This is a show that would be perfect having just a single season, 24 episodes and done. It’s the type of show that would do well under a UK schedule.
But in America no one wants to do that. You go in hoping and praying that your show is going to be the hit that lasts 10 seasons when 95% of them don’t make it past season 1. So every show either has to come up with more and more ridiculous plotlines as each new season comes about, prolonging any resolution to the mysteries you’ve created, or it gets cancelled before any mysteries are resolved. There is no in-between.
No one wants to take that chance. But I’ll bet if the producers of Awake said up front, “this show will last two seasons. Nothing more. Seriously we’ll be done. We have the story all mapped out, and it will all be resolved and if you stick with us it will be amazing television.” you know what? I’ll bet it would be the number one show for those two years.
The conspiracy angle has been a fairly minor part of the story. It was brought up at the end of one episode and then was featured again several episodes later. What I find interesting is that as far as I can tell, the only references to the conspiracy have been in the red universe. So it’s possible it’s completely imaginary.
And everyone talks about cliches, but as far as I can tell, this is the first cop show featuring a detective being followed by a hallucination of a penguin.
[spoiler]The inmate needed to knock the guy out so he could go to sleep and start working the case in the other world. Good idea.
His inability to determine which world he is in and all that was overdue.
I knew BD Wong was a hallucination in the asylum right away. Too obvious.
How does a nut job with a history of attempted violence in a supposed special security facility get all the bomb stuff, especially the welding tanks? They gotta stop having plot craters like that.[/spoiler]
I also think the conspiracy stuff is unwelcome. Too many layers of cruft.
They seem to promote the tennis coach as a potential (one-sided) romantic interest in the wife-less world. But she’s hardly on the show.
Excellent points. Twin Peaks, for instance, would’ve been outstanding as a miniseries, or a one-season series. Instead they ran it into the ground, trying to stretch it to fill more airtime, and then ended it with a never-resolved cliffhanger. Gah!
Still watching. Still interested, but none of the episodes have come as close to its great pilot episode. There’s gimpses, though, but I’m not holding my breath that it’ll crystallize into something as promising as the pilot.
Yup. My wife and I say that about a few series: this and How I Met Your Mother jump to mind immediately. No, instead we’ll just stretch it until it sucks, then give it a crappy ending.
Hadn’t consciously stopped but just realized seeing this thread that I haven’t bothered queuing it up in the DVR in a few weeks either. It began to lose me with the scenes in both worlds that he was not present for nor aware of. (A basic rule of fantasy is that you stay true to the reality you set up - when the audience has to accept that at least one of these sets of experiences is a dream then each needs to be true to what a dream experience would be lest you destroy the ability to suspend disbelief.) Maybe it could have held me anyway if they went somewhere more interesting with the psychological aspects (a cop version of In Treatment of sorts) but instead it seems like a one-off clever idea with no idea of what to do with it and an uninspired execution. I’m not sure if I’ll bother to watch any more or not. Probably not.
I’m still watching even though I have a lot of the same complaints as others here. I wish they’d drop some hints about what’s happening with regards to the reality/dream. Or is it a parallel universe thing or what? Our main character seems unconcerned, which is probably not a good sign.
But that’s the whole point of the show. The therapists want to to realize the other side is a dream, but his thought is “If I figure it all out, I’m going to lose my son or my wide. I don’t want to do that.”
Yes, but each therapist is equally credible. There hasn’t been an episode that would lead the viewer to believe that one or the other reality is the real world. I don’t know, it just seems like it’s turning into a prop for solving crimes and not a major plot point.
I don’t want them to resolve which timeline is “real”; the one thing that attracted me to the show was that it was not resolved (and really is irrelevant). Any explanation is bound to be worse than leaving it unexplained.
I could have stayed interested with it being unresolved. They lost me when it became irrelevant. Then it is merely a means to have two stories each week that with the gimmick of them having something in common which may be a twist or part of the crime solution. Boring.
