‘The Messengers’ is hardly a revelation
After a string of nice surprises, CW’s latest series is a letdown
Eventually, every hot streak comes to an end.
When it comes to dramas, CW has been on quite the perception-shifting run. Starting with last spring ’s sleeper, the surprisingly adult teen space drama The 100, CW has gone on to give us fall’s best new broadcast series, Jane the Virgin and The Flash, and one of this spring ’s more entertaining new hours, iZombie. All this from a network that had, for a stretch, seemed alarmingly preoccupied with young pretty people doing incredibly vapid things.
Enter, alas, The Messengers, with as little fanfare as you’d expect from a show making its debut on a Friday in April. On the bright side, it’s still better than the worst of CW’s pre- 100 stock, shows such as Reign or Hart of Dixie that actually consume your brain cells as you watch. But it’s a letdown, and while letdowns in TV are not exactly shocking, they remain unwelcome.
Written by Eoghan O’Donnell, Friday’s premiere spends most of the hour introducing the characters and the premise, and too much of it falls behind the audience, which probably will figure out where The Messengers is headed long before it gets there. Suffice it to say this is yet another twist on the Book of Revelations and The Rapture, two “r’s” that will, for some viewers, call to mind a third “r” — rest, as in “give it a.”
A mysterious object falls to earth, triggering an immediate government cover-up (done with an instant efficiency the real government can only envy) while sending a temporarily fatal shock wave through five unrelated strangers: Vera (Shantel Van-Santen), Erin (Sofia Black-D’Elia), Peter (Joel Courtney), Raul (JD Pardo) and Joshua (Jon Fletcher) They have nothing in common: Vera is an astronomer; Peter is a high school student; Joshua is a televangelist. But they’re all drawn toward a mysterious stranger who fell from the sky, known only as The Man (Diogo Morgado).
Are the mysteriously superpowered five angels or devils? Is The Man Lucifer or Gabriel? Answers are coming, some of them in the form of effects so cheesy, you wonder if they’re a deliberate throwback. Unfortunately, when they do eventually arrive, the answers all feel too old and too obvious.
Obviously, the show could improve, but nothing in the first hour — from the flaccid script to the indifferent casting — is likely to leave you thinking it will. So it’s a good thing that our TV plates, as well as CW’s, are full at the moment, making The Messengers relatively superfluous.
So let that be the message: Enjoy Jane and The Flash, and keep your Fridays free.