Invasion
ABC Wednesdays, 10/9c

Premiere Date: September 21, 2005

Invasion has the hype machine of a hit. It borrows the ensemble cast formula that made Lost so successful and intriguing, it is among the new trend of supernatural television shows, and it benefits by following it on the Wednesday lineup. It is also produced by Shawn Cassidy Productions, which also gave us the clever American Gothic (along with Executive Producer Sam Raimi, before he hit mainstream success and popularity), as well as CBS’ Cold Case.

With a relatively light time slot, this should be a no-brainer hit, right? Insert ingredients, mix well, and bake. Unfortunately, Invasion isn’t the sort of loaf you’d expect to be edible.

As a matter of fact, flush this loaf right down the toilet.

So let’s get to the facts. The ensemble cast is comprised of relatively unknown actors from failed television shows of the recent past. Among the B- and C- list tube talents is the lone recognizable actor, journeyman character actor William Fichtner. He plays Tom Underlay, a Florida sheriff who doesn’t seem quite right, and plays it as expected. Which is part of the problem – this guy plays a snake in every role he’s had. So when you first see him, you think, “oh, that guy. I bet he can’t be trusted.” And sure enough, he can’t.

So the story goes, during a hurricane (and I can’t believe ABC is going to be able to premiere this show right in the middle of storm season, especially with what has just happened), some alien lights are stirred up, take down a plane, and are sighted by the young daughter of park ranger Russell Varon (Eddie Cibrian), another of the show’s rotating lead characters. And there’s this whole story about how the girl, who wonders off looking for a cat in the middle of the hurricane, is from divorced parents, and her teenaged brother who seems grown-up well beyond his years blames his mother for the split. And it looks like Ranger Russell doesn’t waste any time, because he’s remarried to hottie-on-the-spot tv reporter Larkin Groves (Lisa Sheridan) with whom he has another baby on the way. Oh, and did I mention the kid’s real mother is dating Sheriff Underlay? There’s a story behind all this that is only set up with the pilot episode, but you probably don’t care to find out.

There’s a brief bit of promise when Groves’ live-in conspiracy-theorist brother investigates the little girl’s story and pulls something out of the marsh, and the sequence where he examines the “body” looks like it was directly inspired by Wilford Brimley’s steaming autopsy of the thing found in the Swede’s (no, Norwegian’s) camp in John Carpenter’s classic, The Thing. But at the end of the episode, you can’t help but think that the premise is just a V redux with a splash of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Unfortunately, V was only cool twenty years ago, and paying homage to Body Snatchers with a Young and the Restless subplot like this is just insulting.

The episode ends with a cliffhanger as an obvious attempt to rope in its audience, but the only things sticking to this are the flies it attracts. Make Invasion one to avoid this fall.