TV-Reviewed

When I saw NBC’s previews for Persons Unknown, I scoffed at the premise. However I just couldn’t help myself. I had to watch and see how it turned out. While I’m glad I didn’t skip the series entirely, I can’t say this series isn’t a particularly memorable one.

For the unfamiliar, Persons Unknown starts out with a young woman named Janet Cooper (Daisy Betts). She’s with her young daughter in the park when the daughter goes missing and Janet is also kidnapped. She wakes up in a hotel room, unaware where she is and has no idea where her daughter is.

Jason Wiles as Joe Tucker

She’s not alone, however. Also in the hotel are other guests. They’re slowly waking up, just like Janet, and freaking out. No one seems to have a clue where they are or why. They immediately begin to bond because they know they’re all in this together. The strangers would eventually be able to leave the hotel, but they couldn’t leave the small 50s-esque town they were in. The only people in the town were the ‘guests’, the hotel manager, the Chinese chefs, and Tom (Reggie Lee).

While Tom would eventually prove he wasn’t the only inside man in the town, it wasn’t clear initially who else was involved. Tom was an interesting fellow. He was very much a company man. He believed in what “the program” was up to, even though that mission was pretty clouded through most of the first season.

The series became problematic for me less than half-way through the season. With this small group of people stuck in a mysterious town, things became a little repetitive. While I realize the constant fighting would probably be realistic for the situation, it got old really fast for me.

A breath of fresh air was introduced when Mark Renbe (Gerald Kyd) and Kat Damatto (Lola Glaudini) became more important to the show. Mark was actually Janet’s husband, but he left her when she told him she was pregnant. A bastard thing to do, I admit, but it is what it is. Mark felt bad about it, but never had the guts to apologize to her for it.

When Mark learned of Janet’s disappearance, he began to look for her and began noticing other people were taken on the same day. Those other people happen to be the others in that weird little town in the middle of nowhere.

I thought Mark and Kat were great together. The love story there was touching. Kat was taken for an adventure of a life time and I give her props for putting up with so much danger. Not many women would do this for their boyfriend, especially when she knows he’s trying to find his estranged wife, of all people.

The end of the season was about as good as could be expected. Persons Unknown was never going to see a second season. The premise sounded too long for a 3-part miniseries or 2-hour movie. I’d say a thirteen episode season was about right.

Kandyse McClure as Erika Taylor

Persons Unknown had several flaws. In addition to the typical plot holes, there were two things that bugged me most about the show. The first involved any scene with Moira Doherty (Tina Holmes) and Graham McNair (Chadwick Boseman) as the only two characters. Moira’s dialogue is delivered way too slowly, even for effect. Every time she had another sappy story to tell, I wanted to hit the fast-forward button on my remote to get through the scene.

The second big issue I had was related to all of the cameras used by “the program”. Are you kidding me?! Apparently the company behind all of this has more money than every other company in the world. The sheer number of cameras they seemed to have deployed would totally freak people out. No numbers were established, but they seemed to have cameras in every room of every house, on every building and lamp post, and even on every rock in the wilderness. The bizarre camera usage was completely absurd, to the point of it became downright silly.

NBC dropped the ball when it came to airing this series. They did a fine job airing most of it, but when it came to the end, they decided not to air one particular episode. They elected to putting it on NBC.com and on their OnDemand service. What sucks about that is I hate streaming low resolution web video and I can’t access OnDemand shows because I use a TiVo.

I won’t lie. Persons Unknown was a decent show about paranoia, determination, and all that, but what I enjoyed most about it was the love story between Mark and Kat. Joe (Jason Wiles) and Janet looked like it may be the obvious one, but it was Kat and Mark’s that worked out in the end. I appreciate we at least got that out of the series.

Rating: 6

Click on the box cover to learn more about Persons Unknown on DVD.