Pilot Review: Zero Hour

Zero Hour (ABC)
Premiered February 14 at 10pm

If I were coming up with a television concept, I’m sure that I’d love to make it as convoluted and crazy as possible, but there’s an important reality to the way that things work these days that necessitates an alternate plan to make sure that a story can be sufficiently wrapped up should it be cancelled prematurely. The best examples of this are “Flash Forward,” “The Event,” and “Last Resort,” all of which premiered to high concepts and high hopes and ended up fizzling out as they didn’t make it past one year. I don’t think the buzz on this show was ever strong, and its midseason premiere date puts in a class of automatically less likely to succeed. Most problematic, of course, is the show’s mythology, which involves plentiful doses of Christianity and apocalyptic predictions, not to mention the concept that people – our main character, at the very least – can be reincarnated with no useful memories to help them prevent easily avoidable deaths of other characters. Anthony Edwards would hardly have been my first thought for go-to action hero, but the role is so broadly written that his casting almost doesn’t matter. Not one but two “Californication” alums are on board as Hank’s sidekicks, Addison Timlin and Scott Michael Foster, whose roles here lack much depth or personality aside from their awful attempts at flirtation and banter. British actress Carmen Ejogo struggles to hide her accent and is absolutely terrible as tattooed social worker slash FBI agent Beck Riley, whose presence is always an irritation. It always amuses me that international actors in films that prove to be hits in the United States end up cast as villains in American TV shows, and I suppose Michael Nyqvist, from the original “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” is better than his part allows him to be on this show. This show is so immensely outrageous and silly that it’s not really worth dissecting it. If there was something about it that appealed, I would stick around, but there just isn’t.

How will it work as a series? Because I’ve been playing catch-up the past two weeks and reviewing episodes two at a time, I figured I would watch the second episode, especially since pilots are often two hours. I was equally unimpressed, mainly because episode two took on even more of an impossibly large global operation, and I think this show is just too eager to get out of hand, and there’s no way they’ll be able to wrap it up in time for its impending cancellation.
How long will it last? I’ll be surprised if it’s still on the air by the time this review posts. Netting the lowest numbers ever for a series debut on ABC is bad enough, and it only took NBC two weeks to get rid of “Do No Harm,” which started with similar results. Dropping in episode two almost seals its fate, but I think ABC is worried that it will never get the Thursdays at 8pm time slot right after the demise of “Last Resort,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “My Generation,” and others, so maybe they think people will turn it on by accident and make it a sleeper hit?

Pilot grade: F