Too much evidence of things seen before
Believe what, exactly? That there’s a little girl with undefined mystical powers whom bad guys want and good guys have sworn to protect? We’ve gone that route before, recently in Touch and usually with scant success, but OK — what’s one more time? Believe that recent Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón, who cocreated the show and directs tonight’s pilot, and
Star Trek director/ Star Wars rebooter J.J. Abrams are going to take time from their film careers to give the show the attention it needs when both have movies in production? Maybe. Experience says no, but you never know when a project is close to someone’s heart.
But believe that NBC can properly shepherd this action/ fantasy along, despite the plotcollapse fiasco that was Heroes and is Revolution? That could be one suspension of disbelief too many.
The vaguely superpowered child here is Bo (Johnny Sequoyah), a bright little girl with powers she (and we) can’t yet understand. Parentless, Bo has been shuffled from foster home to foster home by a group led by Delroy Lindo’s Winter, who has sworn to keep her safe.
Unfortunately, the bad guys — led by Kyle MacLachlan’s Skouras — have found her and killed her latest foster family. So for her next protector, Winter chooses Tate (Jake McLaughlin), a wrongly imprisoned death-row inmate whom Winter frees and then coerces into guarding Bo.
Naturally, Bo and Tate do not get along. Bo — who Sequoyah plays with a nice mix of innocence and brattiness — thinks Tate is mean, stupid and burdened by anger issues, an assessment that may leave many viewers nodding in unhappy agreement. Tate thinks Bo talks too much and listens too little, as when she wanders away from their escape plan to go help a doctor she just met.
In case you were wondering what Believe would do from week to week, that Fugitive- like setup appears to provide the answer. Tate and Bo will be on the run, pausing from city to city just long enough for Bo to use her powers to help some stranger of the week.
As you’d hope from an hour directed by Cuarón, tonight’s premiere moves swiftly and surely, with well-shot action sequences and bursts of visual flare, led by a nightmarish image of birds coming to Bo’s rescue. Small touches of humor mix with large doses of pseudospiritual sentiment: Had one more character expressed belief in another or urged another to believe in himself, the show would have been a prime candidate for TV’s next drinking game.
Yet for all those flourishes, nothing really shakes that feeling that it’s all been done before and it won’t end well. Bo’s powers — which up to now include the ability to move objects, control animals, read feelings and tell the future — are dangerously open-ended. When a hero can do anything, risk and interest disappear. And while the episode does eventually explain why Winter chose Tate, nothing we see in the character or the performance is likely to convince you he made the right choice. Oh, and if that choice means we see less of Lindo, who gives the hour’s most entertaining performance, it will be a bad one indeed.
Maybe the show can overcome those hurdles. Maybe this will be the one child-saves-theworld show that finally works.
But I’ll believe it when I see it.