I’ve been at the box-sets again. I watch far fewer TV dramas than I used to. That’s probably been the case since I bought the iPad that I’m using to write this piece right now. It has led to a healthy increase in the amount of reading that I do. I haven’t reduced the amount of sport that I watch so the one thing I have done less of is TV drama. I still have half a series of Killing Eve and an entire series of Big Little Lies on the planner.
Given that I devote less time to watching TV dramas something really has to pique my interest to get me to tune in. An intriguing premise maybe, a standout cast or a dramatisation of a film or book I’ve previously enjoyed. This happened recently with Manifest, an NBC drama which aired on Sky One. Unfortunately though not surprisingly it did not live up to my early hopes and expectations of it.
The premise is the hook. An aircraft takes off from Jamaica bound for the USA (where else, this is television drama after all) and goes missing. Five years later it reappears and lands. The killer twist is that for those on board it has only felt like a few hours. During the flight they experience some fairly terrifying turbulence during which the lights go out and the oxygen masks drop but once that is negotiated it seems to them like an otherwise uneventful flight. They disembark expecting to go about their business as usual only to find that five years have passed. The world has moved on around them. They have all been presumed dead by their families who have aged five years while the passengers have not. It’s a bit like living in Wigan only to step outside the boundaries of the borough and realising that it’s actually 2019.
There are hundreds of passengers on your average commercial flight from Jamaica to the USA so Manifest decides to keep its focus on one family. TV and film do not give a shit about anyone but those central to the plot. The Stone family are not all on board the time-shifting flight. It’s over-booked (no wonder Thomas Cook went under if this kind of travel balls up is common) so Grace, wife of Ben Stone and mother of twins Olivia and Cal, offers to catch the next flight with their daughter and Ben’s parents. Cal has leukaemia so takes priority, meaning his father has to travel with him and so be split from Grace. Also with Ben on that first, soon-to-be mysterious time-hopping flight is Ben’s sister Michaela.
It’s an incredible set-up but it all goes wrong from there. Even at 16 episodes it is a stretch to believe that the writers could come up with a reasonable explanation for the five-year lag, resolve all of the personal and relationship conflicts which arise and cunningly set it up for another money-spinning series. In the end they don’t try, settling instead for a resolution to some but not all of those conflicts but leaving the question of what happened to flight 828 to cause it to flash forward five years unsatisfactorily unanswered. All of which makes you feel like you have wasted about thirteen and a half hours of your life. At around 50 minutes per episode it turns into a longer haul than any flight you’re ever likely to take. Longer even than the one I took with American Airlines from Manchester to New York during which they had to rip the doors off the toilet to make it possible for me to spend any pennies.
The acting doesn’t help. The actress playing Michaela is Melissa Roxburgh and while she has every right to appear stressed under the circumstances her permanent hangdog expression starts to grate. Ben is played by Josh Dallas whose bio informs me that he was in Thor. I can’t say I remember his role in that but his performance here makes it even harder to imagine. He treats the Stone family crisis like Cliff Huxtable and Mr Drummond treated the teenage angst of the kids in their care. Let’s just talk it through and everything will work itself out. It won’t Ben. Least of all the plot which as we have established the writers have no intention of resolving until the last dollar has been squeezed out of the concept at the end of series 7.
In the end it all feels a little bit too much like Lost. If like me and 98.4% of the population (probably) you saw that show before seeing Manifest you’ll probably view the latter as an inferior tribute act. One of Lost’s strengths before it entered really disturbing levels of batshit craziness was in how it tied all of the numerous characters’ back stories into the air crash/island plot. There’s none of that with Manifest which dispenses with the diverse ensemble cast of its predecessor to focus solely on the Stones. Others on the time-hopping flight get involved at various points but with nothing like the same depth. Overall none of the characters, not even the Stones, do enough to show how inexplicably losing five years of your life in a single night might affect you.
I should have watched those still to be viewed episodes of Killing Eve and Big Little Lies from the planner.
No comments:
Post a Comment