ABC's new fall series Emergence has all the components necessary to be a big success. Allison Tolman is the flashy award-nominated actor who anchors the series. Donald Faison is the sitcom-star-face that can draw in Scrubs fans. Emergence is also a genre show hoping to cash in on the prestige of massive hits like Stranger Things and Westworld. But, network television has found itself in a weird habit every year of pushing out a promising sci-fi mystery series that never manages to stick. And Emergence might be this year's big swing sci-fi show that never lasts long enough to see its big mystery get solved.
The series follows a police sergeant, Jo Evans (Tolman), who finds a young child at the scene of an accident. The child has no memory of the accident or who she is, so Evans takes her to the hospital where she makes the decision to eventually take the child home. But in the process, Evans discovers that the child has supernatural powers like making the direction of rain change. The little girl is The Mystery™ with her own set of strange abilities, and the pilot makes it clear that the meat of Emergence hinges on this girl's supernatural powers.
While every good sci-fi show has The Mystery™, really good television has always required an additional layer of mystique to thrive in the genre. Think of David Lynch's style in Twin Peaks, or the production value of Stranger Things, or the storytelling risks in Lost. But Emergence and similar network series from years past seem to stumble when it comes to the next layer that sells the show.
For Emergence, that (attempted) element seems to be the substantial time given to Evans' home life where she and her husband (Faison) navigate the complex relationship of co-parenting post-divorce. That family-drama angle is one that networks specifically have been attempting to mesh into sci-fi for years, typically to no avail. Last year, NBC's Manifest dove into the personal ramifications following a plane that lands five years after it supposedly disappeared, throwing everyone's lives into chaos. Before that, 2017 featured a soapier take on the genre in Midnight, Texas on NBC. Resurrection was ABC's strange 2015 attempt featuring a child who returned 30 years after he died. But what all of these series lack is a sense of urgency because while family-dramas are good and sci-fi is good, the tones haven't seemed to work together in a while.
Even when done successfully, the finale of Lost attempted to marry the concepts of touching humanity to science fiction, resulting in a deeply polarizing finale that a lot of fans called a bust. There's a certain cursed-narrative that haunts the crossroads of family drama and sci-fi, and yet at least one network has attempted to make it work across the past decade, with most attempts crashing after a couple seasons.The most successful recent network outing is NBC's Blindspot, which focused more on its crime show (not family drama) nature while letting the mystery simmer in the background.
To be clear, the acting in Emergence is good. Tolman could read the clichéd phonebook, and it would still be interesting. However, sci-fi has always been a base that required an original ingredient, and it should almost always up the stakes of the game. The family dynamic in Emergence asks viewers to invest in a family that doesn't come across as believable, care about a hackneyed Mystery Girl who seems somehow too shy and precocious at the same time, all while ignoring the half-baked mystery that ties it all together.
Zach Dilgard//ABC
But the issue is that the family friendly nature of network television is struggling to compete with the grittier corners of science fiction. It is no longer edgy to steal the memory of a mysterious protagonist, and a vague supernatural mystery isn't enough to quench a true sci-fi fan's thirst. Successful shows who indulge sci-fi clichés like Stranger Things know that those tropes are only there to predicate the series. Without something more, you're cancelled. But the one-to-two season run will be nice enough while it lasts, even if the mystery remains unresolved.
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