Eliza Dushku

Tru Calling: Season One

Someday, shows like this won’t get canned.

December 03, 2004 - Years ago, an ex-girlfriend dragged me into the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, which featured the lovely Eliza Dushku as a slayer who’d taken the path of evil. She kinda disappeared, though, and started a movie career that couldn’t develop much steam.

It was too bad, because she was talented, poised, and very likeable. Thankfully, she managed to grab the lead role in Tru Calling, where she plays a med student interning in a morgue. Oh, and dead people talk to her.

Yeah, there’s a strong The Sixth Sense vibe here, with a side of Early Edition, and Quantum Leap for dessert. But the show will surprise you in a few ways. The set is also packed with some nice extras, featuring bunches of deleted scenes, a few featurettes, a music video of the title theme, and of course commentary tracks with the executive producer, Dushku and Shawn Reaves, who plays Tru’s brother Harrison.

For those of you who never picked up on the show, here’s the rundown: a body comes into the morgue, opens its eyes at one point, says something along the lines of "Help me," and Tru Davies rewinds right there to the previous day. She works the night shift, so the whole day gets rewound, and it’s her job to pick up the clues and prevent the victim’s death.

I won’t say that the show is particularly innovative. In addition to drawing liberally from the above inspirations, it combines the classic WB-style teen drama, only a little more mature, since Tru is post-college at 23 years old. But I am grateful that I don’t have to slog through episode after episode of the same formula.

You see, there are a couple things going on here. One, Tru’s family plays a large part of the show, and they have their own story arcs and problems through the span of the season. Harrison is an unstable gambler who’s protective of his older sister; their sister Meredith (Jessica Collins) is a coke-snorting executive; their father (the wonderfully subtle Cotter Smith) is distant and constantly disappointed by the children, who were all deeply affected by their mother’s murder ten years ago, which Tru witnessed while hiding in the closet. The show isn’t afraid to touch on fragile issues, like drug abuse, suicide, adultery, terminal illness, and of course, murder. And it’s not afraid to actually have subplots and to tell a story over the course of a season in easily syndicated nuggets.

Two, the "setup" doesn’t come within the first five to ten minutes. Take CSI, for example. You know what the problem is before you’ve even gotten comfortable on the sofa. The show hooks you in just enough at that point to get through the opening credits and commercial, then we’re on again.

 Fox Home Entertainment How could you not want to watch this every week?

In Tru Calling, however, you can go fifteen to twenty minutes before Tru gets rewound to the previous day. You see, part of the appeal is showing how Tru deals with the problems the rewind has uncovered for her. She or someone else makes a mistake, the day rewinds, and she gets to fix little things that she remembers got screwed up before. So we go through after the rewind and chuckle to ourselves as Tru helps someone out without them being aware of what’s going on.

Unfortunately, by the time the rewind shocker finally swings around, it seems that most people have flipped the channel. Tru Calling is not being renewed for a second season, the producers have already reportedly moved onto other projects, and the sets have been dismantled. Six episodes were filmed for the following season, but it doesn’t sound like they’re ever going to see the light of day.

The cast was uniformly excellent, the season arc was compelling, the plot twists were great, and the overall substance of the show was quite rewarding in the face of all the dreck out there in TV Land. I do have to take points off for the size of Tru’s cavernous Boston apartment, though. (The show was shot in Vancouver, but I’ve never been to Boston, so it worked for me).

I think if the show had been smarter about pulling in the viewer hard and fast, it would have taken off. You may think that dead people talking to somebody is a little beyond your suspension of disbelief, but it’s handled well, and the supernatural elements remain tastefully restrained all the way to the finale.

Score: 9 out of 10

The Video

The way the cinematographer works with light and shadow is something that takes several episodes to set in, and the DVD transfer does an excellent job of preserving this softly moody artistic direction. The camera also loves Eliza Dushku and makes the most of her looks without exploiting them. The set comes in widescreen, with small black bars on the bottom and top of a standard TV screen. I didn’t notice any artifacts or other glitches.

Score: 9 out of 10
 Fox Home Entertainment What’s going on in the background?

The Audio

Sadly, Tru Calling doesn’t get the 5.1 treatment, but Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround is in full effect, and the mix is solid throughout.

Score: 7 out of 10

The Extras

To be honest, the overwhelming majority of the deleted scenes are brief, usually no more than thirty seconds or so, and the commentary can be boiled down to the scene not being necessary to the narrative. However, the most powerful episode of the season, Daddy’s Girl, gets five extensive scenes featuring a subplot that was completely omitted from the final cut, and they really add to the texture of both the episode and the characters. Fans of the show should get some satisfying insights.

The featurettes are generally uneven and probably could have been rolled into one segment without losing much of the actual content. It’s great to hear the cast and crew talk about their involvement, but I felt there was some significant overlap in what they had to say. It’s also a bit sad to hear them talking about the next season and what they have up their sleeves.

About half of the episodes feature commentary, and about three-fourths have some deleted scenes to sift through.

Score: 8 out of 10