Sheriff Jude Ellis fled to Port Canaan, Oregon when his life collapsed in the big city. But when hundreds of dead bodies wash ashore, Jude is forced onto the front lines of a conflict no one could hope to see coming.

The simple fact a TV show exists that puts character actors Steve Zahn, Sandrine Holt, Rick Gomez and Jay Karnes in the same room as one another is worthy of praise. Together, those four have carried shows, and movies, on their backs towards acclaim that would never have happened without them.

With that baseline level of charisma, The Crossing is off to a good start. The fact it opens with hundreds of people spontaneously appearing under water, and an otherworldly sequence where Reece (the always excellent Natalie Martinez) rescues her daughter only improves matters. This is a show that starts strong, starts fast and seems designed to not do those things that every complicated conspiracy show does.

Case in point: we find out these people are from the future, and it isn’t a happy one, about twenty minutes in.

That brevity and speed is something to be applauded and it gives the show the urgency it needs. It also doesn’t swamp the characters, with Zahn’s methodical Jude and Gomez’s chatty Rosario both registering early and strongly. There’s some good interplay between Jude and Holt’s FBI Agent too and the show does some clever stuff with early expectations of that relationship.

It does fall down a little though and it does that in the last place it should: the refugees themselves. Marcus W. Harris is great as de facto leader Caleb but no one else here really gets a chance to register. Even Martinez is required to be dutiful, driven, relentless and… not much else. Worse, there’s a massively obvious piece of wire work that, while the scene still lands, damages the scene it’s in.

These are quibbles though and they’re quibbles that can be absolutely fixed on the fly. The show feels compact and like it’s got a definitive shelf life and end point in mind – and if that’s the case then the problems it has will fall away soon enough.

Verdict: Clever, often fun and surprising The Crossing is off to a good start and set for a better follow up. Also we’re calling it now: Nestor is not from the present. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart