Hi, I’m Mike TV

Television for the week of August 15th.

Alphas

Episodes 1-6

The story so far… SyFy’s Alphas premiered on July 11^th, and has aired six episodes since. I watched all of those in one sitting while across country visiting family, in a basement with my little brother while we ignored what everyone else was doing upstairs at the reunion. There’s no way I’m playing horseshoes with Grandma when there’s a new show about people with powers to catch up on. Lift something with your mind, and then we’ll talk Grandma- NOT BEFORE.

 

Alphas follows a group of super-powered people who work for/with the government to collect dangerous powered people before the public finds out about their existence, and then studies their powers once in captivity. The group is led by the non-Alpha Dr. Rosen, a scientist type who doesn’t always agree with the government’s less than humanitarian methods of dealing with the Alphas. Doesn’t exactly sound original does it?

 

Ever since Heroes crashed and burned after its promising first season, and then struggled like a dying gazelle on its way to a dried out waterhole, different networks have attempted to make the super-powered humans entering the normal world where they’ve never been before formula click. And it should click! In theory, comic book type stories should work far better in the serialized form of television then in movies. The vast amount of characters, intricate plotlines, alternate timelines all take awhile to build.  There’s a reason that the comic book movies that work are the ones that streamline the stories and center on a few important characters- any time they try to actually bring the comic experience on screen you get a Spider-Man 3. So again and again they try to make it work on TV. And again and again it fails.

 

Heroes is the only one of this kind of series that’s been allowed to get past a single season. The minute ratings slip on these super-shows they get the axe, usually getting less than glamorous demises on the internet, not even being allowed to finish on air. This is due to the shitty way normal networks deal with their shows in general, and the high production costs of the super powered shows. So why would SYFY give this failed formula another shot?

 

Well for one, look at the rest of SYFY’s original shows. They’re all quirky, geeky, filled with banter and character driven drama. The fact that other networks even tried to hop on that train is a bit ludicrous, this is the channel that all of those shows should have been on to begin with. People want their comedies and law dramas on certain channels and nerdy comic book shit in it’s own corner. And that’s fine, in it’s dark corner of cable television these shows thrive and find their core audiences that obviously exist, and they exist with a raving rabid vengeance.

 

The second reason Alphas actually has a chance to work is its concept. It was originally developed in 2006, I’m guessing somewhere during Heroes first season, and its characters’ powers are a little more grounded in reality, however silly that sentence seems. There’s Harkin, the FBI agent who can increase his adrenaline at will, making him stronger and faster; Nina, the sultry seductress who can ‘push’ people with her voice to manipulate them to her will; Rachel, the neurotic girl next door type who can enhance all of her senses; Gary the highly function autistic who can see wireless signals, and newcomer Hicks who can calculate spatial distances perfectly, making him perfectly precise. None of these powers sound all that….powerful. They’re almost all just normal human abilities kicked up a few notches. That grounding is what is going to help audiences stay on board. They’re not going to have to try to unravel alternate timelines or time travel paradoxes, just good character driven drama and rival organizations attempting to thwart each other’s plans regarding the Alphas.

 

I’ve tried to paint the show in broad strokes, because just in six episodes there are twists and turns, cliffhangers and surprises. If Alphas learns from it’s predecessors failures, and keeps itself fairly streamlined for the first few seasons, and slowly build character arcs, and maintains those characters’ connections with each other, it will succeed. Because regardless of the presence of super powers, a show need characters we connect to, and stories that don’t cause the average viewer to fight off migraines. I’m going to keep watching, and if you generally like this kind of show, or other things SYFY offers, check it out.-MG

Alphas airs every Monday at 10:00 PM on SYFY.