Fall TV: The Event

Over the summer, NBC's The Event had the most annoying advertising of all the new fall shows because it basically told you nothing. And guess what? The pilot told us nothing too!

For years, all the networks have been trying to come up with the next 24  and the next Lost. And so far, they've pretty much all tanked. I'm pretty sure this is going to be the latest in that line of failures.

The problem with the pilot was that it somehow managed to be all plot but no substance. All these different characters that aren't connected were introduced but we don't really get anything on what their purpose is or who's good or bad. I assume that the ordinary guy, Sean, played by Jason Ritter who I generally do like, is supposed to be the audience surrogate/hero, but they don't even give us enough on him for us to want to really care.

There's also the president, played by Blair Underwood (who's now apparently Hispanic...I guess we've moved on from black presidents on TV), who's dealing with some weird detention center in Alaska where Laura Innes (of ER) appears to be the leader. These people seem to know something about "The Event" and the CIA is involved somehow too but basically none of it makes any sense. Something happens at the end with a plane and a flash of light or something but I can't even really describe that. It really doesn't help that half of these bits and pieces came in the form of flashbacks.

So what is the Event? Is it alien-related? Science fiction-y stuff? Government conspiracy? Guess what? I really don't care! Needless to say, I lost interest in this very very quickly. I've definitely been hard on Lost for a lot of things but all these wannabes are much, much worse...