TV Review: Second Chance

There are no new ideas.  Okay, there are a few, but in the entertainment industry they are few and far between.  I loved season one of Mr. Robot, but its philosophical connection to Fight Club (not to mention plot similarities) was obvious from the first episode.  It’s a great show, but it’s not completely new.  There is an old saying among writers that there are only 7 plots; if so, imagine how much recycling goes on when who divide 7 plots into 400 scripted television series.

Fox premiered a new show on Wednesday with the bland, boring name Second Chance.  The plot is largely recycled from a previous show on CBS in 1999 called Now and Again.  Both deal with an experiment that essentially puts the brain of an old, out of shape man into a young, healthy, exceptionally strong body.  Only the details are different.

Second Chance was initially called The Frankenstein Code, then Lookinglass, until the suits at Fox settled on Second Chance (which sounds like a sitcom remake of Green Acres).  Phillip Baker Hall plays Ray Pritchard, the 75-year-old father of an FBI agent (Tim DeKay, basically reprising his role from White Collar) who is murdered to cover up a break-in at his son’s home by a gang of jewel thieves.  Because he has a 1-in-10 million marker in his DNA, his body is appropriated by the male half of a pair of brother-and-sister twins who own Lookinglass, a $10 billion social media website, who then puts him in a tank and does something that makes him young and incredibly strong.  The reason, it turns out, is that his twin sister is dying of cancer, and this experimental treatment is the only possibility of saving her life.

Nothing about the pilot is terribly plausible (the science behind Pritchard's transformation is one of the least implausible points).  Pritchard takes very little time to adapt to his new body, even though I would imagine that a 75-year-old man would find being young and incredibly strong disorienting.  The twins, supposedly Indian or Pakistani, have the bland names of Otto and Mary Goodwin.  Otto is supposedly some freakish genius, but all the pilot manages is slightly odd.  Mary’s illness is apparently related to Ali McGraw disease, that rare illness named after the actress from the movie Love Story that causes young women to become more beautiful as the disease progresses.  The plot deals with a vicious gang of jewel thieves who escape for over a year because they are paying off higher ups in the FBI, which doesn’t strike me as a plausible jewel thief MO.

I’ve said before one shouldn’t read too much into pilot episodes.  Sometimes pilots are brilliant but the creator has nowhere to go; other times pilots are rushed into production and it takes time to flesh out the characters and find the right plot points.  The creator of Second Chance is Rand Ravich, who created the series Life that I enjoyed quite a bit.  Based on that pedigree I am willing to give the show a few more episodes to find its footing, but the pilot does not look terribly promising.