US TV: the hits and misses of a turbulent season

Now that the dust from the writers' strike has finally settled and programmes are slowly limping back on to our screens, one thing seems clear: most of the shows launched this season are wounded, in some cases fatally reports Sarah Hughes...

We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.

But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.

Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.

It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.

Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.

The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.

Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...