Thoughts on The Event Premiere

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Posted September 21st, 2010 at 11:22 am

NBC pushed The Event as “event” television, with a heavy marketing campaign and built intrigue around the premise of the show. That can sometimes backfire, as audiences may give it a shot but they are a fickle bunch. If the premiere didn’t deliver immediately they could abandon the show. So is The Event more Lost (which solidified a fan base) or FlashForward (which audiences abandoned)?

I came away satisfied with the pilot, it didn’t blow me away but I got more of a Lost feel from it which is encouraging. That show succeeded because fans cared about the characters with the mystery driving things in the background. The Event did a good job of introducing characters and making them likable or sufficiently mysterious. It also definitely had the hook with the ending to the episode with no idea what happened to the plane or who “they” (referenced a few times) are.

The narrative might have been difficult for some to grasp as it jumped around between the “present” and flashbacks. It did so moving to different points of time and focusing on different characters. Basically it was a more scatterbrained Lost.

I’m generally not a huge fan of stories that start at the present and jump back then working the rest of the time to show how things got to that point, though when that is done well it can be an enriching form of storytelling. I thought it worked in this episode however due to progression in the “present” as well as learning things in the flashbacks with still huge gaps left to be filled.

If you watched the premiere of The Event let me know what you thought of it!