TV Review: Alphas

Alphas

Genre(s): Thriller, Action, Superheroes, Drama
Network: SyFy
Time: Mondays at 10pm
Rated: TV-14
Starring: David Strathairn, Malik Yoba, Warren Christie, Laura Mennell, Ryan Cartwright, and Azita Ghanizada

Description: When a witness is inexplicably murdered in a locked room at a federal courthouse, Dr. Lee Rosen is put on the case. He leads a team of “Alphas”, human beings with enhanced abilities due to differences in their brain structure.

 
I was happy to find that Alphas was more than “SyFy does Heroes on a smaller budget.” Yes, you’ve seen this structure before… a bunch of people each have one special ability. One can convince people to do whatever she wants. One has super strength. One has enhanced senses… and so on. However, Alphas differentiates itself in its approach to the material. The core team feels more like a therapy group and less like a team of superheroes. It’s a way of saying that, yes, having these powers would drive you crazy and possibly ruin your life, while doing it in a way that feels less like whining and more like issues we experience in our own lives. However, the series is either not interested in or not able to extend that level of psychological realism as far as I might want, and thus I’m a little iffy on whether I should recommend it.

Oh, heck with it, watch it, it has David Strathairn in it. The acclaimed actor plays Dr. Lee Rosen, some sort of brain expert and/or therapist who runs a team of people with special abilities while simultaneously trying to help them with their various issues. Strathairn brings a certain level of gravitas even to somewhat ridiculous exposition, which is good because he isn’t getting a lot of notes to play here. Rosen is a fairly straight-forward aging hippie father figure. That is in fact is part of my biggest problem with the pilot that I saw: even over an extended episode, none of the characters developed any complexity whatsoever, or acted in some way that surprised me. They all fit very nicely into their little boxes, but showed very little capacity to extend beyond that.

The therapy group/superhero team includes Bill, a former FBI agent who can gain super-strength for a limited time through an “enhanced fight-or-flight reflex,” Nina, a beautiful woman who has that “persuasion” superpower I mentioned a few weeks ago, Rachel, an awkward Persian girl who can enhance one of her senses at a time (but at the cost of temporarily not having the rest of them), and Gary, an autistic who can “see electromagnetic waves.” Apparently this last one means he can “see” wireless signals and their contents at any time, thus (for example) being able to track cell phones using his brain (“except for Nokia”). When this group goes to crime scenes, it sometimes feels like the boat trip from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

The series was co-created by Zak Penn, who has written a bunch of superhero movies, including X2 (yay) and Elektra (boo), and the pilot was directed by Jack Bender, who was the go-to director for many years on Lost. Yet somehow the series never really develops much of a style. In terms of visuals Alphas is probably more reminiscent of The Closer than Heroes, and that basic-cable feel extends to a lot of corners of this series. It delivers on a very basic level and never really gets much further than that.

As sometimes happens with other basic-cable shows, what does transcend that label are the performances being given by the cast. Strathairn is great, of course. Ryan Cartwright, recently seen on Bones, does a fairly good job with the showiest role, that of the autistic Gary. A little of that character might go a long way, though. Cartwright is asked to wave his arms around a lot as if he’s pushing around radio signals or something. I also enjoyed Callum Keith Rennie of Battlestar Galactica fame in the pilot as a grizzled cop contact of Rosen’s, but I was disappointed to find he is apparently not a series regular.

There are plenty of shows where there is a crime committed each week and by the end of the episode said crime is solved. I don’t really anticipate this series deviating from that structure in a major way anytime soon. However, it is in the somewhat unusual “crime-fighting as therapy” premise that Alphas may be able to find its niche.  If it’s going to merit weekly viewings, it needs to find more complexity in its characters rather than simply putting them through paces. But the fun thing about TV is that the writers may have the time to do that: the pilot was SyFy’s highest-rated debut in two years. Alphas won’t blow your mind, but if the idea of “social outcasts use superheroing to work through their psychological issues” sounds interesting to you, you’ll probably come away entertained.