Forgotten Television: The Event

Sean Walker (Jason Ritter) has plans on proposing to his long-time girlfriend, Leila (Sarah Roemer) on a cruise, but Leila mysteriously disappears. At the same time she is kidnapped, her mother is killed and her sister, Samantha, is also taken. Her father, Michael (Scott Patterson), an airline pilot, is then used in an assassination attempt on newly elected President Martinez (Blair Underwood) by crashing a plane into the Presidential retreat in Florida. This is to stop him from announcing to the world that a group of aliens from another world have been on Earth in a detainment center in Alaska for several decades. The aliens look like humans, but age at a much slower rate.  Sean, in an attempt to stop the assassination, tries to hijack the plane, but he is too late and cannot get into the cockpit.  Just as the plane is about to hit, a portal opens and swallows the vessel and transports it away from the President. The leader of the alien race, Sophia (Laura Innes) then tells the president that she has not told him everything.  All of this and a bit more all happened with in the pilot.

The Event premiered on September 20^th, 2010 and ran until May 23, 2011 for a full season containing 22 episodes.  As the season progressed, we learn of different factions of the alien race fighting for different things.  More characters are introduced, people we thought were human turn out to be aliens and several characters are killed off.  The first part of the season, including the pilot were shot mainly in flashbacks, showing the same events but from three different characters points of view.  The constant time jumping was later abandoned, as the audience was finding it confusing.  The show is often compared to 24 and Lost as it uses similar elements and both of those shows ended earlier that year.  The reviews of the pilot were mostly favorable, but some were cautious on the sustainability of a show that introduced so many mysteries in just the first episode.  But the produces promised that the show would have timely answers to all the mysteries as to not frustrate the viewers and to make it known that they weren’t “making it up” as they went along. What actually was “The Event”? I’m not really sure. It could’ve been the plane sent to kill the President which disappeared into the vortex. That just seems a little off. Maybe the real Event was still to be seen. Perhaps we’ll never know.

I remember this show coming out in 2010, but for whatever reason, I was unable to watch it at that time.  In watching it now, I see that it was a well-made show with a good script, naturally flowing dialogue moved at a good pace and had a stellar cast, who all played their roles quite well.  I was also struck with a complete feeling of confusion as the time jumps between the present and the past made it very hard to concentrate on a single storyline.  I believe this was done on purpose, to keep the audience engaged and guessing as to what was happening, I feel it might have been overdone a bit.  I am very good and following the plot, but even I had a hard time following this one.  By the end of the pilot, you do have a better sense of how all the individual pieces you were shown fit together and it does hook you into wanting to watch more.  Which, I suppose, is the purpose of a pilot.  Although, the first seasons does wrap up much of the storylines the ending does leave it open for what would happen in season two.  But unfortunately, after a favorable start to the season, the ratings kept plummeting and the show was not picked up again.