Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on March 6, 2015

Dig has lofty goalsit wants to be about faith, invoking a 2,000-year-old prophecy while setting some of its story in one of the most religiously historic regions in the world. And thats no surprise, considering the show comes from the executive producers of Homeland, a show that has had similarly high aspirations about the worlds political state, and Heroes, which aimed (aims?)to tell an interweaving worldwide story of several different characters.

Digs DNA is apparent in its premiere, but unfortunately it comes saddled with the weakness of both its predecessors rather than their strengths.

Separated into three stories, Digs pilot focuses primarily on Peter Connelly (played by Jason Isaacs, who was used to much better effect in another TV pilot, Awake), an FBI agent coping with the loss of his daughter by working abroad in Jerusalem. He sleeps (with clothes on) with his boss (Anne Heche) at the U.S. consulateand buries himself in his work to avoid properly grieving. Hes a faithless man, but when he meets a woman, Emma (Alison Sudol), who looks suspiciously like his daughter (making their scene kissing and skinny-dipping in a pool all the more creepy), his worldview begins to, if not shift, at least become more open to the possibility of other forces at work.

Especially when that woman, a young archeology student who shows him the tunnels beneath Jerusalem where shes searching for the Ark of the Covenant (fear not, Indiana Jones is name checked), shows up dead. His boss refuses to let him investigate, but he does the next best thinglies to the local police to jump on the case and begin assisting with transporting the criminal in another case back to America.

While Peter is on the case, Dig also focuses on two other plots that take a bit more of a backseata young boy named Josh trapped in some religious cult in the American southwest, and a young Hasidic Jewish man taking care of a fabled red heifer in Norway.

Both of these subplots bring out the worst in Dig, when everything becomes about plot setup and not about making sure there are interesting characters to drive those plots. Its one thing to want your show to be mysterious, to have hooks that keep viewers coming back for more. But without a Jack Shephard, Hiro Nakamura, or Carrie Mathison to make these plots feel substantial, all thats left are a few vaguely intriguing mysteries, the answers to which would be just as thrilling to read about after the fact as they would be to watch.

Thats not to say these threads of producers Tim Kring and Gideon Raffs story dont have some worthwhile elementsthe cult that appears to have clones and the red heifers actual biblical significance are curious enough that Im considering checking in later in the season to see how these stories progress. But theres very little to them so far, and what is there feels both slight and needlessly opaque.

So the brunt of the work in Digs extended pilot falls to Isaacs, who has proven he can portray a work-focused but familially troubled man (Have I mentioned how good he is in Awake?). He does what he can even when the material fails him, and his charming-yet-antagonistic relationship with local policeman Golan (Ori Pfeffer) is the shows one upbeat and truly entertaining aspectin an otherwise stonefaced hour.

Peters plot is also where the show introduces its most fascinatingand ridiculousmysteries, including a breastplate belonging to the High Priest of Israel that would allow him to communicate with God, some ancient gems missing from the plate, and Hasidic underground ritualistic animal sacrifices.

And while the other two plots feel underdeveloped, some obvious seeds have already been planted for connecting them to Peters plightthe gemstones missing from the breastplate look much like the ones Josh was coloring in his book, and the heifer in Norway will likely play a role in some future sacrifice. It can often feelforced in the same way that Krings Heroes felt like it bent over backward, sideways, and began to somersault to ensure plots remained interconnected. But anchored by Isaacs performance, it all has enough promise and biblical heft to incite some curiosity.

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'Dig' premiere react: Faith in its characters?

Category: Hasidic
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