Terra Nova: Series Premiere

If one happened to watch one of the 10,000 promos that FOX has been airing to garner interest for their new big budget show, Terra Nova, they might quickly dismiss the program as a strange hybrid between Lost and Jurassic Park. And they would be pretty accurate. Sort of.

The two-hour premiere of is one of the most ambitious pilot episodes in recent memory, as it attempts to briskly draw the audience into its complicated, but not uninteresting world. We begin in the year 2149, where Earth appears to be on its dying breath, as the air quality has gotten progressively poorer and the population has grown out of control. We meet The Shannon Family, led by Jim (Jason O’Mara) and Elizabeth (Shelley Conn), who are asked to go back in time 85 million years to Terra Nova, where they will attempt to join the cause in trying to save the planet before it meets its inevitable demise.

Right from the get go, Terra Nova succeeds in intriguing its audience by not over explaining in the first 10 minutes. The writers do a good job of trusting the audience to be able to pick up the story as it goes along, instead of just adhering to the lowest common denominator of television viewers. Though it might seem a bit convoluted in the first few scenes, the show is successful in demonstrating the overall tone that we can expect for the rest of the episode. Overall, the first half of the premiere does an admirable job setting up a story with major potential.

The brilliance of the structure in the first half of the episode makes it all the more disappointing when the second half falters and dips slightly into the unfortunate area of cliché’.  Though the visual aspect of Terra Nova is quite stunning, complete with dinosaurs aplenty, most of my focus was on the lack of authentic character interactions and how the relationship between Jim Shannon and his son Josh (Landon Liboiron) could’ve gone so many different ways than the chosen path.

Josh, who is assuming the standard TV role of the angry teenager, shows hostility for his father throughout the premiere, with much of his anger coming from his reluctance to leave his old life. Perhaps Josh’s point of view could be taken more seriously if he was made to leave home because his dad got a new job in a different city, and not because THE EARTH IS ENDING AND IT NEEDS TO BE FIXED.

The lack of authenticity in the character of Josh wouldn’t be so troubling if he wasn’t featured so prominently throughout the premiere. In fact, the show would be altogether improved if it didn’t try to do so much so quickly, and instead took its time in developing genuine relationships between its characters.

As the premiere moves on it becomes clearer and clearer that the words “kind of like Lost” were used a lot in the writer’s room. But that isn’t necessarily such a bad thing.

The premiere of Terra Nova suggests that it will eventually delve further into the backgrounds of some promising characters (notably Commander Taylor, played by Stephen Lang). And with any luck, the show will be able to live up to its enormous potential and deliver a variety of in-depth characters that will make the show more than just an outstanding aesthetic achievement.