Television Review: THE EVƎNT, Season 1.5

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I felt like NBC's THE EVÆŽNT had pretty good momentum through the first half of the season.[1] But then the show took a three month hiatus. I suspected that this, more than any flaws in characterization, plot, or dramatic tension, would result in the cancellation of the show. Since I wasn't a die-hard fan, I lost track of it and didn't realize when it resumed airing the rest of the season. One day I saw it advertised on Hulu and realized that the season was already over. And, sure enough, by then the show had been cancelled due to poor ratings.[2] THE EVÆŽNT started out with flashbacks and mysterious happenings—obviously an attempt to duplicate the LOST phenomenon. But viewers complained about this aspect making the show too confusing, so they jettisoned it from the second half of the season.[3] However, unlike LOST, they promised that they wouldn't take forever to answer questions posed. They did a pretty good job of this, answering questions within a few episodes but still managed to maintain dramatic tension.

My verdict: The acting was still kind of bad and this is exacerbated by occasional bouts of poorly-written dialogue. Even the characterization was often uneven. The Vice President (later the Acting President) was a completely unbelievable character. Vicky Roberts was also hard to swallow—I think the writers wanted her to seem unpredictable and mysterious, but I thought she just came across as inconsistent. And he President's sudden conversion into a hawk was a bit of a stretch.

Some of the plot twists were interesting. Others didn't make any sense and were only thrown in for drama's sake. Even without the flashbacks, some elements of the show were unclear. For a long time I thought the aliens were the ones collecting the children. Perhaps the writers were trying to keep it mysterious, but I found it to be just confusing and hard to follow. However, things did get clearer as time went on. The finale didn't pull any punches and left us on some great cliffhangers. It's really too bad that the series was cancelled. Despite its flaws, I would've been willing to watch another season.

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Notes:

[1] Read my review of the first half of Season 1 here.

[2] See http://www.deadline.com/2011/05/nbc-cancels-the-event-too/.

[3] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Event#Narrative technique.

Image attributions:

Earthrise is by astronaut Bill Anders, and as a work of the US Federal Government exists in the public domain. Available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg.