The first episode of Extant (CBS, Wednesdays) establishes with several quick cues that you are looking at the future. When astronaut Molly Woods (Halle Berry) washes up in the bathroom, she pulls up a news feed on the mirror. The garbage can outside her house is a transparent prism that compacts trash elegantly. Also, the show seems to posit an alternative universe in which CBS airs high-profile new dramas and they’re not about cops or lawyers.
That particular aspect of the near-term future has been ushered in by Under the Dome, the loopy but successful Stephen King adaptation that, now in its second season, has turned a small town in Maine into a menacing butterfly garden under glass. Now CBS is premiering Extant, a Steven Spielberg-produced joint about the eerie aftereffects of a long-term space mission; next summer, the network will air Zoo, a James Patterson thriller about a when-animals-attack pandemic. For the law-and-order-bound CBS, the summer season is like the sleepaway camp in The Interestings, a place where it can let its hair down and pretend to be a different, more adventurous network for a few weeks.
I’ve only seen one episode of Extant, but if that means we get more intriguing experiments like this in years to come, then long live the Dome. (I say this with the caveat that Under the Dome looked intriguing after one episode too.) Extant also has a high-concept mystery at its center: Molly has just returned from a 13-month mission on a space station, alone–yet she’s pregnant. But from the early looks of things, what’s driving Extant is not a single who-or-what’s-the-daddy mystery, but the show’s ideas.
Granted, most of those ideas are nothing new under–or rather orbiting–the sun. Molly’s predicament, explored through flashbacks to her lonely time working in space, has elements of 2001‘s austere spookiness, with a touch of Gravity and Solaris thrown in. There’s an element of high-tech corporate conspiracy that recalls Alien and any number of other sci-fi films. And the series’ compelling Earthbound plot is straight from Spielberg’s (and Stanley Kubrick’s) A.I.: the family Molly has returned to is her husband John (Goran Visnjic), a cybernetic scientist, and their son, or “son,” Ethan (Pierce Gagnon), an artificially intelligent, lifelike robot and the crowning achievement of the ambitious John’s career.
