LITTLE ROCK — “The assassination plot is not the event.”
“The disappearance is not the event.”
“The CIA cover-up is not the event.”
“Well what the hell is it!!!!”
The first three were the titillating statements thrown out in an online NBC-TV promotion for its new show, The Event (spelled with the second “e” backward to add to the mystery and the hype).
The fourth statement was bellowed by my poor husband, Dre, after watching the online promos in an attempt to get to the bottom of the just-as-mysterious TV promotions.
Yes, NBC has tried valiantly to run us nuts. Again. And it’s just about succeeded.
The last NBC show with which I shared my frustration in this space was Heroes, with its motto of “Save the cheerleader. Save the world”; its superhero powers-endowed characters; the guy with the huge glasses; and the strange evil dude portrayed by the actor who went on to play a young, cute Mr. Spock in that old-Star-Trek-charactersmade-young-again movie.
Heroes confused us so much that we soon gave up on it. And life returned to normal. Until those danged promos for The Event cranked up in the summer.
How does NBC.com sum up the series? “An average guy stumbles upon a secret so big, even the president is on a need-to-know basis.” Said secret is described as “a global conspiracy that could ultimately change the fate of mankind.”
The Event, which premiered Sept. 20, stars Jason Ritter as Sean Walker, described as “an everyman” who, bless his heart, just wanted to find his “would-be fiancee” Leila (Sarah Roemer), who’d been rude enough to disappear without a trace during their cruise. The show also stars the couldn’t-be-ugly-ifhe-tried Blair Underwood as Elias Martinez, the president; Sophia Maguire (Laura Innes), “the leader of a mysterious group of detainees”; and Leila’s father, played by Scott Patterson.
Online, “biographies” of the characters are done up as dossiers and marked Top Secret, with keynames, phrases and sentences blacked out as if actually censored by the government. The first promos we saw were the mysterious, Cloverfield movielike snatches of conversation between the president and some other dude, as well as snatches of conversation between two dudes about the president.
For those strong enough to resist all this, I salute you. Weaker minds such as ours get their owners in trouble.
The first episode just heightened our confusion. Every commercial break preceded a cliffhanger moment, which made Dre cry out in anguish like a wounded wildebeest. Being girly, I was offended that the bad guys (whomever they were) chose Sean’s romantic cruise - during which he was planning to propose - to swipe Leila and get him kicked off the boat.Worse yet, the show messed with the timeline, constantly cutting to flashbacks dated “two days earlier,” “five minutes earlier,” “when the earth first cooled,” supposedly to help explain things.
The biggest cliffhanger, of course, was at the end of the episode: a plane disappears into midair just as it’s about to crash into the president’s vacation home. Dre’s response: “If I ever meet the person who wrote this [show], I’m going to take my foot and put it [ahem, in a location that would make that person extremely uncomfortable]!”
Which would have been a good time for me to walk in, as if in a trance, chanting, “Save the cheerleader. Save the world.Save the screenwriter.”
Well, we now at least know more than we did. We know that a mess of human-looking, extra-terrestrial aliens have been held in the United States for decades; a few escaped capture and blended in with human society; thepresident found out about the captured aliens and planned to blab to everyone, but then somebody tried to kill him; the assassination attempt was foiled by another alien, who’s actually mad at the president and trying to force him to let the captured aliens go; and meanwhile, Sean’s search for Leila ... wait, my head is beginning to hurt.
“Gah! Insane!” wrote a commentator on the show’s NBC.com site-within-a-site.
“I am officially addicted,” wrote another commentator. “It’s like a Tom Clancy action movie.”
And that, folks, is the real conspiracy. NBC keeps sticking quarters in us, and we keep getting played.
Wait, I’m writing this column on a Monday. New episode tonight! Quick! Where’s the popcorn? Where’s the Valium? Where’s my dignity?
This is not The Event either. It’s just an e-mail address:
Style, Pages 57 on 10/31/2010