There are stories that are about something. And sometimes they are "just a bunch of things that happened", as the Simpsons described their adventure regarding Mr. Burns’ blood and the stone Olmec head.
The first episode of Tru Calling, the new Fox series in which Eliza Dushku starts working for a morgue handling the bodies rather than simply racking up the body count as she did playing Faith on Buffy and Angel, seems to fall into that latter category. This is a series that strives for the tradition of the watchable Quantum Leap and Early Edition, wherein someone is given special powers to use to solve one problem each week. In this case, Eliza’s Tru sees a body in the morgue and is suddenly transported back 24 hours, presumably usually to save the person’s life. In the first one, there’s a bit of a mystery about who killed the corpse, although it really isn’t an intringuing question; there are some folks who coulda done it, but I was never sucked in enough about the victim or intrigued by the situation enough to care. Tru also uses her first 24 hour transport to try to help her two troubled siblings. One attempt is ineffective, the other is effective only because the writers decreed it so; it was actually a stupid thing to do.
Dushku holds her own, but there’s nothing to hold on to. This series doesn’t have grace, intrigue, or fascinating characters. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened, and it only happened because the writers say it did.
(There was one scene where a guy named Marco left Tru alone in a building full of corpses for the first time, when she expected him to stay. In the empty offices, Tru calls out “Marco!”… and damn, was I waiting for an eerie, ethereal dead voice to cry “Polo!” No such luck.)
