BWW Recap: FOREVER Breaks the Surface in Series Premiere

Immortality cannot be an easy thing. All your friends and loved ones are going to die and leave you. The droning on of eternity becomes pure drudgery. You will survive to see mullets and leisure suits back in style. Such is the fate of Dr. Henry Morgan, New York City Coroner.

Henry's immortality is established in a very nice opening sequence, in which he meets a pretty blond on a Manhattan subway in a very unlikely transit. I've been on subways and I have never had the room or comfort to chat up an attractive stranger; usually, I find myself crammed between two surly people whose deodorants have long since given up. But I digress. Henry impresses the blond with his remarkable powers of observation and they are on the verge of making a date for him to see her perform with the symphony before the train is ripped to pieces by its crashing off the rails. In the subsequent wreck, the blond is dead and Henry is impaled by a metal bar. He has a moment to reach for his pocket watch before...

He finds himself surfacing in the East River, alive, naked, and with an audience. Henry's immortality also has an embarrassing side, it seems.

This event is the catalyst that launches an intriguing, frustrating, sometimes downright annoying episode. The police investigation of the train wreck introduces Det. Jo Martinez. She's a sharp, hardworking cop with a bleak secret of her own. And she's on the case of what happened in the train wreck. Her job drags her into the life of Henry Morgan, since he is the coroner on the case. And he's a bit uncanny. He looks on the dead body of the train's engineer and he knows more than he should. And his office is filled with Eighteenth Century antiques. And he was on the train but seems unscathed. And he failed to mention his presence on the train to her! And he becomes her first suspect.

There's a good deal going for this show. First, it features Ioan Gruffudd, who does charming, low key and witty very well. Alana de la Garza plays Jo and she has a neat Sela Ward-like vibe happening. Together, they have great chemistry, which is interesting, since there may not be a coupling in the future between the two. Both have lost loves in their past, to whom they are respectively devoted. We may get a chance to see a real friendship between male and female partners. That would be a refreshing change from the usual endless waiting for the two stars to admit their mutual attraction.

Further on the good side, it features wonderful New York settings and the always reliable Judd Hirsch as Henry's friend and confidante, Abe, whose poignant origins are revealed in the episode.

Somewhat troubling is the tone, which is rather tongue in cheek. It feels weirdly flippant at times, since the show is much occupied with death in general and autopsy in particular. Henry finds some perverse humor in his numerous and gruesome deaths, as does Abe, who suggests they celebrate the crash, since Henry's never died in a train wreck before. Granted, that tone may be a refreshing respite from the grim and black-humored, which is the predominating theme of a majority of supernatural television. If FOREVER can make the light handedness in the midst of the dark work, wonderful! But, to do so, the show runner is going to have come up with some improved dialogue. Lines of the nature of "I'd rather have blunt instrument shoved into my spleen and, believe me, that's speaking from experience" is not going to maintain audience good will for long.

Also perplexing is Henry's character. He's smart, sure, and experienced, but the show tries to frame his "idiosyncracity" as some sort of superpower. He needs to find out how a person dies, he replicates the victim's death and kills himself. To save the day, he kills himself. He died three times in the pilot episode. That's going to be hard to sustain. Death is not an interesting superpower in itself. And it raises pesky questions, like what happened to his clothes?

However, this show is worth several views. The pilot episode establishes the presence of a mystery man, who exists only as a voice on the phone, and who knows more about Henry and his situation than anyone should. He is the suspect in the train wreck at first, but other information comes out. If the pattern holds, this show may be provide a balance between an on-going mystery and the case of the week. There are also wonderful flashback episodes, set in colonial times, World War I and the 1940's to name a few in this premiere episode, which provide color and interest. There's much to be discovered about both Henry's and Jo's pasts. I, for one, am curious to see what the next turn will be.

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