Pesky Flashbacks Detract From NBC's "The Event"
Posted: Tuesday, September 21, 2010
by Gerry Charbonneau
http://nibblednews.typepad.com
"Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it." -- Alfred Hitchcock
The new NBC program "The Event", which aired for the first time on Monday September 20, 2010, has been constantly advertised and actively promoted for months.
These viewpoints or vantage points if you will center on Jason Ritter's character (Sean) who is deemed to be a regular guy searching for his missing fiance Leila (Sarah Roemer shown in picture)) and fighting his way through a series of mysterious ( if not at times confusing ) circumstances aimed at allegedly assassinating the president of the United States (Blair Underwood in picture).
NBC is reportedly placing all its bets on "The Event". This is the network's latest bid for "must-see, event television". But will hype generating advertising and billboard promotional tactics be enough to entice audiences to watch the program when frantic and confusing film editing or perhaps second rate script writing cloud character development and plot?
I found the first twenty minutes or so to be confusing. It was difficult to figure out who the good guys were supposed to be, if there was a plot on the president's life and , who the main characters were and lastly where in the world we were...more like a travelogue than a drama. Even episodes of Survivor let you get your feet on solid ground from time to time.
The only real semblances of continuuity and uniformity were the well placed commercials and station breaks. You can always count on these to be punctual and emotional if not bladder relieving. At least you can go to the fridge and get a snack between segments of this thriller.
It seemed as if the director was attempting to emulate a Sam Peckinpaw - Steven Spielberg approach to his story interpretation. The slow and deliberate airplane crash reminiscent of Peckinpaw's slow motion camera work in Straw Dogs combined with the continual globe trotting visits to Alaska, an ocean liner cruise ship and finally homeland USA left me personally searching for a parachute or the channel remote switch.
We can only hope that the 97 detainees reportedly being held incommunicado in a fictionalized Alaskan version of the Guantanamo Naval Base detainee facility are able to escape and flee to an empty Hollywood movie set to produce their own must see version of this tale. Hopefully these detainees will not be Eskimos who have merely refused to watch the series in its entirety no matter what the movie's production staff threaten to do to them.
An opening segment of a must see event should be so filled with enough quality content, character development and plot that viewing audiences are enticed and drawn back to watch future episodes.
Actors offering wooden performances, overused airplane hijacking scenes and wind machines emulating the devastating effects of an impending plane crash have been used before and should seriously be placed in mothballs and forgotten.
Actors such as Mr Underwood who have proven their dramatic salt in more dramatic series should be afforded the right and the opportunity to present their more dramatic and entertaining sides and not merely opt to offer the viewing audiences mugged shots of impending terror and fear.
It can only be hoped that the network has aired the less desirable portions of this event and that the rest of the episodes will contain more pulp and less directorial flatulence.
This Article has been viewed 572 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.