Review: Eureka

Eureka

In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, The Sci Fi Channel

In the UK: Acquired by Sky One, for airing this Summer

Small towns have lots of secrets. Think Blue Velvet. Think Northern Exposure. Think Hidden Palms.

Okay, don’t think Hidden Palms.

There’s even a new series coming up called Secrets of a Small Town that I’ll be reviewing this week.

Eureka has a big secret. It’s a town inhabited almost entirely by scientists, all doing research on crazy, crazy inventions. Just about anything important that’s been invented since World War Two (which is when Truman set up the town at Einstein’s instigation) came out of Eureka’s labs.

Into this most top-secret of small towns comes a US marshal and his charge, who also happens to be his daughter. They’ve been in a car crash and are looking for help. It isn’t long before they’re drawn into the strange yet everyday occurrences of Eureka, as big chunks of things start to go missing thanks to an experiment gone wrong.

I’d like to tell you more about Eureka. I’d like to offer an exciting and incisive opinion about Eureka. But the show’s like porridge. You can work your way through it for two hours and still not discover if it has a taste or not.

Eureka is perfectly competent television. It’ll fill an hour or two of your time. You may even recall enjoying it. But at the end of it, you won’t know why, and you won’t be able to remember really much about it at all. All you’ll remember is that you spent your time watching Eureka.

Don’t expect the moon on a stick and you won’t be disappointed by the show. It’ll fill time while you’re waiting for something else quite merrily. Or you could do something else more interesting, which is what I’d advise.

You can find out more about Eureka at the SciFi Channel’s Eureka page. You can also watch the entire two-hour pilot over on SciFi Pulse. You probably won’t remember doing that afterwards, though.

UPDATE: Despite claiming I was going to be reviewing Secrets of a Small Town, I’m not going to because the pilot hasn’t been picked up by ABC. That’s probably because it was rubbish.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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