The debut episode of Eleventh Hour, a new CBS procedural produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, is about cloning. It comes out strongly against it. This is what we in the word-slinging business call “irony.”
Based on a four-part British TV series of the same name, Eleventh Hour has been put through the network’s CSI-procedur-o-matic, with a generous dash of House and The X-Files thrown in for good measure. It appears as if Bruckheimer and CBS are convinced—and probably with cause—that viewers are happy to watch essentially the same show several times a week, with only slightest variations to distinguish one from another. If you were to map their DNA patterns, as the show’s super-duper-genius biophysicist hero does to 19 buried fetuses, they’d be similarly difficult to tell apart. It would be unholy if it weren’t so damned boring.
Still, the one thing Eleventh Hour has going for it is Rufus Sewell as Dr. Jacob Hood, an eccentric FBI brain called in to investigate criminal abuses of sciences like cloning or, in the second episode, exotic plant toxins. He’s a lot more warm-hearted than Hugh Laurie’s irascible crank on House, but no less remote or wondrous in his powers of deduction. He’s the kind of guy who can walk in a room and say, “Rachel, I’m going to need some buff-tailed bumblebees” without batting an eye. In virtually every scene, Hood dazzles us with his understanding of botany, philosophy, genetics, hallucinogens, etc.—whenever the occasion calls for one, he has an answer at the ready. Patrick Stewart played the character on the original series, and Sewell, an actor normally assigned to mustache-twirling baddies, has just the right air of antisocial detachment.
But oh, the blandness surrounding him, starting with his sidekick Rachel Young (Marley Shelton), an FBI handler whose job is to protect him and try to curb his natural tendency to meander into danger. Based on the first two episodes, here’s what we know about her: She’s blonde. She can kick ass when she needs to. She doesn’t like guys hitting on her. And also, she’ll chase after perps in little but a hotel bathrobe if that’s what it takes. Otherwise, she’s just an irritable sounding board for whatever crackpot ideas come out of Hood’s head.
The pilot episode, “Resurrection,” finds Dr. Hood and Rachel in Seattle, where the authorities (led by Marc Blucas, who you’ll remember as bland nice-guy Riley on Buffy The Vampire Slayer) have discovered 19 fetuses in medical waste jars buried in the forest. The perpetrator is a young Christian who was paid to burn the materials but took the initiative to bury them once he discovered their contents. It sounds like a provocative situation, but in fact, the fetuses are of the same DNA stock, all failed attempts to clone a human being. That sends Dr. Hood and Rachel on the expected bread trail through various red herrings and viable suspects, including a pregnant single mother serving as a surrogate for the cloning experiment, a black-market obstetrician assigned with bringing it to term, and a couple of real power players, like the billionaire bankrolling the project and the shadowy figure in charge of it.
Everything that happens is completely by the numbers—or, since this is CBS, by the Numb3rs—and the only thing that keeps it interesting is when Sewell pauses for a science lesson, such as explaining cloning through the barcodes on milk carton or demonstrating it by taking a pair of tweezers to a grape. The second episode, “Cardiac,” is a slight improvement, since the story is less expected (a town where 11-year-old boys die of cardiac arrest) and the one-liners are funnier. My favorite: “I’m going to ask you one more time, Jesse: Where did you get the toads?”
Tune in next week (or don’t) to find out…
Grade: C
Stray observations:
• Dr. Hood’s rather dramatic ploy to get the Christian kid to talk: Drag him into a church and make him confess before Jesus.
• Just a taste of Rachel’s generic dialogue: “[Hood] spends most of the time in his head, so I have to watch his back.”
• Yawn
• zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz