Intrigued by NBC's Dream-y Double Life Drama Awake? Here's How It Works - Today's News: Our Take | TVGuide.com

Intrigued by NBC's Dream-y Double Life Drama Awake? You Should Be! Here's How It Works

Feb 29, 2012 10:52 PM ET
by Denise Martin

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Awake

In many ways, Awake is an even riskier bet for NBC than the showtune-happy Smash. The show follows a detective whose reality has splintered following a fatal car accident: one day, he wakes up to comfort his grieving wife because their son has died; in the next, he's a widower living with his son who survived. During one of his mandated therapy sessions, he lays it out: One of these existences might not be real — but he'd rather go on living in both.

More ambitious and certainly more challenging than most network dramas, Awake is not nearly as complicated as traversing through Inception, a comparison some critics have already made. Instead, think of it as a cop drama with a twist, albeit a very ambitious twist -- while Detective Britten (Jason Isaacs) is trying to be a husband one day and a father the next, he's also carrying on with his day job catching bad guys. Each week, he'll have a case to solve, and details or clues from one realm will help him in the other.

Video: Watch the series premiere of Awake

The first hour, directed by David Slade (30 Days of Night), has been deftly — and beautifully — organized into two very separate realities. Time with his wife (Laura Allen) is warm, golden, sun-kissed, while days with his son (Dylan Minnette) are cooler and bluer. Britten also sees different therapists (B.D. Wong and Cherry Jones) and has different job partners (Steve Harris and Wilmer Valderrama), though both are tasked in some way with keeping an eye on him. Four episodes in, none of the narrative is particularly difficult to follow.

More problematic is the NBC landscape: Awake is stuck in a tough timeslot — Thursdays at 10, following the network's low-rated comedy lineup and against established dramas The Mentalist on CBS and Private Practice on ABC. We say, let the network worry about all that. Here's your six-point cheat sheet, straight from creator-executive producer Kyle Killen (Lone Star):

Somber premise, not so somber drama. Awake picks up well after the Britten family car crash. When we meet Britten, he's adjusted well to living a dual life — he even wears different colored rubber bands to help keep his realities separate. In other words, real or not, Britten still has both his wife and son in his life, and that's a gift he wants to take advantage of. "It isn't a show that's relentlessly about grief because, frankly, whether it's healthy or not, he's not a person who is grieving," Killen says. "As far as he's concerned, he has everyone."

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