Fall TV Top 5: Smith

I haven’t said much about the new fall TV season yet. But now that the networks are starting to premiere their new shows I figure I should at least mention my favorites.

This was actually a very good pilot season and with the exception of everything on Fox (and ABC’s horrendous wedding day comedy Big Day) I’d be willing to sample a second episode of all the new shows.

But there are five that I’m already committed to based on the pilot alone. (Last season there was only one: ABC’s Sons and Daughters.) So I'll be sure to point those out here as each is about to premiere.

Of course none of those are on Fox. I deliberately ignored saying anything about their new series as the network started rolling them out a couple weeks ago. They’re all bad. The Thursday night comedy Happy Hour is particularly notable as the worst new show of the season. Thankfully ratings for the shows are in line with their quality.

ABC’s Anne Heche-led relationship “dramedy” Men in Trees has also already started airing. The pilot wasn’t bad but it wasn’t very good either. The show has a Friday night timeslot of death that pretty much guarantees it won’t be around come 2007.

Last night brought the premieres of the perfectly adequate traditional comedy The Class on CBS (after one episode I like it more than the same network’s How I Met Your Mother, but will I bother watching?) and the season’s most overhyped new show NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

But that brings us to tonight’s premiere: Smith on CBS. It’s a heist drama (a genre failed multiple times last season including FX’s Thief and NBC’s Heist) but it has a killer cast, the best production values of any new series and a potential for greatness.

The most surprising thing about Smith is that it feels like a cable show, but it’s on CBS. And it’s entirely possible that that will be an oil-and-water combination that will lead to failure. But I like ambitious TV and it’s rare to find something on network TV that is this ambitious.

That killer cast I mentioned is led by Ray Liotta and Virginia Madsen, welcome additions to series television, and also includes Simon Baker, Jonny Lee Miller, Amy Smart, Franky G and Shoreh Aghdashloo. Not all huge names but put them together and they make a strong TV ensemble. The pilot isn’t heavy on character development for the supporting players but there’s enough to make you believe these people will go in interesting directions in the future.

And the characters and relationship written for Liotta and Madsen are fantastic. He leads the heists, she doesn’t know but she has demons of her own. It’s great to see good actors get good material (they wouldn’t find this kind of stuff on film very easily).

I don’t know if Smith is going to attempt to pull off a heist a week (a “commercial” choice, but also risky), or if it will focus in on the characters and explore their moral ambiguities with an occasional heist on the side (an “artistic” choice, but also wiser).

Either way I’ll be watching.