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The new TV season: Few smooth takeoffs, many bumpy arrivals

September 15, 2011

View Photo Gallery - 2011 Fall TV preview: : A look at some of the new network and cable television…

This year’s fall season isn’t going to soar to great heights, but Post TV critic Hank Stuever has landed on a handy way to sort the new shows, with one simple question: Better or worse than dead-average “Pan Am”?

Once Upon a Time

Sunday, Oct. 23, 8 p.m., ABC

An elegant surprise that stirs fond memories of Sunday-night Disney TV shows of yore, meant for grownups but suitable for older kids, toggling between the present day and legendary fairy tales. When the handsome prince marries Snow White (“Big Love’s” Ginnifer Goodwin), the Evil Queen crashes the wedding to cast the mother of all spells, banishing everyone in the magic kingdom — including the Seven Dwarves, Gepetto, Jiminy Cricket, Rumpelstiltskin and even the Evil Queen herself — to “somewhere horrible,” where happy endings don’t exist and the characters have no memory of who they once were, trapped in humdrum lives.

That horrible place? Maine. Where young Henry (Jared Gilmore from “Mad Men”) escapes and runs off to Boston to find his birth mother (Jennifer Morrison from “House M.D.”). She doesn’t yet know it, but she’s Snow White’s adult daughter; Henry hopes she’ll help him break the spell and restore the kingdom. That’s a lot to take in, but “Once Upon a Time” is a smartly crafted reward for fans of light fantasy, with the right mix of cleverness, action and romance. Grade: A

Hell on Wheels

Sunday, Nov. 6, 10 p.m., AMC

Hands down the most intriguing show on the fall slate (from the network of “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Killing,” etc.) this violent and gritty western is set in 1865 during the building of the transcontinental railroad. The first episode effortlessly launches several stories: A former Confederate soldier (Anson Mount) travels the country seeking revenge on the Union soldiers who raped and killed his wife during the war, which leads him to Iowa and a job on the rail line. There, a former slave (Common) bristles at the empty promises of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lily (Dominique McElligott) is married to a railroad surveyor and barely escapes an Indian attack on their camp. From afar, a railroad baron (Colm Meaney) maliciously bursts with manifest-destiny greed, giving the whole thing a loony, melodramatic fatalism that echoes “There Will Be Blood.”

Though imbued with epic sweep, “Hell on Wheels” is a western at heart, even if that heart is cold. Plenty of guns, knives, arrows, scalpings — mixed with the incendiary socio-psychological wounds left in the Civil War’s wake. Grade: A-

Homeland

Sunday, Oct. 2, 10 p.m., Showtime

Classified memo to all Washington-area intelligence wonks (and wannabes): We have a new show to fuss over, which arrives with a taut air of near-perfection. A Marine POW (Damian Lewis as Sgt. Nicholas Brody) is rescued eight years after his capture in the Iraq war and given a hero’s welcome home to NoVa. But a determined CIA analyst (Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison) believes Brody may be a converted terrorist, based on intelligence she gathered during a bungled mission to Iraq a year earlier.

Already the object of her superior’s scorn, Carrie secretly investigates Brody as he readjusts to life with his wife (Morena Baccarin from “V”); Brody doesn’t know she’s been having an affair with her husband’s best friend in his absence. What makes “Homeland” rise above other post-9/11 dramas is Danes’s stellar performance as Carrie — easily this season’s strongest female character, who is also hiding some personal secrets of her own. The latter half of the first episode is exhilarating. I’m hooked. Grade: A-

American Horror Story

Wednesday, Oct. 5, 10 p.m., FX

The latest series from creator Ryan Murphy (“Nip/Tuck,” “Glee”) is a deeply disturbing adrenaline attack in which a haunted house provides metaphorical backdrop to a troubled marriage. Dylan McDermott and “Friday Night Lights’ ” Connie Britton play a couple who move with their teenage daughter to Los Angeles, where a bad real-estate agent steers them toward a beautiful old home — the former scene of torturous medical experiments in the basement and, some years after that, the murders of twin boys. (Ask the mentally disabled girl who lives next door — she’ll tell you all about it.)

Infused with a “Dark Shadows” and “Rosemary’s Baby” vibe, “American Horror Story” is one scream after another. So much creepy stuff happens in the first episode that viewers will be left asking: Can I possibly watch an entire series of this? Followed, of course, by a more obvious question: Why do they stay in that house?

Overdoing things is one of Murphy’s trademark flaws, but this show has a captivating style and giddy gross-outs. It also has Jessica Lange, who’s terrific (in both senses of the word) as a sinister neighbor. Grade: B+

Enlightened

Monday, Oct. 10, 9:30 p.m., HBO