US TV

Imagine you knew everything. I mean literally everything. Okay, maybe not the answer to questions about things that haven’t happened yet – although with all that knowledge about everything, you’d certainly do well on the stock market and horse racing, for example – but whatever question anyone ever asked you, you could answer it, provided it was part of the sum of all human knowledge, whether it was a question about an obscure 19th century French law, how to make an explosive or how many dimples there are on a golfball.

Everything, that is, except your own name or indeed anything else about yourself. Are you a god in human form? An alien? A scientific experiment?

That was the set up and central mystery of Fox’s John Doe, a 2002 series that saw Prison Break‘s Dominic Purcell wake up naked on a deserted island off the coast of Seattle, with no memory of who he was, brain chock full of answers, a mysteriously shaped scar on his chest and even more mysteriously only able to see in black and white – apart from a few, very important things that show up in red.

It’s a fascinating idea, and one that requires a fascinating answer. Unfortunately, the show was also a salutary example to serial shows based around a central mystery – whatever you do, you better have some good answers at the end of it all. Here’s the series-explaining title sequence:

Continue reading “Nostalgia corner: John Doe (2002-3)”