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What to watch on Monday, September 24...

Much like last Thursday's What to Watch was pretty much overrun by NBC returns, tonight it's CBS's time to shine. With a handful of returns on top of a brand new addition to its Monday night line-up, "CBS Mondays" is shaping up to be a pretty decent night for television. THE SUMMER IS ALMOST OVER, GUYS! We've almost made it! And with that, let's take a look at what's on TV tonight:

SEASON 8 PREMIERE, 8pm, CBS
How I Met Your Mother
The series starts up just where it left off, with wedding bells ringing as Barney and Robin prepare for marriage. Of course, their concerns that the other will get cold feet and run sort of puts a downer on the whole event. All of the fears and pre-wedding jitters brings Ted right back to how he felt when he was about to marry Victoria—and how he was so adamant that she write her new fiancé a note describing that she left him at the altar. Phew, sounds like a heavy one!

SEASON FINALE, 8pm, The CW
The L.A. Complex
For the second week in a row, the CW is airing two new episodes of The L.A. Complex back-to-back, but THIS time the second episode (airing at 9pm) will also be the finale. If you're the kind of person who just likes to tie up loose ends, then you should make sure to at least catch the tail end of this two hour block. In the first "Xs and Os" everybody is panicking about the state of their lives: Abby worries about her impulsive behavior with Gary, Beth worries she'll lose Simon, Kall worries about his relationship with his father, Connor worries after his sister does something shocking, and Nick worries after suffering a career blow. Man, easy on the anxiety, folks! Then, in the finale, "Don't Say Goodbye," Connor gets uncomfortable with Charlotte and finds solace in Scienetics (I'm really hoping that's L.A. Complex code for Scientology, because it would be hilarious if this show went there) and Raquel gets ready for her big fund-raising event. Also, Beth keeps fighting for Simon. Maybe it's just something she should let go, did she ever think about that?

SERIES PREMIERE, 8:30pm, CBS
Partners
In CBS's brand new sitcom, two long-term business partners (one straight and one gay) are in the middle of a life-changing decision—for one of them: Joe (the straight one, I can only assume) is wavering on whether or not to ask his girlfriend to marry him. Good thing for good friends, right? When Louis makes an attempt to get involves (with the best of intensions of course), his efforts do more harm than good. Yep, sounds like a sitcom.

SEASON 2 PREMIERE, 9pm, CBS
2 Broke Girls
In "And the Hidden Stash" we kick off as Max and Caroline make their way up to a white-collar prison to visit Caroline's father (Steven Weber). Once there, he encourages them to show up at the Channing estate auction to buy a very specific item. Sounds just sketchy enough to work!

SEASON 5 PREMIERE, 10pm, ABC
Castle
In "After the Storm"—which is a very fitting title, don'tcha think?—Beckett and Castle re-evaluate their relationship after waking up from their heated night of passion. Spicy! While they work all of that out, they also have to deal with facing the folks who murdered Beckett's mother and who are now, subsequently, after Beckett, herself. Also, Beckett butts heads with a Senator. Wow, Beckett is really the center of conflict right now, isn't she?

PLUS ALL NEW EPISODES OF...
2012 Emmy Awards Fashion Wrap, SPECIAL, 8 p.m., TV Guide
Alphas, 8 p.m., Syfy
Basketball Wives LA, 8 p.m., VH1
Bones, 8 p.m., Fox
Dancing With the Stars: All Stars, LIVE SEASON PREMIERE, 8 p.m., ABC
Switched at Birth, 8 p.m., ABC Family
The L.A. Complex, TWO EPISODES BACK-TO-BACK—SEASON FINALE AT 9p.m.—8 p.m., The CW
The Voice, 8 p.m., NBC
WWE Monday Night Raw, 8 p.m., USA
Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, 8:30 p.m., TLC
All on the Line, 9 p.m., Sundance
American Chopper, 9 p.m., Discovery
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, 9 p.m., Travel
Border Wars, 9 p.m., NatGeo
Blood, Lies, & Alibis, 9 p.m., Investigation Discovery
Get to Work, 9 p.m., Sundance
Love It or List It, 9 p.m., HGTV
Major Crimes, 9 p.m., TNT
Market Warriors, 9 p.m., PBS
T.I. and Tiny: The Family Hustle, 9 p.m., VH1
The Mob Doctor, 9 p.m., Fox
The Real Housewives of New York City, 9 p.m., Bravo
Warehouse 13, 9 p.m., Syfy
Chrissy & Mr. Jones, SEASON PREMIERE, 9:30 p.m., VH1
Mike & Molly, SEASON PREMIERE, 9:30 p.m., CBS
American Masters, 10 p.m., PBS
Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, 10 p.m., Food
Fashion Police, EMMY AWARDS SPECIAL, 10 p.m., E!
Fast N' Loud, 10 p.m., Discovery
Gallery Girls, 10 p.m., Bravo
Hawaii Five-O, SEASON PREMIERE, 10 p.m., CBS
House Hunters, 10 p.m., HGTV
Lovetown, USA, 10 p.m., OWN
Revolution, 10 p.m., NBC
Ridiculousness, 10 p.m., MTV
House Hunters International, 10:30 p.m., HGTV
The Inbetweeners, 10:30 p.m., MTV
Get To Work, 10:30 p.m., Sundance

LATE-NITE HIGHLIGHTS...
Steve Martin and a performance by Gotye on Late Show with David Letterman, 11:35 p.m., CBS
David Spade on Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 11:35 p.m., NBC
Julianna Margulies, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and a performance by The Killers on Jimmy Kimmel Live, 12 a.m., ABC Blake Shelton, Serena Williams, and Andrew Rannells on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 12:37 a.m., NBC
Dennis Quaid and Ellie Kemper on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, 12:37 a.m., CBS

What are you watching tonight?

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Partners S01E01: "Pilot"

Where does one even begin to evaluate a three-camera sitcom these days? The mere presence of a laugh track in 2012 is basically the producers declaring, "This is not art. Don't think about it. We'll tell you when to laugh." Sure, there have been some high quality—even important—three-camera sitcoms throughout TV history, but man has it been a while since the last one. Was it Seinfeld, a show that eschewed common farcical plotlines for something more esoteric? Or was it Will & Grace, the sitcom brave enough to have a gay man as its titular lead? But let's be honest, the modern sitcom vanguard features no laugh tracks. Larry David no longer needs one and neither do we.

Partners, though, comes from Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, the brains behind Will & Grace. That series was a much-loved, smart, and often very funny show about a gay man, his best lady pal, and their much funnier friends. So does Partners' pedigree somehow vault it above the grim, populist, ad-selling bonanzas that are Chuck Lorre's current slate of hits? Nope! Partners is very terrible! But the conundrum is that it's also very similar to Will & Grace in tone, energy, and sense of humor. So why was one a classic but the other an embarrassment? As it turns out, we the viewers have grown a lot since Jack McFarland last flitted across our TV screens. What was once risky and forward-thinking is now regressive horse-sh*t. That's Partners.

So right now we can only evaluate Partners based on its pilot (frequently a series' weakest episode), but here's what we have to go on: Two grown men—allegedly successful architects—have known each other since childhood and have presumably been exchanging barbs about their Jewishness and/or gayness every day since. As played by David Krumholtz (as Joe the straight) and Michael Urie (as Louis the gay), the men have a codependent relationship that the show would have us believe is paramount to all others, except that in the pilot a simple misunderstanding caused them to have a COMPLETE FALLING OUT. Like, friendship-ending, business-dissolving falling out. It all began when Joe told Louis (in between terrible, terrible gay jokes) that he intended to break up with his girlfriend Ali (a likable Sophia Bush) because he didn't feel like getting married just yet. But then, once Joe got Ali alone, he decided to propose instead. Despite the fact that Joe and Louis are VERY close (that's the premise of this whole show!), Joe didn't mention to Louis his sudden change in plans (or change in LIFE) at all. So the next morning Louis attended yoga class with Ali assuming that she'd been dumped and accidentally revealed that Joe was originally going to dump her and she did NOT take it well. You know? Louis was simply operating off of the information he was given. A simple misunderstanding that could have been explained in one well-worded sentence. But because this is a terrible sitcom instead of real life, Joe became livid at Louis for ruining everything (and Louis bizarrely agreed that HE was in the wrong, and not, somehow, the monstrous so-called friend whose fault this was in the first place). Anyway, Louis proceeded to use his sassy gay charm to get Ali and Joe back together, save the partnership, and save the friendship. And then everyone enjoyed a nice cup of espresso together at the local coffee shop. Cue laugh track, cue applause.

Just seeing that series of events spelled out on my computer screen makes them seem more reasonable than they came across during the actual show. What's missing, of course, is the overwhelmingly unfunny "I'm a gay!" "I'm a Jew!" type jokes that these characters all speak in. You know how when you get together with a childhood best friend (someone whose very soul you've become intimate with) and you only talk about the most surface-level things about each other? No? Probably because that's not how human beings behave. Obviously sitcoms offer a heightened reality, but good ones do so in the service of revealing human truths. There are no human beings here, there are only idiotic, shallow ciphers who toss off punchlines that seem clever until you think about them for even a second. Like, the slightly racist Latina caricature secretary seems to hate Louis enough that she'd shut him down with "Joke joke joke, gay gay gay, I will cut you," but then in her next scene kindly offer to let him nestle his face in her cleavage? I don't know WHAT was going on there except that it wasn't funny. So what was the point?

Aside from the inherent likability of Sophia Bush, probably the only other thing I liked about Partners was Louis's dummy-hunk boyfriend Wyatt (Superman Returns' Brandon Routh), whose obliviousness toward basic reality (and especially Louis's overt hatefulness) suggest that he might have mental problems. Though Routh refreshingly plays Wyatt without a stereotypical gay affect, the writers do him no favors by turning him into a stone-cold idiot. A repeated joke in which Wyatt made reference to a heart-shaped pin he was wearing ("I have a heart-on") never made sense in context, and it definitely didn't make sense that he couldn't hear himself saying "hard-on." I don't know. I'm not a comedy doctor, but this joke and others like it just didn't work. Speaking of doctors, Louis's insistence that he was embarrassed that Wyatt was a nurse instead of a doctor was so loathsome as to make me despise Louis. In what world is the repeated job-shaming of a significant other not a dump-able offense?

Another thing: These characters are YOUNG. They are maybe 30. So why do they all speak and behave like wealthy 50-year-olds who grew up in the Catskills? Partners repeatedly betrays a huge disconnect between the type and class of person writing the show (wealthy Los Angeles TV producers—Mutchnick and Kohan based this on their own lives) and the supposedly young, normal people it claims to portray. What young gay man has ever enjoyed Clay Aiken, let alone gotten a tattoo of Clay Aiken on his ass like Louis supposedly did? (Clay Aiken has an older FEMALE fan base, you out-of-touch, aging homosexual millionaires!) And what kind of person in 2012 would be in a relationship with Brandon Routh yet feel the need to lie to others that he is both a doctor and Jewish? Nobody. Not only is this show not an accurate portrait of young people gay or otherwise, it's not even an accurate portrayal of human beings.

In conclusion, I get it. Partners is a sitcom and it's not meant to be analyzed for deeper meaning. Still, I hate this thing, get out of here, Partners!

What did YOU think of Partners' pilot? Will you be tuning in again?

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Friends, we've screened the pilot of Partners, the new CBS sitcom about an odd-couple pairing of a straight New Yorker and his gay best friend from childhood who own an architecture firm. But is it worth your time? Here are some first impressions that might help you decide.

What is Partners?

Partners is a multi-camera sitcom about two longtime best friends—neurotic architect Joe (Num3ers' David Krumholtz) and his gay best friend, flighty architect Louis (Ugly Betty's Michael Urie). They're so close that outsiders could reasonably assume the two are in a romantic relationship, but when Joe gets engaged to Ali (One Tree Hill's Sophia Bush), it creates complications in Joe and Louis's tight-knit friendship. Meanwhile, Louis's boyfriend Wyatt (Superman Returns' Brandon Routh) puts up with Louis's emotional abuse while frequently wearing scrubs.

When does it premiere?

Partners debuts Monday, September 24 at 8:30pm on CBS.

Who's behind it?

The most pertinent selling point about Partners is that it comes from Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, the creators of Will & Grace. Partners is said to be an autobiographical take on their real-life working relationship.

Who's the target audience?

People who miss Will & Grace but not necessarily Debra Messing. Also those who think that gayness is inherently funny and fabulous. (So, not actual gay viewers.) OR people who would enjoy seeing Brandon Routh in scrubs.

What's good about it?

The aforementioned scrubs situation. Also, the writing is zippy and reasonably clever for a three-camera sitcom. And Sophia Bush remains awesome.

Are there any not-good parts I should know about?

This thing is as dated as it gets, not only because of its format/laugh track, but because of its relentlessly hoary "I'm a gay!" "I'm a Jew!"-type punchlines. Additionally, the loud, frequently obnoxious Louis character verges on hateful, repeatedly shaming his boyfriend for being a nurse instead of a doctor. (How is that not a dump-able offense?) There's also a sassy Latina secretary who verges on racial caricature (Louis's opening barb comparing her to something out of West Side Story just sums up this whole project.) So yeah, in general, this sitcom seems like it's an artifact from the '90s.

Okay, but seriously, should I watch it?

Maybe if you are too tired to reach for the remote control. Also how do you feel about Brandon Routh wearing scrubs?

Do you have a clip or a trailer I can take a look at?

Maaaybe!

Drink of choice for my Partners viewing experience?

An Old-Fashioned?

Partners debuts Monday, September 24 at 8:30pm on CBS.

View the original article here