Third-episode verdict: The Event

6 October 2010 Rob Buckley TV reviews, US TV 1 Comment
The CarusometerA Carusometer rating of 3

In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, NBC
In the UK: Channel 4. Starting this month

"What is The Event?" (shhh, Mitchell and Webb fans). NBC’s big hope for ratings success, it’s a bit of silliness that I think I’m going to duck out of right now.

Now the first episode wasn’t incredibly impressive but did have enough mystery and fun in it to make watching episodes two onwards a reasonably bright prospect. However, pretty much everything you guessed was going to happen during the pilot turned out to be the case in episode two, leaving a few mysteries that were really just logistics rather than anything else. It was also even sillier than the first episode.

Episode three did at least reinject a few mysteries into the plot, giving us factions within factions, gave us some character background for Jason Ritter, and tossed us a few miracles to be explained involving those mysterious people being kept as prisoners in Alaska. It also gave us a couple of good stunts and a new female goodie, which is a nice change from the current set who are all either dead or being held captive somewhere.

But what’s being built here is a world with its own mythology, something involving ‘an Event’ which apparently isn’t just (spoiler)us meeting aliens for the first time. And I’m frankly not that interested. It’s too divorced from the real world, nothing’s in the slightest bit plausible and with its constant time jumps, it feels like an excuse to fill up airtime, rather than anything too interesting, different or carrying an important message. Maybe the cliffhanger at the end of the season is that the world’s about to end. But The Event‘s silliness is such that I wouldn’t care if it did.

Basically, despite NBC’s fevered efforts attempting to create an online mystery-solving community to mirror Lost‘s, it’s not Lost 2, it’s Flash Forward 2. So I’m dropping out. Let me know if it picks up again in later episodes, but you remember what happened with Flash Forward, don’t you? Do you want to waste that much time again?

Carusometer rating: 3
Rob’s prediction: Will last a season at most, unless a miracle happens.

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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