I liked it, for what it is so far. I’ll be giving it a few weeks.
The shaky camera did annoy me, particularly in the bit where they’re climbing up to the cockpit. (And it’s especially bad for me because I just installed a big-screen theater projection system, so I’m looking at the wobbly handheld images ten feet across. People complained about Bourne Supremacy; this was twice as bad.) I hope they cut back on that a bit.
The characters, I think, have not yet been fully revealed. We got a quick hit of what they’re like under stress (“Are you familiar with the writings of Shan Yu?” :D), but there’s a lot more that can happen. I didn’t get any sense of the typical TV character approach, where you’re expected to know everything about the person within ten minutes. We have types so far, but there’s room for growth. That will make or break the show, I think.
And as far as the question about “how can this premise be a series,” which I think is a good one, I know what I want to see. I want to see the group of survivors attempt to form a functional society. I don’t want good guys and bad guys and a predictable, programmatic conflict. I want people coping with their situation. I want to see them try to form some sort of social structure, to recapture what they remember of civilization, to wrestle with what’s necessary simply for survival and after that what’s necessary for human dignity. In other words, what I’m hoping for is a science-fiction show in which the science being explored is anthropology: something at the midway point between what Survivor is intended to be about (but which I think gets lost underneath all the artificial manipulation) and a grown-up Lord of the Flies. That, I think, would be a hell of a show. Dark, perhaps. Cerebral, possibly. But also deeply primal, and an exploration of what it really means to be a modern human being.
There are years of stories in the simple machination of politics and manipuation, as different cliques group together to pursue different objectives, and attempt to enforce their varying ideas of how they should live on the island. (Presuming it’s an island, that is. We haven’t had a Cast Away style circuit of the beach to show just how big this land mass really is.) There could be an ever-shifting constellation of cooperation and betrayal as the factions jockey for position, recruit one another’s members, and work to gain the upper hand. Sometimes one group would be dominant and we see how their approach plays out; then there’s a setback and another group rises to exploit it, and we see how they deal with it. It’s sort of what the alliances on Survivor are supposed to be, but these would be truly life and death.
There is, I can safely say without exaggeration, some seriously compelling dramatic meat to chew on there, and a nearly bottomless reservoir of story possibilities. It remains to be seen whether the show will be something worthwhile like that, as opposed to a simple-minded chase show or a Dr.-Moreau-style conspiracy hour or something even less interesting.
But the framework is there for something truly great. I’m willing to hang for a while to see whether it pans out.
That’s what I said when I heard the stomping of the creature. Great minds think alike.