I feel bad that I don’t like NBC’s new show, I Feel Bad. So here’s the premise — mom of three kids who works in a video game company running project teams has Mom guilt about lots of things. Each episode therefore will be her starting off “I feel bad about…” something as she goes through the day.

The show stars Sarayu Blue as Emet, the daughter of a stereotypical Indian family — the mother is overbearing, the father is mentally absent, but they’re available for childcare, so they’re relatively close. Her husband is aware enough to spot a question as a trap but not aware enough to be really part of what’s going on in the pilot. She has four male coworkers at the office and one good female friend, and she consults them all about her problems of the day. Which likely is going to continue to revolve around her kids. In the opening, it is about her daughter being quite young but wanting to be on a highly sexualized dance team. Emet is afraid she’s turning into her mother, so she wants to be the cool hip supportive mom even though she hates the dance style.

So why do I feel bad? Emet’s mom is so bad as to border on farcical, almost Corner Gas style and I hate Corner Gas. She’s so passive aggressive it feels like they’re parodying mother-in-laws when in fact she’s the mother/grandmother. I don’t know her previous work, but her husband Brian George is a perennial Indian character actor, often in comedies, and most recognizable lately as Raj’s gynecologist dad on The Big Bang Theory (hard to believe he’s only been in 15 episodes in the last 11 years, he seems more regular than that) although older fans will recognize him as Babu from Seinfeld. Not for nothing, the guy has 283 credits since 1976. He keeps busy. But he has never been more than a bit player to me and he has almost no role in the first episode.

Husband David is played by Paul Adelstein, who has been in multiple shows in recent years, but nothing I saw him in, and as I said, he’s not very well-developed in Episode 1. Throw in the four coworkers, kids, and the female best friend, and you don’t get much of an impression (although the coworkers do cover a bit of ground — almost like if you put them all together, you would have a functional person to talk to at work).

Which therefore leaves the show, as always, squarely on the main character’s head, and the reason I feel bad is I just don’t care what happens to her. I didn’t like her when she was Lalita Gupta, Raj’s would be girlfriend on The Big Bang Theory, but that’s probably not relevant at this point. You see her right from the start in the middle of chaos, so there’s no time to bond with her, she’s just in it. She narrates the episode, which is another problem we’ll come to in a second, so you think it would feel almost intimate. You know her, you’re in her head, instant bond. Not so much. The narration might be the problem…rather than showing us her reactions to various things, the episode just tells us what she’s thinking. And while it is slightly deep, her actual behaviour with coworkers is ludicrously shallow and naive. I have no reason to root for her in any of this, nor care to watch her.

Which brings me to the plot device of the narration. There is no real plot to the episode, and instead it is her saying “here’s something” and then “here’s something else”. More like a disjointed set of skits rather than an actual script joined together in any way other than sequence of scenes. Add to it that her solution to her problem is to be a horrible, manipulative person to fake her daughter out, and I REALLY don’t care about the show with no structure or likable characters.

I read a review by someone who said they’re Indian and could totally relate to the mother and the main character. Good news, as a friend likes to say, there are over a billion Indian people and someone is related to all of them, so maybe the show will find a home. Not with me, cuz I’m out. I didn’t laugh once in the entire episode.

When I did my initial prediction sight unseen, I said, “Oh, look a story about a mom with lame plot ideas each week = CANCELLED”. I didn’t re-read that before I watched the episode, trying to keep it unbiased as I start, but I would stick with the same review afterwards, as well as the prediction. CANCELLED.

NBC has a new show called Manifest i.e., a small play on words for both a passenger manifest on a plane and a supernatural phenomenon manifesting itself in the real world. In the opening episode, you have a plane from Montego Bay to JFK that takes off normally, hits some pretty rough turbulence in the air, recovers, and tries to land at JFK. But the air traffic controllers re-route it to a small airport outside the city instead. Why? Because the plane has been missing for over five years, with everyone assumed to be missing and presumed dead.

It is a pretty great premise, not the least of which is that unlike Lost being out in the deserted wilderness, everyone is back to their regular lives in NYC. Except their old lives don’t exist anymore for some. For others, it’ll be a bit, well, different.

I also love the main character. A police officer dealing with guilt from the death of someone in a car crash (she was driving, the other person died), had a boyfriend / near fiancé when she left for the trip, and five years later, he’s married to her old best friend. Melissa Roxburgh plays Michaela, and I have seen Roxburgh over the years in a few guest star roles (Arrow, The Tomorrow People, DC Legends of Tomorrow, Travelers) and last year’s Valor. I knew she looked familiar, but had trouble placing her. But what I love about her character i.e., police officer, is that the writers have a natural hook for her to investigate, well, things. And while a lot of shows struggle in pilots for actors to find their character, she inhabits the role perfectly.

Equally, her brother, Ben, is played by Josh Dallas just coming off of 7 years as Prince Charming on Once Upon A Time. He can rock the odd side of scripts and just go with it, and he seems to have no trouble adjusting to his new character. Not even when Michaela and him start hearing their own voice in their head telling them to go to a specific building in NYC and “set them free”. They think the voice means the dogs guarding the building site; spoiler alert, it means set two little girls free who were abducted and are being kept in the building. Michaela frees them, they realize these voices are not simple hallucinations, and this sh** is starting to get real.

There are other stories going on too, mostly to do with Ben and Michaela’s extended family. Ben’s son has leukemia, and was given just six months to live before the flight. Now, there’s a new protocol available to treat it that looks pretty promising, and it is based on research from a doctor that was on the flight too. Ben’s daughter is now five years older, Ben’s wife has some sort of secret person texting her (I’m betting it’s a woman lover, not a man), and the son is connected to all of it.

And then at the end of the episode, they realize they’re not the only two people on the plane who were affected.

When I read the description, I thought it sounded too much like Lost, not to mention too many links to shows like The Returned. Lost went long, others usually don’t. It is so hard to get enough weird to hook people and keep them coming back but not so much weird that they can’t suspend their disbelief or they give up completely. So I predicted CANCELLED, sight unseen.

Now that I have watched the pilot, I’m going to upgrade it to RENEWED, primarily based on Michaela and Ben’s characters. It’s a nice hook. I’m not entirely convinced it will catch fire, but I’m watching whether it does or not.

One of the things I like to do when I’m making my prediction is simply rely on the descriptions of the shows. I don’t care if the lead is someone famous or not, because that is sometimes a hindrance as much as a help. Executives may be swayed by it, but I am a lover of stories, not single actors, when predicting the likelihood of success. For FBI, the descriptions were pretty basic. Hey, look, a story about the FBI. And based on that little info, my reaction was that there was no hook. And if the best they could do was “something something FBI something something”, I predicted CANCELLED.

If I had dug deeper, I would have seen some of the cast’s pedigree. The lead actress is Missy Peregrym, of Rookie Blue fame. I thought she was fine as a rookie cop, but she has almost no presence to me. And she was Serious Missy for this first episode, with little range or anything to offer worth watching.

She’s partnered with Zeeko Zaki, who is, well, nobody. A few roles, nothing outstanding to co-anchor a show. But in the episode, he has serious presence. More than Missy, that’s for sure. Ebonee Noel plays a hot CSI-type technical analyst / field operator (hard to pin down her role), but not much for her to do.

But the bosses have presence. Jeremy Sisto plays the assistant SAC for the NYC office, and I really liked him as Lupo on Law and Order back in the day. His boss is played by Connie Nielsen in the pilot, and she too has a L&O:SVU background for at least a partial season. From the looks of IMDB though, it appears she might have been recast for episode 2, and replaced with Sela Ward (Sisters, CSI:NY). A good supporting cast, but not enough to draw me in and keep me watching.

So remember how I said above that it was “something something FBI something something”? Well, now I’ve watched the episode, and I still have NO IDEA what the show is about. Is it about the FBI field office in NYC? Is it going to be simple case of the week? Will they really be able to have HIGH INTENSITY CRISIS EVERY WEEK? I don’t know, because the show never bothers to tell me what the show is about.

Cancelled? Absolutely. The real question is, “What the hell was the pitch?”