Reunion - On British TV, Please

A prediction. The next great big American TV import to hit British shores will be Reunion, which started yesterday on Fox.

Why? Because Reunion is another high-concept drama series, and we bloody well love those babies.

It all started with 24. At first it sounded like the biggest gimmick in
the world - one episode is an hour in a day; that’s something an idiot
theatre student would come up with. But no, 24 turned out to be
implausibly enjoyable. It was preposterous nonsense, of course. But it
was brilliantly preposterous nonsense.

Then came the mighty juggerhit that is Lost. A bunch of people on an
island filled with polar bears, and each week you see a character’s
back-story in flashback? Let’s face it - it could have gone either way,
but it’s really rather great. And that fat bloke knows more that he’s
letting on, we’re telling you…

And now, trying to make it a hat-trick of brilliant mind-blowing
high-concept dramas, is Reunion. Basically, the premise - thanks to the
Fox website - is this:

"The new show where every episode is another year.
And every year reveals another step in solving the mystery of the
murder between high school friends. The six characters age from 18 to
38 in the course of one television season!"

That’s right. There’s a group of 18-year-old high-school friends, and
by the end of the season, one of them is dead. But we don’t know which
one. And we don’t know who is responsible for it. Every week, we get a
year closer to finding out the truth. Sounds good, right?

Well, uh, probably. We’re being entirely speculative here, but unless
the show has a huge make-up budget, the ageing (or de-aging) of the
characters is going to look pretty bloody crappy.

Also, it’s a lot to ask of young actors to slowly evolve from teenagers
into 38-year-old adults - they’re almost playing a new
character every episode. It worked well in Our Friends In The North,
but then you had Christopher Eccleston and Daniel Craig starring in it,
not some girl from The Chronicles Of Riddick.

American reviews are split right down the middle about Reunion. Media Life magazine has already called the writing "laughably bad," whereas the Detroit Free Press call it "a gilded palace of guilty  pleasures." Who to believe?

It’s not even certain that Reunion will even make it to the last
episode - it’s scheduled against CSI and The Apprentice. Would you
rather watch a man with ridiculous hair bellow into a mobile phone on
top of a skyscraper, or a bunch of kids yakking on about Wang Chung?
Trump’s the winner, every time.

But it’s early days. We’d like for Reunion to do well enough for a
British broadcaster to buy it. It’s got Sunday afternoon written all
over it.

Have you seen Reunion? What did you think? Leave your mini-reviews below.

Read more:

The official Fox Reunion website

[story by Stuart Heritage]