Category Archives: 2000s

Veronica Mars Season 4

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So this has nothing at all to do with pilots, aside from the fact that the show in question has one of the best pilots ever, but it is so completely awesome that I had to post it. It’s unaired footage from Season 4 of Veronica Mars. No, there never was a Season 4, but this gives us a little taste of what might have been after that incredibly frustratingly open-ended series finale. I guess it’s been hanging around the web a while, but I just discovered it.

Our little girl made it to the FBI–and what a great frakking premise for her first assignment!


I guess the world will never know whether Keith was elected sheriff.

Archer

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You can literally blink and miss things in this pilot*. Watch it twice. Or three times. First just let the absurdity of the situation wash over you, then go back and soak up all the sight gags and the often casually tossed-off hilarious dialogue. Then absorb the animation; it’s amazing, with remarkable depth of field and subtlety of facial expressions. In the scene where Archer is eating breakfast, pause it and just look at the detail of the food on the table; it’s gorgeous.

The first moments of the pilot give you the idea you’re watching something really dark. Our hero, Sterling Archer/code name Duchess (H. Jon Benjamin), is about to be tortured for information by an old guy with a vaguely Russian accent and a golf cart battery. But the female face that appears on the far side of the observation window looks far more intimidating.

Thus we have our set-up. Archer is a super spy who works for his mom (Jessica Walter). As evidenced by their first scene together, they’re a solidly matched in toughness, narcissism, and vitriol.

Acher’s uniqueness is its successful mash up of spy action with workplace comedy. It’s like if the chick from Alias went to work at Dunder Mifflin. At ISIS, we get pithy axioms like, “When your co-workers put food in the refrigerator, that’s a bond of trust.” They worry about expense accounts and break room etiquette.

Natch, there’s intra-office schtuping. Archer used to date machine gun-toting uber-bombshell Lana (Aisha Tyler). They broke up over–you guessed it–his mommy issues. This woman scorned is now with Cyril (Chris Parnell), who has no earthly business dating the likes of her. He is so painfully dull that his scene with Archer is literally the only boring moment of the episode.

Archer is sleeping with the secretary, Cheryl or Carol. He can’t get her name right. Remember that–the joke lasts beyond this episode.

Archer pretends he thinks there’s a mole in the office, as a ploy to gain access to the ISIS mainframe. When he is forced to break in, he reveals how painfully inadequate the company’s security is. It turns out there is a mole in the office and he is only caught by complete accident.

This thing is just packed with oddball lines ranging from the unexplained “that thing with the mayonnaise” to the twice-used “Johnny Bench called.” (Look it up. I had to.)

The pilot gives a taste of what every episode will be about; It’s not that the agents are complete bumbling idiots. That would be too easy. They’re totally cool and skilled, it’s just that their extreme self-interest blinds them to half the stuff going on around them. And they hate each other, but it’s as a team that they somehow win the day.

And, whether Archer loves his mother or hates her, he does so too strongly to be healthy. At any rate, they’re eerily alike from their piercing blue eyes, revealed in the pilot’s first moments, to their peculiar vehemence about ants, revealed in the last.

*This is actually episode 1.1, “Mole Hunt.” There is an unaired pilot available on DVD through Amazon.

Chuck

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Following a couple weeks of lackluster season finales, I’m contemplating shows that start out great and then go off the rails somewhere. Sometime it happens in a moment, like when a couple finally gets together and dissolves all of the show’s sexual tension, or sometimes it happens over time as the characters just run out of funny and interesting things to do. Sometimes you even know it’s going to happen before it happens, the way we know that Barney Stinson is going to get married. In a church.

Don’t get me wrong. Shows–and characters–have to evolve. But sometimes you look back on a pilot wistfully, longing for the way things used to be. Such is the case with Chuck.

Chuck really hit its stride in Season 2, with a finale so good that we were willing to eat at Subway just to resolve the cliffhanger. But you can see the seeds of that greatness in the pilot. It has it all.

We meet Chuck Bartowski as he and best friend Morgan Grimes are playing spy–attempting to sneak out a bedroom window to escape a birthday party Chuck’s sister Ellie is throwing for him. One look at these guys hanging half out a window and we know they’re total dorks. Somewhere around Season 3, Chuck (Zachary Levi) got hot, and that’s just weird. Even Morgan (Joshua Gomez) got better looking. It’s their awkwardness that makes them so loveable.

Chuck’s unease with women is illustrated nicely as he attempts to chat up women at the party, lamenting the loss of a girl who dumped him back in college. She dumped him for a guy named Bryce Larkin (Matt Bomer), who we meet in short, interspersed scenes. Despite Chuck’s assertion that “I think he’s an accountant now,” Bryce is covered in blood and running across rooftops doing somthing very un-accountant-like.  

Since you probably know the story, I’ll zip though it. Bryce emails Chuck a shitload of images encrypted with CIA secrets and they become seared into Chuck’s brain. A hot girl named Sarah comes into the store where Chuck works and asks him on a date. She’s really a super-spy trying to get the secrets back, assuming they’re sitting on a hard drive. When she and her NSA counterpart, Colonel John Casey (Adam Baldwin *drool*), realize that the secrets are in Chuck’s head, they use him to help disarm a bomb and save the day.

Here are the cool things to note. In saving said day, Chuck uses a combination of the intersect (the data in his head) and his own skills (knowledge of DOS, a particular model of laptop, and the existence of a certain computer virus). That’s what makes Chuck awesome. If the intersect ended up in someone else, this story could not have existed. (It gets even better when he flies a helicopter in Ep. 2.) Also, we’re never sure who are the “good” guys and who are the “bad” guys. Bryce is killed–apparently–by the CIA. Was he a good guy? Can Chuck trust the CIA? And what’s the relationships between the CIA and the NSA in this case? The question of who Chuck can trust lasts throughout the season, as we wonder at times whether Sarah or Casey is really on his side.

This pilot is also brilliant at giving us just what we need to know about each character, no matter how minor. We get a good sense of loving big sister Ellie and her boyfriend Awesome. The scenes at Buy More are hysterical, despite being slowed to a snail’s pace at one point while Chuck helps a dad film his daughter doing ballet. But we get a taste for Anna, Lester, Jeff, and for a moment at the end–Big Mike.

The pilot showed us that this show had heart, suspense, and tons of humor (e.g. Chuck singing “Vick-vi-vicki Vale” as Sarah enters. “It’s from Batman,” he says. She replies “Cuz that makes it better.”)

You know what it doesn’t have? Jeffster. As funny as that was once, maybe even twice, Jeffster got completely out of control. And one long-lost parent who’s really an underground spy, I can take. But not two. And, for all her talk about spies not falling in love with spies, that’s kinda all Sarah does. Sometimes shows run their course in a season or two and this one has done it. So let’s appreciate the early days.

Three Moons Over Milford

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Three Moons Over MilfordSince the world didn’t end last weekend, a surprisingly fun, light-hearted show about impending doom seems fitting this week. Three Moons Over Milford aired for all of 8 episodes on ABC Family in 2006. Although the pilot has a happy, shiny tone, I suspect the show was too quirky even for the network home of Kyle XY.

We first hear, via radio broadcast (a handy plot device for opening pilot episodes), about how people around the world are increasingly engaging in risky behaviors like skydiving and running with the bulls. Elizabeth McGovern, who has a whole Lauren Graham thing going on, trots out of her ridiculously cool, modern house and jogs around the town to give the viewer a once-over of Milford, VT, founded in 1738.

Milford looks for all the world like Stars Hollow, CT but despite its New England charm we get hints that things are amiss. An elderly man joyously rides a scooter, a woman waters her lawn in the nude, and a newlywed couple displays some fun-with-gender-swapping.

We get the set-up via the opening credits: A meteor struck the moon, splitting into three pieces now hovering precariously on the horizon, threatening to destroy the Earth at any moment. One interesting element of the episode is that, until the climax, we’re only show the moon(s) in reflections. Images of the three jigsaw piece chunks show up in a swimming pool, in puddles and in windows.

We get to know Laura Davis (McGovern) and her family, which looks like it would be perfect in a world with an intact moon. Only now, her white collar husband Carl (Henry Czerny) parks his Porshe in front of his yurt, where he is getting in touch with… something. It’s not quite clear, as his lifestyle seems to be a generic jumble of Eastern and new age mysticism. When Laura goes to see him, the two debate which one of them is “missing mankind’s last, greatest opportunity.”

Back story on the family is parcelled out little by little, but we learn the most when Laura goes to see a small-time lawyer about her daughter’s indiscretion with a open flame (more on that in a moment). The lawyer, Mark (Rob Boltin) is destined to be the love interest from the moment we meet him and this point is underscored when we learn that he harbors hatred for the Davis family. (Enemies in the pilot=making out by season finale.) It seems the Davises came to town to launch a company with the nondescript name Syndek in an ultra-modern glass building, bringing a more worldly type of citizen to this backwoods town and driving up the price of coffee (among other things, presumably).

Mark has his own problems. His overbearing mother tells him, “Sarah Louise called for you,” with a strain in her voice warning him against this person. We finally catch a glimpse of her at the very end of the episode. Her mysterious introduction serves as the hook to urge the viewer back for episode 2.

Laura’s teen daughter, Lydia (never-seen-before-or-since-but-not-half-bad Teresa Celentano) is dabbling in witchcraft. She and her friends gather in the school gym to take part in a worldwide ceremony to reunite the moons. Their mission ends in the aforementioned fire. Lydia talks like a Gilmore Girl. (Do you see where I’m going with this? According to the blogosphere, the similarities to Gilmore Girls only got stronger as the series went on.)

The son, Alex (Sam Murphy) is celebrating his 16th birthday and looking forward to owning car. In the meantime he’s lying about his age and hooking up with a neighbor in her 20s, Claire (Samantha Quan). Claire typifies the pervasive worldview. She has vowed to grab what/who she wants in life, but once she throws herself at Alex she keeps repeating, “This isn’t me.” It’s as though everyone is trying to reinvent themselves, and is unsure how, in light of the looming Armageddon.

It’s odd, when you think about it, that someone needed to make a show about a world that could end at any moment. Because, really, the world could end at any moment—whether you believe it will be by an act of the divine, nuclear holocaust or zombie apocalypse. Only a handful of people seemed inspired to act on the warnings of May 21, but let’s face it, the guy behind it seemed like a nut. If the moon was split in three (however physically improbable; I’d love to hear Sheldon Cooper’s take) you couldn’t help but consider the reality. Maybe the premise was too much for ABC Family’s demo to process.

Samantha Who?

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Samantha Who Christina ApplegateSamantha Who was a sit-com in which Christina Applegate played the eponymous character, but Jean Smart, who plays Samantha’s mother, steals the pilot. She opens the show with snarky hilarity not far removed from her character on The Oblongs. Samantha wakes up from a coma to find her mother, Regina, standing over her with a video camera, generating sympathy footage to win a spot on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. “I don’t care if no one likes her. She’s my daughter,” she trills.

For a sit-com pilot, this one has quite a bit to accomplish. It has to fill us in on a good chunk of back story and essentially introduce us to two versions of the protagonist. It was also a show that built on itself, episode to episode, so the pilot had to start that momentum. It’s a comedy that’s part mystery, keeping viewers on their toes.

Samantha awakes from her coma with retrograde amnesia; she doesn’t remember anyone or anything. Overlook that cliched improbability and indulge in the fantasy the show offers–what would you think of your life if you could view it as a objective outsider? How would you fix what’s wrong with it? We already know that no one likes Samantha, thanks to Regina, but Samantha doesn’t. Her parents seem to at least be there for her, as does her boyfriend Todd (Barry Watson; Matt Camden is all grown up and smoking hot) and her self-described best friend Dena (Melissa McCarthy doing her usual spunky thing). But life is full of surprises for Samantha and, in turn, the audience.

Jennifer Esposito plays  BFF Andrea, a 180-degree switch from her character on Related (did anyone but me watch that show?), but her value as a friend is highly suspect. We first meet her as she and Regina trade punches in a hilarious scene back at the home of Samantha’s parents. The two of them are so evenly matched for understated bitchiness, they could have their own spin-off. Andrea also informs Sam that she hasn’t spoken to her parents in two years; we have to wonder if that’s by Sam’s choice or theirs.

Andrea invites Samantha out to a club and the secrets being to emerge. Each twist builds on the last. We find that Samantha has been cheating on Todd with a married man named Rene, that she actually ditched Dena as a friend back in the seventh grade, and that she can fire off scathing insults at lightening speed when provoked. Oh, and she’s an alcoholic. Martini in hand, she discovers an AA token in her purse–which says more about the kind of friend Andrea is than anything else–and bolts of to a 12-step meeting.

Barry Watson as Todd has a unique task to pull off in all this. He’s perfectly polite, but not at all affectionate with his supposed girlfriend. Their attempt at a kiss is hopelessly awkward. There are no tears of relief that his love has emerged from a coma alive and well; something is definitely off. Yet, he is fully willing to allow Samantha back into their home and demonstrates his attentiveness by reciting personal details about her like that she always sneezes three times. When Samantha asks smarmy Rene how many times she sneezes, he reacts with fear of catching something. So, we’re set up to root for Todd. However, we find out near the end that he broke up with Samantha just before her accident. It’s probably for good reason, based on what we’ve learned of her so far. That leaves us with our season-long question, will they get back together?

The show did well in its first season but viewership dropped off in the second because, really, how long can you believably sustain an amnesia story? By the end of the pilot Samantha has already had one flashback, from the day she and Todd met as she stole his double latte at a coffee shop. Pieces of memory like this are destined to continue episode after episode. The pilot leaves us wondering what else will pop up. It also goes out on a high note with a great Jean Smart moment.

Here’s a video of Jean Smart talking about the show.

Birds of Prey

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With excitement building for the Wonder Woman reboot this fall, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at some other DC Comics heroines, the ladies of 2002’s Birds of Prey.

In a nutshell, a blonde, a brunette and a redhead live together looking hot and fighting crime. The pilot is the story of how they got together. The show, or at least the pilot can be appreciated at face value, if the viewer has no previous knowledge of the characters. It could even be accused of ripping off Charmed, with its story of three powerful women joining forces and a suspicious cop on their trail. But there is ton of back story—at least 40 years worth of comic book lore.

Alfred, of Batman fame, narrates the opening. The story is set in New Gotham, and Batman has disappeared from its crime-ridden streets. The voiceover lends a storybook feeling, a bit like the tone of Pushing Daisies.

Barbara Gordon (Dina Meyer), formerly Batgirl, is confined to a wheelchair since The Joker shot her. She now lives in a clock tower—a set that looks like the same one Smallville used—surrounded by computers. By day she works as a school teacher. Living with her is Helena (Ashley Scott), the daughter of Batman and Catwoman. She was raised by her mother, killed by a henchman of The Joker while her daughter stood by, helpless. She has grown up to be The Huntress, a hero who runs across building tops by night, fighting crime while The Oracle oversees from her tower. In the comic world, The Huntress had completely different
origins, but did turn to heroism following the murder of her parents. (This according to The DC Comics Encyclopedia.)

As these two women experienced their personal tragedies, a third girl dreamt their pain. She is now teenage Dinah (Rachel Skarsten), and she has travelled to New Gotham to seek out the women from her dreams. On her way to find them, she witnesses a man being hit by a bus. She runs to his side and, when she touches him, she sees a vision of him being attacked by rats. Her power, it seems, is the ability to share people’s thoughts or fears. The comic book Dinah became The Black Canary, though that name isn’t mentioned in the pilot.

The man’s death sparks the women’s investigation into a series of related murders disguised as suicides, which leads them to some dockyards and the lair of the killer. Among the three of them they get to combine supernatural, or metahuman powers of an X-man with the high tech gadgetry of Batman.

As the women investigate these deaths, the police are also on the case. Detective Jesse Reese (Shemar Moore) is one officer who believes that something bigger is happening beneat the surface. He’s the “the truth is out there” character of the show. Sums up what may be the message-of-show with the awkwardly worded adage, “Myths are just the truth a few generations later.”

Another significant introduction in this pilot is that of Helena’s psychiatrist, one Harleen Quinzel (Mia Sara – remember her, Sloane Peterson from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?), whose name reveals that she’s an enemy-in-waiting.

With its roots in death and destruction, this pilot promises a fairly dark show. There are small doses of humor, with lines like, “This place is supposed to be a secret. That’s the whole point of a secret lair.” Barbara and Helena argue about lighter things, too, like being out of groceries. There’s also a quick Superman/Smallville reference: “There’s been some really weird stuff with meteor showers.”

This pilot does a nice job of tying together the episode plot with a longer-term plot, when Harleen interacts with the episode villain at the end. There’s both resolution and reason to keep watching.

UPDATE 2/17/2012: In case you’re a big fan of the Black Canary character, you may like to know that Katie Cassidy has been cast to play her in the forthcoming Green Arrow series on The CW. And, in case you haven’t been paying attention, that Wonder Woman reboot never happened, but I’ve since blogged about the pilot of the 1970s series.

Two and a Half Men

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Let’s play pretend. Let’s pretend that we don’t know Charlie Sheen has gold teeth or what he truly thinks of Chuck Lorre. Charlie Sheen is a movie star who made an unfortunate foray into television taking over for Michael J. Fox on Spin City. And Jon Cryer is just Duckie. And these two guys who we last cared about in the 80s are co-starring on a new show called Two and a Half Men.

Charlie Sheen’s character, Charlie Harper is painted as a womanizer literally from the first seconds of the pilot. He’s in the bedroom with a woman. When she leaves the room to change into a lacy negligee, another woman calls the answering machine to tell Charlie off. The laugh track is kept busy with sex jokes for the first minute and a half.

The next voice on the answering machine is that of Alan (Cryer), Charlie’s brother, who announces that his wife has thrown him out. Thus the premise for the show—Alan wants to stay with Charlie, where he will surely be in the way of Charlie’s love life. In fact, he’s already there on the other side of the bedroom door. In the conversation that follows, we find that Alan, the brother who has been married for 12 years seems to know far less about women than the single Charlie. Also, it’s slipped Charlie’s mind that Alan has a 10-year-old son, Jake.

The jokes fly fast and furious. Alan has brought his own sheets to sleep over. He’s been named Chiropractor of the Year. Charlie gives a rundown of his cush life, which includes midday margaritas and sundeck naps.

The next morning Charlie opens his eyes to find a pasty little boy face hovering over his bed. Jake (Angus T. Jones) is not a cute TV kid. He’s a pudgy, dorky kid, one used to structure—eating lunch at a certain time, drinking a specific brand of milk. Charlie doesn’t do structure. Jake’s presence sets up some no-duh commentary on adult life, i.e., “If [wine] makes you feel bad, why do you drink it”? Charlie quickly learns of another advantage; the kid is a babe magnet. “You’re better than a dog,” Charlie delights in telling him.

In this episode we meet Judith (Marin Hinkle), Alan’s uptight wife who believes she might be gay and Evelyn (Holland Taylor), the guys’ well-dressed, no-nonsense mother. We also learn early on that Charlie has a stalker who calls him “monkey man.” She’s a cute neighbor, Rose (Melanie Lynskey) who claims to be the maid and does nonsensical things like gluing the kitchen cupboards shut. We know to expect a lot more of her.

The revelations of Charlie’s degradation continue throughout the episode. “Charlie is great with kids,” Alan assures Judith. Cut to Jake playing poker with a bunch of men in a smoke-filled room. In retrospect, it’s easy to wonder if Charlie Sheen is even acting; he doesn’t even have to respond to a different name.

A lot of Alan’s humor comes from his pained facial expressions. He naively clings to the belief that he and Judith are just “working things out.” He’s so uptight one wonders how he fathered a child in the first place. There is no end of potential jokes in this odd couple scenario. (As a side note, Alan’s character bears an uncanny resemblance to Felix in the 1968 film The Odd Couple.) It takes a new tone, though, one that was perhaps more irreverent than network sit-coms tended to be in 2003.

Alan and Jake try living with Evelyn, but Charlie asks them back. It seems that the love of a kid has put a tiny crack in the walls around his party boy heart. Clearly things don’t work the same way in real life.

UPDATE: 5/13/11 Ashton Kutcher has officially been cast in Two and a Half Men.

Reboot!

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It seems like you can’t go a day without hearing about another upcoming reboot of an old movie or TV show. Currently, viewers of the small screen are speculating about new takes on Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman, Beavis and Butthead, Dallas, Miami Vice, Teen Wolf… there’s even been the threat of a Bryan Fuller-helmed Munsters remake.*

A pilot for a reboot has a unique task. There is the assumption that most viewers are already familiar with the property, and there is going to be a niche audience that is much more than familiar. The diehard fans are poised to critique every detail.  So what makes a pilot for a reboot successful?

There are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to approach. At one end, the pilot could say to the viewer, “Forget everything you knew about previous incarnations of this property.” The story basically starts over, in the present day. V is an example. Viewers need not have a clue about the 1980s mini-series and following TV series. In fact, they might be better not having seen the original and having the whole lizard reveal spoiled for them.

At the other end, a pilot can dive in to a storyline already in progress. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles does this really well. We last saw Sarah and son John in 1991, when John was about 12 years old, so the show now has to bring us up to 2008, when it debuted. The pilot opens in 1999 and, staying faithful to the timeline set forth by the movies, John is introduced as a teenager. We learn in the opening scene Sarah is haunted by the same nightmares of worldwide destruction that we remember. In order to get us to the right year, the writers have the new Terminator, played by Summer Glau, bring the characters forward in time to 2008. If you’re actually new to this, it’s likely you just won’t care about these characters. It’s also likely you’ve been living under a rock.

On the lighter side, 90210 stuck with the timeline set forth by its predecessor, Beverly Hills 90210. The newer show had some fun updating viewers on the lives of characters we once knew, even bringing some of them back so we wouldn’t always be stuck remembering them with hideous hairstyles.

According to Ramon Rodriguez, who has been cast as Bosley, the new Charlie’s Angels is set to go in a new direction. However, the movies already took a big step away from the camp of the original series. So what, exactly, are they moving away from? And do we care? Does a show’s pedigree matter, or only that it’s good?

There’s still a long way to go with all of the aforementioned reboots, and no telling how much restructuring they will go through on their way to the airwaves—if they even make it that far. Then will each one be a 90210? Or a Melrose Place? Once they debut, fans will no doubt have their expectations well in place.

*Here’s an update on the Bryan Fuller Munsters remake, 8/11/11

Mercy

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So Mercy is supposed to be about strong women. This show is earnestly trying to tell us at lot of Truths: that war vets deserve our respect, that nurses can be as smart and competent as doctors, that the human spirit triumphs over adversity… but the message I got out of it was that women fall for men who stalk them.

What is with these female characters and their suitors who just stroll idly into a hospital, traipsing into patients’ rooms and interrupting hospital business? Despite some obligatory kicking and screaming, the women inevitably cave. And no supervisor ever says, “Hey, can you get your ex-husband out of this dying old lady’s room?”

Let’s back up a minute. We meet Ronnie (Taylor Schilling) as she is having a nightmare about being shot while a radio report about a memorial service for a soldier plays in the background. She wakes, in what is apparently her girlhood bedroom with her mother smoking a cigarette over her. Mommy dearest yells something about  Ronnie needing to take back her husband, in light of what Ronnie’s parents shelled out for the wedding.

The next scene is far more powerful and might have been a better point of attack. Ronnie witnesses a car accident and springs into action to save the life of the driver. She saves his life using a soda straw and gets him safely to the hospital, only to have the victim’s fiancé tell her off for being “just a stupid nurse.” That moment paints a clear picture of Ronnie as a smart, capable, and chronically underestimated woman; a character an audience could respect. Even when we learn more, that this hardass veteran who takes Paxil but isn’t intimidated by authority or cowed in the face of bodily fluids, she seems like a protagonist we can root for.

Then we get into the relationship stuff. Ronnie is estranged from her cheating husband, Mike (Diego Klattenhoff), and lives with her liquor-soaked parents and younger brother Bobby—the offspring appear to follow in their parents’ alcoholic footsteps. Her best friend at work is the sexy Sonia (Jaime Lee Kirchner), who is playing games with a lawyer she likes while also being courted by a cop. Further complicating the picture, Ronnie is screwing around with—and possibly in love with—a fellow soldier who is now coming to work at the same hospital.

The hospital atmosphere is Scrubs-like; a mixture of irreverent humor and touching, music-filled moments of human connection. There are some wryly funny moments, like this one: “We’re gonna go get a drink, do you wanna come?” “I’d love to, but first I just have to kill Mr. Weintraub.”

Every workplace pilot has to have a character whose first day it is. In this case that’s Chloe Payne (Michelle Trachtenberg), the sympathetic character if only because she isn’t falling at the feet of some macho douchebag. That is, until the episode’s final moment when all three of the female characters are mooning over a hot bartender. Really? This is how educated, battle-hardened women behave?

Defying Gravity

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I knew when I first saw this show it was going to break my heart. It was too cool to hold up on network TV. It blends science fiction with relationship drama and a hint of philosophy, somewhere between Firefly and Being Erica. It started airing during the summer of 2009, it went away, it came back it went supposedly on hiatus, and in the end the only place to see the last episodes was on DVD.

The story is partially in flashbacks, but the “present” is the year 2052 and a group of astronauts is about to embark on a landmark journey to seven planets, over six years. The story is told primarily through the eyes of the first character we meet, Maddux Donner (Ron Livingston). The opening scene is dark and concerting, showing us a sad picture of Donner’s life at home with his father, who is either an alcoholic or senile, or both. The dreary room is lit only by the television where a group of smiling astronauts is introduced. Donner’s father asks, “Which one are you?” A flashback shows us the tragic end to Donner’s space travel career, as he is forced to leave the surface of Mars amid a storm with two crewmates still on the planet’s surface.

Although the next scene is one of exuberant celebration, opening the pilot this way sets a tone that we, the viewer, cannot shake. Heartbreak lurks beneath the glossy, high-tech surface in this future. The episode is sprinkled with mentions, by the ground control team, of an “it” that is being kept secret from the crew. To be honest, these didn’t catch my attention on first viewing, but in hindsight they hold much significance.

The next character we meet is Zoe Barnes (Laura Harris, playing the polar opposite of her Dead Like Me character). With a simple look between her and Donner, the romantic tension is established. Later in the episode it is suggested, if not spelled out, that the two characters have a history.

Ted Shaw (Malik Yoba) was Donner’s partner on the Mars mission, and though the two of them still work for the International Space Organization, they are marked forever as the men who abandoned their crewmates.

The Mission Commander is Rollie Crane, whose new wife Jen is also part of the mission. Also on the crew are Nadia, Paula, Ajay, Evram, and Steve. We get a snippet of each one as they talk into a camera, reality show-style.

The show’s creators didn’t waste time or energy making the future look “futuristic.” A bar still looks like a bar, and people still wear jeans and tees. They saved the budget for the ship, The Antares. There are beautiful images of the expanse of space, seen through panoramic windows in a shining, pristine vehicle.

The business of explaining the technology is accomplished by having one of the crew members, Paula, carry around a mini-DV camera and talk to an audience of school children. There are holes in the science, of course. It is explained that the astronauts’ suits have special fibers that pull them toward the floor of the ship in the absence of gravity. Yet, their hair lays flat. Not being a physicist, I am probably missing other problems as well, but the story is exciting enough to let those go.

Odd things are happening to both Donner and Zoe. Donner is having dreams about being on the mission and seeing Zoe float naked out into the vacuum of space. Zoe is hearing the far-off sound of a baby’s cries. In flashbacks, we are filled in on the fact that Zoe got pregnant during training, but had an illegal abortion. These moments are just breadcrumbs at this stage but promise to lead to something amazing, possibly frightening.

The twist in the plot comes when two of the crew members, Rollie and Ajay, already aboard the space station orbiting the Earth, suddenly develop identical and unusual heart conditions. Before the ship can start on the mission proper, Donner and Ted must be subbed in for the two ailing astronauts. Ted  knows the secret—whatever it is—that mission control is keeping from the crew.  The question raised, the theme of the episode, is whether fate determined who was on the mission and who was not. We are promised more back story about the training, which may answer that question. But the show appears to be one that will raise as many questions as it answers.

Though many viewers blinked and missed Defying Gravity, I’m not the only one to appreciate it; here is a good analysis from Spill.com.