One Woman Guesses the Plots of 13 New Fall Shows From Just Their Titles

Now that all the broadcast networks have announced their Fall TV premiere dates, it’s only a matter of time until you start seeing more and more advertisements for their new shows. That is, of course, if you don’t fast-forward through commercials, which so many of us do.

So let’s say you manage to never see an ad for a show. Could you tell what it’s about from just its title? To find out, I phoned the one person I could confirm still had no knowledge of the networks’ fall lineups: my sister, Jennifer Bierly, a lawyer who hasn’t had TV since her first child was born in December of 2008.

I read her the titles of 13 new series for the 2015-16 season, and she offered her best guesses of their plots. Whose shows sound better: the networks’ or hers? We’ll put it to a vote at the end.

Blindspot (NBC)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “That one has got to have something to do with cars… So this is Patrick Dempsey’s new show! Patrick Demspey is a NASCAR driver, who has an off-track troubled life in some way and is just struggling to kind of hold it together. Oh, I know! Patrick Dempsey is a NASCAR driver, who has a drug addiction! That’s what it is.”

What It’s Actually About: “From executive producer Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash, The Mysteries of Laura) comes Blindspot: A vast international plot explodes when a beautiful Jane Doe is discovered naked in Times Square, completely covered in mysterious, intricate tattoos with no memory of who she is or how she got there. There’s one that’s very clear, however: the name of FBI agent Kurt Weller, emblazoned across her back. ‘Jane,’ Agent Weller and rest of the FBI quickly realize that each mark on her body is a crime to solve, leading them closer to the truth about her identity and the mysteries to be revealed.” (Premieres Sept. 21)

The Player (NBC)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “That’s probably along the lines of For Love of the Game with Kevin Costner. It would be about a major league baseball player who is trying to make a comeback after an injury. It’s about his comeback and how his family handles it — he’s got a wife and a kid that’s a middle school-aged girl.”

What It’s Actually About: “From the executive producers of The Blacklist and starring Wesley Snipes and Philip Winchester (Strike Back, Fringe) comes an action-packed Las Vegas thriller about a former military operative turned security expert who is drawn into a high-stakes game where an organization of wealthy individuals gamble on his ability to stop some of the biggest crimes imaginable from playing out. Can he take them down from the inside and get revenge for the death of his wife, or is it true what they say: The house always wins.” (Premieres Sept. 24)

The Grinder (Fox)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “There’s all these shows out there that are done from the perspective of the people who are trying to solve the crime. This one is in the perspective of the person committing the crime. So The Grinder is a criminal. He’s known as The Grinder. He’s not just a murderer, he’s a torturer. You don’t want to like him, and you don’t like him, but you’re sucked in by the story of what drives him to do it because it’s so unique in that it’s coming from his viewpoint — his mental illness, what goes on in his head, how he seeks out victims. It’s the process of someone dying, not someone dying, that he goes after. That’s kind of sick. I might write that book.”

What It’s Actually About: “The Grinder, starring Emmy Award nominee Rob Lowe (Parks and Recreation, The West Wing) and Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award nominee Fred Savage (The Wonder Years), follows a famous TV lawyer (Lowe) who, after his hit series, The Grinder, is canceled, moves back home and joins his brother (Savage) at their family’s real-life law firm — despite having no formal education, no bar certification, no license to practice and no experience in an actual courtroom.” (Premieres Sept. 29)

Grandfathered (Fox)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “Okay, this show is about a family, but it focuses on both grandfathers. You have mom, dad, and three kids, and you have grandfather on mom’s side and grandfather on dad’s side — and they’re completely different. Mom and dad are working parents, and both grandfathers are widowed, and they’re the ones that stay home. So it’s a comedy about how the two of them take care of the kids. That would be a good show, right? It stars Tim Allen and… how old is Ray Romano now?”

What It’s Actually About: “A comedy about coming of age — at any age — Grandfathered stars John Stamos (Full House, ER) as the ultimate bachelor whose life is turned upside down when he discovers he’s not only a father, but a grandfather.” (Premieres Sept. 29)

The Frankenstein Code (Fox) 

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “That one’s gonna be set in London. That’s a heist show. It’s a group of hackers, and the Frankenstein Code is the software or the spyware that they use to hack in to rob banks online. But it’s set in London.  That’s important.”

What It’s Actually About: “In The Frankenstein Code, from executive producer/writer Rand Ravich (Life, Crisis) and executive producer Howard Gordon (Homeland, 24), a disgraced, 75-year-old ex-sheriff, whose life ends at the hands of corrupt cops, is brought back to life and given a second chance by a pair of young tech scientists, as a 35-year-old (Rob Kazinsky, True Blood) with unpredictable near-superhuman abilities.” (Premieres in 2016)

Rosewood (Fox)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “That’s gonna be the fictional take on Ree Drummond, who’s the Pioneer Woman. I have her cookbooks. You have a girl who’s from the city and she’s visiting friends in Wyoming, somewhere like that, and she meets a cowboy, falls in love with the cowboy, and moves to the cowboy’s ranch. Either the ranch is Rosewood Ranch or the town is called Rosewood. So it’s about how she acclimates going from city life to country life, trying to figure out how she’s going to be fulfilled living in that wide open space. It’s a working ranch, so you have kind of the whole Dallas dynamic, where she’s trying to fit in to a family that’s established and this is what they know, and she’s the outsider in more than one way.”

What It’s Actually About: “From executive producer Todd Harthan (Psych, Dominion), Rosewood stars Morris Chestnut (Nurse Jackie, The Best Man franchise) as Dr. Beaumont Rosewood, Jr., a brilliant private pathologist who uses wildly sophisticated technology and his drive to live life to the fullest to help a tough-as-nails detective (Jaina Lee Ortiz, The After) and the Miami PD uncover clues no one else can see.” (Premieres Sept. 23)

The Catch (ABC)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “I don’t want to do more sports. … So the The Catch is going to be about a guy who is a serial dater — kind of like Will Smith in Hitch, kind of like Ryan Gosling in that movie [Crazy, Stupid, Love.]. A couple of episodes will be about him being a serial dater, and then he’ll find somebody that he clicks with and he won’t know how to handle it.”

What It’s Actually About: “From Shondaland’s Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers, The Catch is a new thriller centered on the strong, successful Alice Martin (Mireille Enos). She’s a fraud investigator who’s about to be the victim of fraud herself by her fiancé. Between her cases, she is determined to find him before it ruins her career.” (Premieres Midseason)

Blood & Oil (ABC)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “That’s gonna be like Sons of Anarchy. They don’t run guns, they run drugs, mostly in the Southwest. I don’t want to be too Sons of Anarchy, but it’s about a motorcycle gang that runs drugs.”

What It’s Actually About: “Billy and Cody Lefever dream of a new life beyond their working class roots and move to ‘The Bakken’ in North Dakota, booming after the biggest oil discovery in American history. They’re soon pitted against a ruthless tycoon who forces them to bet big and put everything on the line, including their marriage.” (Premieres Sept. 27)

Code Black (CBS)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “Okay, that’s a terrorist show. That’s about terrorists who take over the New York City subway system, and you have a cameo.”

What It’s Actually About: “Code Black is a heart-pounding medical drama that takes place in the busiest, most notorious ER in the nation, where the staggering influx of patients can outweigh the limited resources available to the extraordinary doctors and nurses whose job is to treat them all — creating a condition known as Code Black.” (Premieres Sept. 30)

Angel From Hell (CBS)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “That one is a comedy about a stepmother who comes into a family and has completely opposite ideas of virtually everything that pop culture and teenagers stand for right now. So every episode, it will address something like too much TV, too much games, whether or not they need cell phones — but in a funny way. She’s good for them, but it’s hell — everything that they’re going through is not what their friends are going through. And it’s even more difficult because it’s not the widowed father doing it, it’s the stepmother. Wait, he’s not widowed… No, make him widowed… Kill the ex-wife… Or maybe just put her in jail.”

What It’s Actually About: ”Angel From Hell stars Golden Globe and multiple Emmy Award winner Jane Lynch in a single-camera comedy about Amy (Lynch), a colorful, brassy woman who insinuates herself into Allison’s (Maggie Lawson) organized and seemingly perfect life, claiming to be her ‘guardian angel.’ Allison is an intense, driven doctor who is sure that Amy is just an inebriated, outspoken nut, until every one of her warnings proves true.“ (Premieres Nov. 5)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “The CW is into vampire and supernatural stuff? Okay, I got it. That is about a girl and a guy on a college campus, and they are dating, and she’s more into him than he is into her, and they break up. But, she had some sort of superpower — I have to think about what that is — that he never knew about. But she is still in love with him, and she uses her superpower to mess up any dates or relationship that he tries to have with other women after her… She’s a witch, and she can just wish things to happen. She’ll think it or visualize it, and it’ll happen. She’s not intending to hurt anybody or anything like that, but she utilizes this witchcraft, almost like a voodoo doll, to control him to do something that turns the other person off.”

What It’s Actually About: “Rebecca Bunch is a successful, driven, and possibly crazy young woman who impulsively gives up everything – her partnership at a prestigious law firm and her upscale apartment in Manhattan – in a desperate attempt to find love and happiness in that exotic hotbed of romance and adventure: suburban West Covina, Calif. (it’s only two hours from the beach! Four in traffic).” (Premieres Oct. 19)

Wicked City (ABC)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “That’s a cop drama. Are there any shows on right now where the main characters are lesbians? Because I’m thinking it’s a cop drama set in a city where two women are on the force and they’re lesbians, and it’s about their struggles in being accepted by their peers in the force while dealing with solving crime in the city. Remember Law & Order, when that one assistant D.A. [Elisabeth Rohm’s Serena Southerlyn] went in, she was fired or something, and you never knew she was a lesbian, and right at the end, she said, ‘You only fired me because I’m a lesbian.’ And just with all the laws and marriage equality, I thought maybe it would break into some entertainment.”

What It’s Actually About: “Wicked City follows a unique case set in a noteworthy era of L.A. history, starting with a murder case from 1982 centered on the rock ‘n’ roll, cocaine-infused revelry of the Sunset Strip. Alliances are formed between detectives, reporters, drug dealers and club-goers to solve a serial murder case.” (Premieres Oct. 27)

People Are Talking (NBC)

What Jennifer Thinks It’s About: “The first thing that comes to my mind is an affair, of some sort. … We’re coming up on an election year, so that would be about a politician who has an affair, but the kicker is it’s a woman. The husband finds out about it right before the start of a major campaign — she’s running for mayor of a large city. The whole thing is about how they go through that election trying to keep that from being public knowledge and trying to resolve their own issues. I need to name someone who would star in that. Helen Hunt. I’m bringing back Helen Hunt.”

What It’s Actually About: “From producer Will Packer (Ride Along) and director Pam Fryman (How I Met Your Mother) comes this unabashed new comedy about two diverse couples who are both neighbors and best friends. As they go through life side-by-side, they can’t help but analyze and obsess about everything. From topics like sex and race, to the fact that the trusted new babysitter might just be a porn star, nothing is out of bounds for this wildly outspoken foursome.” (Premieres Oct. 16)