Knocked out the Park - the 2013-14 Telly Hit

Every year in September, we go through the "let's load up the TiVO with 50,000 new telly shows" game, that I intensely dislike, and Luis loves. I have my handful of favourite telly shows; that is all I need to be happy. I am not thrilled when the good ones are yanked off the air - which seems to happen all too frequently without my express approval - and yet they keep the lowest common denominator shows on forever. It irks me to no end.

But every season I end up getting sucked into a show or two, despite my best efforts to dig my heels in and go kicking and screaming into them. This season, the show I was least likely to watch suddenly shifted into high gear and I watched it - all of the first four episodes, with just one more remaining. Is the suspense killing you? Sure it it... but here goes: Almost Human.

Now, I was dead-set against it for two reasons: it had that depressing and weird futuristic feel that far too many shows have these days; and I was constantly confusing this with another depressing and futuristic and much too dark show, Tomorrow People. This is a show to avoid at all costs - it was so dark, no sense of humour and too hard to follow. But this is not what I am here to pass along to you.

Almost Human opens with a police action gone wrong. Keith Urban, a 41-year-old actor who looks too good for this line of work, is an officer named John Kennex who is in charge of a team of men, all of whom are killed. He loses his right leg, but in 2048, this is a minor injury (!). However, the bad guys are out and about en masse and the police force needs him back now.

The premise is that technology has gone amok and the criminal element has gone haywire with its use, which is not so different than now, but it has gotten so out of hand here that all human officers are paired with androids that look human, although it is obvious that they haven't the right "feel" to them; but John is unable to get on well with the MX series. The MX series is clearly not human but looks right, if you can get past the monotone voice, the fact that they all look the same and that they are designated by a number, not a name. So in the first ten minutes of the show, John is paired with 745 (I think), who couldn't keep his mouth shut and John pushed him out the door on the highway in front of an oncoming truck. Goodbye, 745.

John returns to the station to be informed he cannot go solo and he cannot go with another non-human. Rules is rules and you must suck it up and follow them. So he finds the geek guy, Rudy, who works solely on the androids and is told that there are no more MX series androids, so he will be getting the DRN, an old series that has been phased out for being too human (sort of in the same vein as Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the DRN series has a emotion chip or subroutine to give them that human touch). This particular one is named Dorian, a good solid Irish name (not that anyone asked me), on a tall, attractive black gentleman with the most lovely blue-grey-freen eyes I have ever seen. It appears that the gene pool is definitely getting some wonderful hiccups in it - dark skin and hair with light eyes is a stunning combination, and eyes of this nature are hard not to take a good, long look.

Again, this is an old post, so it ends here, and this is it, Unfortunately, this wonderful show was cancelled on 3 March 2014. Pitiful. Another special note: Keith Urban is the gentleman who played Dr. "Bones" Leonard McCoy in the two newest Star Trek films, with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto. I hope we see all of them in more telly and/or film mediums.