Prime-Time Space Invaders

Invasion

Threshold

Surface

The New York Sun, September 20, 2005

Be afraid, very afraid. Someone somewhere, probably in a French newspaper, is soon going to make a big deal out of the fact that all three U.S. television networks are debuting series about extraterrestrial invasions of Earth. Much as the enjoyable, and perfectly straightforward, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has long been reinterpreted as a parable of Cold War paranoia (it was nothing of the sort, of course), so "Invasion" (ABC), "Threshold" (CBS), and "Surface" (NBC) will undoubtedly be viewed as an expression of American unease at the threat posed by the alien civilization of Islamic extremism, and, yes, this too will be nonsense.

The coincidence that ABC, NBC, and CBS are offering viewers little green men - or eerie white lights ("Invasion"), or nasty spinning things ("Threshold"), or savage sea monsters ("Surface"), or whatever - owes a great deal to the success of "Lost" and has nothing at all to do with a malevolent and murderous crank firing off fatwas from a cave somewhere in Central Asia. That said, it's also true that since the days that all our species lived in caves, we have enjoyed frightening ourselves with tales of gods, monsters, ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. The evil menace from beyond the stars is just an old bogeyman in a new spacesuit, and as ABC, NBC, and CBS know well, he can still be a good source of chills, thrills, and ratings success.

"Threshold" boasts a hipster hip high dwarf (Peter Dinklage), a beauty who has appeared in both "Sin City" and "Spin City" (Carla Gugino), the return of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner), and movie-standard production values. Despite all that, the storyline - involving aliens, secret government agencies, and offbeat protagonists - brought back too many memories of the much-missed Mulder and Scully, and it suffered by comparison. I'll give it another episode, but I'm unconvinced that this threshold is worth crossing. Turning to the next of these three shows, I should confess that I haven't actually seen "Surface," but as, by all accounts, it needs to sink very quickly, that's probably just as well.

That leaves ABC's "Invasion." Its creator, Shaun Cassidy, was responsible for the Mayberry-gone-bad of television's disgracefully underrated "American Gothic," one of the spookier shows of recent years and, as a former teenybopper idol (and the half-brother of another), he's someone who knows a thing or two about the dark side. "Invasion," sadly, does not live up to this promising pedigree, but does have, instead, a certain simple-minded charm. So pull out the popcorn, crack open a beer, and switch off your brain.

"Invasion" is not just cliched, it embraces cliche, and it does so with panache, verve, enthusiastically awful acting, and the hokiest use of sinister background music that I have heard in quite a while. We have the iconically-named American small town (Homestead, Fla.) under threat, we have the "typically" fractured American family (children shuttling between rancorous ex-spouses, new significant others on the scene, and so on), and we have the idiot American conspiracy theorist (played, confusingly, by someone trying to impersonate Jack Black) who is likely to be proved right in the end.

The sense that I had seen this all before didn't stop there. By the end of the first episode, there were dark "Body Snatcher"-style hints that neither the hero's ex-wife nor her current husband may be who she or he seems; the Jack Black impersonator had discovered that it's a bad idea to reach down into the swamp for a mysterious underwater light in the course of a scifi show; and a young child had searched the woods for her missing cat in the middle of a raging, lethal storm to, predictably, the wails - between recriminations - of those estranged parents of hers.

Awkwardly for ABC, that raging, lethal storm was a hurricane. As the devastation caused by Katrina became clear, the network pulled commercials for "Invasion," but ultimately decided that the show must go on. That was fair enough, although, ironically, the devastation portrayed in "Invasion" seems feeble when compared with the real horrors inflicted on the Gulf, and loses much of its power as a result. Equally, any Katrina survivors who see this depiction of a prompt, smooth recovery effort in the aftermath of a hurricane will be under no illusion that what they are watching is anything but fiction.

Nevertheless, while "Invasion" is certainly very far from being the best new sci-fi series now on television (that honor is reserved for the reworked "Battlestar Galactica"), those sparkling lights were intriguing enough to me to merit hanging on for at least one more episode. But be warned: Two weeks ago I took time out of a vacation to visit a UFO watchtower in Colorado, so my standards may be less demanding than yours.