By John J. Joex
I was just starting to think that this season might foretell a turnaround for genre television on the broadcast networks. ABC’s Once Upon A Time seems to have worked out its consistency issues and is doing well in the ratings, FOX’s Alcatraz and Touch both show promise and had some early ratings success, and I have also been enjoying CBS’s Person of Interest (yeah, it’s barely a genre entry, but it’s getting pretty good). And then the early previews for ABC’s The River made that one look pretty creepy and intriguing as well. But now Alcatraz is tanking in the ratings and the arrival of The River has delivered a show not quite ready for Prime Time show. Not that these two speed bumps make the season a complete loss, but the resurgence of the genre on the broadcast networks I thought I was seeing may not quite be here yet.
The River comes to us from Paranormal Activity’s Oren Peli and even has Steven Spielberg onboard as executive producer (not that his presence helped FOX’s Terra Nova any). In the series, we are introduced to TV personality/world explorer Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) who starred (with his family) for many years on one of those documentary series discovering nature (“There’s magic out there!” was his buzz-line). But he goes missing in the Amazon and is legally declared dead after a search and rescue mission can find no trace of him. But then his emergency beacon is detected, and his estranged wife and son mount an expedition to find him. The network that carried Cole’s show finances this endeavor and sends a camera crew and production team along to document the events. They quickly find, though, that Cole had apparently gone over to the deep end into Amazonian mysticism and that he ventured into a murky, uncharted part of the river known as The Boiuna. The expedition then decides to follow his trail into this part of the river despite dire warnings to the contrary.
When I first heard the high-level synopsis of The River after ABC picked it up last year, my initial thoughts were “Lost on the Amazon”. After having seen the first three episodes, I will revise that to “Lost on the Amazon meets The Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity”. There may have been a good idea at the heart of this premise, but the execution just hasn’t brought that to fruition. Starting with the found-footage format, this series just has too many leaps of logic and too little consistency. The entire series is supposed to be shot only by the cameras that the crew brought as well as those on the boat, but immediately you realize that there are entirely too many cameras around getting perfectly imperfect dramatic close-ups. And that’s only the beginning of this show’s problems. Too many elements are cobbled together into a rather stale mixture of genre tropes that fails to find any inspiration or new angles for the material. And that’s a shame because when The River really wants to it can be quite intense and creepy and even outright scary. Plus, the show has put together a pretty good cast including Greenwood (who we have only seen in flashbacks so far) and 24‘s Leslie Hope. But they can only do so much with the material given them and there is too little of the truly inspired horror moments between the genre retreads and the superfluous soap opera side stories.
The biggest problem with The River is that there is just not enough material here for a TV series. They could get a good movie or maybe a mini-series out the concept, but not an ongoing series. People complained that Lost started to feel padded by its third season, well The River already felt that way by its second episode. The story of Emmet Cole’s disappearance and descent into the Amazon’s world of black magic (caught on tapes they find onboard his ship) is actually interesting. But dragging that out through a format of freaky-encounter-of-the-week in the Amazon episodes just completely bogs this down. I expected more from Peli who has miraculously delivered three very good movies from the Paranormal Activity story so far (with a fourth on the way), but perhaps he just lost his way when faced with the rigors of weekly television.
ABC only picked up the series for an eight episode try-out run, and based on the show’s ratings it looks like it will not go any further than that. The first episode pulled a tepid 2.3 rating in the all-important 18-49 demographic and the second sank to a 1.9 rating. Of course, if they had planned this for only an eight episode run from the beginning, that might have helped. Less padding and more focus on the core story. But I’m guessing this will end on a cliffhanger that will go unresolved. And probably not too many people will care either.
Watch The River Online for Free at Hulu.com
