Fall TV: What is it with time travel this year?

To wit:

• The Flash. Episode one and we're on our third reality of the season.
• Legends Of Tomorrow. Time travel is the whole schitck, although it will probably take some kind of left turn this year.
• Timeless. Personally if I was in this boat I'd ask Homeland Security to write up a dossier of my complete life so that it would be the first thing I read when I got back. Nothing like getting blindsided by (A) a missing sister and (B) a fiance.
• Travellers. Hasn't started yet, but I understand it too is a time travel gig.

Odds are at least one of the latter two won't make it to Christmas.

Fall TV: Pitch

One of Jenn's picks. Maybe I'm sexist/racist/stick-and-ball-ist, but the heart-warming story of a young black woman making her way through the big leagues of professional baseball does nothing for me on any of those three levels.

Fall TV: Gotham

We resisted going back to this, it just seemed too... much. Jim Gordon has turned into an anti-hero and it is hard to see how we'll end up where we allegedly are going with the Batman universe, I'm just not so big on these fallen-good-guys stories. But Jenn likes Fish Mooney so we're back on it.

DareDevil Season 2

Hmmm... since it is a NetFlix series, should it be called "series 2" instead of "season 2"? We're not going to get the third season until 2018. But I guess the US sensibilities apply, so "season 2" it is.

Anyways. This season started a bit unevenly, there was a bunch of "what the hell is really going on here" with things, and when things got amped up you realized that they already were amped up -- that transition, as well as the part-A to part-B transition, was more than a bit rough. The end was a bit weird too -- "We live to serve you, Black Sky!" "Well, I fight against you!" "Well we fight you then!" -- and I'm like, what? That was a very confusing five minutes. Then the pseudo-happy-season-endings with a hint of a cliffhanger tacked on the end of that.

The whole dragging-Murdock-through-the-dark was simultaneously too much and not enough, if you know what I mean. And I didn't really think Frank Castle's journey was worth the trip, in the end.

Overall, season one benefited from nobody really knowing what Daredevil was all about. Origin stories are useful for a reason, that being that the arc of discovery provides a real framework for the A-story. Absent that, you have to have a good A-story to carry the series, and I think that this season tried to have two of those and it didn't really work.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

I am conflicted by this -- there are interesting things going on in this miniseries, but my need to find out what happens is constantly at war with the tedium with which things move forward. I think the fact that the episodes are longer than average -- what, 1h 20m each including commercials? -- is part of the problem. Had it been chopped up into hour-long presentations it might be much better, although the story pacing would have to be altered somewhat to make the beats work.