It's an eventful time for "The Event." It's beginning a three-month hiatus before emerging again on March 7, 2011. Back in the optimistic days of 2010, NBC ordered up a full-season of episodes, only to watch the ratings slide, with one week's airing coming in fourth in its time slot (5.2 million viewers, 1.7 rating). Going into the hiatus, the show is, charitably, "on-the-bubble."
I've worked as a writer/producer on a lot of series in their first seasons and I know it's hard to make great TV. In actual fact, it's hard to make even modestly okay TV because of crushing schedule challenges, challenging executive notes, turf wars, budget constraints, and network dictated concept changes. If history is a guide -- given the ratings troubles -- the obviously experienced creative team at "The Event" is hearing a lot of often mutually contradictory ideas about changes they should or should not be implementing in their final episodes.
"The Event" certainly provided lots of action (more bullets per minute than most series), plenty of intrigue (everybody lies and manipulates), and some great actors (Blair Underwood, Hal Holbrook). There's just one thing I wish it had more of, something that would have deepened it, and maybe provided the hook it never found -- UFOs.
The series doesn't seem to take UFO/ET reality seriously, and probably never intended to. It's a clever and often-compelling aliens-are-here concept that seems to take place in a parallel universe where there was no Kenneth Arnold sighting, no UFOs over Washington, D.C. in 1952, no military interceptions, no abductees, no Twining Memo, no Project Blue Book, no Condon Report, no Grays, and, basically, no on-going public interest in the UFO issue.
"The Event" seems to take place in a parallel universe where there was no Kenneth Arnold sighting, no UFOs over Washington, D.C. in 1952, no military interceptions, no abductees, no Twining Memo, no Project Blue Book, no Condon Report, no Grays, and, basically, no on-going public interest in the UFO issue.
In the world of "The Event," the only brush with "The Others" was a crash, not at Roswell in July 1947, but in Alaska in November 1944. No character in "The Event" has ever so much as uttered the word UFO or connected these alien visitors held at the Inostranka Facility into a larger picture of actual continuing contact and secrecy stretching over six decades. In the world of this series, they crashed up north, they got swept under the ice, and most people just forgot about them.
So, in their pilot, the President of the United States is about to disclose that we've been keeping dozens of youthful human-looking aliens up in cold storage for sixty years -- like he's outing a cosmic Gitmo -- but he's making no connection to the UFO issue that really does exist in the real world. But the readers of this site know that if the President were going to disclose a secret Alaskan facility with incarcerated aliens, the truth-telling wouldn't have stopped there. A thousand million real questions about black ops, secret technology, underground bases, and so on, would have been asked in response.
I'm not saying their limited way in was the wrong decision; it did keep the focus on their primary storyline. But it carried certain other risks, given the core audience they may have been going for. Examples:
"The X-Files" lived in a world where their episodes and the series mythology were woven into the paranoia and conspiracy that real UFO investigators have had for decades. So did the NBC UFO conspiracy I created with Brent Friedman in the 1990s, "Dark Skies." We embraced the reality of the phenomenon and went from there, bending and twisting for dramatic purposes. But neither "The X-Files" nor "Dark Skies" simply cast aside all the mysterious, documented UFO knowledge gained over six plus decades by tens of thousands of witnesses. We dug around in it, and used it to make our stories deeper and more troubling, because our audiences wondered if we were presenting some version of the truth as fiction. Nobody believes that human-looking aliens are being kept up in Alaska under armed guard. That's just a story, even if it is a good one.
"The Event" adopts all the trimmings of conspiracy -- that somebody must be manipulating events from behind-the-curtain of power, that there is a decades long cover-up, and that the stakes of maintaining the secrecy are life-and-death -- but never embraces the meal that people have been seeing UFOs for decades and telling stories of contact, for real.
Objects that are not supposed to exist have been flying around in our skies since World War II. At least some are physical, they've been tracked on radar, seen by pilots, watched by many thousands of excellent witnesses, including police officers, and soldiers from every branch of the armed services. They do exist. In our world. But, so far, not in the world of "The Event."
If you want to know a bit more about the book itself, here is the link to read the Introduction to A.D. After Disclosure. It is easily available through Amazon.com. Or you can order it through your local bookstore.
As always, we thank you for considering a purchase of the book through the button below at Keyhole Publishing. It will be shipped directly from the publisher signed by co-author Richard Dolan, and you will receive a free MP3 of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song," currently available on iTunes.
