Awake

Pilot: The best pilot episode I’ve seen in the past several months. An excellent concept about coming to terms with the loss of a loved one, and I have no idea about how the future creators intend to develop it, but they should try damn hard because it has massive potential. Jason Isaacs is faultless, balancing on a weirdo/nice guy knife edge in a bit of a different way from usual. Awake might seem rather hard to watch (and why not, let the viewer do some thinking about where we have ended up), but the camera filters help a lot. The detective part of the story works great, occasionally reminiscent of the sensitivity of Heat, mixed with a more realistic crime movie and I hope that they have some good and intricate cases waiting for us. If you’re telling me that the price for being able to see and feel and live with them is my sanity... then I’ll happily pay that price. In the end this was the only season, but maybe that’s good (even though I don’t understand why the highest quality, most ingenious series this year was canceled after just 13 episodes.. the possibilities...) because luckily the first season reached a conclusion. And although a big question mark remains in your mind at the end, that’s a pleasant, even welcome feeling. And all in all Awake is a very refreshing series about details and fine points. Each case to be solved is interesting and the final episodes are a beautiful example of work with such an original motif. And what about the end? If you are interested to know which reality is real, then... let’s just say that isn’t an interesting question. (01/03/2012)

I liked it, but I'm still going to complain. First and foremost about NBC for refusing to produce a second season due to low ratings, thus leaving the series with a premature ending - the re-filmed ending and a bunch of unresolved themes are just not going to satisfy me and it’s going to sting for a long time. Secondly, the creators themselves also deserve some criticism. So what if people like David Slade and Miguel Sapochnik were on set? The first three episodes are identical copies of the same concept, with the "realities" changing to the exact second, whether it's sitting in a psychiatrist's office or solving the cases themselves, but they don't offer anything new. It finally starts to get interesting when Michael Britten - the best part of the series, the excellent Jason Issacs, who finally has a positive role and plays it perfectly - starts digging into a possible conspiracy. The bad thing is that the second half of the series is already airing. I can imagine an alternate reality where this well-crafted series was based on solving a single case, or perhaps two, one in each reality, and if the grand conspiracy is brought to a clever conclusion. This is why I give it 3 ½ stars, which I round down with my bleeding heart. (25/05/2012)