How to Pick Which New TV Show to Watch Next Fall

ABC and NBC have both ordered up period-dramas set in the early sixties that deal with dashing men (the ultimate playboy, airline pilots) and women seeking — and to an extent getting — emancipation through objectification (Playboy bunnies, airline stewardesses). As with Mad Men, there’s plenty of period appropriate boozing, smoking, schtupping, political incorrectness, and costume changes, but because this is for network TV, both shows have been tricked out with some hokey plot twists. Watch The Playboy Club if … You want your Mad Men knockoff to come with a murder plot (and also to be so faithful it uses the same soundtrack, behind-the-head Draper shot of its leading man, and African-American Playboy bunny).Watch Pan Am if … You want your Mad Men knockoff to come with a spy plot.

ABC and NBC face off again, this time with fairy-tale dramas. In Grimm, a homicide detective can see the fairy-tale creatures that are all around us, doing horrible things (the big bad wolf is abducting girls who wear red hoodies). In Once Upon a Time, an evil stepmother has banished Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Red Riding Hood, Pinocchio to a rainy town in Maine, where they’ve lost their memories and mope around waiting to be rescued by Snow White’s clueless daughter (Jennifer Morrison). Watch Grimm if… you always wished for Law & Order: With Magic.Watch Once Upon a Time if… you always wished for Desperate Housewives: With Magic, and more rain.

As we noted, this development season was particularly strong for women, and every network is going into the fall with a comedy about a cool, wacky twentysomething girl with a potty mouth, relationship issues, and a love of drink. Fox has Zooey Deschanel in The New Girl, ABC has Krysten Ritter (and James Van Der Beek) in Apt. 23, CBS has Kat Dennings in 2 Broke Girls, and NBC has Whitney Cummings in Whitney, Laura Prepon as Chelsea Handler in Are You There Vodka, It’s Me, Chelsea, and Best Friends Forever.Watch The New Girl if … you most enjoy twentysomethings when they are adorable, quirky, recently dumped, look good in hipster eyewear, and are making extended jokes about Dirty Dancing.Watch Apt 23 if … you most enjoy twentysomethings when they are adorable, sassy, recently dumped, sexually provocative, and making extended jokes about Dawson’s Creek.Watch 2 Broke Girls if … you most enjoy twentysomethings when they are adorable, sassy, poor, into cupcakes, working with a laugh track, and making extended jokes about hipsters and Bernie Madoff. Watch Whitney if … you most enjoy twentysomethings when they are sassy, in a committed relationship, working in front of a live studio audience, and making extended jokes about how horrible weddings are. Watch Are You There Vodka, It’s Me, Chelsea if … you most enjoy twentysomethings when they are sassy, drunk, and making extended jokes about Chelsea Handler. Watch Best Friends Forever if … you most enjoy twentysomethings when they are adorable, quirky, in committed relationships and/or recently dumped, good friends, and making extended jokes about co-habitation.

One of the most striking trends of the new fall season: a mess of shows about how hard it is to be a man in this here woman’s world! ABC has no fewer than three sitcoms about the emasculation of the American Man at the hands of his loving wife and family: Tim Allen’s Last Man Standing; Man Up, about three men who don’t really know how to be manly; and Vulture favorite Work It, about two men forced to cross-dress to find gainful employment. CBS fills out the quartet with How to Be a Gentleman, in which an effete guy has a cross-cultural exchange with Kevin Dillon’s boneheaded — but macho — personal trainer. Watch Last Man Standing if … you love Home Improvement and want to laugh when Tim Allen says he’s worried about his grandson Boyd attending a hippie-ish nursery school because, “You know how that ends? With Boyd dancing on a float.”Watch Work It if …you love horrible drag and want to laugh when a guy says, “She’s making Lou go grocery shopping? … [He’s] been reduced to sniffing and squeezing fruit like some… girly monkey.”Watch Man Up if … you love Phil Dunphy and feel genuinely sympathetic for slightly henpecked, totally hapless dads. Watch How to Be a Gentleman if … you love Johnny Drama and want to watch a show less offensive than the above three.

The big reboot of the season, Wonder Woman, didn’t make it through pilot season. That leaves us with the American adaptation of Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect, now set in New York and starring Maria Bello as an gun-toting woman in a fedora having trouble with her male colleagues, and the new version of Charlie’s Angels, now set in Miami and starring three fashionable women as gun-toting women who will, clearly, get around to wearing fedoras (and bikinis), and who have no trouble with males of any kind. Watch Charlie’s Angels if … you prefer your female role models to be scantily clad and purely escapist. Watch Prime Suspect if … you prefer your female role models to be unhinged and badass.

It’s almost a parlor game at this point: What special power has not yet been used in a procedural? There’s the guy who can tell when you’re lying, the guy who can tell what you’re thinking, the asshole genius, the woman who has dreams, the woman who can look at bones. And now there are three more: Fox’s Bones spinoff The Finder, and CBS’s crime procedural Unforgettable (previously called, awesomely,The Rememberer) and medical drama A Gifted Man.Watch The Finder if … you would like your protagonist to be able to find anything. Watch Unforgettable if … you would like your protagonist to be able to remember everything.Watch A Gifted Man if … you would like your protagonist to have a do-gooder ghost guiding him.

Lost is everywhere this season, with different shows making use of different Lost-ian plot points (hatches, smoke monsters, ghosts, flashes sideways, and so on). Lost’s cast members are showing up all over the place, too, from a Shonda Rhimes show to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Ringer. Most of them even seem like they’re still playing versions of their Lost characters, except for Desmond, who has lost his accent.Watch ABC’s Scandal if … you miss Desmond.Watch Fox’s Alcatraz if … you miss Hurley.Watch The CW’s Ringer if …  you miss Richard Alpert.Watch CBS’s Person of Interest if … you miss Ben.

Another recurring theme of this year’s new shows: Moving is rough, especially because everywhere one moves seems to be inhabited by horrible fakers. (Beware, those pursuing nationwide job searches: According to TV, the next time you relocate, the chances of you ending up in a place rife with plastic surgery and intrigue are very likely.) There’s: ABC’s GCB, in which a former mean girl moves back to bitchy Dallas; ABC’s Suburgatory, in which a teenager has to move to the bitchy suburbs; and the CW’s Hart of Dixie, in which Rachel Bilson plays a doctor (really) who moves to the south. Watch G.C.B. if … you like fish-out-of-water stories to be campy and satirical.Watch Suburgatory if … you like fish-out-of-water stories to be sardonic and essentially sweet. Watch Hart of Dixie if … you like fish-out-of-water stories to star Summer Roberts. 

There are two shows in particular this season that look pretty okay, but we’re not quite sure how they’re going to milk the premise for one whole season, let alone many. First, there’s NBC’s Awake, which comes from Lone Star’s Kyle Killen, and similarly involves a guy leading two lives, except this time those lives are maybe all in his mind. (In one, his wife has died, in the other, his son.) The other show is ABC’s The River, about an expedition to the rain forest to find a missing explorer: In the pilot, the crew turns up the aforementioned Smoke Monster and lots of shaky camera work, but … continues exploring anyway. Watch Awake if … you don’t mind committing to a show that may not pan out, just so long as the show is Lone Star meets Inception. Watch The River if … you don’t mind committing to a show that may not pan out, just so long as the show is Paranormal Activity meets Lost.