![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() However, while Landon Liboiron is not the world’s best actor, I honestly don’t think much of this is his fault. The character is a pretty stock reckless teenager type who doesn’t have any particularly redeemable features as far as we are shown. I saw a lot of complaining about Josh, the young teenage protagonist who finds himself in peril as the Terra Nova premiere reaches its conclusion, and I get it. It’s also, honestly, not that bad if you just consider it as your run of the mill drama series of course, that’s the last thing the show wants us to think. As a result, both the exposition and the exclusion end up feeling forced, resulting in a pilot that bears the fingerprints of producer/network manipulation. It’s like a television magic trick at this point, in which producers have to provide more exposition and explanation in order to keep viewers from being confused, but then they need to include enough mystery that they build anticipation and excitement. Most broadly, and what will I guess prove the basic thesis of the post to follow, is that Terra Nova is a classic example of a series being trapped between more and less. However, there are a few things about Terra Nova that need to be discussed. Premiere week is all about first impressions, and the absence of real first impressions has led me to largely focus on a few tweet reviews and a lot of time following the ratings and waiting to see how second episodes fare. There’s a thrill in seeing the snarky tweets piling up in Tweetdeck, or finally piecing together what critics who had seen the pilot (in multiple different iterations) have been talking about for weeks. Having screened so many of the pilots earlier in the summer, the sense of “instant reaction” was missing over the course of the past week, which was something that Terra Nova was able to deliver. What draws me to Terra Nova, then, is simply that until tonight I had not seen it. I’d also suggest that Terra Nova is not the worst network pilot by a sizable margin, as regardless of its many flaws it is definitely going out of its way to make a major impact (which is more than we can say for a show like Charlie’s Angels). It isn’t the best network pilot I’ve seen, or my favorite: I those crowns would probably go to ABC’s Pan Am, a show that I thought understood its purpose and communicated it more effectively (if not necessarily more subtly) than any other series. Considering that I haven’t written about a single fall pilot, it might seem unfortunate that I’m choosing Terra Nova. ![]()
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