After nearly a year of buildup and premiere delays, Fox's Terra Nova finally hit the small screen Sept. 26. The Steven Spielberg-produced drama follows the Shannon family in their trip from the corrupt world of 2149 back 85 million years to a new human colony in the time of the dinosaurs. Despite the hype and promise, however, the show is severely lacking in acting and believability.
In the sunless world of 2149, Earth is on the brink of planetary collapse, and the world's only hope is a fracture in time that allows humans to travel back to a prehistoric Earth, giving them a fresh chance to build civilization. At the beginning of the pilot, the Shannon family is tapped to go to the "new" planet, prompting Jim, the patriarch of the Shannon clan, to break out of prison and finally make his way back to his family by illegally transporting himself back in time with them to Terra Nova. His hope, and his wife Elizabeth's hope, is that they will now have a second chance as a family, much like mankind has a second chance at taking care of the planet.
What follows, though, is a very predictable and over-dramatized family drama. Through Jim's and Elizabeth's three kids, Terra Nova portrays father-son tension, which whips around a little too much, a youngest daughter who might not remember her father because of his jail time, and, of course, immediate potential love interests for the two older children.
While the script and the acting may be overdone, the general premise of the show does actually give it a fast pace, which will end up pulling in a lot of viewers. Like many sci-fi adventure dramas, there is an immediate sense of mystery arising from the new time and new setting as well as some mysterious plot twists that suggest there may be more to this new world than initially meets the eye. If you can get through the melodramatic portions of the show, you will be rewarded with sprints of adrenaline. In the pilot, the CGI dinosaurs quickly threaten the lives of some rebellious teenagers, and the colony experienced violent trouble from a rogue group of former Terra Nova citizens known as "Sixers."
With Steven Spielberg included on the list of producers, it's no surprise that Terra Nova is a lavishly produced work not commonly seen on television. This alone will pull people in initially, but will likely not be enough to keep ratings as high as anticipated. The writing, thus far, has focused too much on the growth of the story and too little on the growth of the characters. The relationship drama and the acting seem forced, and both are incredibly predictable. Almost every bit of dialogue is foreseeable, which allowed my attention to drift away often.
Terra Nova shows potential in offering story lines for all sorts of viewing audiences, but what it lacks is a sense of realism. I felt uncomfortable watching the relationships develop and the story line continue, as the characters all seemed to work with such awkwardness. Terra Nova will definitely become popular among a certain audience, but based on the pilot, I doubt that the drama will pull in as many people as the hype would have predicted.
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