As escapist fare tramples everything on the television horizon – singing and dancing and otherwise whistling past the graveyards of our times – another wave of uncomfortably realistic dramas is in the wings.
Apolo Ohno can rumba day and night to keep us from thinking too deeply about, say, war. And Billy Ray Cyrus can cha-cha-cha from here to Kentucky to avert attention from domestic terrorism or school shootings, but eventually small-screen dramaturgy will kick in. There are scary, mysterious and oddly realistic stories to be told – and ratings hay to be made.
ABC’s serial drama “Traveler” attests to the network’s belief that paranoia remains commercially viable.
The series was actually announced last spring, then put on hold and trimmed to a finite eight episodes. It will run this spring as a sort of extended miniseries.
A serialized drama with layers of mystery and a predetermined end point, it holds more promise than the meandering, open-ended serials now causing viewer distress. (Paging J.J. Abrams: Tell us all is not “Lost.”)
In the new contained serial, a kid’s prank coincides with a terrorist bombing. The kid’s name is Traveler; he and his buddies set off on a cross-country adventure in the fashion of Jack Kerouac. We are fellow travelers.
Strangely prescient foreshadowings of Virginia Tech are everywhere. Terrorism makes a convenient running theme, set against the idea that certain people are essentially unknowable. You can live in a college suite with somebody and have no idea of their inner workings.
What if you don’t know your friends or roommates as well as you think you do?
What if a prank isn’t really a prank? What’s the difference between getting punk’d and getting arrested for terrorism?
A young man obsessed with his videocamera, taping himself, planning something outrageous to “go out with a bang,” the pilot for ABC’s “Traveler,” on May 10, is distressingly close to recent events.
The youthful motivation is to step off the traditional path, have a grand adventure and change their lives. The buddies read Kerouac and get their respective grooves on.
On a dare from longtime pal Will Traveler (Aaron Stanford), two graduate students, Jay Burchell (Matthew Bomer) and Tyler Fog (Logan Marshall-Green) skate through a New York museum. Once they are out of the museum, it blows up.
Hit pause and absorb how the ways in which the coincidental reflections of real-life events are too eerie: “I’m sorry I had to do this,” Traveler says just before the museum blows up.
“We lived with him for two years!” the roomies marvel, and yet, they don’t know what he was really like; they don’t have a single picture of him.
Here dramatic license takes over. Powerful people in high places seem to be pulling the strings. There are larger plots at work. Somebody must have known that something big was going to happen. They apparently want Jay and Tyler to take the blame. The two preppie-looking young men find allies in unexpected places as they race through New York, but why are they – and their daddy issues – at the center of this madness?
The problem is that any new series has to be as smart as “Lost,” as well-cast as “Grey’s Anatomy,” as cute as “Ugly Betty” or as purely populist and escapist as “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars” in order to win attention these days. Judging by the pilot, “Traveler” is ambitious, nicely photographed on the streets of New York and, oddly, stocked with present-day concerns that carry extra dramatic impact.
But it’s not as inventive, creative or unique as the best dramas on the air. We’ve seen these chase scenes before.
We are familiar with the politically tinged idea that things are not what they seem.
Super wealth, mysterious authority figures reporting to even higher masters, a hard-driving soundtrack with crashing, heavy bass punctuation delivering us to the act breaks – please, tell us something new.
Frankly, with “The Sopranos,” “Heroes,” “The Riches,” “Lost” and “The Shield,” I’m already overcommitted.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
