Resurrection

Looking long term, Resurrection may be one typical TV dark secret that takes a while to unravel, and maybe that's good enough for most. But it's cutting enough corners here in the beginning to be worrisome. And if you were lucky enough to see The Returned (or will be streaming it asap), then Resurrection won't be for you.

It’s hard to look at Resurrection and not see all of the nerve that broadcast networks have lost.

The first 20 minutes of Resurrection are terrifically emotional and engrossing. When the focus is on Jacob and his parents, the show is a real heart-tugger. But then it gets into family soap opera territory (what big secrets have family members kept from one another!) and the mystery returns when another dead person is found to be alive.

For a series with an out-there premise, Resurrection feels awfully ordinary.

It is non-terrible, but when there is a vastly better take on the exact same idea, the only excuses for watching this one are a lack of a Netflix subscription (and you can also buy the episodes on Amazon and iTunes) or a violent medical allergy to reading subtitles.

If not for Epps--and Fisher and Smith, who are terrific as two people trying to come to terms with the impossible--I might have preferred this one had stayed buried.

Resurrection starts out well enough.... All too soon, however, the mystery turns into soapy melodrama, and the supernatural is superseded by the clichés of network drama.

While the two shows both contain bereft parents, law enforcement officials with personal agendas, pastors with painful backstories, quiet and sometimes spooky small boys, and newly reanimated criminals, the atmosphere in which Resurrection places them is thinner than Mt. Everest’s. Compared to The Returned, Resurrection’s performances, eeriness, themes, its production values, storylines, and opening credit sequence are all similarly weak.