Will You Watch Believe? This Little Girl Knows! GET HER!

What Is This Thing?

Bo, a sweet-faced little blonde girl with mysterious predictive powers, is fought over by two shadowy yet extremely well-funded forces -- one apparently good, one evil -- but as we meet her, she's just been entrusted to the care of Tate, a resourceful ex-con who's just been busted out of prison in the eleventh hour before his execution.

When Is It On?

Mondays at 10 PM on NBC.

Why Was It Made Now?

Since Revolution is still a relatively solid performer, NBC has decided to do more things like that, I suppose (and if we're all supposed to care about Heroes again in 2015, we might as well be reacquainted with the idea of characters living in the real world while evincing superpowers).

What's Its Pedigree?

One of its creators, Mark Friedman, previously brought us The Forgotten, the recent Christian Slater vehicle. And its other creator is Alfonso Cuarón, who just won the Best Director Oscar for Gravity. Other than the two of them, the only names you may recognize are Delroy Lindo (who plays Winter, the head of the "good" contingent trying to keep tabs on Bo) and Real World alumna Jamie Chung (who works with him), and Kyle MacLachlan (as Skouras, Winter's antagonist). Oh yeah, and it's from Bad Robot -- which is also responsible for the aforementioned Revolution -- so J.J. Abrams got his mitts on it at some point.

...And?

The episode opens with Bo and her new foster parents getting killed in a car crash, after which Leeds, Skouras's agent, descends on the scene to finish off the adults and try to abduct Bo. She isn't successful on the latter score, but she quickly dispatches both parents by breaking their necks, and this whole sequence is well done -- gripping, creepy. There's also a scene in which Bo gets an MRI and blows out the machine with her awesome brain power that's also pretty exciting, and effectively staged and acted.

...But?

Oof, the rest. Winter poses as a priest giving Last Rites in order to pull off Tate's prison break, none of which seems especially believable even after we get a sense of how deep Winter's pockets may be, to buy off the requisite prison officials. And as Tate, Jake McLaughlin is not terribly winning. I guess his whole "tough guy pressed into service against his will" thing is supposed to evoke Logan/Wolverine, but the more he fights his assignment, the more this viewer fought the premise of the show. I don't know if it's Tate or McLaughlin that lacks charisma, but the effect is the same. And Johnny Sequoyah, as Bo, starts out the episode refreshingly real -- not your typical gross, precocious kid actor -- but by the end of it, after she's convinced her ER doctor not to quit medicine because of the patient he's destined to save, she seems to have found her inner Olsen. Also: from what we see in the pilot, it seems like Skouras has a lot of money -- enough to have a NASA-like command center to keep track of Leeds, in addition to all the other trappings, like a private jet. So why doesn't he hire Leeds a partner so she doesn't keep biffing every opportunity she has to capture Bo?

...So?

I've seen TV before, so I'm pretty sure that what's presented as the "good" and "bad" sides will either trade places or end up both being controlled by the same even-more-all-powerful figure. And my esteemed colleague Dave has seen TV before, which is how he knew the reason Tate was picked to bodyguard Bo wasn't his past criminal record but that he's actually Bo's father. And given how much I (and all of us) have been burned by NBC's sci-fi shows in the past, the rest of it was not sufficiently surprising or compelling to make me want to watch past the pilot. Sorry, Alfonso Cuarón! I still love Children Of Men!