Last night was the preview of the new series, Touch, starring Kiefer Sutherland.
The actual series doesn’t start until (I think) March 19th, but they showed the pilot episode. If you missed it, I believe you can go to Fox dot com to see this pilot episode in the meantime.
We thought it was pretty good. Kiefer has a son with what appears to be a form of autism (but might be something different) who is 11 years old and has never spoken a word (although you hear his voice-overs in the show).
The son seems to have a special ability with numbers and the grand scheme of the universe. Yes, it sounds a bit whack-a-doodle, but it got very interesting pretty quickly. The pilot episode had lots of threads about people with vaguely interconnected lives, and it was well done how they all connected in the end.
Will most certainly give the show a few more viewings come March!
I had been looking forward to this show for months, and the pilot wasn’t as good as I expected it to be. I think they really should have gone for an hour for the pilot in order to give somre background and paint a bit fuller picture.
It wasn’t an hour? I guess I couldn’t tell because I had to stop it repeatedly due to some activity at the house, so it took us about 90 minutes to watch it. I assumed it was.
I liked it; it wasn’t until after it ended that I learned it isn’t returning until mid-March (:dubious:), but I’m a little hazy on the geography. Keifer lives in a NYC downtown loft; his kid goes to a school (I assumed a neighborhood school) but is able to get himself far enough out of town to a cell tower in the middle of rural America, on foot. Then CPS takes the kid away to a group home that’s “just down the block” from the loft, and the kid gets to the cell tower again, on foot.
I think it was an hour, too. I liked it - I’ll give the real show a chance (pilots aren’t always exactly like the show itself). My husband’s criticism (and I agree with it) is that all the threads came together too neatly; we’re kind of hoping that everything doesn’t get tied up with a bow each episode.
The idea of these kids being the next step in evolution was fascinating. Some parts of the show were pretty clichéd (the single dad who does everything for his kid, the kid being at risk of being taken away by CPS, etc.). Overall I liked it.
Overall, I liked the show. Initially it seemed like several disjointed situations, but I was very impressed when all of those disjointed situations started coming together. Yes, it was unlikely, but I didn’t have any trouble suspending my disbelief.
I also got the impression that the fireman guy is going to appear in other episodes. After all,
the fireman doesn’t know, yet, that the woman he carried down 31 flights of stairs in the WTC was kiefer’s wife.
That’s about what I’d expect, yeah. An hour-long US TV show usually comes out as about 40-45 minutes of actual programme, sans commercials. I know they’ve been increasing the number of ads per hour, but almost doubling the running time seemed excessive.
It seemed like a well put together show, but I just didn’t find the stories it told very interesting. I’ll probably still check it out when the series starts, but I’m not sitting on the edge of my seat in anticipation.
It had some good points, but the bit about him finding the woo stuff on the internet and then buzzing by that guy’s house was too over the top for me. The kid is a pretty good actor, and Kiefer is good, too. Nice to see him in a different role, but it looks like he will have plenty of opportunities to say “… or thousands of people will DIE!!!”
Maybe I’m a little “touched”, too, since as soon as I read the synopsis and saw the part about the social worker, I thought: “I bet the social worker is an attractive black woman.”
But they did a good job of handling all those plot lines without making it a confusing mess. Going forward, I don’t have a lot of hope that the woo aspect is going stand the light of day, since IRL it would revolutionize the way the entire world works. But they’ll probably want to protect the anonymity of the kid or some utterly impossible nonsense like that.
The hug was great, even if predictable.
Oh, and how much do you want to bet that at some point, maybe the season finale, the kid talks? He doesn’t talk like a normal person or anything-- he just sort of looks up and utters some phrase that can’t be understood, at least not at first.
