SERIES PREMIERE: Halle Berry is being billed in many places as coming to TV, but she’s actually returning – two years before she won a Best Actress Oscar in 2002 for Monster’s Ball, she won a Best Actress Emmy for her starring role in HBO’s Introducing Dorothy Dandridge miniseries. (And she began in TV, too, on the 1989 sitcom Living Dolls, but I digress.) Anyway, she stars here as Molly Watts, an astronaut who has just returned from more than a year on a solo mission aboard a space station – only to find that she’s returned pregnant. This 13-episode CBS series premise constitutes a close encounter of the fifth kind – really, I’m not making that up – and includes Steven Spielberg, who directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as an executive producer. Based on the pilot, Extant isn’t so much an upgrade as a retread – but time will tell. Meanwhile, you can read a full review on Ed Bark’s Uncle Barky’s Bytes, or listen today to my review, of this show and of the upcoming FX genre thriller The Strain, on the radio, or website, Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

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