TV Pilots are an inexact science. Good to great pilots don't always turn into great TV series, and some very good TV series survived so-so pilots. Frequently with many changes.
The series E-Ring this fall will be nothing at all like the pilot, apparently. The wife, a major component of the pilot, doesn't exist in the TV series. That means I can't predict what this Benjamin Bratt-starrer will be like. I did like the supporting cast (wife included), a fair bit of the rescue-by-submarine plot and Bratt's got plenty of TVQ. But the series seems a non-starter for me, following in the brief footsteps of several recent series pushing the American military agenda. JAG excepted. Does the exception make the rule ... or invalidate it?
On the other hand, I'm pretty secure about my projections for the other two series in this blog entry. They are Surface and Threshold, both inspired partly by last year's Lost bonanza.
Surface used to be Fathom. Surface stars nobody I know, save Lake Bell. And I watch LOTS of TV. So there is no stardust to get in my eyes, although Bell looks WAAAAAY better in blue jeans and a rumpled sweatshirt than she did in a Boston lawyer's suit. The story was fractured and each piece was water-based. And there is NO reason to continue after that. Not since the halcyon days of Sea Hunt, has a water-based story survived. Love Boat was a set, for those in an arguing mood.
I just don't see Surface lasting as long as the original Kolchak, Night Stalker, the series that I really feel Surface is an ode to. The Lost comparison? Must have been drugs. I know Lost, and this is no Lost.
On the other hand, Lost isn't that fair a comparison to Threshold either. In fact, a favourite of mine, Stargate SG-1, has a lot more blood in this one that the fine folks marooned on that lost isle.
There's lots of familiar faces, led by scrumptious Carla Gugino. Nobody that saw it will forget Gugino's bit role in Sin City and a TV series worth DVDing was Gugino's Karen Sisco from a couple of years back. She's got the "Samantha Carter" role in Threshold. She's got her own team of eccentrics, including Brent "Star Trek's Data" Spiner as a crotchety med expert and Peter Dinklage as the uninhibited math whiz that speaks 200 languages. Dinklage always seems to make me see the character rather than the lack of height. Always welcome Charles S. Dutton has the leader job Don Davis played so well over at Stargate.
The team gets thrown into an alien contact mission at sea (see, THERE's the connection between the three shows [G]). The contact seems about as successful as most of the Stargate crews' entanglements with their own baddies, the Goa'uld. And the debut episode of Stargate immediately jumped into the body-taking over powers of the bad guys. Same story here. Leads to a real nifty final shot, even if it isn't exactly unpredictable.
Still, I can see this show outlasting Surface by a fair bit. It's got pseudo-science, name stars and Carla Gugino. And her dog Monster, a lovably ugly mutt that could be a breakout star on his own.
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