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Harsh realms | page 1, 2
The striking pilot episode (which aired Sept. 24) depicted one very bad day in the life of Michael Wiseman (guest star John Goodman, in a heart-rending performance), a middle-aged, big-bellied, big-hearted New York insurance executive. In the morning, Wiseman's wife, Lisa (Margaret Colin), rebuffs his affections; his teenage daughter, Heather (Heather Matarazzo), gives him attitude over breakfast. In the afternoon, Wiseman learns that he has been passed over for a promotion, which goes instead to a younger worker whom he had trained. At quitting time, Wiseman goes out with his pal Roger (Gerrit Graham) and gets drunk; by nightfall, Wiseman is dead -- he's accidentally jostled on a subway platform and falls under a train. All of this is undercut with taut, nearly wordless scenes of an elderly Asian terrorist methodically planting nerve-gas-laced eggs on a Japanese subway train and in a Paris airport. After two weeks on the air, Caron is still taking his sweet time bringing these events, a world apart, together.
Harsh Realm
Now and Again
Joyce Millman Joyce Millman's column appears every other Monday in Salon Arts & Entertainment. Ah, but Wiseman isn't entirely dead, although his family thinks so. His uninjured brain was secretly salvaged by a shadowy government group -- Is there any other kind? -- and hooked up to a wealth of technology. Wiseman's brain comes out of its grogginess to process a neat proposition made by a garrulous government agent named Dr. Theo Morris (Dennis Haysbert). Wiseman -- or rather, his brain -- has been selected to animate a covertly built superman, "an American man," as Morris' rousing sell-job explains, "a man who could do those things mere mortal American men are loath to do. Travel in dangerous places! Take risks! Wage wars!" ("Now and Again" lucked into the Susan Faludi/downsized-man Zeitgeist.) The catch is, Wiseman can't contact anyone from his previous life, or else he and they will be terminated. Wiseman agrees and he's plugged into the ripped, man-made bod of a young superstud (Eric Close). He's the new $6 million man. Actually, he's the $3 billion man, but four out of five taxpayers would probably agree that he's a lot cuter than the Hubble Space Telescope. Memories, alas, are stubborn things, and Wiseman soon finds himself in a lonely funk; he misses his wife and daughter. By last week's episode (the show's second), he had busted out of confinement and made contact with his sad widow (who had been stiffed out of Wiseman's life insurance money by his greedy employers); he didn't tell her who he was, letting her think he was some kind of handsome, homeless wacko. But soon the government boys caught up to him and he was corralled again and prepped for his first assignment: Catch the nerve-gas-dispensing terrorist, who has reached New York. "Now and Again" is a pleasing blend of dark humor, suspense and soulful yearning for departed loved ones and lost youth. Caron was obviously influenced by the John Frankenheimer movie "Seconds," which starred Rock Hudson as a burnt-out middle-aged businessman granted a new, youthful identity. But the show also harbors a puckish, "X-Files"-style (with nods to "The Twilight Zone") irony -- an irony that Carter shows absolutely none of in "Harsh Realm," by the way. Wiseman sold insurance for a living; he believed in insurance. But, in the end, all of his actuarial tables and policies and assessments of risk couldn't keep him, or his family, safe. The world is a harsh realm.
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