Surface

I believe this show has great potential. It's great to finally see a good family show that we can all watch together. NBC has not always been my in my top TV stations...But you now have my full attention! This show reminds me of some the shows that I use to watch when I was a child and now that I am a grandmother...IT'S Great to see the return of good TV. It has great suspense and action and the young man- Carter Jenkins- an Outstanding young actor. Where did you find him? He seems a natural and he seems to fit the show. I look forward to more challenges in the coming shows and agree it's up against some other great shows...But- if given the chance...it will survive. Great Show and Great "New" actor- Carter Jenkins. MLBrinke

I have to admit that the acting and the CG special effects in Surface are both rather weak, but seriously this must be one of the best sci-fi shows at the moment. It's storyline is rather deep going, interesting, the character development is pretty nice, and since episode 1x12 it's got a very nice twist to it. Sure, it has its ridiculous moments as any other show has but after all it's quite captivating and always makes you wait for the next episode. Especially now that it's going towards the season finale things are getting more and more interesting.

Besides current shows like Supernatural with its magnificent cinematography and scary atmosphere or Threshhold which started out very well but ended in me cancelling it because of its ridiculous always-the-same per-episode story lines this show - Surface - must be on par with Stargate Atlantis. Both shows have weak CG and weak acting but in the end they got stuff to it that makes you really wanna see what's happening on next. And that - I say - is good entertainment.

I will review again after the season finale, but at the moment I can clearly recommend this show. Thumbs up!

This is one of the better sci-fi series. It involves character development, a few really tensionate moments and reasonable episode scripts. As one other commentator said here, it looked as if it were a mini series, not a full blown series with filler episodes and low budgets.

The problem with the show, which in short is a Godzilla series, is that it started too big, with incredible monsters, fantastic science, then it all boiled down to local Americans doing stuff. Then, the show ended too soon, since the Olympics were coming and hey! a sci-fi show is a sci-fi show, but half naked athletic people running around aimlessly is much more important. So they only did 15 episodes instead of the expected 22. The audience was small, too, as people didn't really caught it on at 20:00. In the end the suits did it. Trust a marketing plan to destroy anything that looks remotely original and promising.

Conclusion: you have a show with good special effects, stuff like huge monsters killing people or destroying boats, then going into genetic engineering, transforming people, human clones, end of the world, tsunamis. Also, the only fillers are scenes with aggressive rednecks or other annoying people being killed for their stupidity. The down-side is that after 15 episodes that prepare something huge, the show ends. No real ending, no closure, just a bitter taste of cloth in one's mouth, as if you just swallowed a piece of suit.

The 15 episodes of the first, and I wouldn't be surprised only, season of "Surface" worked as involvingly as if it were a mini-series like "Taken." The executive producers, Jonas and Josh Pate, never seemed to be stalling or creating filler but had clear character and story lines and trajectories set from the beginning.

The production values, including of the sea monsters, were very high for a weekly series, so that even if the series is not renewed viewing the DVD as a whole will be very entertaining. An important element in its success was the filming locations in North Carolina which provided more visual variety than we usually see in most series which are routinely filmed on either an L. A. back lot and environs or in the Vancouver area.

While there were tips of the hat to many other sci fi movies and shows of the past (Jay Ferguson's "Rich" certainly seems similarly obsessed as Richard Dreyfuss in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"; the daring duo's extreme adventures under the sea certainly seemed like a tribute to Jules Verne, let alone "The Abyss"; some sort of cryogenics facility seemed a lot like something we'd seen in "Coma;" their nemesis seemed to be borrowed from "The X Files," etc.) but it all came together freshly and with some unexpected twists.

Unusual for sci fi, the female roles were key and interesting. While I at first thought Lake Bell's "Dr. Laura Daughtery" was too young (not to mention impossibly gorgeous in a bathing suit) to be a marine biologist, over the first few episodes her threatened status as a newly minted PhD was dealt with spookily as part of the conspiracy to make her suspicious. Her scientific capabilities were always believable, even if her survival luck was amazing. I remained a little unclear about her personal time line of her life with her son, who she must have had when she was a teenager, and ex-husband (let alone the apparent ex-boyfriend "Jackson" who literally stuck out his neck for her). But her devotion to her son was a sweet recurring theme, even as she kept abandoning him to follow leads and escape henchmen.

Martha Plimpton had a delightful guest starring arc as a quirky, guilt-ridden scientist. And the teen age girls actually had brains and feelings. While the mom was clueless, so was the dad, amidst their extremely upper middle class lifestyle.

The relationships between the brainy females and their guys was always appealing, and their dialog sprightly. "Rich"s practical life skills as a fisherman and insurance agent, and brute physical force, were continually balancing "Laura"s scientific knowledge. I was very impressed that the series kept their relationship as a friendship with loyalty but no exaggerated sexual tension, as he is throughout a devoted family man to the wife and daughters he has had to leave behind on his quest, helping to make this appropriate family entertainment.

Teen Carter Jenkins' "Mile Barnett" was geekily adorable throughout, from his boyish loyalty to an unusual pet and his first crush on a girl who actually appreciates him, to his exploration, and finally embrace, of new found super powers. I particularly liked how the series helped him find his way through his volunteer work at the aquarium, which is shown as not just a commercial show but a serious scientific institution.

The story certainly capitalized on the world's recent experiences with natural disasters to believably surmise how people react, from prejudice to panic. A particularly effective episode incorporated MSNBC news and web coverage into the story line for a cynical commentary on old and new media.

Some of the travel times around the country seemed as unrealistic as in "Alias" as the central duo tracked down clues (and they seemed to get as much sleep as "Jack" in "24").

But the bringing together of the central characters and themes in the finale was convincing and exciting, even as it left open plenty of story lines for a network to capitalize on for a second season. NBC was smart to rerun episodes on the Sci Fi Channel and hopefully that could continue to build up interest in even short term renewal or mini-series conclusion.

There is no denying it. Sci-fi on TV is difficult. There are so many problems that the genre brings with it. Like the need for a good budget, solid writing, decent acting. Perhaps the budget and the script writing is the departments where i feel most attempts have failed. So does "Surface" succeed? Not completely, but more so than most.

The way i see it, a good sci-fi show doesn't really need a lot of CGI to work, nor does it need a ton of money. What it needs is the capacity to create a larger-than-life feeling. The feeling that there is more than meets the eye, something to make me curious and willing to try and figure out how it's going to end. Adding the pieces of the puzzle and sometimes saying "Aha!" is what makes or breaks a show like this one.

"Surface" had a couple of flaws. First of all it's basic premise is not as exciting as it could have been, nor is the revealed story as exciting (or daring) as i hoped in the beginning. Also the TV-feeling is very present much of the time. All the way from the crappy CGI (that ranges from decent to awful) to the rather shifting quality in the acting department. Also it feels sometimes a bit too family-oriented in that it takes the edge of sometimes and becomes almost cutesy. But aside from these flaws it's an enjoyable show. Maybe not as spectacular as some of the other sci-fi shows out there. But it manages to keep me interested the whole season and it offers a couple of nice cliffhangers between shows as well. The ending for me is not that appealing. I don't like shows that end without ending so to speak, leaving the story unresolved. It's especially unfortunate in this case since the show seems to be canceled after the first season (it is as of yet undecided).

HBO is to me the benchmark for quality television. Their series have the best actors, the best production values and above all the most solid writing. This is not HBO-quality, but it's good for what it is. Good enough to want another season without a doubt.