Review: Touch

Last night was the preview/premiere of the new series Touch on Fox.  It stars Kiefer Sutherland as a single father Martin Bohm, raising his 11-year-old autistic son alone ever since his wife was killed in the 9/11 attacks.  His son has not ever spoken a word, and only scribbles numbers and other notes on paper.  Bohm is a blue-collar guy, struggling to make ends meet for him and his son, all the while dealing with the frustration of not being able to communicate with his boy.

Bohm eventually figues out the numbers that his son Jake are writing down aren't just random sequences; he notices the number 318 popping up all over the place - on clocks, school buses, and house addresses.  Bohm doesn't start piecing things together until later on when he realizes the numbers are connected somehow, and Jake is trying to communicate in the only way he knows how. 

Numbers factor in pretty heavily in the episode beyond just the 318.  In Bohm's first adventure, he comes across a former firefighter in the NYFD, who early on buys a lottery ticket.  We see the firefighter's apartment, and he has hundreds of lottery tickets covering all his walls, all showing the same sequence of numbers.  We don't yet understand the significance of the numbers, but they do play into the story by the end of the episode.

Meanwhile, a cell phone in the lost and found area at JFK where Bohm works at manages to find its way to Dublin, Tokyo, and eventually Baghdad.  It's much too convoluted to go into the how and why, but the connections are able to be followed in the episode.  The phone is indirectly connected to the rest of the episode, but it makes for a decent B-plot while Bohm figures out what Jake is trying to tell him.

Touch is the latest project from Tim Kring, who also had created Heroes a few years back.  Heroes was one of those shows that started off with a lot of promise, but fell further and further downhill as the series progressed.  One of the over-arching themes of Heroes was the interconnectivity between all the characters as they bounced around from one place to another, and that same theme comes up here in Touch.  The kind of contrivances needed to make the global storyline of the episode worked, leading to a conclusion that was designed to tug at the viewer's heart strings.

One thing I'm not quite sure about is how far the series can go.  Martin Bohm isn't Jack Bauer, so I highly doubt Bohm will be working on saving the free world from tragedy after tragedy.  However, I don't see the series working on such personal levels every week either.  There's probably a healthy balance somewhere in between the two extremes, and it's also possible that some storylines could carry over week to week. 

In a television scape that's ridiculously oversaturated with lawyer, cop, and doctor procedurals, Touch is a welcome change in tone and style.  If there is a larger mythology to uncover beneath the surface of the show, I'd be curious to see where it goes.