Forgotten Television: The Omen

Epidemiologist Dr. Linus (William Sadler) travels to a missile silo in Colorado searching for a missing associate.  When he opens the silo, he accidentally releases an evil entity who possesses people with the goal of doing evil things.  A.P. photojournalist Jack Mann (Brett Cullen) was secretly at the silo as well searching for the thing that killed his wife and daughter.  The entity jumping from human to human finally makes its way to its intended target, a head nurse Annalisse (Chelsea Field) who works at a Boston hospital where the government is experimenting with a deadly virus. The evil wants to steal the virus and release it during Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  Can Dr. Linus and Jack save Annalisse and stop the virus from being released? Watch and find out!

The premise of the show was intriguing and not badly executed.  The acting wasn’t terrible, and the three leads did a good job of appropriately reacting to the unbelievable situation they found themselves in.  The music was good and built suspense when needed and the storyline flowed at a good pace and at decent rhythm.  I was a bit confused as to who was actually at the Silo in the beginning, we never see Jack there, but he has pictures of Dr. Linus there and his boss mentions that he just got back from “the silo in Colorado”. This is an example of how clumsy the expositional information was handled.  In general, the dialogue surrounding information the audience needed in order understand what was happening and character backstory felt awkward and forced. It didn’t naturally unfold, I call this “Pilot Syndrome”, where they need to get as much information to the audience as possible as fast as possible.  When done well, you don’t even know that is what they are doing, but that is not the case here.

The last issue, and possibly the biggest, had very little to do with the storytelling or the acting or any of the other production aspects of the pilot, but in its very name.  They chose to call it The Omen, banking on the name of a successful movie franchise but the two stories seem to be completely unrelated.  There is nothing tying the two productions together. NBC aired the hour-long episode as a TV movie on September 8^th, 1995, but opted not to pick it up as a series. Calling it something more creative and allowing it to have its own identity and if they tightened up the dialogue a bit, this could have been an interesting and well done series.