SERIES PREMIERE: Early on in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy slept with the vampire-with-a-soul Angel, only to have him revert immediately to a monstrous post-coital brute – perhaps the ultimate metaphor for the sexual dynamic feared by a young woman surrendering her virginity to a loved one. In The Innocents, there’s a more fairy-tale supernatural dynamic at work: a young girl, upon reaching her 16^th birthday, suddenly discovers she has unknown, powerful abilities that she must strive to understand and control. The girl is named June, and is played by Sorcha Groundsell – at least most of the time. The rest of the time, she’s played by other people, because June is a shape-shifter, who discovers she has the gift, or the curse, of absorbing the outward appearances of others merely by touching them. This is a familiar trope from The X-Men, and, on TV, currently is dramatized superbly as a subplot on FX’s Legion. On The Innocents, it all plays more like a Young Adult novel: June is in love with young Harry (Percelle Ascott), and the two of them run away together, but from whom, and to where? Based on this just-dropped Season 1, The Innocents doesn’t have its characters acting logically much of the time, but as fantasy genre shows go, it’s at least a bit better than most recent CW attempts. For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.

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