I awoke Friday morning to write about this high-concept show I've been eagerly following, looking forward to the two-part season finale, only to read what seemed a nightmare headline. But it was real.
Awake had been cancelled by NBC after one season...
Awake was a little off-beat, maybe even somewhat difficult to engage. But really? Was it? The series started with Detective Michael Britten driving off the road and crashing with his wife and son in the car. He awakens each day to find himself in one of two worlds, each seeming as real as the other. One day, his wife has been killed in the accident and his son has survived. The next night he goes to sleep and, in the morning, awakens to find the reverse has happened — his son had been lost and his wife very much alive.
Every time he awakens he travels back and forth between the two worlds. The question is, which one is the dream and which one is reality?
It was a tantalizing scenario, with Detective Britten (Jason Isaacs) seeing different psychiatrists in each parallel experience. Each of them say the other world is a fabrication of his dreaming life, that it is his subconsciousness trying to cope with the death of his wife. Or, his son.
Viewers were embedded in Britten's world, trying to unravel the mystery while also being led through some very deep, instructive turns about our perception of reality, and the ways humans cope with adversity. Producer Kyle Killen's unusual idea also involved a pretty decent cop story as part of its companion structure.
Killen, you might recall, has a thing for double lives. His ill-fated series,
Lonestar — a story about a con-man leading a double life of bigamy — was pulled from Fox last year after just two episodes.
Lonestar wasn't that bad, and
Awake might have been great. We'll never know. And it's a shame, too, because scripted shows that take risks and go into fresh territory don't come around that often.
The brilliance of the
Awake metaphor was that Detective Britten's two lives aren't all that out of the ordinary, as many of us walk around with alternative stories playing in our own heads. Yes, there's the dreaming life, but there are also the turns untaken because of loss, circumstance and events that cannot be avoided. Those are the lives un-lived, only to be imagined.
And let's not forget daydreams. Each of those untravelled roads has a what-might-have-been script and voice of its own that we habitually visit.
Awake tapped into that internal life, that internal dialog, in a very intimate, provocative way, much in the way that
Vanilla Sky probed it in 2001.
Jason Isaacs (
Brotherhood, the
Harry Potter series) was a brilliant choice for a leading actor. He has an even, meditative voice which was perfect for characterizing the possible dreaming state of both worlds. And it was encouraging, for once, to see a leading actor who does not look like he had been cast from a
GQ ad. He is a bit roughly un-pretty, and his ordinariness was another level of credibility that allowed us to engage the show on its own ground.
The art direction was also beautifully understated, with one of the Britten lives slightly tinted green, the other slightly orange, so we always knew which life we were in.
We may never know which waking life was the authentic one, unless there is a resolution already in the cards for season one -- or if Killen shot additional scenes that provide additional insight into Detective Britten's experience. (Although we may have to wait for extra, or re-edited material in a DVD release to come.) If so, they might give firm enough clues to please those viewers who thought the orange life was the real one, or to those who believed the green life was real.
My sense is that both will be satisfied. There have been so many simple, inventive turns in
Awake's well-written detective stories that it really would not be surprising if the final turn is that Detective Britten has been suspended in some momentary purgatory and has seen branched-lives ahead in a flash (à la
Lost), and has not even survived the accident.
That would not be disappointing, and hopefully, we'll either have that or some other twist that will give some resolution to the story.
First year shows that got cancelled such as
The Playboy Club, The River and
The Firm won't be missed. They were blips — rehashed, middling ideas built more on style, than substance.
But
Awake wasn't one of them.
Maybe, given the annual roll out of derivative shows, the real surprise here is not that
Awake got put to sleep. It might be that it got made at all.
All we can do as an audience is watch when networks get it right and keep tuning in. Until then, I guess it's back to
America's Next Top Model.
That got renewed.
The final two episodes of Awake will air Thursday, May 17 and Thursday, May 24 at 10 p.m. on NBC.