Pilot Season – Prey

    1998 seems to have been a very rough year for television (Hey, ‘Brimstone says hi!’). Shows that debuted that year include ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ ‘Sex and the City,’ ‘That 70’s Show,’ ‘The King of Queens,’ ‘Felicity,’ my personal favorite ‘The Sifl and Olly Show,’ ‘Charmed,’ and ‘Will and Grace.’ And that’s it, those are all of the non-kids shows that actually stuck around for more than a season or so. Notice a pattern? Because I sure don’t. Meanwhile movies were having one of the stupidest years on record. Of the top ten grossing movies of the year the only one that’s considered a classic is ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ The rest is all ‘Armageddon,’ ‘Godzilla,’ and ‘Dr. Dolittle.’

    I’m making it sound worse that it was. ‘ER’ and ‘Friends’ were astride the television ratings, ‘NYPD Blue’ and ‘The X-Files’ were still going strong, ‘Ally McBeal’ … existed, there was nothing to compare to the vapid cultural wastelands of a decade before. But in going through the list of failed shows that came out that year you can practically feel the desperation of the executives just throwing stuff out there trying to find something that worked.

    It’s interesting that I mentioned ‘Will and Grace’ above because that show might have missed out on one of its central stars, Debra Messing, if earlier that year a show by the name of ‘Prey’ hadn’t crashed and burned. Premiering in the middle of January and ending it’s run in July it at least managed to air all of its 13 produced episodes before ending on a cliffhanger that’s been unresolved for over 22 years now.

    I need to admit that most of my cultural tastes solidified in the late 90’s and so most of what I like about this show (and I do like it overall, rather despite myself) is that it is so endlessly of its time. I was still in college when this show aired and so many of the background details, the overstuffed furniture, the needlessly baggy clothing, the overly drum-n-bassy background music, how computers could just barely still get away with being magic, all took me right back to those late nights where my friends and I would use the money we didn’t spend on lunch to buy overpriced espresso and rehash the same philosophical points that kids had been arguing about since Descartes. A magical time when you had to learn how to adjust your stride so your portable cd player wouldn’t skip, when flannel could comfortably make up half of your entire wardrobe, and it was vitally important to exactly explain why Massive Attack’s ‘Mezzanine’ was maybe the best album ever.  Nostalgia’s a hell of a drug.

Oh, guy in the back, don't even bother.

    The clearest critique I can give of the show is that it very much has a Season 3 problem. The way it normally goes with television shows is that the pilot sets up the premise and the first season plays it out. The second season takes what works in the first season and amps that up while weeding out what didn’t (what we call a ‘Parks & Rec’) and wrapping something of a bow on the original premise while also setting up the premise for season 3 and beyond. To use the best example that comes to mind the end of season 2 of ‘Supernatural’ wraps up the story of the Yellow-Eyed Demon and explains his actions in the pilot, gives Dean one year before he gets dragged to Hell, and looses a set of demons upon the world that they have to combat. Now that’s how you set up a season 3.

    I have no idea what a season 3 of ‘Prey’ would look like. They made it through season 1, set up something for season 2, but I don’t really see how this premise had legs.

    Let’s dig into the show proper. Our Heroes work at a genetics laboratory where they also consult for various law enforcement agencies. A serial killer who’s been acting strange even for serial killers is apprehended and the head of the department gives testimony in court that causes the killer to threaten her. She gives a cryptic clue to our lead, Debra Messing, about some research she was doing involving said killer and then that night she’s murdered. Our lead does some research of her own and through computer magic discovers a secret group of evolved humans who are as genetically distinct from us as we are from chimpanzees and apparently they’re all dirtbag killers. The FBI agent she’s been liaising with turns out to be fake FBI and a secret evolved human but not a bad one and so now they have to fight back against this new species.

    I’ve only watched the pilot so I’m going over synopses here but from episode descriptions it seems the show rather quickly goes off the rails. First apparently all these evolved humans are essentially serial killers who hunt regular humans for sport, which, fair enough. They can interbreed with humans but the evolved humans are always the product. There’s apparently an episode where they find that girls of the new species as young as nine give birth to four children at a time, which, yikes? Then they turn out to have psychic powers, and then they have their own religion and they worship at their birthplace in the Mexican desert, and it ends with a cliffhanger where they may have a ‘cure’ to turn the evolved species into regular humans, which in a running theme is not how genetics work.

    Essentially what we have here is a secret alien invasion show with all of the alien technology removed. The evolved humans may be smarter than us but they still only have access to our technological base and resources. The psychic stuff is eye-rollingly stupid for a show that at least pretends to believe in science but it might have eventually turned interesting if they went with a forming hive-mind kind of idea or something. Maybe the reason they don’t just run to the governmental authorities (1998, remember, we still believed in that) is that it turns out all of the highest reaches of the government have been infiltrated by the new species and they’re starting to turn the world towards a massive war to wipe out humanity and leave them the spoils. If this morphed into a conspiracy thriller, where they have tests for the new species but there are co-opted humans maybe this could be a quasi-body snatchers thing.

    So I guess I stand a little corrected, there are places this show could’ve gone if they’d tried hard enough. None of that is in the pilot, mind you, there’s just groups of genetically superior assholes who don’t take basic precautions to hide their identities and don’t seem to mind being locked up in prisons. Even the good-guy member of the evolved species instantly turns boggle-eyed creepy when he’s discovered.

    How much you’d like this show entirely depends on how much you can roll with incredibly outdated everything. The soundtrack and the clothes are one thing but I also adore the computer that instantly understands and responds to voice commands and runs hundreds of genetic sequence comparisons in a few seconds. And not, like, a supercomputer of some kind, just a desktop, CRT monitor and all. The science is laughable, the characters are rough sketches at this point, and it’s very hard to watch Debra Messing be threatened by a serial killer without assuming Will is going to stroll through the door and make a comment on how he’s his crappy ex. Worse pilots have turned out better, I suppose. College age me would have likely eaten this up with a spoon.