Debris Review: Pilot (Season 1 Episode 1)
Debris Season 1 Episode 1, “Pilot,” somehow straddles the line between confidence and insecurity that leaves us feeling cautiously optimistic about the series.
Judging a series solely off of its first episode is always going to be a weird endeavor because it’s hard to get a sense of any show off of just that one hour of television. Things end up getting refined, changed, or tweaked as any series goes along, especially with a procedural case-of-the-week like Debris.
That being said, based on just this one episode, there’s enough here to be encouraged by. With shows as high concept as Debris is, there’s an inclination to fall steadfast onto one side of the line or the other. This isn’t Lost, where you immediately know that you have something special on your hands.
On the other hand, this isn’t something like The Event, where you have the exact opposite impression. No, it’s not completely impressive but it’s also not the disaster that one could easily imagine a show like this being.
It is bold, in certain regards, how the series drops you in cold with little explanation to a lot of the worldbuilding before it gets underway. It doesn’t laboriously go through all of the steps that got us to where we end up at the beginning of this episode and instead explains things as it goes along.
This is a show that is certainly drawing a lot from The X-Files, but also from creator J.H. Wyman’s other series Fringe and Almost Human, and it’s subverting the way shows of that nature get set up, particularly in bringing the partners together.
We’re skipping the reluctance and acceptance stages that we’re used to and just jumping into that Finola (played by Riann Steele) and Bryan (played by Jonathan Tucker) are an established team with an effective chemistry and dynamic.
Those two actors are pretty key to what makes a lot of this episode work. It’s the first thing you have to get right with procedurals of any kind. If the investigators don’t work well together and have some kind of rapport, then the whole show is going to fall apart like a lousy house of cards.
You get almost immediately the kind of dynamic at play here. To borrow some The 100 parlance, Finola is the heart and Bryan is the head and both of those characterizations are clear almost from the getgo. Their investigative styles aren’t as clear yet, at least compared to other shows of its ilk.
There’s nothing as clear as the skeptic and believer archetypes from The X-Files or even Fringe but there’s certainly enough here to give it a good jumping-off point.
The bug to the feature of this show is that while it seems very confident in what it’s doing, at least from a presentational standpoint, it seems to draw a lot of the worldbuilding with a rather broad brush. It alludes to what the debris is and what it might be but it also seems woefully uninterested in exploring that in any substantial way.
Whether or not there are aliens at play, which seems likely, is met with little more than a shrug and that’s a tough thing for a viewer to deal with straight out of the gate. At this stage, it just feels particularly non-specific that doesn’t do the show any favors.
What did you think of this episode of Debris? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Debris airs Mondays at 10/9c on NBC.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.
One thought on “Debris Review: Pilot (Season 1 Episode 1)”
I really enjoyed the pilot. I have one problem with the Ms Steele. Her voice is too quiet. I wish should would speak with more authority.
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