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It’s a critical cliché that people who write about TV and film are frustrated writers who aren’t good enough to write for the real thing so they take delight in tearing the pros apart. The flip side to that is the clichéd critic’s response that it’s easier to write a rave than a pan. Well, I don’t fancy myself a high falutin’ critic or anything, but I can assure you that I far prefer expressing my enthusiasm for a mythology show than I do saying why one fails. Which is why I really didn’t want to write about The Event.

Problem is, in the great chasm left behind when the two great genre shows of the decade, Lost and Battlestar Galactica, ended, only a few of any worth rushed in to take their place. JJ Abrams had his Undercovers, which came and went. There’s also the Heroes replacement No Ordinary Family. We also have the genuinely great The Walking Dead, and finally The Event. So with precious few shows to cover, here I go with one I want to like but just don’t.

Two shows tried to take Lost’s place last year before it even ended, FlashForward and V. The great flaw in them is the same as that plaguing The Event. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mythology, world building, whatever you want to call it, is important. It creates grounding. It makes the story real. It gives nerds something to nitpick. But it’s still just the backdrop to the main attraction, the characters.

Smoke Monsters, vampires, aliens, spies, these are all fun things to have in a show, but the characters are the emotional lightning rod through which we experience the true visceral pleasures of television. Full confession time: I’ve only seen the first two and a half episodes of The Event. I just couldn’t take it any more. I enjoyed the entertaining, if not very unique, premise of aliens living in hiding amongst us, but I just had no interest in the characters.

There’s just so much high emotion one undefined character can express for another undefined character before I tune out. Missing girlfriends, manipulated pilots, suspicious authority figures, and every time they emote some sturm und drang about any of them and I take a step back to dip into my mental filing cabinet to remember just who they’re talking about. Taking a viewer out of the story like that is pretty much the last thing a show runner would want. It leads to channel flipping. An emotional ride through the fascinating mythology is the goal here, which is why good characters are so important.

Compounding the issue is the fractured narrative structure. Now, I know this can be done successfully (Lost anyone?), but there is always the risk of making your story so much of a puzzle it becomes more of a head trip than an emotional one. This is not to disparage challenging the viewer. I encourage that. It’s just that, when there is no emotional core, the cracks in the puzzle become more glaring, leading to that nerd nitpicking I mentioned. When we’re along for the emotional ride, we are more forgiving of plot flaws which, let’s be honest here, even the greatest stories have. So how do you tell a non-linear story without losing the audience’s heart? Yeah, that’s right, strong characters. Which The Event doesn’t have.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been more vague and less detail oriented about this show than I should be. This is because I’ve seen so little of it. Which raises the question, at only 2.5 episodes under my belt, am I really being fair? I’m not the expert on The Event’s mythology that I am on others. Perhaps something develops and I’m missing out on some rich drama. I think that’s a valid argument to make. However, conventional wisdom is that viewers decide in minutes whether or not they’re going to keep with a show. At more than two episodes, I’m way ahead of that curve. And the ratings seem to bear this out, dropping and dropping over its first half a season. Unlike, say, a Chuck, The Event really hasn’t developed much of a loyal fan base to counter that, so it’s probably in trouble.

And why has Chuck developed a fan base? Not to be redundant, but it does have well-developed characters. Well, maybe not Ellie, but you see my point. Okay, I’m done with this. The Event bores me too much to really have much more to say about it. Next time I’ll go with a show I do like. That’ll be a lot more fun.