Journeyman Pilot Review – 7/10 stars, give it the six episode run

Thanks to NBC’s partnership with Amazon (and I’m not sure why NBC would want to abandon their partnership with iTunes, given that it’s the market leader and all), I was able to watch, for free, the pilot episode of NBC’s Journeyman, A Love of a Lifetime, which will premiere on NBC September 24. You can watch the pilot also, by visiting the Amazon site for the show. Keep in mind that the installation of Amazon’s Unbox Video program (Net Framework 2.0) takes a considerable amount of time (almost 15 minutes, and I have a fast computer), so, as the program states, you will need to "please be patient" as the program installs. More on the merits of Amazon's jump into the digital tv market shortly.

Quick review: Journeyman starts off a little bit slow, but after 30 minutes, definitely gets more interesting. Setting aside the handful of inherent problems I'll get to in a minute, it's worth watching the pilot, and I'll continue to watch the next five episodes to see if it gets better.

My four sentence summary of the show itself (borrowing a theme from a tv show with an obviously similar plot): Tired of his job as a beat reporter in San Francisco, Mr. Dan Vassar (Kevin McKidd (Rome)) heads home one night to return to his wife and kid, and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, forced to use antiquated technology like pay phones, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is his wife, who comes to believe his time traveling tales, and his brother, a cop who hates the fact that Dan married his ex-girlfriend. And so, Mr. Vassar finds himself traveling back and forth through the past and present, watching old sporting events he knows he has seen before but for unknown reasons is unable to gamble on, and hoping that each time that his adventures are good enough that NBC will renew the show.

Spoilers and my review of the pilot continue.... In the pilot, Vassar, a (insert boring adjective here) reporter, finds himself traveling back and forth in time through 1980s and 1990s San Francisco. On one of his first "trips," he happens to see someone standing in front of a trolley and saves his life. Flash forward to the future and a simple blackberry search through Google: the person was real and alive. Maybe it wasn't a dream but just some bad sushi.

While Dan is gone though, his wife freaks out that he has disappeared for two days and all of his friends and family think he's on drugs when he tries to explain where he had been. Surprisingly he doesn't get fired from his job, and they even try and have an intervention. As he fruitlessly tries to explain, these trips seem to last only as long as commercial breaks, but by the way, he has also seen his dead ex-girlfriend. This revelation only makes his brother madder that Dan broke the cardinal "bros before hos" rule (and committed it against his brother on top of it). Dan's travels back in time come at rather inopportune moments (e.g., when he is driving a car, which subsequently crashes into a pole as he vanishes). Likewise, he wakes up back in time in even more perilous situations (e.g., on trolley tracks with a train coming). These antics quickly become annoying.

While he's back in time, you learn that he used to be engaged to a smokin' hot lawyer (Livia Beale, played by Moon Bloodgood) who he thought died on a plane crash, but apparently is a time traveler also. (This part of the storyline made a brief appearance, but looks more like a potential future storyline setup than anything else). In another leap, you learn that while he was engaged to this hottie, his current (and future) wife is dating his brother, but obviously has the hots for him. In the future you learn that his cop brother resents him for the fact that after the lawyer allegedly died, Vassar married his brother's girlfriend, and shortly thereafter had a kid. And I thought Heroes had come up with some doofy storylines. His kid also plays the piano, and is essentially meaningless to the storyline except to show that he does feel guilty when he goes back in time and his ex-girlfriend strips down in front of him. To which he says, in the most politically correct way he can, "I have work to do." Literally, unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, and he gets up and leaves.

The gist of his first time traveling episode is that he saves some guy's life, then on trip two, he convinces the guy's girlfriend to keep her baby and marry him. When he goes back to the future and finds out that the wife and baby are killed, he returns in time to stop the guy from killing them by, and I'm not making this up, yelling his name so that he turns around just long enough that a bus hits and kills him. I would say, how ironic, but it really is just an example of lazy writing. When he goes back to the future, he discovers that the son grows up to be a doctor and saves some kids on a bus. Oh, he also buries a box in his backyard, which he digs up in the end of the episode so that his wife believes him since all this time traveling nonsense has led her to want to divorce our wayward reporter. Cue cheesy music and curtains until next week.

Things that were funny, however, include what I am pretty sure is an iPhone that he keeps carrying around that (correctly) gets no service when he goes back in time. There are also a few references to old technology, like those giant cell/cordless phones you would see on old episodes of Saved by the Bell, and old events, like T.O.'s gamewinning catch when he played for the 49ers. There is a Y2K joke which would have been funny, but I don't think it was really integrated into the culture in 1997. Maybe that was just on the east coast though. Nevertheless, the show has potential, and I'll watch a few more episodes to be sure that it is good and not some piece of junk. The acting and storylines aren't that endearing or spectacular, so I'm not going to be surprised if this show winds up sucking.

Like in Heroes, the problem with time traveling generally is that if you change one thing, it theoretically would change a lot more than one thing. The Star Trek Next Generation episode Tapestry exemplifies my point. Nonetheless, our time traveling reporter doesn't do too much changing of his own life though (yet) or uses his knowledge of the future for his own financial gain (yet), and I suppose that as long as they try and avoid making the show all about that or trying to trade his wife for his ex-time traveling girlfriend, I can suspend disbelief long enough to say that the show is pretty alright, and worth watching at least once, if not more than once. I'll even keep my mouth shut about the fact that they are "borrowing" ideas and general themes from other old shows like Quantum Leap or Early Edition. So, the bottom line is, I'm going to give it the six-episode run. It's too bad I can't go back in time like this reporter guy in case this show turns out to suck.

A final word on Amazon's Unbox video program: It's no iTunes video. While you can watch video before it is completed downloading, which is good, there are a few kinks that Amazon still needs to work out. Namely, the video, because it is some sort of streaming video, which has the tendency to be quite choppy. This choppiness, more than anything else, is highly distracting, and I never noticed this when viewing similar shows online through NBCs or other network websites, or even through itunes last year.

I thought the choppiness may have been that I had other programs running, but that was not the case. So, my advice to NBC is to not shoot the iTunes distributing chain in the foot just yet; regarding Amazon, they need to jump this version out of beta if they want to have any success in this particular market segment. Part of Amazon's problem may be because the program itself requires a whopping 200 MB of disk space, and the downloaded videos approach or exceed 5 GB in size. On the other hand, I take full credit and announce that it is with great pleasure that Amazon took me up on my October 2006 suggestion to jump into this market and made this particular episode available. I am still waiting for my check though.

Tags: nbc journeyman review, journeyman pilot review, journeyman love of a lifetime review, amazon unbox video problems, moon bloodgood, kevin mckidd, journeyman characters