September isn’t just the name of a cheesy Swedish popstrel who brought us recent slightly-better-than-Cascada crap floor-filler Cry For You. It’s also the name of one of the 12 months of the Gregorian calendar. Shocking, I know. But further to this, it’s also the month in which our TV screens start to light up with the welcome return of all our favourite shows, thanks to Irish and British broadcasters newfound desire to screen shows mere days after their US premiere in order to save themselves the loss of ratings that comes with everyone downloading the shows rather than waiting until January.
In anticipation of having things to watch on the tellybox again, I present this handy retrospective on what happened in some of the major shows in their truncated 2007-2008 seasons.
Desperate Housewives: The 5 transvestites of Wisteria Lane added a sixth man to their menagerie this past season, as Katherine Mayfair joined the group. Like everyone in whatever state it is this show takes place in, Katherine had a Dark Secret; namely that a wardrobe fell on her little tyke Dylan and killed her to death. Then, like any grief-stricken mother, she buried her daughter in the woods and adopted a similar-looking child from Romania. Upon hearing this, Katherine’s Violent Ex became violent, so she shot him with a gun that Contrivance had dropped off at her home. In a beautiful feminist conclusion, a jury of her peers forgave Katherine being so trigger-happy, and lied to the police for her. Other dark secrets this year included Bree pretending her grandson was actually the product of her own uterus, the collective trannies agreeing that Edie wasn’t deserving of their friendship because she’s a bitch whose face is slowly melting and Gabby killing her hubby who then came back and got killed again. Meanwhile, despite years of foreshadowing, the long-awaited plotline wherein it is revealed that Susan has been operating with only 20% the brain-mass of a regular human being failed to materialise yet again.
Heroes: Season 2 finds Peter Petrelli in a cargo-hold in “Cork”, “Ireland” where he’s found by some Oirish thugs who were expecting to find thousands of OiPods. Tortured by a torrent of terrible accents, Peter loses his memory but gets it back just in time to be manipulated into teaming up with meh-some villain Adam Munroe. Munroe, aka Kensei, aka Hiro’s Hero wants to unleash the ill-defined Shanti virus and kill the world because we’re all so awful. Eventually he is stopped, but not before he kills George Takei. Meanwhile, Claire Bennet gushes about how great her new car is in a spot of product placement for Ford, then gushes about how great her new boyfriend until the power of negative viewer reaction sees him off. A season-long snore-fest follows brother and sister Maya and Alejandro as they blunder across the boredom border. Even Sylar can’t make them interesting, though he does put Alejandro out of our misery at least. Niki dumps Wunderkid on Grandma Uhura for a while, then “dies”. But it’s okay, Wunderkid has his super-powered cousin to look after him now. Meanwhile, Mama Petrelli rocks; Mohinder continues abusing his power to deliver the show’s absolutely clunkingly awful narration; a photograph of the Company’s founders shown midway through the season which deliberately obscures Arthur Petrelli’s face makes it completely obvious that he’s not dead and will show up at some point in the future (once they've cast someone); and Nathan Petrelli is shot either because he was about to reveal his powers on national television or because his wife is a Dixie Chick who criticised President Bush. You know what those Texans are like.
Gossip Girl: Rich, beautiful white people with perfect bodies and names like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen Nervosa, living on the Upper East Side, sleep with one another, worry about the consequences of sleeping with one another and live glamourous lives with Terrible Secrets™. This formula proved so original and successful that every show the Network responsible for GG is putting out in 08/09 is copying it. Nice once.
Lost: How do you concisely recap Lost? Badly, that’s how. Here we go! Flash-forwards reveal that five people and an ugly baby make it off the Island: Jack (still television’s least appealing leading man, with absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever), Kate (*yawn*), Sun (who gets all up in her father’s face post-Island and ousts him from his own company), Hurley (who goes batshit and starts seeing Hobbits) and Sayid, who becomes 007 to Ben’s Judi Dench… the sort of Judi Dench who stabs someone in the neck and causes a boatful of innocents to blow up, that is. The Saga Of Kate and Which Man Will She Choose? continued to be shit, especially in comparison to the much more affecting Saga of Dessie and Penny. The same Penny who Ben pledges to kill after seeing his own 16 year old daughter get shot in the brainpan. Remember kids: guns don’t kill people, evil mercenaries sent to find weasel-eyed chosen ones do. Speaking of the weasel-eyed chosen one; he finds that he’s not-so-chosen any more after mounting a frozen dais and turning a giant wheel which causes the Island to vanish and leaves him unable to ever return after he wakes up in Tunisia. Sounds like the aftermath of a normal night out in Limerick, really. Kooky Old John Locke is the new chosen one, except he turns up dead in the flash-forwards. Not the wisest career move then, eh John? Hey, remember when they said there was a logical explanation for everything that happened? On top of teleporting Islands, this season also featured Desmond’s mind jumping about in time, the return of the immortal Richard Alpert and the return of Jack’s dead father who popped up on an exploding boat long enough to tell a black man it was okay for him to die now. I await that logical explanation with baited breath. And don’t think we’ve forgotten about the four-toed statues either.
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