TV Review - Second Chance

This series makes no sense. Writer Rand Ravich seems to be crafting a super hero, origin story, jumping on the Greg Berlanti bandwagon. His exercise, however, just doesn't hang together. Sadly, in an attempt to be smart, it only ends up being incredibly dumb.

Supposedly, the show was inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story about a scientist who tries to perform a resurrection of the dead. As portrayed, what occurs looks more akin to Ponce de León discovering the fountain of youth.

Here, two scientists, a brother and sister, come up with a process to resurrect a dead person. When an old man, a former sheriff in his 70's or 80's dies, that old man is resurrected, but not as himself. He comes back as a young, muscular man in his 30's. The assumption is the young man is what the old man looked like when he was actually that age.

Yet, when the sheriff interacts with people who knew him, like family members, including the sheriff's son, no one recognizes him, so the assumption that the resurrection process is a reverse-aging process is not confirmed or clear. The next assumption is that the sheriff was given a new body, but, the two scientists reiterate that the reason the sheriff was chosen for resurrection was because he had a genetic, cellular or specific makeup that makes him special, so if he's given a new body, as in Tarsem's Self/less, it defeats the scientists' purposes.

The reason it could be dubbed a super hero, origin story is when the sheriff becomes a younger man, he apparently has super strength. He's like a lesser version of Steve Rogers aka Captain America. Unfortunately, the first three episodes don't make great use of that super strength at all. The action is extremely lame. Not that the show is structured to have him beat up bad guys, but he doesn't even explore it at all!

Robert Kazinsky (EastEnders and True Blood) stars as Jimmy Pritchard, the younger incarnation of the sheriff in Seattle, Washington. Instead of exploring his powers or trying to understand his new body, he prefers to be a cocky jerk trying to solve the crimes of his adult son, and flirt with the female scientist who helped resurrect him.

Tim DeKay (Carnivale and White Collar) co-stars as Duval Pritchard, the adult son of the sheriff who's in his 40's. He's married and has a teenage daughter. He's a FBI agent. Eventually, he learns that his father has been resurrected as a younger man, but for three episodes, he proves himself not a very good FBI agent.

Jimmy hides the fact he's Duval's father by saying they're half-brothers. Duval is suspicious and doubting, as he should be, but, he accepts the story without any due dilligence. Duval doesn't ask for a driver's license or any documentation. He doesn't ask to interview Jimmy's potential friends or family or past co-workers. He really does nothing to verify his story. Duval is set up to be a good and straight-laced, FBI agent, but something like not verifying Jimmy's story makes Duval look bad.

The two scientists are Mary Goodwin, played by Dilshad Vadsaria (Revenge and Greek), and Otto Goodwin, played by Adhir Kalyan (Aliens in America and Rules of Engagementa). Mary is dying of cancer and Jimmy was chosen because his blood is a match for her, so she needs him alive to get blood donations.

Yet, it's never explained that if Otto developed this resurrection process in order to bring back a man who can give his sister blood donations, then he could also use that same process on his sister herself. If she dies, he can just resurrect her. Ravich and his writers never connect that Jimmy seems unnecessary when put up against Otto's ability to bring people, or at least one person, back from the dead.

For some reason, the show needs the audience to believe that this white man is important or required as some kind of hero figure. For some reason, the show needs the audience to believe that the core of the series should be about the father-son relationship between Jimmy and Duval, these two white men, and not about the brother-sister relationship between the two people of color.

One Star out of Five.
Rated TV-14-LVD.
Running Time: 1 hr.
Fridays at 9PM on FOX.