Vengeance... diminished: K-ville Cancellation Watch

I was all set to dive into the new TV season with a bunch of new posts on everything and anything happening between the hours of 8pm and 11pm EST. Then I watched the K-ville premiere last Tuesday, fell asleep, and subsequently could not think of anything interesting to say about it. It's about cops and robbers, I think. I honestly don't remember anything about the bad guys. A woman got shot, and the shooting was politically motivated maybe? Oh, who cares.

It's about race because it takes place in New Orleans post-Katrina and the two leads are a black guy and a white guy. And it's scored with heavy rap music. Except the show has nothing interesting to say about race, or poverty, or crime, or New Orleans... Basically, everything The Wire does well, K-ville does with merely mediocre competence. The highlight of the premiere was some ridiculous and climactic helicopter sequence. And that's only because at this point I realized this show had no point, and I could safely pass out.

Cancellation Watch: I'm going to give it until mid-season, even though it doesn't deserve it. But it's on Monday, and FOX won't have anything to replace it with. It's up against Heroes, but I actually think that might help it. Heroes is confusing for people who don't watch it regularly (see my upcoming post on watching Heroes for the first time). For those people, a conventional cop show masquerading as an cop show with a twist will be sufficiently distracting. This is why Law & Order lives on (albeit in a limping, sad little way) and NCIS is a top rated show.