Copyright © 2010 by Sarah Stegall
The Event
“I Haven’t Told You Everything”
Mondays, NBC, 9PM
Written by Nick Wauters
Directed by Jeffrey Reiner
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
“I haven’t told you everything.” —Sophia
Well, now we know what happened to Oceanic Flight 815 (Lost). It started out as The Event and got swallowed by the Langoliers. Half this story takes place on an airliner, and the other half is chopped up and sprinkled throughout the episode like chives in a salad. There is no obvious lead character, not much of a clue as to what problem is threatening the characters, and no clue as to what is at stake. We have a pretty twenty-something couple improbably on an ocean cruise (show me the hipster couple who can afford those rates). We have mysterious military maneuvers in Alaska. There is an implied threat against the life of the President, who is pretty much a generic character.
Note to Hollywood: there is an actual black man in the White House. There have been black TV/movie Presidents aplenty—Morgan Freeman, Dennis Haysbert, D.B. Woodside, even Chris Rock. It is no longer innovative. Please stop using it as shorthand for character development. Casting a black actor as President does not automatically make him someone we’re going to care about—give him an actual personality, please. Blair Underwood’s (New Adventures of Old Christine) President Martinez gets in one or two glares, but can hardly hold the scene against the likes of Zeljko Ivanek, who could steal the show from Darth Vader. Ivanek here plays his usual vaguely insinuating, reptilian, devious character, Blake Sterling. He is trying to talk the President out of something, we’re not sure what. It’s hard to figure out why we should care about this President, despite his pretty wife and children—he’s not a human being, he’s a symbol, and I find it hard to get worked up about a symbol.
The same problem pervades this show, and that’s bad news for a pilot. Television is a character-driven medium, heavily reliant on the audience’s investment in the show. That’s why we are used to pilot episodes that are short on plot but long on back-story—we need to have a reason to come back next week. Maybe the producers looked at Lost and saw the pretty, flashy bits—the flashbacks, the sense of confusion, the lurking suspicion that there were paranormal or at least science-fictional reasons for what was happening. If that’s what they did, then I have to say that they failed to pick up on the reason Lost, and earlier shows like 24 and The X-Files, succeeded so well—they had characters we cared about from the very beginning. If we were confused by the timing of 24, or the flashbacks of Lost, or the weird and unbelievable things on The X-Files, we at least could hold firmly to Jack Bauer or Jack Shephard or Fox Mulder. In The Event, we have nobody. We are confronted with a confused, time-juggled mess, with no central concern or driving sense of order.
The character we see most of is Sean Walker (Jason Ritter, Parenthood). He’s a likeable young man, not really very grown up. We see him at various stages—awkwardly asking his girlfriend’s father (Scott Patterson, 90210) for her hand in marriage, then trying to propose in a tropical setting, or fending off the advances of a chance acquaintance on the ship. He comes across as slightly dim, but good-hearted. Then his girlfriend disappears in an all-too-familiar scenario (what? No one has ever heard of or seen her? Didn’t we see this movie?), and he completely loses his mind. When confronted with a mystery, he raves, he screams, he fights with security people. He makes scenes, he makes trouble. Finally, he takes a gun on board an airliner and tries to take over the airplane in mid-flight. Confronted by an air marshal, he yells, “This is not what it looks like!” Dude, this is exactly what it looks like—an armed hijacking. Am I really supposed to sympathize, to root for this idiot?
I was lucky to tease that much coherence out of this storyline. As I mentioned, the narrative line of this story was as scrambled as this morning’s eggs. This approach can work—it worked in Lost, in Memento—but it takes a sure hand with narrative and a strong central character the audience can focus on. Just as I was orienting myself in a scene, however, it would cut to something else “thirteen weeks earlier” or some such. As soon as I thought I had figured out who was who, we cut to some stranger in a scene on the other side of the globe, doing something unexplained and mysterious. A little of this goes a long way—even Lost confined itself to a couple of flashbacks per episode. The Event seems to be built out of disconnected scenes, as if someone took the 3 x 5 index cards off the storyboard in the writers’ room and shuffled them at random. The result is neither consistent nor pretty. The only thing that kept me watching was my desire to see if all of this would come together at the end.
It sort of did. The plotlines sort of converge on a press conference the President is holding, in which he is going to make an announcement about “The Event”, whatever this is, while backed up by Laura Innes (ER) character Sophia, who seems to be a trusted advisor—in manacles. The aforementioned airliner, now under the control of Sean Walker’s would-be father-in-law, dives towards the press conference, but everything on the ground seems to be shaking, whirling, coming apart. In a final blazing moment, the plane simply disappears into a ball of light. My money says it reappears over the Pacific, breaking up over a deserted island with a smoke monster.
Hyped for weeks, The Event scored 11 million viewers on its maiden voyage. The network still came in third. Watching this show will require concentration akin to a final exam in calculus, with rigid attention to every detail. I don’t know if many viewers are willing to invest that kind of time. Obviously, millions were willing to give it a go with Lost, and NBC is hoping that kind of lightning will strike. Frankly, I don’t know if I’ll be sticking around to find out. I can follow this story—if I work at it. I can figure out the characters and their relationships—if I care to. The trouble is, no one has given me a reason to care. The only real draw so far is an intellectual one—what swallowed up the plane? But that’s only going to draw me in if I care what happened to the people on it, and so far this show has given me no reason to do so.