‘The Event’: What’s Wrong and How to Fix it in Five Easy Steps

The Event Returns with New Episodes in March, 2011

As noted in our original review, we here at The ‘Tastic are big fans of the new NBC series, The Event.  Unfortunately, since its premiere, the audience numbers have dropped steadily and the show is on life-support at this point and it’s completely unnecessary. We still stand by the contention that it’s one of the best new shows on TV but we are backing off the contention that we made that it is the second best new show on TV and if we were to review it today, instead of the admittedly generous 9 out of 10 we gave it after the premiere of the pilot, we would probably rate it a 7 or 7.5 at best.  We think we know what’s wrong and how to fix it.

The problem with the show is simple: the audience needs less talk and more rock. Showrunner/executive producer Evan Katz, who is probably the greatest asset to the show, is probably its biggest liability as well. The Event has been acting as if it’s a successful genre show, with a built-in audience in the middle of its fourth or fifth season and truthfully it’s been acting like this since the mind-numbing (albeit exciting) pilot episode with the 8,000 flashbacks and flash-forwards. The ‘Tastic admits that as genre-geeks, we may have been a little bit more over-exuberant and a little less objective for The Event than we probably would have been for another type of a show.

The fact is that as cool as this show is, we can certainly understand why the confusing back-and-forth in the pilot episode probably caused a substantial portion of the audience to jump ship immediately. Now, the flashbacks have been used much more effectively, not as much and solely for the purpose of character development (similar to how Lost did it but not as significant to the plot) since that pilot and that is an improvement, however, what’s killing this show now is the fact that was alluded to before: it’s not doing anything to keep or attract audience members. The story is very good but it’s also very slooooooooooooow for the most part with the occasional highlights of frenetic action.

Again, this type of “behavior” from a show is completely acceptable and often quite typical from a popular, established genre show with a dedicated audience but it is incredibly dangerous to do with a new show especially when it’s a niche-genre show to begin with. It’s difficult enough for a standard procedural show to build an audience, but for a Sci-Fi/Action-Thriller, it needs to immediately appeal to a general audience and hook them and the producers have to be simple about how they go about doing that. They need to go with what always works: ‘splosions… lots of them… often… and repeated chases and gunfights. Get into the cerebral crap and the plodding character development later on when you’ve already got ’em hooked. Tell an easy to follow story, initially, with a couple of good twists thrown in for good measure and rock and roll, already.

The failure of The Event to play it safe and do what’s necessary for a genre show to be successful on network TV rests squarely on the shoulders of Katz and as fans of the genre, it’s coming off to us as a bit arrogant. We are big fans of Katz and his work but he is running this show as if it’s 24, season nine or Lost, season seven as if 10 million people are tuning every week without fail. Sorry, but The Event is nowhere near ready to be at that comfort-level. General audiences are skeptical of genre shows to begin, and they are particularly skeptical of Sci-Fi shows.

We love The Event and we want to see it last more than just one season. We have come up with a plan of action that if followed, may indeed save this series (if it’s not too late already).

1. You got some splainin’ to do. Stop acting as if every week, everyone already knows what’s happening. Explain it every week until at least the second season and we don’t mean just in the teaser. You’re never going to build an audience with new viewers if they have no idea what’s going on when they jump in mid-stream.

2. Simplify. We love a complex Sci-Fi story, but you need to pare it down a little bit. There are far too many sub-plots going on with this show considering how new it is. Simplify it just a tad. The joke with Lost was that it was four seasons in before fans realized they were watching a Sci-Fi show. That’s how The Event needs to position itself. Compelling stories that are easy to follow that make the audience forget that they are even watching a Sci-Fi show.

3. Less flashbacks. As noted, the flashbacks are not nearly as bad as they were in the pilot, however, they are unnecessary for the most part as is most of the character development. This is one of the more confusing aspects of the show production. Here we have a show that has been described (even by us) as the mutant offspring of 24 and Lost and is executive produced by the former executive producer of 24 (Katz) and it is obvious that the intent is to produce a show similar to 24 (which is something else we noted in our review in regards to NBC). So knowing this, the question is, why exactly are they wasting their time with so much back-story and so much character development?

This is an action-thriller. We don’t need this much information about these characters. Fill us in with the minor details as we go along. We don’t need the life story on all 500 characters of this ensemble. I found out more about Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) in the first six episodes of this season than I ever knew about Jack Bauer in 192 episodes of 24.

Leave some mystery for God’s sake. It makes the show more interesting. Here’s a prime example: It turns out that Vicky Roberts (Taylor Cole) has a son. Instead of just letting us know that she had this child and having our protagonists use the knowledge of this child to manipulate her, the writers provided us with this protracted and elaborate origins story in the form of several flashbacks explaining how she took the child as a baby from one of her assassination targets when she was supposed to kill the baby as well and she has been raising him as her own in secret ever since (with the help of her mother). This was completely unnecessary for the story and the flashbacks took up nearly an entire episode. If they wanted to drop that story in along the way in bits and pieces, in the form of exposition through dialogue, fine, awesome, bring it, but don’t waste an entire episode in a lame attempt to take the audience by the hand to guide them through a story.

It’s not only insulting to the audience, but it paints you in a corner with nowhere to go with the character’s history in case the story goes in a different direction. Just consider how long it took to tell the back-story of the characters on Lost. The audience was given snippets for years on each character until the picture was complete and not only did it work brilliantly but it left them completely open to change the characters as the story progressed.

So, between these protracted flashbacks with these elaborate back-stories and the numerous subplots, The Event is wasting a lot of screen time unnecessarily. So, from now on, no more flashbacks unless absolutely necessary.

4. More ‘splosions, please. And what we mean by this is more action in general.  This goes back what we said about “less talk, more rock.” For an action show, The Event is lacking in the action department and if the producers follow the advice as set forward above regarding sub-plots and flashbacks, they’ll have a lot more time for the action. “Action” was used four times in the preceding two sentences.  Are we making our point clear about the need for more action on this show.

Manny Coto

5. Manny Effing Coto. For those of you who don’t know, Manny Coto is one of the premiere producers and writers in television today and his particular forté is genre, specifically Action, Horror and Sci-Fi (check out Manny Coto’s bio at IMDb).  Among those of us in the know (*snicker*), Coto really gained attention when he came into the third season of the miserable failure of a series, Star Trek: Enterprise and actually gave the show some respectability with the writing.  In season four he was made showrunner/executive producer and changed the direction of the series entirely, allowing the series to end on a high-note.  Season four of Star Trek: Enterprise is widely considered to be the best of the four seasons and that has everything to do with Manny Coto.  And, yes, we expect to get hate mail from Trek fans about the “miserable failure of a show” remark.

After leaving Star Trek: Enterprise, Coto became an executive producer alongside Evan Katz for seasons five, six, seven and eight of 24. Without, a question, season five was the most critically acclaimed season of that series (winning the Prime-Time Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series) and it’s no surprise why, really.

Katz and Coto worked together for several years on a successful genre Action-Thriller and Coto has an excellent track record of bringing a new vision to a series to change its course.  It would seem to be a perfect pick for Katz to hire his old colleague to come in and see if he can do something to change the direction of this struggling show with great potential to put more asses in the seats as the great Reggie Jackson would say.

Now, we don’t know what Manny’s schedule is like, and truthfully, the Manny Coto dream may just be wishful thinking, but season five of Dexter just finished airing two weeks ago and he was an executive producer and writer for that show and according to IMDb his plate looks pretty empty as of today.  We simply can’t think of anyone else that would be better suited to change the direction of this series and potentially save it.

The truth is that the long hiatus (new episodes will not air until March 7, 2011) may be the final nail in the coffin for The Event, so this may be all be moot anyway, but we hope not.  There are promising signs that NBC still has faith in the series, particularly that a week before the new episodes air, they are dedicating two hours on Monday February 28, 2011 to a “catch up ” episode (for more information, click here).  Why that’s a such a promising sign is because it’s stealing a page out of the Lost playbook and goes back to the first recommendation we made, which is that you need to explain to the audience what’s going on until the show picks up steam and has a dedicated, solid following.  Progress, indeed.

The Event is truly a bubble-show.  In the end, we hope despite all of its problems, NBC rides with it for at least one more season.  If not, meh.  It’s just TV, after all.

You can get caught up with The Event and watch all ten episodes, right here.

‘Caprica’ – A Post-Mortem Analysis and News of the New BSG Series

If you haven’t heard the news, last week SyFy cancelled the critically acclaimed Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Caprica, which chronicled the history of the 12 colonies (more specifically, Caprica) and the events that led to the first Cylon war. Although, heavily promoted before the series debuted in January, Caprica never lived up to its hype with audiences and its poor ratings reflected that.

Since the announcement, there has been a misguided fan campaign to keep the series alive with of all things, bombarding the SyFy Offices with apples. You see, this esoteric reference that even the folks at SyFy probably won’t get is in regards to the symbolism of the Cylons’ “original sin” (and an apple appeared regularly in Caprica promotional materials). Clever, right?

Yeah… nobody cares.

I’m going to have to concur with the “Let it Go” sentiment on this one as much as I liked the show and am a fan of BSG, Caprica was a good show but it’s far too cerebral for the franchise considering that there was very little action. Unfortunately, fans expected a shoot-em up because it was a BSG prequel and a lot of viewers just can’t get past the fact that it isn’t that type of show. Revolving it around angst-ridden, teenage girls didn’t help it either.

As is the usual case for when any genre show gets cancelled, the choruses of “the network didn’t promote it well enough,” “switching the night it aired killed it,” and my favorite, “SyFy was greedy and split the season up into two parts to double-dip on on the DVD’s” are being sung by the fans.

As noted, the claim that the show wasn’t promoted well enough simply isn’t true. SyFy promoted the crap out of it before its series debut and the numbers were miserable for season 1.0 as well. It was lucky it got picked up for 1.5.

As far as the change of nights is concerned, it was purely a defensive measure. I wrote a piece about this on last month. Networks (excluding FOX) are taking Friday nights seriously now with their programming. It’s no longer considered a dumping ground for failing shows. That hurts SyFy because they took advantage of that for years. Both Caprica and Stargate: Universe have had awful ratings regardless of the night they have aired.

As far as the split-season is concerned (again, not that they would have mattered), it’s because the 1.5 episodes hadn’t been produced. Doug Drexler (CG supervisor for Caprica) confirmed with us that they had just finished all the post-production work for the season finale on August 28th so the main reason that the season was split was that the episodes weren’t complete.

The issue of the split seasons being taken advantage of by SyFy for DVD revenue comes up all the time as if it actually has some merit. It really doesn’t. Why would SyFy intentionally cut off their nose to spite their face by damaging the series overall by breaking up the continuity of it in order to boost DVD sales for one half of a season? Not only does it not make any sense for the simple reason that SyFy can split up a DVD set into two parts regardless of whether or not the season was actually split up when it aired, but intentionally hurting the continuity and thereby hurting the ratings precludes them from future DVD releases of subsequent seasons.

My point on all of that is that what ANY fan of ANY series wants if they want their show to survive is for “X” network to be as greedy as humanly possible because that means they’ll try to milk the series for as much money as they possibly can and that means they’ll do whatever they can to make sure the series lasts a long time.

The problem was that it couldn’t build an audience because even though it was pretty good, there simply wasn’t enough exciting going on to compel audiences to tune in every week until the last four episodes and all the apples in the world can’t change that.

However, that being said, the series that every fan wants to see, the one revolving around the war with the Cylons and the twelve colonies has been green-lit.  The project called Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome will feature a young William Adama and is officially described as such:

“Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome takes place in the 10th year of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, a sentient robotic race, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, a brash rookie viper pilot enters the fray. Ensign William Adama, barely in his 20’s and a recent Academy graduate, finds himself assigned to the newest battlestar in the Colonial fleet… the Galactica. The talented but hot-headed risk-taker soon finds himself leading a dangerous top secret mission that, if successful, will turn the tide of the decade long war in favor of the desperate fleet.”

All things considered, it would be nice if they did a two-hour movie to wrap up Caprica in the future and tie up the loose ends. Or, even better, incorporate it into the B & C pilot like Chris Carter did with Millenium and The Lone Gunmen on The X-Files.  In fact, it would seem to be a necessity because there is so much that was going on in Caprica that was the prelude to the first Cylon war and the development of the Cylons self-awareness to begin with that it would seem counter-productive to the franchise if they didn’t.

You can watch some full episodes of Caprica, here and Netflix subscribers can watch all fours seasons of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series through the Netflix streaming service.

More fun: Hulu has all 24 episodes of the Original Battlestar Galactica (1978) available absolutely free, here.

‘The Event’ (NBC – Monday, 9:00 p.m.)

The Event is an emotional, high-octane conspiracy thriller that follows Sean Walker (Jason Ritter, “The Class”), an everyman who investigates the mysterious disappearance of his would-be fiancée Leila (Sarah Roemer, “Disturbia”), and unwittingly begins to expose the biggest cover-up in U.S. history.

Sean’s quest will send ripples through the lives of an eclectic band of strangers, including newly elected U.S. President Elias Martinez (Golden Globe nominee Blair Underwood, “In Treatment”); Sophia Maguire (Emmy Award nominee Laura Innes, “ER”), who is the leader of a mysterious group of detainees; and Leila’s shadowy father (Scott Patterson, “Gilmore Girls”). Their futures are on a collision course in a global conspiracy that could ultimately change the fate of mankind. – NBC

The Preview (Posted on 9/15/2010):

Shawn:     This is by far the most anticipated show of the new year and for good reason. It’s a spy/action/political thriller à la 24 shown from multiple perspectives with a Lost-type/FlashForward-type mystery to it. The cast is amazing and the effects look killer. This is one of those moral imperative shows. You must watch this. I’d comment more on it but the trailer confused the crap out of me and I still haven’t processed all of it.

The Review:

9 out of 10

Shawn:     First things first: my assumptions about The Event couldn’t have been more prophetic and it doesn’t mean that I’m that great of a judge of a show’s character, it just means that NBC marketed it perfectly. As noted above, I said it looked like Lost and 24 had a baby and considering an hour before it premiered, NBC was quoting Us Magazine (who had seen it) as saying the EXACT SAME THING, I’d say that’s precisely what NBC is going for and it wasn’t a plan that they just dreamt up over the summer.  This has been in the works for almost year, now.

Fans of 24 may not know this, but the last season of 24 (last year’s season 8 ) was not necessarily going to be the end of 24 as of mid-season ’09 – ’10, and in fact, 24‘s ratings weren’t even particularly bad (9.31 million viewers but they were dropping and had been for some time).  Despite the obvious repetitiveness of each season and the notion that the tank was clearly empty (the writers themselves admitted this), 24‘s main problem production-wise was that it was a very expensive show to produce every week and the ratings weren’t high enough for FOX to be able to ask for the advertising dollars they needed to produce it AND keep it profitable. Around the same time, NBC realized that they had made perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of all time in television programming history by completely eliminating their 10:00 p.m. drama slot, Monday through Friday (to save money), in favor of demoting Jay Leno (and, yes, it was a demotion) and putting him in there all week. If you don’t understand how colossal of a mistake this was, consider this: there was serious talk about NBC shutting down completely as a network.

So, in order to save itself from itself, NBC got some new people in and re-evaluated their situation and realized they needed a strong shot in the arm and actually inquired seriously about bringing 24 over to the Peacock Network. Well, then they got a look at the books and found out how much 24 was actually costing and of course 20th Century slapped a ridiculous price tag on it to boot, and NBC said, “Thanks, but no, thanks.”

So, although the idea of 24 never came to fruition on NBC, the concept of reviving the network with a bang was still alive and well and it’s pretty clear NBC REALLY wanted their own 24. They wanted their own 24 so bad that they hired the Executive Producer of 24, Evan Katz to a seven-figure, two-year deal to run The Event.  Truly, though, it’s not just about having their own 24, it’s about having their own Genre show with the built-in audience from the day the pilot airs.  Genre fans are the most dedicated of all television fans and NBC knew this most recently because they had a genre hit with Heroes until it started to suck (and don’t ask me when it started to suck because it’s all a blur to me.  I stuck with it until the December break last year before I was bored to tears with it.  Apparently it started to suck a long time before that.).  So, this is why you see the comparisons to 24, Lost, FlashForward and Heroes and even though Katz  claims that The Event is none of these shows, it really is certainly in the same vein because if it wasn’t, NBC would never have picked it up, nor would they have signed Katz immediately at the end of 24 for a ridiculous amount of money for 2 years.

Which brings up yet another good point about this series:  the confidence NBC has in it.  NBC had the opportunity to get 24 and with it one of the most popular characters in prime-time television history and an automatic large built-in audience carried over from eight previous seasons.  Now yes, there were the cost issues involved with acquiring and producing the series and of course it’s far cheaper to not pay Kiefer Sutherland the $13.2 million per season that he was making on 24, but having the kind of gravitas that 24 brings to your network right out of the gate might even be worth risking the scratch on… that is of course, unless you’ve got a show in the chute that you really believe will take Genre audiences to a whole new level and that is precisely what The Event does.

The Event redefines Genre television for a new generation of fans.  You undoubtedly see elements of 24, Lost, Fringe and FlashForward but the story is very unique, the mysteries are compelling and the style of the series with the repeated time-shifting (i.e., the show goes back and forth in time repeatedly and it’s not consistent), albeit a little difficult to keep up with at times, makes the drama that unfolds that much more intense.

The casting for The Event is very impressive.  Jason Ritter (son of the late John Ritter) is a bit of a newcomer but he seems perfectly cast as the average guy trying to find answers.  The rest of the cast is excellent as well with a lot of well-known television faces and character actors (Blair Underwood, Tony Todd, Laura Innes, Zeljko Ivanek, Clifton Collins Jr., Scott Patterson, Bill Smitrovich, to name a few. ) and no real superstars was very smart for a few reasons.  First, you have seasoned pros on this show who ALL can act (and if I’ve never mentioned this before please understand that all of my favorite actors are character actors).  Second, they come at a much cheaper price than, say, a Kiefer Sutherland would so think of it like a professional sports salary cap: you have the option of having one superstar and a team of mediocre players or a team full of really good players.  The latter is the preferred and it’s a necessity with a new series.  It’s also a necessity because unlike 24, The Event is… well… event-driven and not single-character driven like 24 was.  A show like this requires a diverse ensemble cast as to not distract the audience from the complex and engaging drama that is unfolding.

All in all, The Event is excellent and has truly lived up to its hype so far and I don’t really have any doubt that with Evan Katz at the helm it’s going do anything but get better and better.  This is the best new network show of the season and the only thing even on cable that’s better is Boardwalk Empire.

Watch full episodes of The Event, here and here.