The promotional world of satire and parody mediums is a dark, but adventurous place. The critical gauntlet for bands, movies, television shows, and anything else that accidentally makes it into our mailbox is long, blood-thirsty, and rarely praising. Praise isn’t funny. Mockery is. Mockery of praise is funny. Praising mockery isn’t. Mocking the praising of mock….well, you get the point.

Once a generation, or month, a brave soul with a strong constitution comes to us, offering up their virgin creations for us to do with as we will. Sometimes they come to us by accident, are horrified by what they unleash, and run screaming into the night, sending notes by carrier pigeon later on asking for mercy. The strong ones, however, stand their ground through the critical maelstrom, and are rewarded with readers that will at least wonder if I’m full of crap and go check it out themselves, completing the quest to gather more viewers.

The one standing at the dark alter today: ABC and two new shows slated for the Fall season.

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Charlie’s Angels

I don’t think I even have to put a premise here for Charlie’s Angels, but just in case: three women(Rachel Taylor, Annie Ilonzeh, & Minka Kelly) run around at the beck and call of a mystery man named Charlie fighting crime as private investigators. With lots of action, gun-play, and sexual innuendo, these three women clean up cases in the span of an hour.

Yes, the television series from the 70s that had a resurgence on the silver screen this past decade is now going back to television. How could this leap be made as an evolution of the Angel franchise? Easy: they made one of the Angels a black woman.

I think we’re done here. Bring out the Golden Globes.

Througout the preview, that is the only thing that struck me besides Charlie having lost all semblance of an accent. Think about it. The original Charlie’s Angels were three white women, blonde, brunette, and red-head. Then the movies come along decades later, and they decide to shed some of the cubbyholing by bringing on a blonde, a fake red-head, and Lucy Liu, who of course knows martial arts. Now they’re dropping the red-head, shifting the Asian back to brunette, and adding an African American while blondie continues to reign supreme.

This evolution of politically correct casting has one plus: maybe, just maybe, the next movie will cast Amber Heard as the blonde, but a lesbian blonde that hits on the other two women while they’re beating up bad guys. Now that is a Charlie’s Angels I would watch. Then again, it’s not too late, ABC…

Other than that, the ABC series looks to be an action show with no nudity that has been done countless times before. I don’t think it’ll last a full season run. Then again, I was one of the few people that liked V, so what do I know?

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Once Upon A Time

I have a sinking suspicion that ABC is trying to put one over on me. This upcoming show almost looks like the network’s excuse for putting out a new Charlie’s Angels. It’s as if executives were saying, “Yeah, Charlie’s Angels is a bubble-gum show, but we still have depth! Remember LOST? Well, Once Upon A Time is even WEIRDER!”

The premise, as far as I could tell, is as follows: a hot blonde(Jennifer Morrison) drives into a town called Storybrooke (oh, come on!). It is there she learns, through a kid(presumably her son that she gave up long ago), that everyone in town is a fairy tale character, but they don’t know it. I’m guessing the wicked witch of the West cast a spell on all of them, and they’ve lived for thousands of years oblivious to the fact that living so long just isn’t normal. Hey, you come up with a better explanation.

I believe they will, for better or for worse. Heading the production are Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis of LOST fame, so I’m sure the explanation will captivate our imaginations until they make the story do a 180-degree turn and make fans rage against the show so badly that DVD sales tank. The problem is that the show won’t have as much action. LOST had a lot of stuff going on, a lot of fighting and shooting, and characters and creatures that you had no idea about, so it was easy to get sucked in to the storyline and let the plot twist as it may.

Once Upon A Time doesn’t have the same luxuries. Unless you were locked in a basement during your childhood with only a box of laundry detergent to read, you know most of the fairytale stories. You also know that they don’t have much gripping action. The movie The Brothers Grimm tried to make fairytales more exciting. Now the DVDs are piling up in bargain bins. At best, the series will build itself up to level that it can never finish at, like LOST. At worst, it’ll lose the audience right away, forcing Storybrooke to be literally burned to the ground.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to barricade myself in my house. Those ABC types are scary…