Things I've Noticed: My Loyalty to Genre TV has a limit

Yesterday I watched the sixth episode of the TV series The Event, and I think I’m done. Back when the show first appeared I wrote about how much I dug the pilot and especially the everyman quality of lead actor Jason Ritter. The thing is, after half a dozen hour-long episodes, even a cool concept and a great lead actor can’t get me to watch the next episode.

My problem with the show basically came down to pacing – for a show that promised me a world shattering event so awesome that the whole series would be named after it, I needed something more spectacular than a plane disappearing mid-flight.

As a genre fan I love the weird and the amazing, and had the plane appeared on another world or in another dimension, I really think I could have gotten behind the show. What actually happened was that the “event” in question was immediately hushed up by the government and didn’t change much of anything for the man on the street (quick side note – amazing “man on the street story” Marvels by Kurt Busiek). Basically I’ve spent the last six hours of this show watching people work to cover up a thing that was covered up in the pilot – oh but wait, they were also covering up aliens and a viral outbreak, but you know what, The X-Files kind of topped me up for shows about cover-ups, aliens and viral outbreaks – also it worked on an episodic format (where a mini-story occurred every episode, and the overall arc of the series occurred in the background), and they did it much, much better.

In the end I still really like most of the actors in the show, I just couldn’t keep waiting around for the premise to show itself. I hope this doesn’t mean I’m loosing patience with new shows but am simply becoming more discerning.