TV Scum: The Event

©NBC

The Event: I Haven't Told You Everything (S01E01)

Leading up to this season's new premieres, The Event had the distinction of being heavily pushed and marketed by NBC, even going so far as to show the pilot at this year's Comic Con. While the consensus so far seems to be mixed, you cannot deny that the establishing episode for the series is ambitious in its ambiguity but then again, a year ago the same was being said about FlashForward and that didn't turn out too well.

Whether intentional or not, I got heavy undertones that were "borrowed" from previous series like 24, Lost, Alias, Fringe and for a balanced act a bit of Sandra Bullock's mediocre film The Net. While it features a fairly large cast of veteran TV and "that guy" actors, Jason Ritter plays our lead Sean Walker who starts the episode embarking on a cruise with his soon-to-be fiancee and ends up brandishing a gun on a commercial airliner trying to stop an attempt to assassinate the president. At least, if things were shown in a straight-forward fashion that's what would have happened.

Taking a page from other non-linear stories, the episode jumps around to focus on different characters at different times leading up to the plot to crash a commercial airplane into the President's not-very-secure retreat. In certain instances, non-linear stories (particularly from director Chris Nolan) are done in a way to emphasize certain plot points or to mislead the audience. Here, the stories do not so much intersect as they crash together at random times, as if to try to build suspense that otherwise isn't there.

The baffling part is that with the various story lines going on, there should be no problem to create a compelling story. There is the mystery regarding 97 unlawfully detained prisoners at a remote Alaskan site, the President's desire to close the facility (such a fantastical plot line), Sean's disappearing girlfriend, and her father's unwitting involvement in the assassination attempt. Most interesting though is a group that manages to thwart the attempt by causing the airliner to literally vanish into thin air. Thus, if you have watched any of the shows mentioned above, you can see where some elements are (at times heavily) borrowed.

The cast is very strong with Blair Underwood as President Martinez, Laura Innes as Sophia, the leader of the group of detainees, and Scott Patterson as Sean's future father-in-law Michael Buchanan.

Just like with any TV series, the pilot is almost irrelevant to the quality of the rest of the series. Hopefully The Event does not fall victim to an overly complicated story and inability to throw the audience a bone now and then as some other failed shows have done. At the conclusion, I had the same thought that surely many had at the end of the first episode of 24 of how can such a premise survive over multiple episodes or even seasons. Only time will tell if this is the current year's Lost or FlashForward.