September 23, 2006

TV: Six Degrees

Six New Yorkers, strangers to one another as the show opens, find their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. By the end of the first episode, each has met at least one of the others, and it seems likely that they'll continue to be drawn closer together as the series progresses. What draws them together? Well, so far, it seems to be a mildly improbable series of coincidences, but perhaps there will eventually prove to be a Greater Power driving it all.

Carlos (Jay Hernandez) is a public defender who gets a mad crush on Mae (Erika Christensen) after she's arrested for public nudity. Mae is on the run, hiding from someone -- we don't yet know who or why -- and (using a phony name) she takes a job as a nanny for Laura (Hope Davis), a recently widowed mother who's just starting to pick up the pieces and wants to start a career in interior design.

Laura meets Whitney (Bridget Moynahan) at the salon; Whitney's a hard-driving PR executive putting together an ad campaign for a new fragrance. She finds a postcard in the park, and thinks the photographer who took the photo might be just right for the job. He's Steven (Campbell Scott), and he's also picking up the pieces of a shattered life; his problem was drug abuse.

Least connected to the rest of the group so far is limo driver Damien (Dorian Missick), trying to leave his criminal past behind him; his gambling habit makes that difficult, as do the constant pleas for help from his brother, who's still a thug.

The first episode crams in an awful lot of coincidental meetings and near-misses; I would hope that once the basic connections are established, there won't need to be as much of that. The cast is a fine ensemble (I mean, c'mon -- Hope Davis and Campbell Scott doing weekly TV? How fabulous is that?), and there's enough potential in these characters and the ways they might play off one another that I'll keep watching for a few weeks to see what develops.

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