Believe

This is a new series, of which I have seen the first couple of episodes.  Someone asked me to review this one, so here goes….

The premise of this show is familiar … almost identical to Firestarter, it concerns a little girl named Bo (Johnny Sequoyah) with special powers who is being hunted by a ruthless man who will exploit her for nefarious purposes if he catches her.  She is on the run with a man who was broken out of death row in prison for the sole purpose of protecting her. 

You can probably guess who the man is.  Yep, her long lost father.  There is a group helping them evade capture, evidently well acquainted with the evil man who hunts her.  There are some good actors here, some familiar faces: Kyle MacLachlan o f Twin Peaks fame and Delroy Lindo, The Chicago Code.

I think it remains to be seen how good this show will be, though producer J.J. Abrams has an excellent track record for success.  While the girl’s special powers help them and those they meet along the way, the evil group seems to have nearly supernatural access to total surveillance in finding them.  It’s hard not to wonder why they don’t disappear into a national wilderness, but that would be a different story I guess. 

All really good fiction is about the battle between good and evil.  The characters here are clearly delineated as being on one side or the other, with Tate (Bo’s dad) being the redeemable rogue.  The danger is going to be making them all clichés of the genre, with one-note personalities.  I hope that Bo has some brattiness and that the main bad guy isn’t just the Brain half of Pinky and the Brain (“What will we do tonight?  Same thing we always do; take over the world.”)

The up side is that this is not a teen angst drama!  Adults might actually come to enjoy it.  So, I will continue to watch this one to see how it goes.