Snap Judgment TV, Part 2: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

So, here it is. The entirely unnecessary TV prequel to the already entirely unnecessary Terminator 3. Like that movie, it has zero involvement from James Cameron; and also like that movie, it's about ten times more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Let's start with the credits. The pilot was written by Josh Friedman (War of the Worlds, The Black Dahlia) and directed by David Nutter (Smallville, Without a Trace, and roughly every other major TV pilot in the last eight years) under the supervision of fellow executive producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna, who founded the legendarily money-hemorrhaging studio Carolco in the 80s and, upon its collapse, held onto their Terminator rights with an Ultimate Fighting Champion-esque vice grip.

The choice of Lena Headey in the title role heralds the advent of a younger, prettier, and more British Sarah Connor than we've seen before. She certainly looks nothing like Linda Hamilton, but then again, neither does Thomas Dekker (the new John Connor) look remotely like an accurate representation of the developmental stage between Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl, so I guess it's safe to say that we're kind of throwing the movies out the window at this point. Which is fine with me, since, as I already said, the show is entirely unnecessary -- and, let's face it, potentially harmful -- to the continuity of the films. Essentially what the creators said here is, screw whatever happens before or after this timeline and let's just make a big-budget show about a bazooka-toting paranoiac mom and her maladjusted kid laying low in suburban America for a few minutes at a time until another killer cyborg blows their house up and they just barely escape; then let's do that again the next week but see if we can get, say, Luke Wilson to do a guest spot.

That's what they appear to be doing, anyway, for the first 15-20 minutes of the show. And then... But soft! What Summer Glau in yonder window breaks! And by "breaks," I mean "turns out to be a good-guy female Terminator masquerading as a high school student." (This, of course, is where that "abandoning all notions of continuity" thing really helps, since you'd think Nick Stahl might have mentioned this little anecdote at some point in Terminator 3 while he was cooped up in the back of a truck with Claire Danes for about a decade with nothing to talk about. But anyway.) So the SummerNator, naturally, kicks all manner of evil cyborg ass and helps our fresh-faced mother and son* escape; and by this point we're comfortably ensconced in the narrative structure employed by all three movies.

Except, wait! In the timeline of the show, it's still the late 90's! That means no iPhones, Priuses, or Fall Out Boy! Whence the product placement opportunities? Whence, goddamit?!

Oh, they've got that taken care of. You think anything is going to get between a big network and its chance to feature the Wii in a prominent scene? Please.

So, unsarcastically, how good is the show, really? It's good. At least for the time being, it's good enough to make me forget that it's telling the same exact story as three movies I've already seen, the last two of which had bigger budgets than an entire season of this show. On the other hand, speaking of entire seasons, I must admit I have a lot of trouble understanding how they're going to drag this out for the promised twelve episodes. Will Sarah turn out to be evil? Will John and the SummerNator attempt to defy the taboo against human-cyborg love? Will any of them find out who killed Laura Palmer? Recycling the usual Bad-Terminator-vs.-Good-Terminator-plus-humans action on a TV budget (even a big one) was a pretty impressive feat -- and yet a small one compared with sustaining a running time equivalent to five more movies. We'll just have to wait and see what the producers have in store for us as (or, well, if) the show goes on. My guess? Violence!

*In this case, mother and son are only fourteen years apart in real life. This is a calculated risk on behalf of the network: on one side of the scale there's the marketing advantage of providing nubile eye candy to both sexes; on the other side, the danger of a verisimilitude-killing offscreen romance.