Everyone knows what kinds of dramas work on network television. They are cop shows with erotic murders, procedurals chopped up into four sleek acts—ice-cube trays full of blood. Some may be wittier, or have hotter stars, but the viewer knows exactly what she’ll get: an hour of pleasure that requires no commitment. Increasingly, to survive on the network schedule, a TV maker needs to learn their language.
It would be easy to confuse “Awake,” Kyle Killen’s new drama for NBC, with one of those shows, but that would be a mistake. This is Killen’s second time on network television: his last outing was with “Lone Star,” on Fox, an ambitious cable-style drama with a complex antihero, although I doubt you’ve heard of it, since it was cancelled after two episodes. Filmed in Texas, “Lone Star” starred James Wolk, as Robert, a con man with two wives. Having fallen in love with his marks, Robert was determined to keep both marriages going, violating the ethos of his grifter dad. “Lone Star” was wonderful to watch, but it was also morally challenging and genuinely strange for network television. I shouldn’t have been surprised when it got rock-bottom ratings, but I was.
When I heard the premise of “Awake,” I was concerned. It’s about a cop named Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs), who has survived a tragic car crash, only to find that he is living two parallel lives. In one version of reality, his wife, Hannah, has died in the accident, while his son, Rex, has survived. In the other, Rex has died and Hannah has survived. Each time Britten falls asleep, he wakes up in the other life. It sounded like another high-concept show that would get cancelled after two episodes. Plus, Killen’s Twitter bio reads, “I wrote that show that got canceled and that movie you didn’t see,” and after Googling I realized that the movie in question was “The Beaver,” about a depressed man who speaks through a hand puppet, which got murdered at the box office, in part because of the dark side of its star, Mel Gibson. Kyle Killen seemed to have some serious duality issues himself, as well as a gift for bad timing, and so I vowed not to watch “Awake” until it survived for at least two episodes.
Three episodes later, I was hooked. “Awake” is as ambitious as “Lone Star,” but it’s been designed to plug directly into our shared TV lizard brain, the one that determines the Nielsen ratings. With its dreamy, Philip K. Dick-ian premise and a strong performance by Isaacs, “Awake” is one of the most affecting explorations of grief I’ve seen on TV. But it is also a legal procedural, or, really, two legal procedurals, or perhaps a hallucination one might have, while on heavy painkillers, after bingeing on legal procedurals. “Awake” is a cop show, a science-fiction series, a character-rich soap and an auteurist cable drama, all at once. It’s the story of a man whose life has become a Freudian puzzle of guilt and denial, glued together by the conventions of television. The turducken of the network schedule, basically, but much tastier than that sounds.
In each episode, Britten solves two crimes. He has two partners, as well as two shrinks, each mandated by his boss, Tricia Harper (Laura Innes). In the scenario where his son is alive, he’s seeing Judith Evans (Cherry Jones), who tells him that his “dreams” are a healthy way to work through his grief. In the scenario where his wife is alive, he sees the acerbic John Lee (B. D. Wong), who makes ominous remarks like “This fantasy is far from a benign coping mechanism.” It does not seem like a coincidence that a viewer may recognize the show’s actors from other network procedurals: Jones from “24,” Wong from “Law & Order,” Innes from “E.R.,” and Britten’s partner, who is played by Steve Harris, from “The Practice.”
As Britten moves from one version of his tragedy to the other, patterns emerge, clues that help him solve crimes and make emotional progress. He talks openly about this situation in therapy, but he’s resistant to change, since right now he has both wife and son, just not at the same time. In Killen’s riskiest move, he tipped the show’s primal plot twist not late in the season but at the end of the second episode; it was a devastating revelation. Britten’s circumstances appear to be the result of a conspiracy, one involving a mysterious bigwig who ordered the car accident—and, judging from that man’s conversation with Harper, both Hannah and Rex died in the wreck.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re feeling burned by “Lost” or “The Killing”; perhaps you’re one of those people still bearing a grudge about “Twin Peaks”—you fear commitment, especially to TV shows that involve conspiracies. Yet, for some reason, I trust “Awake.” This may be because, despite its glossy structure, the show is so plainly affecting. While ordinary procedurals invoke loss, they reduce it to capsule form: we feel grief only in the final act, when the suspect breaks down. Then he disappears from our lives forever. In contrast, “Awake” is flooded with a recognizable human horror—the sensation, after a tragedy, that what’s happening can’t be real. In the scenario where Britten’s wife is alive, she’s been redecorating their house, erasing the family history that her husband still clings to. In the scenario where Britten’s son is alive, he’s angry and distant, concealing his taboo desire that his mother had survived instead.
These painful emotions would be unbearable, except that they are suspended at two eerie removes: first, through the false narrative of Britten’s split life, and then within the equally artificial construct of the cop show, with all its pleasurably phony visual narcotics. (If you channel-surfed past “Awake,” you’d see a strong-jawed man with a gun, or a beautiful blonde in a kitchen, scored to the Music of Strong Feeling.) In the pilot, Britten has a breakthrough intuition—just the type that Monk might make, or House, except that we know that Michael is getting this knowledge from his alternate reality. His unnerved partner wonders where he got the idea. “Can we call it a hunch for now?” Britten asks. “Only seen hunches on TV,” his partner says.
“Awake” overflows with sly references like this, and it feels fuelled as well by the audience’s familiarity with the clichés of the genre: when Britten’s partner wonders why he suspects that a suicide is actually a murder, we know that Britten is right, if only because we’re less than fifteen minutes into the show, so someone must be lying. But this conceit never comes off as po-mo game playing, since Killen keeps finding links between therapy, police work, and the labor of grief. We get the standard jolt of seeing a policeman tormented by his brilliance—the Sherlock effect—but we are also aware that if Britten ever solves his own mystery he’ll be in Hell. When, in the third episode, Michael’s son was kidnapped, I kept reminding myself that Michael’s terror was an illusion, and that this ticking-time-bomb plot came right out of “24.” (That show’s producer, Howard Gordon, who is also behind “Homeland,” produced “Awake” with Killen.) And yet I became so desperate for Britten not to lose his son again that my heart was in my throat.
The “Law & Order” franchise thrives on juicy cameos, and “Awake” allows for twice as many. In one episode, Brianna Brown plays Rex’s former babysitter Kate, who is in one reality a financier and in the other a junkie—two strong performances that seem not entirely linked to the murder plots. Then, in a skillful crosscut sequence, a submerged theme is revealed: the mystery of why Kate was wrecked by a family tragedy in one scenario and strengthened by it in the other. In one reality, it turns out, her mother had pushed a thousand times to get her daughter help. In the other, Kate was “just lucky that she was willing to try a thousand and one.” It’s an insight that wouldn’t feel out of place on “Friday Night Lights,” but in “Awake” it provides a sucker punch in a different way, rising from the surfaces of the cop-show format like invisible ink.
After “Lone Star” was cancelled, Killen described the difference between cable and network pilots: On cable, a thief threatens to shoot your dog, and if you don’t keep him happy for forty-three minutes the dog dies. On network, it’s the same, but if the thief gets bored for more than two minutes the dog dies. Too often, modern television audiences are walled off in their own taste silos, with “Downton Abbey” fans or “Battlestar Galactica” buffs afraid to step beyond the safe boundaries of whatever they define as “quality” TV. “Awake” may be hard to categorize, but it’s worth our attention. Please don’t kill my dog. ♦