The night a mysterious air crash happens on the beach of Peconic Bay will be the night that newly divorced single mother and police chief Jo Evans’ life and family get turned upside down.

There’s something about this new ABC genre show that feels wrong, and it took me a while to work out exactly what it was. It’s not the fact that the central premise feels so hackneyed (although it does). It’s not the fact either, that leads Allison Tolman and co-star Donald Faison are best known for their roles in comedy shows. But it feels… lightweight, and a quick examination of the moving parts (including the aforementioned factors) starts to unlock why.

Let’s take that premise – small town America, mysterious crash, shadowy goings on around the response, strange young girl found near the crash site without a mark on her but apparently no knowledge of her own name or who she is; this is all the sort of stuff we’ve seen a million times before. More importantly, it’s the sort of thing we would generally see in an episode (or maybe at a push two) of another show, like The X-Files. But this is aiming at stretching itself over an entire show all by itself.

Then there’s the leads. Both Tolman and Faison are decent actors, and a good standing in comedy is by no means an indicator otherwise. But they are also playing incredibly thinly sketched-in characters. Jo is a slightly exasperated but instinctively competent mother archetype, all soft edges hiding a tough interior and instantly commanding the respect of fellow officers even when asking them to do utterly inexplicable things. Maybe she earned that, but the show isn’t really interested in giving us any idea how, it just asks us to accept it. With Faison it’s worse – playing Jo’s ex-husband, his job is mainly to apparently be called at any time to help and to just accept last minute changes of schedule for no reason. The really crazy thing is, these two actually have screen chemistry, and between that and how much they seem involved in one another’s lives, one starts to question exactly why it was they divorced.

But it’s in the writing where the problems really start to show. Seeming to realise just how much their audience will have seen all this before, the writers rush through a series of increasingly implausible events, leaving it with a sort of breathless feeling of wanting to get through everything which feels odd for a pilot episode. In this one opening instalment we have the crash, the little girl, multiple mysterious third parties with their separate agendas, at least three separate ‘incidents’ and a whole bunch of stuff centred on telling us that – guess what – there’s something weird about the little girl. Well, colour me surprised there.

It’s not terrible – as I say there’s chemistry between characters, and I’ll never be sad to see Clancy Brown on our screens (playing Jo’s former fireman father) but it all feels so very lightweight and throwaway, and the way in which it skips from one scene to the next feeling like it’s missing important narrative beats just adds to that impression. There’s also – fair warning – a fairly disturbing scene towards the very end involving the little girl that I can already see parents’ groups (especially in its native US) getting very upset about. We shall see where it goes, I guess.

Verdict: Oddly flimsy feeling, and all too obviously aware of its own familiarity to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the genre. I think this will struggle to hold audience interest. 5/10

Greg D. Smith