We get a lot of stuff thrown at us in the first episode of The Event. There's a hijacking, a kidnapping, an assassination attempt, a few shootings. We visit a secret Alaskan prison and witness a confrontation between the President and his CIA director. And we watch an airplane vanish from the sky without a trace.
What we don't get, however, is equally important. We don't get a single character whose motivation we understand enough to care about; we don't get any sense of why all of this is happening; and we don't get much reason to hope that things will improve.
The plot -- such as it is -- centers on The Event. We don't know what The Event is, but it apparently happened several years ago, and has led to a group of 100 or so people being held prisoner at the Mount Inostranka prison. When the President discovers this -- he hadn't even known that the place existed -- he is furious, and determined to set these people free.
Someone apparently wants to stop this from happening, which leads to a kidnapping, which leads to an airline pilot being blackmailed into hijacking his own plane (which his would-be son-in-law attempts to stop by hijacking the plane himself) and crashing it into the Presidential retreat in Florida just as the President is about to give a press conference announcing the release of the prisoners who live in the secret Alaskan prison that Jack built.
The pilot is a grand exercise in the use of pronouns without antecedents (in which category I will count the phrase "The Event;" it may not technically be a pronoun, but since we're never told what "The Event" is, it serves the same functional purpose). "He's going to tell them about The Event." "You have to stop him." "They won't let me."
The show also falls into the trap of lazy casting; instead of relying on the actors to actually portray characters, it simply relies on our preconceived notion of the actors instead. If I tell you that the actors in that President vs. CIA director confrontation are Blair Underwood and Zeljko Ivanek, can you guess which one is the noble hero and which one is the amoral sleazebag? I knew you could. The leader of the Inostranka prisoners, Sophia, is played by Laura Innes, and that's all we're supposed to need in order to root for her.
By the end of the show, when Sophia turns to President Martinez -- the two have just watched that hijacked plane simply vanish from the sky -- and says, "Mr. President, I haven't told you everything," I was screaming the obvious response at the TV: "You haven't told us anything." As David Byrne might have said: The Event is talking a lot, but it's not saying anything. I'll give it another week, maybe, to see if any of the characters are given any dimension, but I'm not optimistic.
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