WINTER TV EXTRAVAGANZA

TOUCH

** 1/2 (out of ****)

Part Heroes. Part Unbreakable. Minus any sort of actual powers. Add Jack Bauer ,if he was a huge pussy. Add a creepy, wheezy version of Danny Glover. Add the hot chick from Undercovers, a show no one watched. Put it all together in a giant mixing bowl of television and out comes Touch. That might not sound appealing, but that’s probably more my fault than the show’s. There were a lot of opportunities for Touch to derail itself and get way too melodramatic and cheesy; but it only stumbled on that path a couple of times. Keifer Sutherland plays a widower whose wife died in 9/11 and now he has to raise their mute, autistic son all by himself. That situation is already drama ridden, as Sutherland switches from dead end job to dead end job trying to keep his kid fed and maintain his wife’s insanely awesome loft. That could be a pretty compelling show on it’s own, but the kid sees everything in patterns and number, and sees how everyone in the world is connected, and decides to start manipulating his dad into doing stuff to save lives. Sure, it’s making his broken failure of a dad a sort of hero, but it’s still manipulation- I do n’t care what anyone says. And the kid is super passive aggressive, since he talks to the audience any damn time he wants but never to anyone around him. Watching all of interconnections is the interesting part, along with the real life drama the show lives in. The pitfalls are Danny Glover’s reclusive expert in weird kids’ professor character that is one of the most broadly drawn characters on television. If the show reigns him in, and keeps Sutherland on a tight leash, it could go from average to good, to one day great. But I bet it only gets more over the top from here on out.-MG