The small coastal town of Bristol Cove, famous for its legends of mermaids, is about to get a dose of the reality behind its myths.

Mermaids. It’s not often that we see them in film or TV, and when we do they vary from Disney princesses to comedy ‘fish out of water’ (pun absolutely intended) characters to vicious predators of the sea, intent on the cold-blooded murder of unwary fishermen. Siren – judging from the pilot for Freeform’s new series – is set to take elements of all of these, with the emphasis firmly remaining on the predator part of the equation.

Opening with a bunch of fishermen making possibly their unluckiest catch of all time, the show barrels forward, barely pausing for breath as we go through military helicopters, secret bases and cover-ups, an introduction to the people of Bristol Cove by way of its most important family, their wayward marine conservationist son and his girlfriend, and the titular Siren herself.

The FX work is, for the most part, well done. Clearly this is a show on a budget, and it therefore does the best it can to make visual effects that do the job, exposing them to camera for the shortest time possible without falling foul of the ‘teasing’ element being overdone a la the disastrous Emmerich Godzilla movie.

The actors too do the best with what they have, the standout being Eline Powell as Ryn, who really nails the appearance of someone being on land who really isn’t used to it. Everyone else turns in their best performance as well, but the issue is that the writing really doesn’t match the other elements of the show. By the end of the first hour, I’m appropriately intrigued to know more about the Sirens themselves, but that’s mainly down to Powell’s performance. What I’m less clear on and even less interested in are: why the military are covering up the existence of Mermaids, what they intend to do with them, why Mermaids are suddenly being caught, any of the family drama involving the male lead and what exactly happened to one character’s apparently absent wife.

It throws a lot at the wall in its opening hour, and a lot of it feels unnecessary and fails to really stick as a consequence. It’s also difficult to see how the premise – that mermaids are real – can be stretched over a number of episodes. By the end of the first one, we know that they exist, what they can do, how dangerous they are – I’m struggling to see, in a creature feature, where else there might be to go with the idea over the course of nine more episodes.

Verdict: Great casting, some top-quality acting and intelligent use of the FX budget are let down by sub-par writing that blows a lot of what you’d expect to be its surprises in its first hour. I’m willing to see if it has more in store for me than I bargained for, but for now this feels like a sub-par SyFy channel flick. 5/10

Greg D. Smith