Entertainment

The concepts of fear vary from series to series

06:24 PM CDT on Tuesday, October 11, 2005

By MANUEL MENDOZA / The Dallas Morning News

Surface solved its central mystery almost instantly. And Invasion executive producer Shaun Cassidy says he plans to answer most of the questions raised in his show's pilot within a few episodes. That alone makes two of the new sci-fi shows markedly different from Lost, the hit series that made them possible.

It was only last week – a year-plus into its run – that Lost first laid out a potential explanation (or two) for the strange happenings on the island. "Did they reveal that Invasion is on after them?" Mr. Cassidy jokes. Invasion follows Lost Wednesday nights on ABC.

"Our show came about in the climate of Lost, and I understand people wanting to make analogies," he says. "I actually think our show is more different from Lost than people realize."

He explains that even the names of the shows conjure contrasting images, his perhaps a bit misleading. "Lost is a metaphysical title. If they wanted to be more specific, they would have called it Monster on the Island or Weird Things Going On. Our show is the opposite. It's called Invasion, and people think they're going to see little Martians popping out of spaceships. We're just not doing that show."

But while Invasion may not be metaphysical, it is, like Lost , metaphorical. Mr. Cassidy was interested in the idea of an "aftermath" world in the wake of Sept. 11. The show follows a group of public servants through a devastating hurricane that may also herald the arrival of body-snatching aliens.

"Post-9-11, this country had a lot of different choices it could've made, and it made some very specific ones that some people agreed with and a lot of people didn't," Mr. Cassidy says. "The consequences of those choices remain to be seen, and I'm interested in that. The instability of our time, the instability of community and family, all those things are in the show. But what's also in the show is that I'm hopeful we can pull it together."

Threshold, CBS' sci-fi entry, is less coy about its alien invasion. The spaceship was fully revealed in the first episode, and its effects are immediately apparent: Humans exposed to it die or turn murderous. Night Stalker, another ABC show, may be the least forthcoming, but that's OK – it's not designed for reveals. Its metaphor comes down to fear of the dark, and you can't really see the boogeyman in the closet.

Which leaves Surface, the one new fright-fest free of metaphor. The NBC series doesn't have anything more on its mind than to be big family entertainment. Its main touchstones are the early blockbusters of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

A boy tries to raise an infant version of the sea monster in his playhouse, à la E.T., while the brother of a man killed by the creature is strangely drawn to it in the vein of Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

With the big fish quickly identified as a new mammalian vertebrate, the only mystery is where it came from. Even the government coverup is toothless; the spooks are just looking to prevent a panic.

"There's so few shows that you don't have to send your kids out of the room to watch," says Surface co-creator Jonas Pate. "We have this cult of death on television where so many shows start off with a body of the week that's been eviscerated in some spectacularly gross or newfangled way. Or if it's a sitcom, it's so broad and sexually risqué. We just wanted to make something a little bit more old-fashioned."

Mr. Pate doesn't even like to call Surface science fiction. "We try to tell the stories as realistically as possible. That type of story is my favorite kind – the fantastic into the familiar. If you look at the biggest films of all time," he says, citing Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars, "they tend to fall in that category. But it hasn't really been done on television."

E-mail mmendoza@dallasnews.com