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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 21 |
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One of TV's darkest dramas
has gripped me like a drug
of TheColumnists.com
Right now I'm playing catch-up on the USA network's "The 4400," a dark and delicious sci-fi series that began its third season on basic cable this week. Like so many of TV's best cable programs, it has had a remarkably low profile, especially since so many of our shrinking newspapers no longer cover television well.
If you don't read much about a new show except the title and a few lines about the basic concept, you're not likely to discover it when you should. Since I'm no longer a full-time TV reviewer paid to watch everything new that shows up on the tube, I've started to miss some really good stuff.
A classic example is "The 4400," which I discovered while looking over the new arrivals in the TV section of the video store. There was a boxed DVD set of Season Two that looked real intriguing, so I figured I'd better go back and find Season One. Once I did, I was hooked.
"The 4400" is produced by Francis Coppola's American Zoetrope company, which I took as a solid reason to check it out. Coppola was in the theatre arts department at UCLA in the late 1950s when I did an undergraduate year there and took several film courses. I learned early that he was a guy who's always working on something interesting. The show is also filmed in Vancouver, B.C., and takes place in western Washington, where I now make my home. All that was catnip to me.
Once I started watching it, I discovered "The 4400" shouldn't just be a favorite with sci-fi fans. This is even more mainstream than "The X-Files" and deserves to be much bigger than just a hit among sci-fi fans. It has a core of really interesting characters that you want to follow week after week.
Here's the basic concept: For the past 50 years, people have been disappearing mysteriously. Nobody has tied any of these disappearances together except the fringe people who believe all missing persons have been abducted by extra-terrestrials. But then one day a fast-moving object enters Earth's atmospshere, survives nuclear missiles fired by the U.S., China and everybody else, then touches down near a pastoral lake in rural Washington state just long enough to discharge 4,400 dazed human beings--the same ones who've been disappearing ever since 1946.
But there are more puzzles attached to these "returnees" than you can imagine. For one thing, none of them has aged a day since they were abducted. What's mroe, they can't remember where they've been or who took them! As if that weren't enough mystery, some of them have returned with "enhanced" abilities that are impressively frightening.
I was immediately hooked by the story of Lily (Laura Allen), a young wife and mother who comes back to find her husband has remarried and her baby daughter is now approaching her teens--and doesn't recognize her at all! Her husband is so troubled by her reappearance that he threatens legal action if she comes around his new family.
Meanwhile, Lily is spotted in the crowd of "returnees" by another person among the 4,400 abductees: Richard (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), a black man who swears she's the same white girl he was seeing in 1951 before he was called into military service during the Korean War. In fact, Richard was abducted right after being beaten up by some white men in his unit who found a photo of him with a white girl and stomped him for "crossing the line."
As it turns out, Lily isn't the girl he remembers, but may be her granddaughter! For Richard, all this is almost impossible to accept. He vanished at a time when he'd be beaten for being seen with a white girl. Now he's back and finds such relationships are now widely accepted. He and Lily have only each other to cling to, so their future as "returnees" is linked.
Then there's poor Maia (Conchita Campbell), who disappeared in 1946 while walking in the woods. She was six years old. Now she's back--and she's still six, but her parents are long gone and she has no living relatives. She's a government ward until Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie), one of the government agents assigned to track the 4,400 "returnees," gets permission to adopt her. Maia has an even greater adjustment problem: She has returned with an uncanny ability to predict the future.
Diana's partner, agent Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch), can appreciate what Diana is going through trying to understand--and protect--Maia. His nephew Shawn (Patrick Flueger), was "taken," but has returned as a high school senior with the ability to heal sickness and trauma by simply touching the affected person. Tom's own son, Kyle (Chad Faust),was with Shawn when he was abducted and was so traumatized by the event that he's been in a coma ever since. When Shawn reluctanly uses his "healing" gift to revive Kyle, the awakened young man insists he's not really Kyle at all.
What's behind all this? Though all answers haven't been given yet, it appears the 4,400 individuals were not taken by people from outer space, but rather from our future. They've been returned to the present time on what may be a special mission: To help us all survive an impending global catastrophe that will forever alter Earth's future.
All I can say is: This is a fascinating series, well-acted and produced, that brings you a different story each week while also keeping us up to date on the key running stories that were developed over the first two seasons.
I'm still watching the final episodes from Season Two and haven't yet come up to speed on "The 4400." And this isn't the first time I've discovered a great show on basic cable by rummaging in the racks of DVD boxed sets at the video store.
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For instance, I'm following the revived "Battlestar Galactica," which now plays on the Sci-Fi channel, where it's an enormous hit. I was a full-time TV columnist in 1978 when the original "Battlestar Galactica" debuted on ABC as a weekly series. At the time, I was impressed--in fact, dazzled--by the elaborate sets built to create a future world in which humankind had been nearly obliterated by the Cylons, a robotic race created by humans to serve them. Yet I felt the show was a blatant attempt to emulate "Star Wars," which had just come out, and had little intellect behind it.
The new "Galactica," which began as a miniseries, then expanded to a weekly show, is much, much better than the original. It's a dark, moody drama series in which sci-fi is only the setting. The characters are rich and textured and the effects, much of them digital, are impressive. It's truly a great show.
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is now one of TV's best leading men as the hero of 'Dead Zone' |
Another dark sci-fi show that I discovered through the video store is USA's "The Dead Zone," which picks up the original concept by Stephen King, from his novel and the subsequent feature film, and takes it to new and fascinating levels. It's back for a fourth season this summer, carrying on the adventures of Johnny, a young man who sruvives a near-fatal automobile crash and later discovers his damaged brain now has given him amazing psychic powers. When I learned Anthony Michael Hall was playing the leading role, I blanched. I knew him only as the nerdy creep from so many teen movies of the 1980s. But Hall has matured into a fine actor and is now one of TV's most compelling leading actors.
This may not be the best way to discover TV's best shows--a couple of seasons after they've come on the air--but it's better than not discovering them at all. If you haven't tried any of these shows, get at it right away. You're missing some great entertainment.
©2006 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted June 12, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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