Alcatraz

The latest J.J. Abrams story is about a series of prisoners and guards who vanish from Alcatraz prison in 1963, when the prison closed, and mysteriously wind up in modern-day San Francisco (which looks suspiciously like Vancouver). A team works to try to re-capture the prisoners and solve the mystery.

It's pretty standard Abrams fare. You have the mysterious, secret-keeping, asshole-ish leader character played by the ever-awesome Sam Neil. You have the perky blonde protagonist lady played by the very cute Sarah Jones (who looks more like a cheerleader than a cop, but whatever). Oh and you have Hurley. Oh, he's not Hurley from Lost. He's some kind of Alcatraz-expert who runs a comic shop. Don't ask. It's Hurley. Move on.

The characters are okay. There's a few underlying mysteries and some serious weirdness. I have no idea who the good guys are and I'm fairly confident Sam Neil's character isn't one of them, and that's fine with me. I'll still root for him.

The concept is weird. I think this could do well as a mini-series or movie, but as a syndicated series, this is going to get tired fast. It's too one-shot to sustain itself as things stand.

And as a native of the Bay Area, I'm finding myself very amused to see locations getting called out that look nothing like their real-world counterparts.

Example: in Monday's episode "Kit Nelson", a child-kidnapper strikes in Walnut Creek, California, then goes fishing in Lafayette Recreational Park (presumably at the resevoir there).

For the uninformed, Walnut Creek and Lafayette are a couple of bedroom communities in the greater Bay Area. They aren't even all that close to the Bay itself, so they're really more just inland suburbs.

And they're very dry areas.

So when I'm looking at a rain-rotted house purported to be in Walnut Creek, I have to laugh. When I see mist rising off of what is ostensibly the Lafayette resevoir and some grungy guy selling worms out of a trailer, I remember a community that is so whitebread and clean that they pull people over for busted signal lights and I laugh even more.

I don't think the hills around the Lafayette resevoir are populated by evergreens and they are certainly more dry-gold than green.

Still, I appreciated a shout-out to some of the little-known communities of the greater San Francisco Bay Area. I can't wait to see if Newark or Antioch make an appearance. Would be a hoot to see Novato show up as well. I'll enjoy seeing the parched hills of those communities looking suspiciously well-watered and Canadian.