THE SKED PILOT REPORT: PREMIERING TONIGHT - "Alcatraz"

In this season of paired projects (Grimm and Once Upon A Time, The Playboy Club and Pan Am), it makes sense that we have two series produced by JJ Abrams:  CBS's fall Person Of Interest and FOX's midseason ALCATRAZ.  Of the two, Alcatraz has by far the more potential, but it's a ragged piece of work that'll need quite a bit of improvement before it hits the air.

Alcatraz posits the idea that in 1963, when the Bay Area maximum-security prison was shut down, the inmates were not transferred to other facilities--instead, they vanished off the face of the earth.  The mass disappearance was kept secret by the government, and only now, almost 50 years later, the criminals are beginning to reappear, not having aged a day and on mysterious missions to kill contemporary people for reasons even they don't understand.  Spooky!  And worthy of the co-creator of Lost (Alcatraz is written by Elizabeth Sarnoff, a Lost producer, along with Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, both junior writers on Kyle XY).  So far so good.

Alcatraz loses its grip when it tries to build a series structure around the premise.  For the millionth time, we're back in the storyline where a gritty local detective (Sarah Jones as Rebecca Madsen) starts investigating the murder committed by one of the reemerged convicts, and despite being warned off by mysterious federal agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), she doggedly pursues the crime, until she proves herself instrumental in tracking the killer down and by the end of the pilot, she's been added to the task force.  Naturally there's a quirky expert (Jorge Garcia--hi, Hurley!) and a intense techie (Parminder Nagra), and naturally there are vague hints that Rebecca and her uncle (Robert Forster) may have more connection to what's really going on than they realize.  It's all terribly routine, and the rudimentary dialogue doesn't add anything to the pilot's by-the-numbers plotting, not to mention the problem of balancing between the time spent with our heroes and with the guest star villain, who's part time traveler and part cipher.

The casting is also lacking.  Jones is very pretty, but not exactly ideal as an up-from-the-streets cop, while Neill's done this kind of untrustworthy authority figure countless times, most recently in Happy Town and Daybreakers.  Garcia has earned a giant amount of audience goodwill, but they might as well have called his character (a professor who creates his own Alcatraz-themed comic books) Hurley and be done with it.  Nagra, who was a solid part of the latter-year ER ensemble, gets little to do.  In the pilot, none of them mesh into much of an ensemble, and the direction by Danny Cannon, a CBS procedural veteran, has a minimum of visual panache.