When I heard there was a new show called Daybreak about a dystopian high school world, with gangs of 4Hers for example, I predicted cancellation. I didn’t notice it was Netflix, so the business model is different, but the premise was just too weird to renew. I figured it was probably some form of Divergent or Hunger Games.

Nope, the show draws from six separate sources:

1. The show takes place after a nuclear attack, which is generic for any number of sources;
2. It steals a page from Star Trek back in the Original Series, from an episode in season 1 called Miri. In it, all the grown-ups (called “grups” in the ST show) are killed by a disease. In Daybreak, they are either dead or have all turned into zombies who keep repeating the last thought they had which is annoyingly mundane (i.e., as one attacks, she keeps repeating a desire to get yoga pants at Lululemon);
3. Add in a little bit of Red Dawn, where the kids have to defend themselves;
4. Pull out the name-dropped Mad Max costumes, vehicles, and marauding gangs;
5. Drop a pinch of the Warriors (there is a direct homage scene where five kids are inviting them out to “play” in the streets); and,
6. Give it a light-hearted main character narrating directly to the camera like Ferris Bueller. They even have him in roll call having his name called…”Josh Wheeler? Wheeler? Wheeler?”.

That is one hodge-podge of a show premise. There’s even a backstory Princess Bride moment going on in there too.

So, fast plot…Josh was the new kid in town and fell in love with the girl who the Principal assigned to show him around, a human “sorting hat” to help him figure out where he fit in. Then the bomb went off, adults were killed, he was separated from the girl, Sam, and now he’s spent several months trying to find her. All the kids have divided up into varying gangs (kind of like high-school cliques on steroids) all over Glendale, and he is trying to remain unaligned so he can find the girl. Two kids he knew in high school, and never liked, join his quest.

Josh is played by Colin Ford, and while he has done lots of cameos in shows I’ve watched, none of them were memorable. He’s pretty good, has a bit of gravitas in the scenes, accentuated by his narration directly into the camera at times. It worked for Ferris Bueller, it works here. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s NOT super Josh, or some MacGyver getting by on his wits…he’s a C student, not super good at anything, but he’s looking for his true love, Sam, played by Sophie Simnett. A relative newcomer, I’ve never seen her in any of the handful of credits she has, but she sparkles in her limited role. The “English” accent doesn’t hurt.

The two people joining Josh on the quest are Alyvia Alyn Lind as a 10-year-old kid he used to babysit who is also a pyromaniac. I’ve seen her before as the young Amanda from the show Revenge, but she never had much to do in the show, it was almost all silent flashback. Here she has lines, but nothing exceptional or challenging, just watchable. Felt like I was watching Spy Kids or something. She’s joined by Austin Crute as a sword-obsessed pacifist who is along for the ride. Okay, not too challenging though.

Other people are running around, but hard to tell how big a role they’ll have. Matthew Broderick (yes, Ferris Bueller) is in the show as the Principal, and all of his scenes are in flashback (at least in Ep1). No idea what happens to him after the bomb goes off.

Sooooo, is it awesome? No. But it is certainly not like anything else on TV. And I have to confess, oddly watchable. The lighter side is eminently watchable, while the dystopian universe is kind of meh. Nevertheless, I’ll probably watch. But if it wasn’t on Netflix, I’d have to go with my original prediction of cancellation.

Fox went with a ripped from — or imagined from — the headlines premise for the show Almost Family, and added a twist. The premise is, “What if a fertility doctor used his own sperm to fertilize the eggs of the women/couples he helped?”. The twist is that the focus is on the aftermath for the potential multiple babies involved. The show even creates a hashtag of #BechleyBabies after the name of the doctor, Leon Bechley. It didn’t seem like it had anywhere to go, so I predicted cancellation.

But when I started watching the show, I was surprised. First of all, the show introduces you to three women…First up is Brittany Snow as Julia Bechley, his sole child, or so she thinks. Daughter, worker in the clinic, she’s devoted her life to the guy. Even put off med school. But her life is a bit of a mess. She’s always on her bike as she never learned to drive, but it’s constantly giving her problems (rain, forgetting things, almost getting hit by other cyclists, etc.). She hooks up with a guy off a dating app, only later to find out that he is potentially a brother. Ewww. The only problem is that she’s really hard to get a handle on, she’s all over the place. It isn’t until the last 10 minutes that she solidifies who she is, but the previous confusion was not plot, it was just bad acting.

Contestant #2 is Emily Osment as Roxy Doyle. Faux celeb, barely getting by, and spiraling. She might be a #BechleyBaby, and she hopes she is because she really wants a sister. Which seems warm, until you realize there is almost NOTHING about this character worth watching. She has a couple of moments, but mostly she’s a waste of skin (the character, not the actress). She seemed more caricature than character. Yawn.

Contestant #3 is the worst of the bunch. Megalyn Echikunwoke plays Edie Palmer, a lawyer and oddly enough, a family friend of the Bechleys. Her mom even suspected that she was Leon’s daughter. In the episode, she’s dating Julia’s ex, and struggling with sex and intimacy. Later she breaks with the boyfriend and kisses a woman she knows and to whom she’s attracted. But she too is ALL over the place…sometimes secure and professional, then immature and flaky, then just confused.

For the first 50 minutes of the episode, I didn’t like any of them. And then…

They have a scene at the end where they are all together and chatting. And it WORKS. Almost enough for me to watch Ep2. Almost.

Instead, I would be predicting cancellation still, which would be more impressive if I did it before today when the show failed to win a back 9 episode order and is essentially dead. Not surprised.

Fox has a new animated show called Bless the Harts, and all I had on it was that it was animated, about a Southern Family, and umm, well, Jesus was one of the characters. Okaaaay. I predicted CANCELLATION.

Now that I’ve seen the pilot, let me address the elephant in the room…yes, Jesus is sort of a character. His picture is on the diner wall where the main character works, and from time to time, she imagines him coming down from the wall and talking to her. So sort of a character. Also a bit of a flake, but I digress.

Anyway, the main character is a waitress at a diner, married with a young daughter, a husband who is not the biological father, and living with her mother. This is the lucky-scratch-card crowd, a cross between Married…with Children and the old show, Alice, who worked at Mel’s Diner. The opening episode combines the debt-ridden broke world of Married…with Children with a bit of the get-rich schemes of Bart Simpson. The main character dreams of having enough to pay off her water bill, which the postal delivery woman notes is over due — so overdue in fact that they start putting the threats on the outside, with cartoon images for those who can’t read. Turns out her mother his sitting on a collection of old “Hug and Bug” dolls (like Cabbage Patch dolls mixed with Care Bears) that she hopes will be collectables worth money. Kristen Wiig (SNL) voices Jenny Hart, and does a decent job.

But in the end, I’m just not sure there’s enough there to hold people’s interest. Sticking with Cancellation!