One of the best shows this winter combines vampires, a global pandemic, Desmond from "Lost," a precocious kid, shootouts with government agents, a conspiracy theory, death-row inmates and Mark-Paul Gosselaar's burly arms. Fox's "The Passage" (Monday, 9 EST/PST, ★★★ out of four) is a high-concept sci-fi thriller based on popular novels by Justin Cronin. It has been boiled down to its most essential elements and easily digestible plot points, exactly the right way to mainstream the show for a broadcast audience without making it dull, dumb or disingenuous. What unites the genre-blending elements of "Passage" is a quest by one well-intentioned man, Dr. Jonas Lear (Henry Cusick) to discover the secret to curing all diseases. His search takes him to a remote cave in South America, where a supposedly immortal man lives. As you can imagine, this is not a good idea, and a member of his team, Tim Fanning (Jamie McShane), is attacked and transforms into something the scientists are hesitant to call a vampire, which seems an apt description (they go with "viral" instead). The government team, led by Major Nichole Sykes (Caroline Chikezie) brings Fanning back to the U.S. and begins experimenting with his blood, using death-row inmates as guinea pigs, but unfortunately just creating more vampiresin the process. When the project takes on new urgency after a humanity-threatening flu pandemic, the researchers decide experimenting on a child is the only way forward, for various pseudo-scientific reasons. Their trusty ask-no-questions special agent, Brad Wolgast (Gosselaar), is sent to kidnap a foster child, Amy (Saniyya Sidney), but his conscience intervenes and he tries to help her escape. Cue the shootouts. It's a lot of plot for 43-minute episodes, but creator Liz Heldens ("Friday Night Lights") aptly threads the needle, balancing disparate elements into an action-adventure series with just enough mythology and mystery to keep the audience guessing. As an emotional anchor, Gosselaar's hunky, post-"Saved by the Bell" persona is perfect for a father figure/GI Joe/tortured soul like Brad. He has natural chemistry with the young Sidney, who deftly stays on the right side of the line between cute and cloying. When the series flips to its more mystical elements, it remains strong. Cusick brings bona fides from his time on "Lost" and "The 100," questioning whether they should proceed with their experiments. The vampires are solid villains, with looks, behavior and powers unlike most – no sparkling skin or brooding teens – so they bring new scares, including creepy powers to invade dreams. "Passage" suffers, in small part, from a series of improbabilities that have nothing to do with immortal vampires. Magically healed bullet wounds, lightning-fast travel, ex-wives with far-too-convenient jobs and resources abound in the three episodes made available for review. But those are logical fallacies you accept when the rest of the show is so good. The first three episodes are briskly paced, which provides instant gratification but risks the writers running out of story too soon (the lengthy source material may help). But what makes "Passage" great is the clever way it melds mile-a-minute action with mystery-box mythology. It could be divided into several shows, but it never feels like shows that were poorly stitched together. It's a unified, at times baffling experience wrapped up with a Gosselaar bow. In a season when "Lost" copycat "Manifest" is pulling in ratings, the weirdness of "Passage" just might propel it to victory.<doc-sep>Based on Justin Cronin’s best-selling novel, Fox’s new drama “The Passage” has the raw material of a hit: Richly detailed source material, an appealing star in Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and a compelling hook. The show assays a world in which an attempt to cure diseases by harnessing a dark sort of power results in the rise of a vampiric race. It ought to work: Hubris leading to man’s own destruction is a theme both time-tested and, these days, particularly fresh. And yet “The Passage,” in its first three episodes, is doomed by its unwillingness to commit to its own darkness. Sequences in which the vampires haunt the dreams and minds of their prey are — in apparent concession to Fox’s status as a broadcast network — flaccid and uncompelling. (No one would expect Fox to broadcast sequences as violent as those on FX’s “The Strain” or “American Horror Story,” but those shows at their best exhibit a nightmarish tension that’s missing here.) And the show’s frame, as a story narrated by a child at the center of a nefarious government plot, deadens what could otherwise be a propulsive pace. In a characteristically thudding bit of narration, Saniyya Sidney, a gifted child performer, tells us, “My name is Amy Bellafonte. I didn’t used to believe in monsters. I do now.” Her character exists in order to be ported from place to place by Gosselaar (who’s hired to transport her to a government lab before having a change of heart and going on the lam) and to give us bits of exposition about how the world fell apart. “So many things led to what happened,” she says at one particularly unrevealing moment. “It was a perfect storm.” Much of “The Passage” feels like that line: A placeholder waiting for the sharper, crisper second draft. Sidney and Gosselaar’s bond is charming — and proof that Gosselaar, despite bad luck with recent projects, has become a reliable player on television. But it’s reliant, too, on a dynamic that feels lazily overmotivated. (Can any accidental parental figure on a TV show ever just like kids without a backstory of grief motivating it all?) Fans of Cronin’s novel will surely show up to support this show, but one wonders if their patience will fray if the series doesn’t, soon, find a way to express its interesting ideas that moves beyond narration and underbaked dream sequences — something that feels, even if epic scale is out of the question, a bit more operatic. After all, we’re talking about the end of the world here. “It was a perfect storm” won’t cut it. But compellingly depicting the storm just might. “The Passage.” Fox. Jan. 14. (Three episodes screened for review.) Cast: Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Saniyya Sidney, Jamie McShane, Caroline Chikezie, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Brianne Howey, McKinley Belcher III, Henry Ian Cusick, Vincent Piazza Executive Producers: Liz Heldens, Matt Reeves, Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, Adam Kassan, Jason Ensler<doc-sep>It looks like we’ve moved on from apocalyptic shows about zombies to apocalyptic shows about vampires. At least that’s what we see with The Passage, based on Justin Cronin’s novels about a vampire virus that was supposed to help fight disease. Read on to find out if the vampire apocalypse is more exciting than the zombie apocalypse… THE PASSAGE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? Opening Shot: A girl is being driven in a car, and as we see a closeup of her looking around, a voice over says: “My name is Amy Bellafante. I didn’t used to believe in monsters, but I do now.” The Gist: Flashback to Bolivia in 2015. Two scientists, Dr. Jonas Lear (Henry Ian Cusick) and Dr. Ian Fanning (Jamie McShane) venture deep into the rainforest to track down a being who might be the key to making a vaccine that makes people resistant to disease. When they find the creature, it attacks Fanning, but Lear discovers that Fanning has been cured… except for his pesky thirst for blood. Four years later, Lear and the institute he’s set up to test this method of disease resistance is facing pressure: The doctor in charge, Major Nicole Sykes (Caroline Chikezie) wants a vaccine ready to treat a potential avian flu outbreak that’s looking to be a pandemic. But all the subjects who have gotten the vaccine — mostly death row convicts, and Dr. Fanning, have become differing degrees of inert vampire in the years since getting bitten. The solution? Find a child, who has many more neurons as an adult, which means the vampire effects of the virus can be minimized. Agent Brad Wolgast (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) has been brought on by his army buddy Clark Richards (Vincent Piazza) to identify, convince and bring in subjects for the experiment, though Wolgast doesn’t exactly know the entire extent of what’s going on. Richards asks him to find and bring in Amy Bellafante (Saniyya Sidney), a 10-year-old in the foster system whose mom recently died of an overdose. But after Wolgast and his partner find her — she bolts, but the partner drags her down, much to Wolgast’s dismay — he endeavors not to treat her as “cargo,” but as the child she is. He’s particularly sensitive to this, as he had a daughter around Amy’s age that died three years prior. When he gets a sense that Amy will not be treated well at the institute, he bolts with her, and then at some point turns himself in when he realizes he won’t make it to the Canadian border. But when Richards and other DoD agents find him with guns ablaze, he realizes they’re not going to take him alive, and he and Amy go on the run again. Our Take: The Passage feels like a missed opportunity. Based on the novel series by Justin Cronin, the idea that there will be an apocalyptic occurrence stemming from a bungled government experiment that turns people into bloodthirsty vampires is fascinating; it’s kind of like if The Walking Dead made a series about how their zombie apocalypse started and spread. Here’s the problem, though; instead of a thoughtful treatise on government overreach and how people are more dangerous than the vampires, Fox has made a show that feels more like a stiffly-acted procedural that just happens to have a continuing storyline. There’s just things you can’t do on broadcast television, and in a show like The Passage, the lack of blood, the penchant for grabby dialogue that has to be relatively clean vs. what you can do on cable or streaming really makes the show punchless. For instance, showrunner Liz Heldens and her staff has made Dr. Fanning such a caricature, that we’re almost happy that he’s now a vampire. And it feels like everyone is being instructed to read the eye-rolling dialogue with a self-importance to make them all look more campy than convincing. It says something that the young Sidney acts rings around Gosselaar, a 30-odd-year veteran who has done much better work than this. In fact, she does the best job in the pilot, and is the only compelling reason to watch. All the other characters seem interchangeable at this point, which doesn’t bode well when there are so many other options out there. Sex and Skin: Richards is leading an on-the-DL affair with Dr. Sykes, and after sex with her, he dreams that one of the vampires, Shauna Babcock (Brianne Howey) is the one he’s having sex with. As they drive away, Wolgast promises Amy he won’t leave her. “Of everything that happened, this is the part I think of the most. Whatever was coming, we would face it together.” Sleeper Star: Chikezie gives a credible performance as Dr. Sykes, but she’s the best of a mediocre bunch. Most Pilot-y Line: “You get exposed by breakfast, you’re dead by dinner,” says Dr. Sykes about the avian flu that’s about to erupt into a pandemic. Our Call: SKIP IT. The Passage could have been so much better. But it’s just too rough around the edges to encourage viewers to hang around and see if it gets any better. Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere. Watch The Passage on Fox<doc-sep>
This Justin Cronin adaptation is easier to stomach than “The Walking Dead,” and introduces a name you'll remember: Amy Bellafonte. From executive producer Ridley Scott and “Friday Night Lights” writer Liz Heldens, Fox’s vampire thriller “The Passage” lacks edge — and that may give it the edge over other fantasy-horror series. As traditional networks lose viewers and their own library content to streaming sites, shows like “The Passage” demonstrate what broadcast television can offer: Likable characters in a serialized story just engaging enough to retain viewers without the pressure of having to binge every single episode right now. This is apocalypse for the mainstream. Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Justin Cronin, “The Passage” takes a relatable and heartfelt approach with the introduction to an orphaned 10-year-old Amy Bellafonte (relative newcomer Saniyya Sidney, in her first major TV role). An utterly charming, smart, and tough tomboy, she becomes “the most important girl in the world” as the key to the cure for a fast-approaching global pandemic. Of course, the purported star of the series is Mark-Paul Gosselaar, who’s parlayed his “Saved by the Bell” fame to become a competent procedural mainstay. His face provides instant familiarity and trust as Brad Wolgast, a federal agent ordered to bring Amy to the mysterious Project Noah in Colorado. Eventually, his humanity and Amy’s charisma win the day, and the two go rogue, determined to rely only on each other. That doesn’t last long, and Amy falls into the clutches of Project Noah, which presents yet another threat to the world. Its experimental cure obtained from the Bolivian Highlands has some major side effects that mimic vampirism, and its test subjects aren’t content to stay inside the facility. It’s just a matter of time before all is chaos, but just how much chaos remains to be seen. FOX Cronin’s “The Passage” trilogy has been compared to Stephen King’s “The Stand,” about the near-extinction of humanity after a virulent pandemic. Similarly, Cronin’s epic spans decades and boasts an astronomical body count. Fox’s adaptation is still in pre-apocalypse mode early on, but has made enough changes to characters and plot that it’s unclear if the series will match the scale of its source material. However, the show introduces a slew of characters, giving a hint of the scope to come. “Lost” veteran Henry Ian Cusick shows promise as the troubled Dr. Jonas Lear, who could prove to be a knowledgeable ally, as does Emanuelle Chriqui as Wolgast’s ex-wife Dr. Lila Kyle. They’re joined by Caroline Chikezie, Vincent Piazza, Brianne Howey, and McKinley Belcher III. The standouts, however, are Jamie McShane, who brings a gleeful menace as Patient Zero, aka the head vampire, and Kecia Lewis as a no-nonsense hermit with a religious and military past. In the first three episodes of “The Passage” given to critics for review, the series doesn’t quite reach “The Walking Dead” levels of world-building and horror. That works in its favor: unrelieved grimness and gore porn seems passe as viewers shift towards a desire towards “hope punk,” a storytelling trend that crosses warfare with optimism. Marshaling that hope is Amy. In Cronin’s novel, Amy is depicted as white, but she’s cast with a black actress and that’s no accident. The friendship and bond between Amy and Wolgast is natural, and in today’s political climate, it’s aspirational, especially when he reiterates that her life is important — and not just because of the pandemic. Amy Bellafonte is important, period. Steve Dietl/FOX Gosselaar’s top billing notwithstanding, Sidney is the star. Cronin wrote the novel in response to his daughter asking for a story about a “girl who saves the world.” The Fox series reinforces this idea by having Amy read “A Wrinkle in Time,” in which protagonist Meg is the one who saves her father. It helps that Fox found Sidney, who commands every scene and every line — which is written with vibrant authenticity — in a natural way. She also states her opinions and isn’t afraid to be proactive under duress. No wonder Wolgast becomes inspired to do what’s right. Together, the chemistry is a delight, especially when they banter about unicorns. For horror fans, there are plenty of heartaches, blood, and scares. The creature makeup for the infected subjects is particularly eerie in how it depicts the infection’s vascular and biological effects. These are not sparkly, sexy vampires.