On Thursday I went to an advanced screening of the pilot of the the NBC show Revolution. I'll try not to spoil the episode for those who haven't seen it, but if you want to watch it before reading this, you can watch it at nbc.com/revolution.
Overall I was very impressed by the pilot. I had high hopes that it would be good but was unsure whether it would deliver. By now you probably know what the show is about, but I'll give a brief summary anyway. Fifteen years after a mysterious blackout, humans must survive without cars, batteries, and anything electronic. Firearms have been outlawed, which explains the sword fighting and crossbows seen in the promos, and militias have risen under the mysterious General Monroe.
The show is centered on Charlie Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos), daughter of Ben Matheson (Tim Guinee) who seems to know something about the blackout. Charlie's brother Danny (Graham Rogers) is taken by militia leader Tom Neville (Giancarlo Esposito) after Ben is killed. With his dying breath, Ben tells Charlie to go to Chicago to find his brother Miles (Billy Burke), who will know how to find Danny. Charlie takes on this mission, accompanied by Ben's girlfriend Maggie (Anna Lise Phillips) and his friend Aaron (Zak Orth).
Almost all of the actors gave great performances. Both Esposito, coming off of an outstanding season of Breaking Bad, and Burke were great in their respective scenes. I look forward to seeing more of them, and hopefully they will share some scenes soon because I would love to see them face off. I was especially surprised by Spiridakos's performance. I was not expecting her to convince me as the young heroine, but she did. Hopefully she can keep it up in the episodes to come. The last performance I want to mention is that of Orth, who provides the comic relief in the show. He had some good one-liners in this episode, so I hope the writers can use him well.
I have to give credit to Jon Favreau (director of the first two Iron Man movies), who directed this episode. He did a fantastic job, but I worry that he may have set the bar too high for future directors. We'll see how they do, but I hope that Favreau comes back at some point, provided that the show continues.
Which leads to my final point: the future of the show. As most hardcore TV fans know, NBC has been struggling with getting dramas off the ground, especially high-concept ones like this. The Event was a massive failure, and Awake, though a great show in my opinion, failed to find an audience. I believe that what this show needs is great character development, something that The Event lacked. The pilot did a decent job at giving us insight into what is driving the characters, but there is still room for improvement. If the writers can make us care about the characters, while simultaneously provide us with an engrossing mystery, I believe the show will succeed.
Revolution is off to a very fine start. I look forward to the rest of the season and hopefully future seasons. There is so much story to tell and so many characters to flesh out, so the people behind the show have a lot of work ahead of them. Here's hoping they can create a show that can reel in viewers and last more than one season. If you're interested, tune in Mondays at 10/9c starting on September 17.
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