researchers’ conclusion is that a combination of a genetic variation, a surge of adrenalin, and high gamma ray activity from the sun gives people super strength in times of need.

David’s next move is entirely unscientific, so we must try and appreciate what he’s going through emotionally — the grief, guilt, and frustration of losing his wife — to explain that he chooses to irradiate himself, alone at night in an empty lab. (He doesn’t even write anything down.) We all know what happens next. Pushed over the edge by a flat tire, David metamorphoses into a giant green Lou Ferrigno. He is mistaken for a monster by a little girl, whose life he ultimately saves, getting shot in the process. A the while, there’s a tabloid reporter, Jack McGee (Jack Colvin), sniffing around.

(On a side note, I can suspend disbelief and pretend the science makes sense. But why is he green? Even his hair is green. In the original comic, he was gray, but the color wouldn’t print consistently, so Stan Lee opted for green. I want an explanation for the greenness, however pseudo-scientific it has to be.)

David and Elaina set about trying to recreate the conditions of the transformation. Again their scientific method is anything but methodical. They sort of make it up as they go. David changes again and the main take-away this time is that, as the Hulk, he isn’t “evil.” He could crush Elaina like a bug but instead they share a sweet moment where she examines his wounded hand. I must say Elaina is pretty bad ass. Where most people would run screaming for cover, she maintains her committment to scientific observation, then concern at the realization that this creature is still a frightened human being. She’s both yin and yang — dispassionate researcher and compassionate friend.

In the end, the lab explodes, killing Elaina, and David, also presumed dead goes on the lam. Elaina has professed her love for David while he’s in Hulk form — and therefore he blacked it out — and now he admits he loved her, too. Why is this necessary? We were going along, suffering this guy’s emotional turmoil with him and can understand anyone’s pain at watching a trusted friend die a tragic death. The fact that they were in love doesn’t add anything to the story and, in fact, cheapens David’s relationship with his late wife. All this time, his drive has been about losing his wife and now, it seems, it will be about losing Elaina. I think it muddies the waters. Still, except for this one fault, the pilot is a thoughtfully told, engaging story, not about a super hero/villain, but about a guy on a journey. It’s decidedly non-campy for a comic book-based story. I think that The Avengers tapped into that tragic ethos in Dr. Banner, even amid a movie that was primarily fun and upbeat.

IMDB has a slew of fun facts on this show.

The pilot starts in media res, and why not, since the title tells us where we’re headed. The question is, will the show make us care about how we get there? After a brief voice-over from the heroine describing her girlhood sense of right and wrong, we’re thrust into the midst of a glamorous party at a Hamptons beach house where the uptrodden* are all dressed according to a theme — the women in red and the men in white — of “fire and ice.”

Like every show on ABC, this one is teeming with beautiful people in gorgeous clothes and impeccable hairstyles. So when, in the first few moments Emily has a tense exchange with a guy named Nolan (Gabriel Mann), we know he’s a bad guy, ’cause his hair is not impeccable. He’s kind of a Hampton’s hipster. “You shouldn’t be here,” Emily tells him. “That makes two of us,” he replies. The next thing we see is a person dragging a body from the ocean onto the beach. When a young, hot couple traipses down to the beach to get it on, they find the body and scream like everyone does when they find a body on TV.

We cut to a tight-faced Madeline Stowe growling to Emily, “Where the hell is my son?” Implication: the body is that of her son.

Then we flash back five months to when Emily first rented her sprawling beach cottage, and we get our first glimpse into her origin story. A flashback reveals a little girl named Amanda, spending the summer in the same cottage with her loving father. The father explains that he loves his daughter “infinity times infinity,” and illustrates with overlapping figure-8s in the sand.

“Infinity tines infinity”? To me that just sounds childish, as in “You’re a big slimy dork, no backsies, infinity times infinity.” But it’s going to be important.

As Emily moves into the cottage we meet her friend, Ashley (Ashley Madekwe), and a “new girl in town” trope ensues where Ashley fills Emily in about the local color. Emily’s neighbor is Victoria, “reigning queen of The Hamptons.” We meet her for ourselves soon enough, along with her husband (Henry Czerny), son and snarky teenage daughter. Emily’s landlady is Lydia (Amber Valletta), Victoria’s best friend.

Living parallel lives with the haves, of course, are the have-nots, a family running a rustic harbor-side cafe. The hipster tries to buy a boat named Amanda (remember that name?) from Have-not Jr. (Nick Wechsler)

The rest of the episode builds to at $10,000-a-ticket fundraiser that Victoria is hosting. In the run-up, Victoria’s husband sleeps with her best friend paving the way for party drama proportionate to the price of admission. Along the way a few more flashbacks help us connect the characters as they are today with the people they were when Emily was Amanda and the acts for which she is seeking her revenge. At the party there’s more of Ashley pointing people out to Emily and explaining who they are. It’s increasingly hinted that Emily already knows much more about this cast of characters than she is letting on.

This pilot is devoted more to painting an alluring picture than to making us care about the protagonist. For soap opera audiences, that might be okay. It promises plenty of ostentatious gowns, bitter rivalries, and vicious betrayals. That’s obviously what a lot of viewers want. I could have done with more character development. I don’t need Emily’s back story all spelled out – it’s more fun to have things unravel slowly — but I find myself wanting to know more about what kind of woman she is. Is she justified in her blood lust? I’m just assuming that she is responsible for the death of her finance in the opening scenes, but maybe that’s where the writers are misleading us. (I haven’t watched any further episodes.) For all I know, she actually loved the guy and had nothing to do with his murder. I guess the moral of The Count of Monte Cristo was that revenge doesn’t pay, but I don’t know how ABC feels on that issue.

If you want to see a fantastic show about a tough young woman avenging the wrongs done to her family, I recommend Veronica Mars, currently airing on SoapNet.

*I cannot take credit for this awesome term to describe the ridiculously rich and beautiful, the uptrodden. I got it from a dear friend, who got it from her late husband, a society and travel journalist based in Palm Beach–he knew from whence he spoke.

The pilot takes place over the course of a single day. (Is this a sit-com pilot trope? I’ll have to think about that.) It starts as many family sit-com pilots do, with the morning routine. Before heading off to school, the pint-size son harasses his teenaged sister, while their mother delivers a flaccid reprimand. As they head out, the husband, Al enters from upstairs dressed for work with a bandage on his hand. He’s injured and, in what will become an incessant theme, his problem is his wife Peg’s fault. She’s not accepting any blame, however, ferociously defending her right to do whatever the hell she wants.

We now know these two lovebirds as Katy Sagal (Futurama) and Ed O’Neill (Modern Family), the daughter played by Christina Applegate (most recently, Up All Night) and… some other guy. The actor playing the son is David Faustino, but his resume pales in comparison to his co-stars’.

Whatever you think of the show’s trite premise, you can see what was groundbreaking about it, and how it helped brand the Fox network as the rebellious alternative to the big 3. (That’s right kids, there were only 4 channels.)

It’s like they took all the regular 80s sit-coms — the Cosby Shows and the Family Ties — and boiled off all of the love and fatherly lessons and left just the parts where the families bitch and belittle each other.

The jokes aren’t exactly hilarious, though some of them are pretty unexpected for the time: “Sorry honey, I didn’t hear you. I was just thinking of killing myself.” There’s a helpful laugh track in case you need assistance with when to chortle.

Even adjusting for television comedy hyperbole, you have to wonder why these two characters are married. They are just awful to each other. And wasn’t this the 80s, the decade of divorce? Edgy as this may have been, it would have gotten old. Then, act 2 finds Al and Peg welcoming house guests. A newly married couple, Jeff and Marcy, living next door is coming over to hang. The jaded older couple immediately sets about corrupting this nice young lovebirds. (A later terrible Fox show, ‘Til Death, would stretch the juxtaposition of these two types of couples into 4 painful seasons.)

Peg doles out helpful advice like, “If they enjoy eating and drinking at home too much, they’re never gonna take you anywhere.” Al’s guidance for Jeff isn’t much different. And just like that, Al and Peg are brought together and there is something like love, even joy, between them. Without concern for whether their kids are out past curfew, they trot up the stairs to get busy. So there must have been just enough love there to keep people interested.

Then I realized, I have already blogged about enough Fox shows to keep the inhabitants of Omicron Persei 8 entertained until someone decides to reboot Single Female Lawyer. So, here’s a list in roughly chronological order. Some selections fit squarely into the “cancelled too soon” category while others, deservedly or not, continue to air. I’m up for suggestions as to others I should cover — just leave a comment.

21 Jump Street

The Simpsons and King of the Hill (covered in one handy post)

Beverly Hills 90210

The X Files

That ’70s Show (A partial cast reunion will be part of Fox’s anniversary special.)

Futurama

Titus

Firefly

John Doe

Wonderfalls

Bones

Fringe

New Amsterdam

Raising Hope

Bob’s Burgers

Breaking In

New Girl

The Finder

I also promise to review the Married…With Children pilot after Fox airs it on Sunday. I have never watched the show before, so it will be a true outsider’s view.

The writers want you to know right off that Awkward. is not like other teen shows. One of the protagonist, Jenna’s, first lines sounds like a direct dig at the soapy AMC Family hit, The Secret Life of the American Teenager: “This wasn’t the inciting incident of some sappy teen special about how I got knocked up on the last day of summer camp.” It does open with our heroine getting it on in a utility closet adjacent to a gym with a blue-eyed popular hunk of hormones. You can practically smell the Axe Body Spray.

Jenna doesn’t fit readily into a particular social group. She doesn’t consider herself one of the “dorks,” yet she explains that she’s felt invisible since getting her braces off. She certainly not one of the cool kids — who would want to watch a show like that — but the show isn’t jumping on the “hip to be geek” bandwagon, either. Like Angela Chase, she’s somewhere in the middle of the popularity bell curve. Her Jordan Catalano is Matty. She actually finds it attractive that he sniffs his own armpits. Like Jordan, Matty has no visible redeeming qualities. Apparently, as the season unfolded, a relationship between Jenna (Ashley Rickards) and Matty (Beau Mirchoff) actually began to take shape, but my reaction to him based on the pilot is, “um, no.”

The opening sex scene has only a tangental bearing on the plot of the episode, which is that Jenna has an accident that is mistaken for a suicide attempt. Just after receiving a mysterious, mean letter, and blogging about wanting to die (in the way that teenagers figuratively want to die everytime something embarassing transpires), she falls in the bathroom. In the process, she also spills a bunch of asprin and knocks a hairdryer into the full bathtub. It’s a highly memorable, if over-the-top scene, which could have made a much better opening than closet sex. Jenna returns to school with her arm in a truly awkward cast, which props her arm up in a permanent wave of greeting. A montage of mockumentary shots lets us know what all the kids are thinking about her. “That girl” has everyone talking about her mental instability.

The most bothersome elements of the episode were the cartoonish and unsympathetic portrayals of Jenna’s mom (Nikki Delaoch) and guidance counselor (Desi Lydic), both the people you hope would keep the teen characters grounded. The counselor is paricularly grating. Then it occurred to me, that is how teenagers see adults — as charicatures. So I’ll give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume that was their intention.

Conversely, I can’t help feel that these are Gen X writers trying to talk like they’re Millenials. Do today’s teenagers actually make Coke-and-Poprocks jokes? Do they even get the reference? That is just one example of funny but out-of-place bits.

As far as the teenagers, we get a pretty typical cast of characters — jocks, geeks, etc. There are some attempts at twists, like the Asian girl who doesn’t do well on standardized tests and the popular cheerleader who has anything but the cheerleader body-type.

Personally, I’ll take Freaks and Geeks or Veronica Mars, or even earlier, Growing Pains (as I would make the case that Angela Chase is a direct descendent of Carol Seaver). I even find Secret Life more watchable — in a train wreck sort of way — at least it appealed to Gen Xers with Molly Ringwald. But Awkward. has received plenty of critical acclaim and a loyal fanbase, and it was recently announced that it will return for a second season. So there you go. Teenage girls falling for cretinous boys will never get old.

Like Touch, Heroes involves unknown connections among seemingly disparate individuals in far-flung corners of the world, people with special abilities, even a young Indian man mourning the recent loss of his father. But Heroes is just bigger. It opens by addressing human potential, the possibility that we are standing on the precipice of the next stage of evolution. Even the title, “Genesis” hints that were in for an epic tale.

The pilot discloses only the first threads of what we immediately understand to be an expansive story. In case you don’t remember, in this first episode we meet, in this order, Peter (Milo Ventimiglia) and Simone (Tawny Cypress), Mohinder (Sendhil Ramamurthy), Niki (Ali Larter), Claire (Hayden Panetierre), Nathan (Adrian Pasdar), Hiro (Masi Oka), and Issac (Santiago Cabrera). Bennett (Jack Coleman) is also introduced, though he’s more of a device than a character at this point.

If you watch the deleted scenes or the unaired pilot on DVD, you’ll see that they originally planned to also introduce D.L. and Ted (a different version of Ted, played by a different actor) in the pilot as well. We don’t meet Matt until episode 2. But we have our plates pretty full with the pilot cast as it is. What’s fun, and no doubt spoke to the genre TV fan base, is that the guys are all pretty big dorks. Hiro is the most obvious fanboy with his constant references to Star Trek, who finds himself in the nerdgasmic position of starring in his own comic book. But Mohinder, Peter, Ando, and to a lesser extent Issac are pretty nerdy too. Even Claire, the beautiful cheerleader is revealed to be insecure and a little awkward.

It was nice that none of the actors were big stars already so we could form our own picture of them with no preconceptions. As everybody got more famous, their characters somehow got better looking, and they all got less real. But I could do a whole post — nay, a whole blog — on what went wrong with this show. I think Touch is going to be challenged by its casting of Jack Bauer. What worked better as a casting choice, Liam Neeson in The Phantom Menace, or unknown Mark Hammil in A New Hope? (Don’t even get me started on Samuel L. Jackson.)

Much of the pilot also revolves around a solar eclipse, which became iconic as part of the show’s logo, and had a feeble parallel in season 2 (or 3, I don’t actually remember. It was all a mush of Sylar dying and coming back to life every other episode.) The second eclipse took away the heroes’ powers, planting the idea that somehow the first eclipse gave them their powers. But this is ridiculous. Not only do we see them exercising their abilities before the eclipse even happens, but we are continuously reminded that genetic mutation underlies this type of “evolution,” and in fact, many of the characters inherited their powers from their parents.  In retrospect, the eclipse has no bearing on the plot of the pilot at all. It’s more of a symbolic visual suggesting that we are all infinitesimal beings sharing a common experience on this fragile planet. It’s poetic, even if it’s a stretch to think that a solar eclipse is visible in New York and Tokyo at the same time.

Although this is an ensemble cast in every sense, each episode finds its own protagonist and, in this one, it’s Peter. We begin and end with the emblematic shot of him standing at the edge of a rooftop, arms outstretched, ready to fly. Peter is trying to get off of the ground in more ways than one; he has grown up in the shadow of his successful older brother Nathan, and wants to know he has a purpose in life. The show opens with the question, can Peter really fly?, and ends with the answer. Apart from that semi-answered question, nothing but nothing is wrapped up neatly by the end of this thing. You can’t not watch the next episode, and the next. Touch, on the contrary, was wrapped up with a bow by the end of E1. I’m noticing that network television is moving in a more and more episodic direction, and I don’t like it. Do you?

TV Tropes has some good Heroes analysis, including the suggestion of a “This Will Not End Well” trope inspired by this show.

Mad Man chooses as its point of departure a critical juncture in Don’s career. It seems the public has caught on, thanks in part to Reader’s Digest, that cigarettes are bad for you. With Lucky Strike as a major client, nervous about this turning tide, Don has to step up his game, all while defending himself from a younger talent pool nipping at his impeccably polished heels. Although he’s on top of the advertising world, this one account could threaten his whole career.

Don seeks solace in the arms of a pretty young artist living in an urban studio apartment. The artist, Midge (Rosemarie DeWitt), gives us our first taste of how this primarily female writing team will draw women. She’s smart, makes her own living, and isn’t interested in committment.

Our first departure from Don’s story is to the first-day-on-the-job story of Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), the new secretary at the firm. (In a workplace pilot, it’s always somebody’s first day.) Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks, who I prefer to think of as “Our Mrs. Reynolds”) shows Peggy around, giving her and the audience the lay of the land.

The job of this pilot is to set the tone, to paint a picture of the business world as it functioned in 1960. It’s a man’s world of course. “Most of the time they’re looking for something between a mother and a waitress,” sings Joan.  While women may be taking a step forward by working and using birth control, most of them are defined in relationship to the men in their lives. Peggy goes to see her gynecologist on her lunch break, providing further context for a woman’s place in society… though scheduling a gyno exam on one’s first day of work just seems masochistic. It’s worse when the doctor says stuff like, “Easy women don’t find husbands.”

The writers miss no chance to wring laughs from the time period, referring to a typewriter and rotary dial phone as technology, for example. The signs of the times extend in more serious social issues, as well, including smoking , sexism, and anti-Semitism.

Key players in Don’s professional world are Roger Sterling (John Slattery) and Salvatore (Bryan Batt). Representing the younger generation are Ken (Aaron Staton), who’s just an asshole plain and simple, and Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) who tells his fiance “I’m giving up my life to be with you.”

There really is too much sexism to begin to document in one post. You could watch this pilot 5 times and still find new things to roll your eyes at. It’s enlightening to see Don chastise Pete for his disrespect of Peggy when he himself just introduced her as “the new girl,” sans name. Yet, somehow we know that these women are going to reveal a hidden strength.

Don has his most contentious run-in of the episode with a client who is not only a woman but Jewish –  not a demographic with which he is used to working. The owner of a department store, this shrewd businesswoman throws Don further off his game. She reappears later in the episode with a message-of-show type speech.

The show continuously hints at people’s hidden depths; that’s kind of the theme of the episode. When a psychologist explains to the ad men that people tend to naturally act in ways contrary to their own best interests (as with smoking), her report provides the spark for the episode’s climactic conflict.

At the very end, twists are revealed about several of the characters, some more unexpected than others. And we don’t feel too bad for the wounded tobacco industry. There are enough cigarettes being smoked on this show to keep them in business even in 2012.

Mad Men returns on AMC on March 25.

The pilot episode of Abed’s Master Key is only a precious minute and 56 seconds long, but to fans so long deprived of a meal, these are succulent little crumbs. The episode just gives us a quick look at all of the main characters–the study group and Dean Pelton–hanging out in their usual spot, the study room that has seen everything from a zombie uprising to some Jeff-Britta coitus.

The Dean gets the bulk of the lines. Although Jim Rash is a big Oscar-winning stud now, he’s probably not the character we want to hear the most out of. Abed‘s name is in the title, after all. The Dean entrusts Abed with a new unpaid job and a shiny key that looks like it may later prove to hold some kind of magical powers, and Abed himself looks rather elf-like. One would expect that an animated web series starring Abed would engender some element of fantasy–here’s hoping!

Each of the other characters only has about one line, but there’s just enough there to see that each is his or her same old self. All told, it’s maybe not as edgy as one would expect from the show that brought us a paint ball apocalypse. They go for a couple of really obvious jokes, (“You look extra animated this morning.”) and a reference to beer pong (kind of 2008) but who cares! It’s Community! Perhaps later we’ll run into Chang, Starburns, and the rest.

The existence of this new series excites me, and not just because we’ve been Greendale deprived. I’m gonna go out on a limb and predict that, if Community is cancelled after this season, as it very well might be, the animated series is already on deck to take its place. Since the convention in animated shows is that the characters don’t age, a show about a bunch of people going to community college could have a much longer and more believable shelf life than a live action show about seven losers. Just think, Abed, Troy and Annie could live together in an apartment with a blanket fort for a room for decades!