Jason Isaacs (Lewis Jacobs/NBC)
HUH?: Jason Isaacs plays a man who is unsure if his wife (right) or his son (left) is dead when he’s plunged into two alternate realities. (
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My first reaction after watching the first two episodes of “Awake” was to think, “OK, great premise — but now what?”
On the one hand, “Awake,” a midseason drama premiering tonight on NBC, promises one of the more compelling dramatic arcs in recent TV memory, revolving around dueling, parallel realities fraught with implications and unanswered questions — reminiscent of an episode from Rod Serling’s classic CBS series, “The Twilight Zone.”
But NBC and executive producer Howard Gordon (“24”) are faced with the challenge of the show’s extremely intricate storyline retaining audience interest week after week.
And, on that front, they’re facing an uphill battle. I say that because it’s mentally exhausting, at least in tonight’s opener, to figure out exactly what the heck is going on here, and in which reality we’re placed at any given moment.
Here’s the deal: veteran LAPD Det. Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) has just returned to work after surviving a horrific car crash.
But he’s got one huge problem. Each morning, when Britten awakens, he lives one of two parallel realities. In one, his wife, Hannah (Laura Allen), survived the accident, which killed the couple’s teenage son, Rex (Dylan Minnette). In Britten’s other reality, Hannah was killed, but Rex survived.
Both worlds intersect and are so real to Britten that he doesn’t know which end is up — or whom to mourn (Hannah, Rex or both?)
It doesn’t help that, in these dueling worlds, Britten is being treated by two different psychiatrists (BD Wong and Cherry Jones), both bent on convincing him that his other reality (and, by extension, his other psychiatrist) doesn’t exist — that they’re elaborate manifestations of Britten’s accident-induced psychoses.
Britten, for all his tsuris, doesn’t seem overly fazed by the fact that he’s (likely) dreaming one of his realities, and here’s where I have a bit of a problem with the show’s otherwise-intriguing premise. You’d think someone in Britten’s maddening predicament would need a straitjacket — or at least some hardcore meds — to continue functioning with any level of sanity.
But he seems content, if just a tad perturbed, to go about his business, knowing he’ll awaken each day to one of his two worlds.
Maybe that’s because he gets to interact with either Hannah or Rex in each of his realities, allowing him to spackle over some emotional cracks along the way. With Hannah, that means dealing with her desire to have another child — awkward! — while, with Rex, it’s trying to connect emotionally as Rex falls under the spell of his female tennis coach (in an obvious bid to fill his mommy void).
Or maybe it’s because Britten has discovered a perk to his predicament, using clues from each reality to help solve crimes in both worlds, much to the confusion of his two different-world partners — hardbitten Det. Isaiah Freeman (Steve Harris) in one, and fresh-faced Det. Efrem Vega (Wilmer Valderrama) in the other.
The acting here is fine all-around, and the British-born Isaacs, known to “Harry Potter” fans as Lucius Malfoy, plays his role as written.
Next week’s second episode adds yet another, more sinister element to the show’s mix. While I’m not sure that’s going to be of any relief to viewers slogging their way through “Awake’s” multilayered storyline, at least it promises to shake things up a bit.