Average.
Pretty much what I expected. You can see the money they spent onscreen and it's impressive to see any TV series with aesthetics that are within spitting distance of a big-budget movie, but...
The characters, wow,
dull. I'm sure it's possible to write a family-oriented show with family members who are memorable and vivid. Spielberg's other show,
Falling Skies, managed that. Both series have many very parallel characters.
The love-interest doctor in
Falling Skies (played by Moon Bloodgood) really comes to life as an individual character. (I suspect Bloodgood is just a much better actor.) Jason O'Mara held his own in the lead role, but his character simply isn't under the same stress as Noah Wylie's character, who as a history professor is much more out of place in a physically dangerous situation and therefore more inherently sympathetic.
Both families have three children, but the three sons of
Falling Skies are not nearly as dopey and annoying as the
Terra Nova kids, especially that jerk-ass eldest son, ergh. Both the actors playing the son and eldest daughter are just bad and painful to watch; same is true for the teen actors overall. Steven Lang has a lot of potential as the is-he-good-or-not? wild card, parallel to Will Patton's character. Just as Patton veered towards good, I think Lang's going to veer bad, and that will be fun to watch anyway. His showdown with the dino was a good sign of future entertaining badassery.
I figured the dino shock-factor would wear off w/n the first few weeks, but I found myself actually getting bored of them last night. Bad sign, since that leaves only Lang's antics and the mystery plotline to hold my interest. So that mystery better be a Brontosaurus-sized shocker. How about an intelligent dinosaur civilization just over the next mountain range? Maybe that's how Lang survived "on his own" in the jungle for so long. Since this is a different timeline, it's also a different Earth, and there's no reason to believe this Earth's past is exactly parallel to our own.
And finally, I have to ask, was it necessary to make this time travel to an alternate timestream of Earth?
Or just colonize Mars. They can make a time machine but they can't colonize Mars?
Or how about using their technological prowess to salvage Earth?
But I got the impression the "time rift" was some sort of accident, rather than a reflection of their superduper advanced technology.
I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes another one-season show like all the other high concept Lost clones that came before.
This show is expensive as hell and the ratings are going to drop more in the upcoming weeks. Not looking good.
I wonder if there will ever be another Sci Fi show on network television that can top LOST.
9M viewers would be a good number with comfortable padding for a second-week drop - on cable.
Falling Skies was a big hit with 6-7M viewers on TNT, but it's very obvious that the budget was significantly smaller. That, plus getting subscription revenues in addition to ad revenues, makes sci fi a viable genre for cable, but for broadcast, maybe it just doesn't work anymore.
If
Terra Nova got a big premiere sampling and then fell off a cliff the second week, I could blame the dull characters, but they didn't even get the sampling level they should have. The whole point of doing a glitzy time travel show with dinos is to grab a lot of attention the first week in anticipation of the inevitable second week drop off.
This may simply be further confirmation that all sci fi shows belong on cable now. With those ratings, even holding constant probably can't justify the budget. They'll have to start ratcheting back on the dino's, but with the characters as the weak link, they can't afford to scale back the eye candy. I think the writing is on the wall.
I think
Lost was just a complete outlier and will never be imitated. I still vividly remember how individual and intriguing the characters all were, after the first two-hour premiere. Very big contrast to
Terra Nova, where only O'Mara, Lang and Christine Adams, who plays Mira, are of that kind of attention-grabbing caliber.
It may be time for network TV to give up on sci fi entirely. Cede the field to cable and stick to cop shows. However, I'll stick with this for the duration. And who knows, it might survive for a while, because international ratings are going to be a big factor with a series like this.
Spielberg doesn't have to rip off anyone but himself to do a dino show.
