The Whispers falls neatly in line with every single Under the Dome knockoff in recent memory; an unheard, unseen paranormal force is messing with a group of white people, most of whom are having affairs with one another. Like all of these shows, the central character is a cop with a high libido – in this case, Claire Bennigan, an FBI agent just getting back to work after her husband “died” in a “plane crash” in “Africa” – surrounded by male characters who demean her professional ability because of her “emotions,” those characters in turn offering cardboard Stepford wife personas to fill out their “family” structures. Throw on top a series of weird, entangled mysteries, microwave for a good 10-13 episodes, and out pops the crisply-baked The Whispers, the latest in a line of shows trying to revive the summer miniseries with hackneyed plots and characters.
Inspired by Ray Bradury’s “Zero Hour” short story (though the show oddly gives no credit to this whatsoever), The Whispers was created by Under the Dome producer/writer and Zero Hour creator Soo Hugh – and while there are no Nazi clocks or alien domes here, there’s certainly some elaborate, tangled mystery at the heart of the show. Something is contacting little white children and becoming their imaginary friend, Drill, and then having them do nefarious things: blow up apartments, steal confidential information, get their mother to fall out a tree house… you know, the kind of ominous, obfuscating stuff that screams “This is probably going to disappoint you!” Through its first three episodes, The Whispers hasn’t done that, but it hasn’t really done much to advance its story either, spending way too much time on the two central couples of the show bickering or mourning over the philandering they or their partner did, saddened over just how broken their relationship has gotten.
In a show that features unseen presences talking to children (which puts a lot of onus on these kids to act, which they mostly do a good job with), a tattooed man with amnesia running around, and a weird amount of attention paid to a nuclear facility and some tree created by electricity (fogmite, anyone?), the most ill-fitting feature of the show are these relationships, and how they portray their women. Claire is consistently badgered for ruining two families, for reasons she never vocalizes. the man she cheated with tells his co-worker that what happened between them “was real,” which his own wife (a severely underutilized Kristen Connolly) overhears; you know the drill here, and how these story beats will play out over the course of a season.
And yet, The Whispers is an oddly intriguing little show, if only in curiosity for how its central mystery plays out and how closely it follows the beats of Bradbury’s story. But that central mystery is also ultimately what limits the show; everything plays in service of that, relationships and conflicts between characters only existing to stretch out plot, a device to keep characters separated and not sharing information (or vice versa, when the show wants to throw the audience a bread crumb). It makes the scenes between the show’s evocative, creepy moments flat and lifeless, a series of predictable cliches and character tropes that only detract from the real reason it wants people to watch.
[Photo credit: Kelsey McNeal/ABC]
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