Miniseries: The Storm (Part 1)

If you thought “Impact” and “Meteor” were bad, you won’t believe how awful the latest summer weather miniseries is. “The Storm” abandons impending objects of destruction for the real villain that lies in mother nature – the weather. That’s not the only malicious force at work here, however. The government is also heavily corrupt – they’re attempting to control the weather, which, while it may have good intentions, is a really, really bad thing. And once they realize that, they’re more than happy to go around taking out any and all people who might be able to expose them as the ones responsible for this devastating storm, which really takes a backseat to the conspiracy plot. The storm has hardly even taken anyone out yet, as opposed to, say, “Meteor,” where major characters were felled and deterred by the weather. Here, it’s just a very evil-sounding Treat Williams commanding his underlings to discredit a defecting doctor and murder all those who could possibly back up his whistle-blowing claims. James Van Der Beek stars as the highly ethical but otherwise useless doctor, and his most impressive quality is his jarring physical resemblance to Luke Perry (anyone else agree?), who, confusingly enough, pops up later as a like-minded but nonetheless intimidating individual who wants to help Van Der Beek save the world and expose the government (not sure about the last one, but this story was confusing as hell).The rest of the cast includes a smattering of familiar faces, all of whom serve no real purpose. John Laroquette, who’s mostly effectively comically but can also do drama, is particularly wasted as a newspaper editor with no intrinsic value as a character. David James Elliott, not content with the weather-movie damage he wreaked in “Impact,” stops by as someone high up and in league with Treat Williams’ character, and he ends up being just one in an array of evil faces hidden in shadows. Marisol Nichols, recognizable to me as Nadia from season six of “24,” is a cop sharply and extensively investigating the doctor’s trail and the murders along it, and she almost seems like the star of the miniseries. I thought it was supposed to be about weather – I guess I was wrong? The music, however, seemed very familiar to me, and sounded just a bit like the score from “Meteor.” I headed over to IMDB, and sure enough, composer Jonathan Snipes wrote the music for both. That would seem to imply that the two were conceived together as weather/natural-disaster miniseries. So why does the storm feel so irrelevant here? I imagine it will play a bigger role in the second half next Sunday, but I will under no circumstances be tuning in to find out.