Revolution

NBC, Mondays 10/9 Central

Sep 17, 2012 By Austin Trunick Web Exclusive

From its first episode, Revolution feels like a show that will work much better in concept than in execution. After a cold opening that reveals a mysterious event that makes every electrical device in the world suddenly shut down, the show fast-forwards to 15 years after “the power went out”—this is how the characters refer to the inciting event—and pockets of humanity are making do in their own little farming communes outside of the cities. It’s such a shame Revolution teases us with this opening catastrophe before skipping ahead to a new, peaceful status quo—imagine Lost opening with the castaways living a happy beach island life, à la Gilligan’s Island, rather than in the immediate aftermath of their plane crash—as the crumbling of modern society as we know it seems like it’d be an interesting time to a set a TV series. But for whatever reason, this is the way Revolution decided to go with it, so we’ll follow along.

Life seems decent in this new, electric-free era. The man we saw in the opening scene happily sips a coffee as his colleague grows vegetables in the hood of a car. His wife’s dead—this’ll be explained later, probably—but he has a new, hot British doctor girlfriend. His children are grown, off bowhunting in the woods. It all seems to be going pretty smoothly, but if something bad wasn’t about to happen, then we wouldn’t have a TV series. Almost on cue, a very evil, pseudo-authoritarian militia shows up, led by Breaking Bad‘s deliciously smarmy Giancarlo Esposito. They want something that the man—or possibly his brother—has, but in a scuffle that involves the entire farming town, they accidentally shoot him—oops!—and leave him to die. This isn’t before he can use his dying words to send his spunky teenage daughter on a mission to seek out his long-lost brother, who we’ll later learn is the most badass swordfighter in Chicago. In the meantime, the militia has also kidnapped the man’s son in his place, which seems like an awful shitty backup plan, but it does help give some other characters something to do in the pilot.

What follows is a whole load of ridiculousness. The girl embarks on her quest, joined by her dad’s girlfriend and a former Google exec, who fulfills the funny, fat guy role in the group. They head off to Chicago, and pretty much find the long-lost brother within five minutes of arriving, and completely by accident. (He wound up being the first guy in Chicago they asked about him—what luck!) It turns out he may or may not know what caused the power to go out, and the evil militia—which is run by his old buddy from the Marines, it turns out—wants that information from him so that they could build tanks, or something similarly sinister. Unfortunately—because a whole military unit couldn’t track down a man it took a teenage girl just a few minutes of screen time to locate—they were followed. It’s lucky that he’s able to kill the dozen or so gun-wielding soldiers with his swords, or else they wouldn’t be able to join forces and set up their quest to find the kidnapped boy in episode two.

Revolution is wise to keep the action flowing steadily, but it falls short just about everywhere else. The idea is cool in theory, but they suck any excitement out of life in a powerless society by just turning it into just another typical, generic dystopia setting. As it stands in the pilot episode, Revolution‘s high concept just feels half-baked. (www.nbc.com/revolution)

Author rating: 4/10

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