3 out of 5

Created by: Kyle Killen

A great concept and clever first couple episodes quietly gives way to an unused concept and mostly standard police procedural bits.

Detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs), post a car accident with his family in tow, finds himself living two distinct lives, going to sleep in one – in which his wife (Laura Allen) survived the crash but not his son – and waking up in the other – in which the survivor / dead-or are flipped.  The lives are truly separate thereafter: different cases, different police partners, and are indistinguishable from “real” life, with his court-mandated psychologist in each, privy to his perceived duality, telling him that whichever other world is but a dream.  Britten has taken to wearing a particular colored rubber band around his wrist to know which world he’s waking up in, and visually, we go the obvious route of different color filters for each: blue and cold when your son survives (apparently), and yellow and bright when your wife survives.

The clever bit comes from the way the lives coincidentally intertwine, with details from a case in life A assisting with a different case in life B, and vice versa.  Playing with this, and juggling the dream vs. reality debates between the strong cast, make for an intriguing start.

But as you might suspect, there’s only so much you can do with that concept, and indeed, the balance slips from the writers’ grasps soon enough: things diverge in ways that don’t make sense with the show’s internal logic (and don’t feel purposeful enough to be cleverly playing with dream / not dream), and the whole detail crossover biz becomes pretty lazy, just tossing something in there to meet a quota.  And so other distractions are offered: partner squabbles being the foremost one, but some better written family-related business comes up once the show passes its midway hump and accepts that it’s just sort of a police procedural.

To which extent it’s entertaining.  Obviously it’s not very clinical, what with Britten pulling clues out of his other-worldly ass, but the cases themselves are generally interesting, and Isaac’s and crew give us good buddy cop dynamics.

An eye-rolling “conspiracy” attempts to full circle things at the end of our sole season; it’s nice that they found an acceptable way to wrap the concept up, and it’s pretty cool that they give this conclusion three episodes to breathe, but it’s also a feather in the cap of Wasted Potential.  Or, perhaps, improper use of potential, because I have no idea how they expected this high level concept to fuel am ongoing series.