Skip to content
Dan Owen reviews
Sky One
- Rptd Tuesday 19th Sept, 9pm.
- Starring: Amanda Redman, Andrew McCarthy
From Paul Anderson– director of “Mortal Kombat”, “Event Horizon” and“Soldier” (please keep reading) comes a new supernatural drama fromSky One that rips off“The Sixth Sense” andand “Millennium”… but proves to be a diverting enough series, actually.
Michael, an American architect, travels to London to lend his skills in theupdating of the Arcadia Hotel, and soon finds himself unwittingly involvedin the search for a serial-killer nicknamed “The Ripper”, while having toface his blossoming psyshic ability to “see dead people”.
While the premise is an old chestnut – at least it’s a good premise. Attimes “The Sight” is very formulaic, but never dull, and it showcases plentyofinventive camerawork. Actually, at times Paul Anderson’s foray intotelevision looks like an American TV Movie (even with cringe-makingly badBritish stereotypical dialogue.) Can the phrase “Got the bugger!” reallycause shivers so easily on TV…?
What did impress was the effective lighting and camera trickery -particularly of a neon-lit London at night and during the “vision”sequences. I have no idea who funded the show, but wouldn’t be surprised ifthe idea is to sell this to US networks in the future.
Plot-wise, the first half of “The Sight” leads viewers into aseemingly bizarre set-up, but then quickly reveals that the set-up isactually fairly standard genre fare, and then proceeds to get dragged downwhen the “real” plot kicks in. Kind of like a bad Dean Koontz novel.
It’s at the mid-point juncture (marked when Michael becomes partners withfemale Detective Price) that “The Sight” sinks to become just a glossierversion of “The Bill”, and so loses much of the mystique it quickly attainedto begin with.
However, I certainly didn’t guess who the killer was (but, with hindsight,perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention to the story because the true star ofthe show was the visuals!). It certainly wasn’t the characters that drew youin to the story. Andrew McCarthy‘s psychic Michael was very 2-dimensional (Idon’t we learned a single thing about him except he’s an Americanarchitect!), while Amanda Redman merely did the “middle-aged, aggrieved,fiesty female policewoman” stereotype we’ve seen a million times before.Secondary characters were even more superflous…
But, as I think people expect from shows like this nowadays, it did containa lot of good scenes which always appeared whenever things got a bit too”standard” to kick viewers awake. Of particular note was the excellentsubway train flashback to World War II during the blitz, and the perplexingapocalyptic imagery in the epilogue.
But for all its eye-candy, I’m not sure what “The Sight” has set itself upto be. It’s taken its cue from “The Sixth Sense”, yet the thrust of thestory was never about Michael’s ability to see ghosts, more a plot-device tomake the detective work easier to write. By the end, it also belatedlystarts making elusive statements about Michael’s “role” to play now he’s beenpassed on The Sight, told mostly in voice-over as we watch some stunningimagery of New York after a nuclear disaster…
A triumph of style over substance then. But it’s very early days. If theycan make the characters into PEOPLE, and start weaving some kind of story-arcinto future shows, this could snowball into a hit for Sky. I’ll certainly bewatching next week – if only to work out where the nuclear fallout scenes fitinto all this…
Review copyright © Dan Owen, 2000.E-mail Dan Owen
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.