The Cheatsheet – 5 New Fall TV Shows that Make the Grade

Every year the broadcast and cable companies throw lots of TV spaghetti at the walls to see what will stick. Most of it’s awful, but we found five shows that actually make the grade.

Each edition of The Cheatsheet is designed to help bring you up to speed on one tiny part of our popular culture - Books, Film, Music, Web, Television, and the general Zeitgeist.

Everyone’s so busy that keeping up can be difficult, and even if you think pop culture is a vast wasteland, sometimes it’s just nice to know what other people are doing. Be it the watercooler, a BBQ or a date The Cheatsheet is working hard for you.

Gone are the teased curls, the high camp and the slo-mo action, and in its place come darker tones, follicular and otherwise. This 2007 Jamie Sommers is re-imagined as a brooding bartender, who barely escapes with her life after a horrific car-crash. To save her she’s re-built with bionic parts – two legs, an arm, an ear and an eye - and reluctantly thrust into working for the company that performed her surgery, a covert security organization with a remit to save the world.

While adjusting to her new powers, our unwilling heroine also has to deal with another dark force, perhaps one of the darkest of all: her rebellious teenage sister. It’s a show to keep an eye on, Bionic or otherwise.
 
You’ll like this if you liked…. Alias, Dark Angel, and of course The Bionic Woman.
   
PRIVATE PRACTICE
ABC, Wednesdays, 9pm

Kate Walsh came to Grey’s Anatomy as Dr Addison Montgomery with one aim: to break Dr McDreamy’s heart, stay for five episodes, and split. Only when she broke the good Doctor’s heart, she won over the viewing audience, and 53 episodes later she was still wearing her scrubs.

Which is why producers have given her a spin-off of her own, in which the good doctor’s moved to Santa Monica to join a private practice. Promising all of the drama with none of the gory surgery, Private Practice catches up with Dr Montgomery after she’s fled Seattle Grace Hospital following a string of failed relationships.

Not that her new team promises to make life any less complicated; the cast of characters includes potential love interest/alternative medicine specialist Dr Pete Wilder (Tim Daly); the practice’s very own Dr Phil (Taye Diggs), a psychiatrist (Judging Amy’s Amy Brenneman), a fertility expert, sexed-up pediatrician and a male receptionist who’s studying to be a midwife.

The second of TiVo’s Top 50 hits, Practice is lighter and more mature than Grey’s, and looks set to be a spin-off that’s less Joey, and more Frasier.
 
You’ll like this if you liked… Grey’s Anatomy, ER, House.