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CBS is reconvening this week, premiering a dozen of its dramas and comedies, including 10 of last season’s 15 most-watched scripted shows. You might dismiss the network’s dominance of the broadcast ratings as a case of being the top dog on a small playground, but the seven million to 10 million viewers each of those shows drew — before any streaming numbers were added — probably don’t care much about your opinion.
Along with the returning CBS hits this week come two new shows, “NCIS: Origins” and “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” and one that still feels new, “Elsbeth,” which premiered in February and is starting its second season.
These additions to the schedule are nominally very different from one another, contributing to the diverse menu a big-box television outlet needs to offer: a sentimental buds-and-blood crime procedural set on a California military base (“NCIS: Origins”); a wacky-Texas-family sitcom (“Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage”); and an archly comic case-of-the-week detective series set in New York (“Elsbeth”).
But their differences are less notable than the thing they have in common: Each has emerged from the CBS ecosystem, spun off from one of the network’s existing franchises. “Origins” is the sixth “NCIS” show; “Georgie” follows “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon”; and “Elsbeth” stars a character who was introduced in “The Good Wife” and later appeared in “The Good Fight.”
There are a couple of ways to look at that. You can see timidity and lack of imagination, and an overreliance on proven quantities like the sitcom mogul Chuck Lorre (“Georgie”) and the smart-drama mavens Michelle and Robert King (“Elsbeth”). But you can also see shrewd strategy at a time when seemingly unlimited choice and the associated fracturing of the audience make viewers’ desires for familiarity and comfort stronger than ever. All of the major streamers could take lessons in brand management from CBS.
The network does not have a “universe” in the sense of Marvel’s crisscrossing superhero stories or the byzantine timelines of the “Star Wars” franchise. But it has a sensibility that is actually more consistent, across a variety of genres and creators. There may not be a CBS universe, but there is a CBS world, a zone with a common language and values. Traveling from “Blue Bloods” to “Fire Country” to “Tracker,” you won’t have any problems at the border.
The shows arriving this week — to which we can add “Matlock,” also in its first season, and “Tracker,” another February arrival — hew to the brand, similar in ways that are hard to quantify but still visible. Easiest to see is the attribute that makes the shows easy for many to dismiss: They are resolutely formulaic, each following a familiar path in nearly every episode. That is not to say that they are entirely predictable, from moment to moment, but they avoid rude surprises.
That is a timeworn observation about shows across all broadcast networks. More particular to the CBS shows is how they balance what can be seen as appeals to Middle American conservatism with nods to blue-state values.
Amid the standard investigation and suspense motifs of “Origins,” we see the crusty team leader, Mike Franks (Kyle Schmid), reluctantly facing up to issues of gender and race in the workplace; but his retrograde attitudes and jokes are still woven, at face value, into the show’s humor. (To be fair, it takes place in 1991.)
“Georgie,” set in the mid-1990s between “Young Sheldon” and “The Big Bang Theory,” focuses sympathetically on the efforts of Mandy (Emily Osment) to find a job while making clumsy jokes about the importance of her breasts in the imagination of Georgie (Montana Jordan), a notion we are probably meant to see as natural given that he is 12 years younger than she is. (The presentation of Georgie as both an adolescent, good-old-boy dimwit and a well-meaning, deceptively smart striver encapsulates the straddle CBS is always trying to pull off.)
In “Matlock,” the lawyer played by Kathy Bates nearly derails her firm's pursuit of a sexual-harassment case when she admits that her age and experience led her to distrust the young plaintiff.
In “Elsbeth,” Carrie Preston’s Elsbeth Tascioni, a Chicagoan temporarily attached to the New York police, is an awe-struck tourist in the big city (probably an experience familiar to many viewers) who also maintains a visitor’s critical distance. In Thursday’s season premiere, she falls in love with opera under the tutelage of a murderer charmingly played by Nathan Lane, but does not plan to go back to the opera house anytime soon — once or twice a year is enough, she notes with asperity.
All of the plot elements or throwaway lines involving social or cultural values are written without any reference whatsoever to actual politics or events in the larger world, of course; reality is in every case subsumed by formula and genre. This relates to another notable characteristic of the CBS shows: the way in which they seem to exist both in and out of time. They take place in specific moments on the calendar, but those time frames seem relevant only as a framework on which to hang jokes, references, costumes and props.
That free-floating quality points to a central truth about the CBS shows: Their universe is the world of broadcast TV itself. They occupy a timeless, homogeneous zone that is comfortably self-referential without being meta in a way that could be distracting or challenging.
“Elsbeth” is derived not just from the Kings’ earlier shows, but also from the template set by the beloved 1970s NBC detective show “Columbo.” “Matlock” plays with the folksy-lawyer premise of its namesake, the 1980s-’90s “Matlock” on NBC and ABC.
“Georgie” is strongly reminiscent of one of the most popular shows during the era in which it is set, ABC’s “Roseanne.” (The sympathetic father and father-in-law played by Will Sasso is a direct gloss on John Goodman’s Dan.) “Tracker” carries some DNA from the great Fox series “The X-Files.” It also directly invokes the CW bellwether “Supernatural,” with Jensen Ackles guest-starring in a role practically identical to the caustic, protective older brother he played in that earlier series (and driving a very similar black Chevy).
All that really matters for these shows is executing on their premises and formulas; if they keep faith, they will find an audience waiting for them. If you want to make distinctions, though, the edge probably goes to the featherweight but amusing “Elsbeth,” which has the polish and some of the wit that the Kings usually supply. (Its mysteries are almost offensively simple minded, though.) “Matlock” has a clever season-long premise to generate suspense and engaging performances by Bates and by Skye P. Marshall as a fierce younger lawyer; the case-of-the-week plots are undercooked, however, and Beau Bridges, as the firm’s alpha partner, is severely underused.
“NCIS: Origins” has some surface interest as a darker than usual variation on the “NCIS” blueprint, which usually calls for a mix of light buddy-cop banter and grisly homicide. Austin Stowell, playing the central character Leroy Jethro Gibbs at the beginning of his law-enforcement career, is about as expressive as Mark Harmon was when he played Gibbs on “NCIS”; Harmon made it work for 19 seasons, but Stowell may not get as much time to perfect his deadpan. (Harmon, who left the original series several seasons ago, returns here as narrator.)
“Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage” has the misfortune of having the slenderest connection to its predecessors. The center of gravity of both “Big Bang” and “Young Sheldon,” the comically obsessive scientist Sheldon Cooper (played by Jim Parsons as an adult and Iain Armitage as a child), is not present, and without him it is hard to see much of a purpose in the spinoff. (The show adds a Sheldon surrogate in the person of a twitchy, obsessive musician played by Dougie Baldwin; in the first few episodes it looks like a miscalculation.)
Georgie, Sheldon’s older brother, and Mandy run through achingly familiar sitcom scenarios of working-class travail, leavened only by the performance of Rachel Bay Jones (an Emmy, Grammy and Tony winner for “Dear Evan Hansen”) as Mandy’s disapproving mother. But it is still a good bet that more than a few of the nine million people who watched the last season of “Young Sheldon” will make the painless journey to “Georgie.”
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