Rating the Fall's Alien Invasion Series
First, to introduce the players. There’s CBS’s Threshold, an alien-invasion series that kicks off with a mysterious signal being received on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. (Update: After this article was posted, Threshold was cancelled.) There’s NBC’s Suface, an alien-lifeform-invasion series that kicks off with mysterious sightings of sea life in the world’s oceans. And there’s ABC’s Invasion, an alien-invasion series that kicks off with mysterious happenings in the swamps and lakes of Florida after a hurricane.
If you gave a creative-writing class a loose premise (spooky alien-invasion tale that begins in the water and spreads onto land), depending on the cleverness of the students you’d probably get a similar-yet-different spread of stories, which is what seems to be the case with these three series. Who gave out this particular assignment is still a mystery, but the pupils have turned in their papers and it’s time for judgment.
Every class has at least one creatively stifled student who, when given a premise, gravitates to the most well-worn path. His creative-writing assignments always read suspiciously like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster, a famous novel, or a classic episode of Twilight Zone.
That student is Shaun Cassidy, erstwhile teen hunk turned overrated TV producer. Cassidy’s Invasion has apparently won over some viewers, and it’s been renewed for the entire season by ABC. I have to admit, I don’t get it. Invasion is a waste of space. From the first scene of the first episode, I could tell that it was yet another pod-people-populated rehash of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” right down to the knock-off title.
The show’s characters include a divorced and recombined family, some spunky youngsters, a ne’er-do-well brother, and in the worst news of all, a suspicious sheriff played by William Fichtner. (What, was American Gothic’s Gary Cole not available?)
In Invasion, spooky lights invade Florida and cause some people to become strange, distant, as if they’ve changed somehow. And the sheriff knows more about it than he should. Yeah, you know what? I’ve seen this movie before, not to mention a dozen rip-offs of same. Am I interested in revisiting the pod-people scenario one more time? No, I am not. And so Invasion became my TiVo’s first casualty of the season.
Next up, the student who seems to write the same sort of story no matter what premise you give him. This student is CBS, personified by David Goyer and Brannon Braga, producers of Threshold.
Threshold feels like every other show on CBS, which is to say that it feels like a slick procedural produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, even though it isn’t. Yes, it’s still an alien-invasion story. But this one has some twists that I haven’t really seen play out on TV before. The invasion is more of an idea than a force; it’s an alien signal that is being spread by people who have been infected with it.
Threshold’s characters aren’t fight-the-conspiracy Fox Mulder types. They are the conspiracy, a tiger-team of government experts who have been assembled to fight the alien invasion before it spreads and before it goes public. The show’s also got a great cast, including Carla Gugino as the leader of the team, Peter Dinklage as a creepy computer wizard with some serious personality flaws, and Brent Spiner as a cranky doctor.
Each week, the team uses science to solve crimes based entirely on crime-scene evidence. No, wait, that’s CSI. They use detective work to find missing peop— crap, Without a Trace. They use math to solve decades-old cases— no, that’s Cold Num3rs Case. In Threshold, the team uses their genius skills and the government conspiracy’s wherewithal to track down people who are trying to spread the alien signal.
I actually don’t mind the CBS procedural playbook; it’s spawned a number of excellent shows, especially Without a Trace. But here, with a science-fictional premise, it rubs me wrong. I find myself wanting something more like Lost. Yes, maybe I’ve been trained by years of watching sci-fi TV to expect skiffy series to be drenched in fanwank, but I have come to expect it. So to me, Threshold’s episodic character works against it, making it feel more pedestrian than it really should be.
I’ve found several of Threshold’s individual episodes to be excellent, especially the one involving a man who was convicted of murdering his family, when in reality he had killed them only after they had been exposed to an early version of the alien signal. It was a regular McDLT of an episode, chilling and heartwarming at the same time.
But other episodes — A DJ in Miami has a copy of the alien signal! Let’s use our black helicopters to set off an EMP and black out the city! — have left me cold. And I can’t help feeling like the pace of the overarching story is so glacial that by the time we’ve figured out anything about the source of the signal, everyone on Earth will have already been transformed into drooling zombies. Or bored to death. One of those.
I found a lot to like about Threshold. But after a half-dozen episodes, I didn’t find enough to keep watching it regularly.
That brings us to NBC’s Surface, in which mysterious new life forms are found in the world’s oceans. Of all the fall sci-fi series, Surface always seemed to be the one most likely to be a complete face-plant. This is a creative-writing student who thinks high concept all the way, creates a story that’ll take a novel to tell in full… a complete, brilliant mess of a writer.
The premise: Pretty oceanographer searches for the truth, fighting government conspiracies along the way? Um… sure. Down-to-earth Cajun becomes obsessed with the strange creature that killed his brother during a dive in the Gulf of Mexico? Riiight. Lonely teen adopts sea-creature baby as a pet? Yikes!
Surface is essentially a Steven Spielberg pastiche. It borrows heavily from “Jaws,” “Close Encounters,” and “E.T.,” and branches out only to borrow from James Cameron’s “The Abyss.” It’s cinematic in scope, with each episode unspooling not as a standalone story but as the next segment of a really, really long movie. After eight hours, it’s still got two completely separate plot threads where half the series’ cast has failed to share a scene with the other half.
Surface is a tad hokey, somewhat cheesy, and altogether implausible. It’s also got its heart in the right place, is sweetly earnest about its premise and characters, and is structured unlike any TV series I can ever recall watching. I have no idea where it’s going or what the series’ premise will look like even one hour into the future.
Yeah, I’ll admit it. Despite its numerous faults (I am really tired of the evil government agent conspiracy crap!), I’ve really got a soft spot for Surface. And unlike the other two series, I have watched every single episode and am anxiously awaiting more.
And that just might be the most outlandish sci-fi plot twist of this entire fall TV season.
Class dismissed.