{alltv} Viewers must decide: Is this 'Event' worth waiting for?

Sunday, September 19, 2010

{alltv} Viewers must decide: Is this 'Event' worth waiting for?

Surely there's still room on TV for some well-posed questions.

Questions, and lots of them, are what NBC has been seeding all summer with an insistent campaign designed to make you wonder, "what event?" The good news is that by the time you get halfway through the enjoyably exciting premiere, you'll most likely want to know the answer to that query.

And the potential, built-in bad news is that by the hour's end, you won't be much closer to the answer. Which means you'll need faith that an answer will come and patience to wait for it, viewer virtues that are in perilously short supply these days.

If Event breaks that impatience pattern, give much of the credit to Jason Ritter's empathy-inducing performance as Sean Walker, a Hitchcock-type Everyman hero who stumbles into a vast national conspiracy. He starts out looking for his lost girlfriend (Sarah Roemer) and winds up on a sci-fi-tinged collision course with his prospective father-in-law (Scott Patterson), a newly elected president (Blair Underwood), the director of national intelligence (Zeljko Ivanek, shifty yet again) and the leader of a mysterious group of detainees (Laura Innes).

Monday's premiere whips along, laying groundwork and mixing plot reveals and portentous pronouncements with some clever feints. Someone very powerful is clearly up to no good, but who that may be, and whether there's someone or something equally powerful on the other side, are among the show's many open questions.

It might have improved the odds of keeping us pondering if the pilot's constant pivots through time didn't make an already complex story pointlessly confusing. Sure, Lost — the show NBC seems to want to replace — jumped through time, but it waited until we were hooked before it really started leaping.

Even so, The Event knows the game it's playing and its risks. You can tell from the wink-at-the-audience last line, delivered by the always-welcome Innes: "I haven't told you everything."

Tell us more — and soon would probably be best.

The Event
NBC, Monday, 9 ET/PT
* * * (out of four)