By Don Jacobson
UPDATE JUNE 2: The Save Invasion fan campaign continues unabated. Links abound. Here are five.
* The official Save Invasion site.
* Sign the petition.
* Vote for the official Save Invasion campaign logo.
* Fund a plane with a banner to fly over ABC HQ.
* The Last (?) Wave Goodbye.
And now, on to our story, originally posted on May 22.
Of course, this happens every year, because it’s network TV. Yet it still brings a fresh sense of outrage each May, as deserving shows that managed to struggle through the season with mediocre-to-poor ratings, perhaps hanging on only because some network suit personally likes them, bites the dust. This spring I’m directing my frustration primarily at ABC, the Mickey Mouse network, for giving the ax not only to the best comedy on all of TV, but to the best drama as well, in one awful bloodletting.
The comedy was Sons and Daughters, the subtle, hilarious, laugh track-free offering from Lorne Michaels and Fred Goss, which I gushed about in March. I fully expected Sons and Daughters to be canceled, however, right from the get-go. First, as a mid-season replacement, it was born on the ropes. Second, it relied on dry humor and intelligence. This is network TV, remember? Such hubris will always be punished with crushing indifference.
But what really, really hurt was the cancellation by ABC of Invasion. This stung on two levels because it was a top quality show – a terrifying and vivid document of modern paranoia – and also because it had a chance to make it. Following Lost, one of the most popular shows around, Invasion had a huge lead-in audience but couldn’t hold them. My theory is this is because the show was essentially a 20-part, slowly unfolding story, and didn’t tip too much of its hand at the start of its run. Short attention-span viewers got turned off because there wasn’t an immediate denouement.
What they missed was only a masterpiece from producer Shaun Cassidy (yep, the “Da Do Run Run”-covering, Hardy Boy-playing, 1970s teen heartthrob), who, between this show and an earlier work from the 1990s, American Gothic, has proven himself to be the equal of The X-Files‘s Chris Carter as the best creepshow maker on Earth. But the genius of Invasion was the fact that the fear didn’t just come from malevolent extra-terrestrials raining down in South Florida under the cover of hurricanes – it also came from the much more familiar fear of all-too-human families breaking apart under the strain of modern American life.
How Cassidy married these two fears into a show that continually pulsated with low-key menace, broken only occasionally by bits of the ol’ ultraviolence (thereby making them that much more effective), was nothing short of enthralling.
It would be useless now to go into all of the details of who was who, which characters were played by which actors (although special mention goes to William Fichtner as the conflicted, possibly alien-possessed sheriff, and Tyler Labine as a the slacker brother-in-law who’s the first to discover the invasion), but I will say that in the show, the water-based invaders “replace” the townsfolk one-by-one, somewhat akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
One of the show’s many thought-provoking themes was how members of already tattered mixed- and step-families reacted when dads, moms and siblings suddenly seemed different after the devastating hurricane, and began spouting dogma about how they’re answering a higher calling – presumably to take over the world and kill everyone else. The hard-to-miss subtext was a comment on the rise of fundamentalist Christianity and how it can be seen as a worrisome reaction to the stress of modern life and the breakdown of the traditional family unit.
That was just one of many, many themes and allusions Cassidy used in Invasion that tapped a rogue’s gallery of fears and longings we experience in our everyday lives and twisted them oh-so-cleverly into a storyline that was Sci-Fi Lite – blessedly short on special effects and long on the kind of sludgy suspense that can only be so beautifully maintained over an extended period (kind of like Crock Pot cooking).
So raise a glass to this year’s best shows that never got watched. Next May I’m sure I’ll be right back here bemoaning another blockhead move by TV execs, a grand tradition that can be traced at least back to May 1968, when Spock, Jim and Bones were put into network drydock.
Posted on June 2, 2006