1 out of 5

Created by: Alfonso Cuarón and Markus Friedman

Covers 7 episodes of season 1

What’s that you say? …You like your dramas to be completely drama-less?  …You prefer your characters and their dialogue to be drawn directly from stock stereotypes and cliches?  …You love twists that are telegraphed 90 minutes in advance, even though any given episode only runs about 45 minutes?  Well then – ‘Believe’ may be the show for you.  Look: not all television is going to be magic, I appreciate that.  And the show that appeals to everyone is non-existent – there will always be a ‘target audience.’  So let’s allow that it’s clear that I’m not the target audience.  But let’s also allow that I generally try to account for that when watching a show, and thus try to rate / appreciate from that viewpoint as much as possible.  I also generally would like to make it through a season of something before weighing in, but I just can’t do it with ‘Believe.’  I was at least able to suffer through season 1 of ‘Helix’ because it offered a dash of WTF that dragged you back for one… more… week…  But that’s not there with ‘Believe.’  This is essentially a week-to-week show of a little girl using super powers to save people from themselves (or some other, holier, life-affirming phrasing that Cuarón would probably use), and that description sounds watchable, but someone (*cough* J.J. Abrams) decided to dreary it all up with dull colors and sullen music and add a pointless wash of mystery to the proceedings, even though we have all the info we really need, so who cares about Kyle McLachlin’s Orchestra operation that’s training telekinetics for government use?  Oh, are we supposed to, as viewers?  Because you haven’t really given us a reason to, except that they’re the bogeymen, showing up at opportune times to chase our girl and her protectors around in order to smother things with forced momentum.  Johnny Sequoyah as the young Bo is super cute and does the X-Factor Layla Miller thing well, but our scripters write her as consistently as every other aspect of the show, which is to say – not at all.  She’s powerful and strong when saving is needed, weak and childlike when complications are needed.  And the power spectrum is all over the map.  As part of the ‘mystery,’ Bo has some untapped talent, but…  What?  When we see what some of the other telekinetics can do, solving that mystery becomes another shoulder shrug.  ‘Believe’ is a show fueled exclusively by the names behind it.  If it could get over itself and just settle down into excepting that it’s a routine sci-fi-lite-for-princesses show, then the cheeseball writing and pat endings could work as part of the vibe.  Instead, we get overblown theatrics trying to cover up some of the most predictable and uninteresting writing of this season.  Weeee