Serious Adverse Events

In a riskier move than most networks were willing to make this season, NBC's The Event is a high-concept, heavily serialized thriller that's trying to be the next Lost, and hoping to hell it's not the next FlashForward. I'd say it falls somewhere in between.

I usually give a brief summary of what a show is about at the beginning of a review, but if you saw the pilot for The Event, you'll understand that that's not going to be easy... Geez, let's see... So, there's this guy played by Jason Ritter who goes on a cruise and then gets on a plane that's going to crash into the president or something, but then it gets sucked into a vortex because there's apparently this group of people who are in prison in Alaska and that's... somehow important. The Event is banking on mystery and and the unknown, so really, viewers walk away from the pilot with a hell of a lot of questions and very little tangible anything. The pilot sought to pique audience interest with a barrage of "Wait, what?" and they succeeded. I haven't a clue what's going on, but I have just enough information that I want to know more.

This pilot revolves around mysterious, unexplained events that seem to center around a few pivotal characters. Every aspect of the pilot aims at giving the viewer just enough information to know that there's a whole lot more to the story. Even the structure of the episode makes for a disjointed narrative. The story is told in a very non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth in time and place, filling in certain gaps while creating others. While I think that approach definitely worked for this kind of pilot, the constant time jumps felt a little excessive and unnecessary. Seriously, every few minutes you'd get "13 months earlier" or "23 minutes earlier" or whatever. They pulled it off, but also wasted a lot of time in the process on a convention that didn't seem entirely necessary. Jumping around this much and from character to character led to a lot of overlap. I had to watch several scenes a few times from a different character's perspective and it got a bit tedious. I realize that it was a stylistic choice, and an effective one at that, but I also appreciate economic storytelling and couldn't help but to think that moments could have been curtailed. I don't know if they just didn't trust the audience to remember where we were in the narrative or what, but the overlap was kind of annoying...

In all honesty, this show seems to trust its viewers a hell of a lot more than most (gratuitous overlap notwithstanding). I appreciated that they didn't hold the viewer's hand while telling this story and let the pieces fall into place without much exposition or explanation. To that end, however, I am a little fearful that this tendency might lead to loose ends and plot holes that simply never get resolved. This is going to be difficult show to write and produce and I certainly hope the creative team has a long-term plan worked out. If they're just making stuff up as they go along, I think they're going to lose track of things. So far, so good.

The pilot was very well-made and definitely had some network support behind it. This is an expensive show that will need to perform quite well in order to stay on the air. The cast is solid and I actually enjoyed Jason Ritter more than expected. I'm not sure how he'll handle anchoring a show, but I suspect this series will have enough going on that he won't have to shoulder the burden alone. Blair Underwood (ugh) is onboard to play his usual arrogant, self-centered man-in-charge (this time, quite literally since he plays the president) which is always off-putting, but I'm hopeful he's not as central to the narrative as others. It was nice to see some familiar faces that haven't been making the rounds lately. Laura Innes (Dr. Weaver from ER) and Scott Patterson (Luke from Gilmore Girls) round out the better part of the cast, although I suspect this is the kind of show that could start sprawling at any moment. Based on the pilot alone, it was had to tell who's going to be pivotal and who's going to get killed off next week...

This is a hard one to wrap your head around in terms of standard TV conventions which makes for a nice change of pace. It's difficult to assess the pilot alone because this is such a serialized concept. At present, the audience has only the barest of bones to work with and no one has any idea what "the event" actually is. I suspect we'll spend the entire first season, and kind of fear that they plan on spending the entire series, figuring it out. I wasn't sure how this show would be received, but it has actually gotten quite good buzz and did even better than expected in the ratings department. Unlike Hawaii Five-0, The Event's audience actually grew over the course of the hour, so not only did viewers not lose interest, the show was engaging enough to draw in additional viewers as it aired.

I enjoyed the pilot well enough and think this show certainly has potential. Will it be the cultural phenomenon that Lost was? Probably not. But it does have a solid (and yet at the same time, amorphous) foundation and has set up enough mysteries to keep the show going over the long haul. My main concern is that they'll be tempted to never answer any of the questions they've asked. If they can manage a pace that's both satisfying and tantalizing concurrently, I could see where this could turn into a real winner.

All in all, I'm definitely intrigued, but I doubt this is going to be appointment TV for me. At least not yet. I want to know more, but I don't feel like I have enough of a basis to be truly invested. Sure I'm curious about how these characters got to be in the situations they're in and want to know what the hell happened to that plane, but I'm not invested enough in these people to be bursting at the seems to find out. As the series progresses, I assume they'll all grow on me and I'll become more attached to what happens to them, but I'm also a little fearful that all the crazy will get in the way of real character development. So far, I'm hopeful, but cautious. The show's real challenge is going to be audience retention. This is a high concept serial, so if a viewer misses an episode, it's highly likely s/he will give up on the show. This isn't a show for a casual viewer, and on a night with an insane amount of programming, I'm a little afraid The Event may become an afterthought. Based on ratings for the pilot, however, it has a better chance of surviving that I anticipated.

I'll certainly be giving it chance and will just have to hope that the writers have an actual plan in mind... winging it simply isn't going to work...

Speaking of work (sort of), the only people who would find the title of this post ingenious are the people who work in my office, but I couldn't think of anything else.

Pilot Grade: B