An Invasion Surfaces Over the Threshold

It must be interesting to be a waiter in a restaurant frequented by the movers and shakers from TV and/or motion pictures. My guess is that Hollywood waiters can predict pretty accurately which trend is going to sweep the industry next. Talk at the tables for the last few years probably centered around reality television and shows featuring celebrities playing poker. Isn't it strange that an industry that thinks of itself as so creative can only focus on one or two ideas at a time?

The latest trend, no doubt spurred by Steven Spielberg's remake of War of the Worlds, is the alien invasion drama. This fall, all three major networks will boast an alien-themed show. Anyone want to make a wager on whether any of them will be renewed beyond their initial run?

The aliens at CBS get right inside us and change our DNA on Threshold, starring Carla Gugino, which is sceduled for Friday nights. Gugino and her team must figure out the purpose of the invasion and figure out what has happened to the crew of a ship where the a creepy looking symbol (which coincidentally resembles the international biohazard symbol) shows up repeatedly.

ABC enters the fray with Invasion on Wednesday nights. The story begins after a hurricane, when people begin changing mysteriously. We feel a chill run down our spine when a young girl's alien-sensing nose picks up the change: "Mommy, you smell different." The change that's come over everybody seems to have something to do with some lights in the water, which may make this show easy to confuse with...

NBC's alien-invasion show is entitled Surface, and the beautiful, newly discovered critters that pose such an ominous threat come from beneath the surface of the oceans.

Whether any of these three shows will be worth watching remains to be seen, but with all three beginning at the same time, I wonder what their chances really are. The basic premise of all three shows involves characters working against the clock to solve the mystery of the invasion and stop it. To keep a drama like this going, the writers have to factor in all sorts of side plots and background information, which makes for a complicated story line. Will viewers be able to keep the developing stories on the three shows straight? Can you imagine trying to watch three different versions of Lost at the same time? One version was too much for me to stick with.

I really shouldn't bitch about it though. I'm delighted to see primetime television moving back toward dramas and comedies and away from the reality-show rut it's been stuck in for so long. Still, it would be nice if there were more original ideas being given a chance.

I know the original ideas out there. In fact, most of the waiters bringing bottled water to the tables of those Blackberry-toting power-players in Hollywood probably have a screenplay on the hard-drive of their computers that would be more interesting to watch than what will fill the fall schedule this year.

Maybe the waiters should stage an invasion of their own.