Revolution

As many of you probably know, there is a new television series on that deals with the ramifications and aftereffects of a fictional scenario in which the electricity goes out in the United States.  It's called Revolution and it's on Mondays at 10 on NBC.  You can get the pilot episode free off iTunes or off NBC's website.

Eh, I wasn't expecting to get my socks blown off, and they weren't.  It was okay, but then again, post-apocalyptic is one of my favorite subgenres, so the show would have to be monumentally awful for me to stop watching.  It has all the inconsistencies, plotholes and cliches you'd expect from a major production, so I won't bother to list most of them.  Although, everyone does seem well fed; there are even still fat people.  And there still seems to be plenty of Revlon and Cover Girl to go around.  On the other hand, the production values were pretty top-notch, and I thought they did a good job with the decaying buildings and structures (like Wrigley Field).  Kinda reminded me of that History Channel special from a few years back, "Life After People".

The one thing I really didn't care for, overall, is the jumping ahead 15 years into the future, after the power goes out.  The show could have been more of an exhilarating mind-fuck if it dealt with the aftereffects of the power going out, like in the excellent novel One Second After.  I'm sure there'll be flashbacks, but I imagine the tone of them will be pretty mild, it is network TV after all.  From what I've read, a lot of people think that it will be cancelled, but I really don't think so.  NBC is totally seizing the momentum of stuff like The Hunger Games, and it showed while I was watching the pilot.  The teenagers seem like they're going to be a key part of the show, and while that's a bad thing from my perspective, it will probably draw in a lot of those viewers.

Maybe it'll become another Jericho, that was another doomer-type show from a few years ago.  I remember that I had stopped watching that one four episodes in, it just didn't do anything for me, and then there was that huge effort from its fans to save the show, so I gave it another try, and I found that the show really picked up in quality after those first four or five episodes.