Nathan Fillion

TV Thrillers Of The Near Future

Hallowe’en may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still ridiculously easy for TV viewers to get their spook on. The 2005-06 TV season is chockablock with otherworldly suspense dramas — apparently taking their inspiration either Medium or Lost, two of last season’s surprise hits — and although you’d think the preponderance of lookalike series would cannibalize each other’s audiences, all five of NBC’s Surface, The WB’s Supernatural, ABC’s Invasion, and CBS’s Threshold and The Ghost Whisperer have won coveted full-season orders. (As for ABC’s The Night Stalker...well, it’s just proof that a scary premise and an X-Files pedigree aren’t enough to pose much challenge to the earthbound gross-outs of a time-slot rival like C.S.I.) Encouraged by the boom in far-fetched plots and ambiguous premises, the networks are prepping even more similarly themed dramas for the future — just check out part of a lineup we’ve retrieved from the 2008-09 season.

Blood River, Wednesdays at 9 on NBC

Civil engineer Dan Brody (Erik Palladino) didn’t think much of it when he fished a dead bat out of at a tank at the water filtration plant for Blood River (a fictional suburb of Seattle). But when town residents start staying up late, turning pale, and listening to Depeche Mode, Dan starts to suspect that bat might have been patient zero in an epidemic of vampirism! Dan comes to realize that the Pacific Northwest, with its many sunless days of rain, is the perfect incubator for a vampire pandemic, and forces the skeptical scientist to seek out the help and advice of an expert, the lovely Elena Markova (Famke Janssen), whose childhood in Transylvania prepared her well for a career as an expert in the occult. Later episodes find the mismatched pair break up a "court" of high-school vamps led by former head cheerleader (Hayden Panettiere); containing, with the help of a local animal-control deputy (Justin Kirk), an infected bat population in a cave on the outskirts of town; and dispatching the parents (Reiko Aylesworth and Josh Randall) of the first full-blooded vampire baby, taking custody of the child to study in a closed environment. The first season draws to a close with Dan and Elena finally consummating their percolating sexual tension, but when Elena nibbles Dan’s neck during foreplay, Dan is filled with doubts: has he spent this year fighting vampires with an immortal double agent?

Haunted Townhouse, Tuesdays at 8 on The WB

With the help of a generous gift from her parents, newlyweds Karen and Scott (Ever Carradine and Archie Kao) are lucky enough to own their first home — a five-year-old townhouse in Augusta, Maine — free and clear. There’s just one problem: they don’t live there alone. Their real estate agent didn’t tell them that despite its relatively new construction, Scott and Karen’s condo has been the site of a tragedy: attractive young nurse Marlee (Joanna Garcia, in flashbacks and voice-over) was killed there exactly one year before the couple moved in, her body dismembered so brutally that even professional crime-scene cleaners weren’t able to recover all of her physical material, some of which remains in unseen cracks of the floor, flecks of blood under the new paint job, and so forth. Because of her extant body parts, and because her killer was never found, Marlee’s spirit continues to haunt her former home, and it puts a crimp on the couple’s attempts at establishing their marital relationship when their dinner parties and lovemaking are constantly being interrupted by canisters falling off countertops, collapsing bed frames, and the shower head getting pointed at the ceiling and turned on full blast. Worst of all, due to the shoddy construction of the pre-fab town house, even the most innocuous of Marlee’s attention-getting tantrums causes significant damage to the thin drywall and cheap flooring. Eventually, Karen and Scott piece together the story of Marlee’s demise and determine that, rather than walk away from their home equity, they must solve Marlee’s murder in the hopes of granting peace to her unquiet soul. Little do they know that her death was tied to a corrupt drug company Marlee was about to expose, run by a CEO (Donald Moffatt) who is prepared to go to any lengths to protect his dirty secrets!

Grey Matters, Thursdays at 9 on ABC

It’s not like hard-boiled veteran beat cop Ted Straum (Tom Berenger) had never seen a junkie before that fateful October night. He’d sure seen them move as slow as that one did — just never straight at him, arms out, muttering something that sounded like "aaaaaaaims," not even altering his pace after shots to the thigh and shoulder and stopping only when Ted’s firecracker of a new partner, Paulina Sanchez (Nadine Velasquez), shot him in the head. The peculiar circumstances surrounding the case lead Ted and Paulina to dig a little deeper, whereupon they discover biologist Craig Roth (Sean Whalen). Roth’s been living under an assumed name, off the grid, fleeing from government operatives who don’t want him to blow the whistle on Project Haiti, which he helped administrate: the Defense Department has been using Death Row inmates to test a toxin that would turn enemy combatants into zombies, with the idea that the troops would cannibalize each other’s brains and thus be easier to defeat in combat as their numbers diminished. The only problem? A test subject escaped and started infecting others in the city of Chicago, where they’re getting mistaken for junkies. But having the answers doesn’t help Ted and Paulina to minimize the outbreak when Craig won’t go on the record and the city’s head of public health (Melora Hardin) thinks Ted is insane. Fortunately, Paulina has connections on the ground, and enlists her brother Jesus (Noel Gugliemi) to mobilize his fellow gang-bangers into a posse of zombie-killing vigilantes as Ted and Paulina work on building a case against the government — and avoid zombification themselves at the hands of crooked Defense Secretary Ronald Bloomfield (Jude Ciccolella).

Father Reilly, Sundays at 10 on CBS

It would be nice to believe that the devil doesn’t walk among us. Unfortunately for Father Steven Reilly (Nathan Fillion), he knows better. Though it may not acknowledge him publicly, the Vatican relies on Reilly to perform one of the Catholic Church’s most mysterious rites: exorcism. Each episode finds Reilly in a new town, addressing a new case of demonic possession, from the soccer mom (Bess Armstrong) who shocks her family by serving them a casserole made of dog fetuses to the grandfather (Powers Boothe) who mows a pentagram into his front lawn and starts performing Satanic rituals. Reilly arrives in the dark of night, performs his rituals in secret, and disappears before he can be discovered by dogged journalist Cynthia DiMarco (Lola Glaudini), who has heard reports of Reilly and is determined to be the one to break the story that exorcisms are still being performed, never mind the expense of tracking him. As Cynthia continues her relentless, Javert-like pursuit of Reilly’s Jean Valjean, Reilly grows cocky, playfully leaving her confounding clues as to his next move. Piecing them together, Cynthia must confront an uncomfortable possibility: has her quarry become...her soulmate?

Unlimited Minutes, Mondays at 9 on UPN

Like most guys his age, Shane Simpson (Bow Wow) is never far from his cellie. But he probably should have guessed that when the mall promotion that made him switch providers seemed too good to be true, it came with a hidden cost: now Shane’s getting calls at all hours of the day and night, in which a mysterious, gravelly voice (Ted Levine) gives him ambiguous hints about crimes that are about to be committed, and he’s honour-bound to do what he can to prevent them. Shane — who has no background in law enforcement, working instead as a waiter in a restaurant owned by his mother (Loretta Devine) — at first thinks he’s getting punk’d by his boys, but realizes after deciphering clues about a jewellery-store robbery, a home invasion, and a carjacking that he’s been conscripted into a fight against the forces of darkness. Who is calling him? Dialling the number that shows up on his caller ID just connects him to the Houston city morgue! But is his anonymous tipster a psychic employee, a body on a slab...or a diabolically clever criminal toying with Shane for his own nefarious purposes? And could it all have something to do with the man Shane’s mother shot in self-defense just before going into labour with Shane?