The 4400. A TV show you may not have been aware of. But it was out there! (****4/10)
The 4400 was a series with a lot of promise. It was out there, on TV, but it has now been cancelled. So the only way you’ll get to see it is on DVD, and Season 4, the final season, has just been released, May 6th, by Paramount Home Entertainment. I say it had a lot of promise, because it really was a neat idea. Over the past however many decades, thousands of people have mysteriously vanished. No one was able to connect these disappearances until 4400 of them are returned to Earth at the same time, obviously having been abducted by aliens. Each of these 4400 people has a unique ability of some kind, an ability no other human has. Telekinesis, telepathy, precognition and so forth. But they have no recollection of their disappearance, they are disoriented and the government gets involved.
The government agency is called the National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC) - not exactly a great title for such an organization, is it? But they are the ones who keep an eye on these 4400 people. And at the end of Season One, apparently we learned that the 4400 people were NOT abducted by aliens, but in fact by human beings from the future. And then they were sent back to Earth to help us all avoid some kind of calamity which was to come. But…that calamity never occurred, because the show was cancelled. It was run on the USA network, and produced by CBS Paramount Network Television. The reason for it’s cancellation, apparently, was twofold - the writer’s strike, and budgetary problems. Well, threefold. There were also “lower than expected ratings”. Fans of this show have launched a campaign aimed at the SciFi/USA network to get it back on the air, but it doesn’t look likely.
And the reason for that is twofold. One, this show just came at the wrong time. And two, it just isn’t that good. This is basically a cross between The X-Files and Lost. The X-Files has run it’s course, and well…there already is a “Lost”. And after two seasons, I gave up on Lost completely. I just couldn’t be bothered to watch each episode and work my brain around it. You had to watch every single episode of that show to know what was going on, and yet one episode did not necessarily follow the previous one. So it wasn’t satisfying from one show to the next. And with the 4400, this concept was taken to an extreme. The end was never, in any way, in sight. In season 4, the clues come toward the end of the season, but the rest of the episodes stand almost alone. The NTAC chases down various members of the 4400, or people influenced by them, and then the episode ends. And it seems as though you don’t really need to watch one to understand the others.
So each episode feels like a low-budget episode of the X-Files. Or like an episode of that old show, The Outer Limits. With some kind of greater purpose, maybe. And it just wasn’t good enough to get a big enough audience to keep going. I can understand why there IS a cult following here. Once viewers had immersed themselves in this show, they would of course be desperate to find out how it ends. But I don’t see that there would be much profit to bring it back just for those eleven people. In fact, until this week, I had no idea this program had ever existed. Now that I do, I will likely forget all about it in a week.