Decent Options: "Privileged" and "Fringe" premiere

Thanks to last night's FOX Eco-Casino party, which now has my apartment well-stocked with enviro-friendly lightbulbs, and my "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" set visit today, I'm behind on my TV viewing for the week. I haven't watched "Mad Men," "Weeds," "Skinz," "One Tree Hill," "Weeds" or "Prison Break." I'm so far behind on "Big Brother" that I've quit entirely and started deleting the episodes piling up on my DVR, a decision that became a lot easier when I tried to think if I would possibly be rooting for anybody to win and came to the conclusion that I'm not.

Fortunately, I saw FOX's "Fringe" a while back. I was more enthusiastic after my first viewing during the summer, perhaps because I enjoy seeing things early, or maybe because seeing TV on the big screen -- a screening room on the FOX lot -- is ideal. Dunno. It's also possible that after reading the script and watching the pilot twice, I've burnt out a bit. My bottom line, as discussed in my Zap2it review, is that expectations are a problem after FOX's Summer of Unceasing Promotion. "Fringe" isn't "Lost" or "Alias" or "The X-Files." But that doesn't make it bad.

The night's other new show is The CW's "Privileged," a dramedy that I don't love, but that I feel a certain amount of warmth towards. A full review is after the bump.

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The CW's "90210" Premieres: Is it a Peach or the Pits?

The summer between my senior year in high school and college, I worked at a pizza place -- Boston's Favorite Pizza, Papa Gino's -- and did mostly night shifts, because that's what my friends were doing. That left me with my days free and since my summer reading was just a Tom Stoppard play, I discovered that FX aired two episodes of "Beverly Hills, 90210" each afternoon. The episodes were from different seasons, but they were at least in sequence, so I caught up on the first six seasons in weird epicycles, watching, say, Season One and Season Four in tandem and filling in blanks in fabulously non-linear ways.

As marvelously and deliciously trashy as it was, it would be wrong to forget that the original "Beverly Hills, 90210" was still over-earnest, ridiculously square, soapy trash. So it'll be interesting to see how rose-tinted critics' glasses are when it comes to "BH90210v.2.0." Will they complain that the acting on the new show doesn't equal the RSC standards set by a young Brian Austin Green and Luke Perry? Will they lament the occasionally preachy tone? Heck, will I fall into those traps?

We'll see after the bump, eh?

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