If you like skating in the Met (and presumably streaking in the MOMA), ABC's Traveler is a show you can relate to. In fact, considering the character Tyler (Logan Marshall-Green) is as dumb as a doornail and always expecting his wealthy father to pull him out of the mess, we'd suggest that if you currently occupy the Oval Office, you could especially relate to the show. How about the rest of us?
Let's start with the basics, Cary Grant did not play a prank that went horribly wrong in North by Northwest. We feel that's important to emphasize and suggest that, if you're the editor of the entertainment section or an entertainment magazine, you check out the review you were ultimately responsible for running. The press material tells you that Traveler is like North by Northwest and the Water Cooler Critics are so stupid (as someone with the show passed on to us) that they have all run with this talking point. It's not just your DC press that gets spoon fed talking points. The friend shocked us by naming one name we've defended before and, indeed, the critic does try to dress their review up by tossing in a book and other things, but there is the standard issue talking point: It's like North by Northwest.
It's nothing like North by Northwest.
The back story of ABC's new Wednesday night show (which is scheduled to conclude July 11th) is that three grad students want a road trip. Tyler's the rich kid whose father's paid the way until recently. Jay's the 'complicated' one (played by Matthew Bomer). Both have various degrees of attractiveness (though they aren't as hot -- especially with those haircuts -- as the press packets claim and the Water Cooler Set duly spits out in print). The third character, Will (played by Aaron Stanford) has all the sexual appeal of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Translation, you know he's going-going-gone the second you lay eyes on him. The road trip takes them to a museum in NYC and they're going to do a little prank. Jay and Tyler do the prank and then get a call from Will asking them if they're out of the museum. They are. The museum blows up.
Jay and Tyler are now the suspects. And, in the tradition of many a summer soap opera plot line, they are on the run. The FBI wants them because they're the easiest suspects (even if they don't fit a profile). FBI agent Jan (Viola Davis) has a few doubts but no one listens to her because she screwed up so bad on a previous case you have to wonder if she's the one who wrongly fingered Brandon Mayfield for terrorism. Or maybe her boss just doesn't trust her because she gets more air time than any other field agent?
Regardless, by episode two, after Jay's girlfriend Kim (played by Pascale Hutton) has sworn her boyfriend isn't a terrorist, Jan begins expressing her own doubts. We think you see our government at its most basic as her supervisor dismisses any discussion of guilt or innocent with the notion that the press believes the two are guilty so go for the big photo op.
Jay and Tyler head for one of the many homes of Tyler's father (played by William Sadler). It is there that they meet someone who, we're told, tidies up after Secretaries of State when they're caught in scandals. So that's how Henry Kissinger has stayed out of prison all these years.
Other than clearing that up, the scenes don't offer much except to prove how stupid Tyler is. The man hooks them up for a lie detector test and asks questions that do not seem at all helpful to clearing them but do seem to be an attempt to determine how much they know about the missing Will and the crime that took place. Moments after, the man will take the boys off in a car, shoot a cop and then attempt to kill them. (This has all aired, we're not doing spoilers.)
This is where Tyler repeatedly assures everyone in the audience of how smart they are because -- like a chesty, high heeled starlet in a horror movie -- he wants to go back to the house -- his father's house. He just can't seem to grasp the very obvious fact that Daddy was in the know.
Jay's brain smart but action stupid. That's because he can see what's coming in every plot point and he will hesitate and he will try to change Tyler's mind but, when he doesn't succeed, he will go right along with Tyler.
The show expects the audience to go right along as well. For instance, college students rarely only know three other college students but apparently class size was an issue and Jay, Tyler, Will and Kim were all in the same courses (despite their differing majors) and, since they apparently know not a single college professor they can turn to, apparently they did independent study.
Early on, when the FBI catches Jay and Tyler and they are being taken in, the van is attacked and a man saving them tells them to "Trust no one." He should have just told them, "Don't talk to strangers" because Will's death appears to have left Jay and Tyler with only one person each (Kim for Jay, Daddy for Tyler).
Though the plot is crap, the scripts aren't actually that bad and zip along quickly. The camera's all over the place, zooming here and zooming there, and the editing is highly fluid. So the only time viewers may nod off is when we're getting back story. That includes when Kim is being questioned by the FBI and when Jay and Tyler question the man Tyler's father hired. As the show moves along (no spoilers), we'll see more back story and it will became painfully clear that if someone's not running, zipping away in a car, shooting a gun or running from an explosion, no one knows how to stage a scene. It's as though the camera's been locked down while the operator takes a bathroom break but time constraints made them go ahead and shoot the scene.
Though not North by Northwest, Traveler is an awful lot like Kyle XY with less attractive male leads (which may explain why Kyle XY resulted in an order of ten episodes its first season and Traveler only gets eight). If your memory goes a little further back (the character Kyle's doesn't), you could even tie into an ABC show from long ago, The Mod Squad. Linc, Julie and Pete got busted for various petty offenses and ended up working as undercover police. That was all established in the pilot. With these 'serialized dramas,' they tend to take a pilot and try to stretch it out over a full season (or two, or three, or . . .).
Bad acting killed many since last fall (think of Kidnapped or Vanished) and indifference from critics and/or audiences killed others (such as Daybreak). But what really may kill them is that they keep upping the ante. This summer Bruce Willis will Die Hard Another Day. And in a 90 to 110 minute film, that works. You can pile on the action over and over and the audience will buy it. The film has a beginning and end, even in the sequels. With these serialized dramas, they have to keep piling it on. As they do, they risk two things, going way over the top and/or audiences growing immune to the same situations. Oh sure, one time it's a bomb and the next its bullets. But these shows aren't The Fugitive where each episode offered a storyline and new characters. They are shows committed to playing the same scene over and over and no wonder so many of the actors tend to look bored. It's not as though Bomer's sitting there thinking, "Okay, when the van we were in flipped and the FBI agents got shot, I widened my eyes this much so for this car crash, I should widen them about two-thirds more."
Now you can argue that Starsky & Hutch or Charlie's Angels did the same thing over and over and that wouldn't be far from the truth. But they weren't upping the ante right before each commercial break. Those were pedestrian shows that depended upon the actors' chemistry to attract viewers. These serialized dramas are light on character (Lost is the exception) and heavy on intense action. You can only be almost caught so many times, week after week.
Look at Prison Break whose entire second season was like the last 15 minutes of an action film. In a theater, there would be no third season, they'd have about five to ten minutes left to wrap everything up and send everyone on their way so the next audience could pile in. Instead, these play out like a nightmare version of the daytime soaps only instead of couples breaking up again, you get the same action scenes over and over.
Episode after episode, the characters are like Sisyphus or the densest Democrat who just won't believe that the party would ever stab the voters in the back over Iraq. Now the Democrats in Congress, much to their surprise, are having to deal with fall out there from grassroots that have been a little too patient and a little too faithful only to finally reach their boiling point. Possibly, TV audiences passed that point some time ago and that's why so many of the 'serialized dramas' failed in the last six months? It wasn't that the shows were 'too complicated' and required 'too much from viewers' as some in the Water Cooler Set have suggested. Please, we're talking TV, not Eugene O'Neill. It was that audiences had built up a tolerance to these shows that take an entire season to do what used to take place in one episode.
Traveler is scheduled to air eight episodes and that sounds and feels just about right.
