Each new season, most shows get at the very least a cursory glance on the tv blogs and sites I read, but every year a few shows slip through the cracks. There might be more exhaustive sites out there but I don’t know them, so as far as I’m concerned, this is virgin territory.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that both of the shows I’m looking at today are on the CW, a network that has done nothing to engender the support or interest of the internet since killing off the much loved Veronica Mars. It’s also fifth in a three-car race when it comes to network television, but being in last place doesn’t stop a network from having spectacular shows. Just look at early 90′s Fox.

In addition to being on a D-list network, these two shows are both a part of the new deal between the CW and Media Rights Capital which outsourced Sunday night programming to MRC, so the odds of anyone giving these shows more than a read through of their synopses before moving along were already pretty low. So, let’s take a look at two lesser-known television shows premiering this year and their odds of survival.

Valentine

Valentine is a dramedy that focuses on modern day love stories. So far each episode deals with a pair of soulmates who have come to a crossroads in their lives and if not pushed in the right direction their love will not come to be, which typically means bad news for all involved. And at those crossroads are a team of love specialists who are actually Greek Gods. Headed by Aphrodite, now known as Grace, the team consists of Aphrodite, Eros (AKA Cupid, AKA Danny Valentine), Leo (AKA Hercules), and Phoebe who mans the Oracle at Delphi (no longer at Delphi) which helps them gain intel on the love struck soulmates they’ll be helping that week. And since every show needs an outsider who needs expositing at, the first episode introduces a mortal romance novelist to the fray because the God Gang is losing their touch when it comes to Love and they needed a fresh pair of eyes.

Beyond the basic “couple needs some love” weekly story, there seems to be an ongoing story related to the greater mythology of the Gods. In the first episode we learn that as Gods become less relevant they become weaker until they become mortals. Aphrodite demonstrates this by cutting her son with a blade and showing him the blood. Clearly, love doesn’t have the sway it once had in our cynical world. It seems as though this show intends to argue for a few related issues in its overarching themes: What the world needs now is Love, sweet Love; War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing; and finally, that our modern lives are eliminating romance and intimacy from the world and replacing them with instant messages and twitters. That last one doesn’t have a snappy song lyric to go along with it. Sorry.

On the mythology front, Ares, the Greek God of War and Aphrodite’s husband, who now goes by Ari — which by the way is a really clever renaming, because Ari is a Jewish name and the middle east is basically the centre of war in the modern world — makes an appearance in the second episode and extols the power of War in the modern world and the uselessness of Love. There are other aspects to the God dramas but let’s not get bogged down in those details.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. The worst kept secret in the universe. I’m a sucker for a love story. Note that I didn’t say a good love story. A mediocre love story might not make my heart leap quite as much as a good love story, but it jumps nonetheless. Beyond loving Love, I also love mythology and the Greek and Roman mythologies in particular. (There’s a reason I watched six seasons of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and it wasn’t Kevin Sorbo’s brilliant acting.) So this show has the double whammy of mixing Love stories with Greek mythology.

That said, based on what I’ve seen so far it’s focusing far too heavily on the Greek God side of the story. It’s not that I don’t like that story line: it’s fairly interesting. But so far the love stories they’ve cooked up are more interesting and sorely underdeveloped, and given that each episode is unrelated they could really be milking that format and letting their serialized arc stretch out longer.

Easy Money

Easy Money is about a family-run loan shark company. It reminds me of Sons of Anarchy, though I’ve still only seen the pilot of SoA so I really don’t want to stress that comparison. The main character is middle child Morgan Buffkin, who is being represented as the smart one in the family. In the first episode, he buys a book and argues with his friend, who’s selling him the book, that Einstein invalidated Existentialism by showing that everything is connected…

Clearly the writers don’t have a strong grasp of either philosophy or physics (or want their audience to understand that their main character isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is) but at least they’re trying.

Despite his bizarre understanding of physics and philosophy, he really is the smart one of the family. While virtually every customer they have tries their best to get out of repaying their debts, Morgan manages to get it out of them, whether by pretending to be the manager to a ventriloquist, or by uncovering adultery to cajole payments out of people.

There are quite a few disparate threads in the two episodes I’ve seen: there’s a new loan shark business in town is run by thugs who are not above forcing competition out of business through threat and theft; the husband of the ditsy sister seems to be getting into money troubles; and a few different customers have been introduced with varying degrees of grudges against the family.

In addition to these, the main story revolves around Morgan’s origin. He’s always felt out of place in his family and at the end of the first episode he learns why: he’s not related to them. This seems to be the mystery that the show wants to develop over the course of the season, but it’s not nearly as intriguing as they’d like it to be. It’s possible that these threads are going to align very smartly and give a really good pay-off to the progeny mystery, but at the moment it’s not really drawing me in.

All told, these two shows aren’t half bad. They’re nothing special, but they’re good enough for me to keep watching at least for the remainder of the season to see where it’s all going. As for their odds of survival? Well, seeing as both of these shows have already stopped production, to give the writers time to catch up, it doesn’t look great, but I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospects for both of these shows, primarily because of this: their ratings aren’t stellar, but MRC is an independent producer and its requirements when it comes to ratings might not be as grand as networks. And it seems to me that MRC is working towards establishing itself as a producer of quality television programming. They might not succeed, but the very fact that they have that goal means to me that they’ll give their material more of a chance than an established network. If the CW were calling the shows, these shows might already have been canceled.