Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Emergence’ On ABC, Where A Police Chief Takes Care Of A Young Girl In Danger (Who Also Happens To Have Special Powers)

Pilot season and upfront season is such a strange anachronism in this TV universe; the whole idea that an expensive pilot can be made and never see the light of day if the network it’s made for doesn’t pick it up to series feels like a big waste of money… but it happens. It happened to Emergence, which NBC commissioned but then dropped right before the upfronts. ABC, who produced it and knows what kind of potential it had, picked it up and immediately put it on its fall schedule. Was it worth saving?

EMERGENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A plane crashes on the coast of Long Island, near the town of Southold. A colorful plume of smoke rises from the beach.

The Gist: When Southold’s police chief, Jo Evans (Allison Tolman), is called to the scene, she sees a downed plane where it looks like there’s no survivors. She sees someone duck behind a dune and finds a young girl (Alexa Skye Swinton) who doesn’t have a scratch on her and doesn’t remember her name. In the hospital, her pediatrician friend Abby (Zabryna Guevara) theorizes that she’s suffered through some sort of trauma, despite not having any visible injuries.

When three men in NTSB uniforms try to push through to question her, threatening to draw guns, Jo gets suspicious. Her thoughts are confirmed when one of her officers, Chris Minetto (Robert Bailey Jr.) calls and says a different group of NTSB officers were on the scene, and they were cleaning it up very quickly. The girl flees and hides in Jo’s police car, where Jo notices the rain dripping sideways. So Jo takes the girl home, where she lives with her daughter Mia (Ashley Aufderheide) and her father, Ed Sawyer (Clancy Brown), a retired firefighter who is recovering from a cancer fight. Mia and Jo give the amnesiac girl a name: Piper.

Jo wonders why the site got cleaned up so fast, and she finds a reporter named Benny Gallagher (Owain Yeoman) snooping around the scene. He has information about what the government may and may not know about the incident. Jo scoffs that he can help her.

But Piper is not out of danger. When she’s home with Ed, she sees something communicating with her via the TV. Two people come to the station claiming to be Piper’s parents, but they bolt under cover of flickering power when Jo gets suspicious. Jo’s calls her ex-husband — and Mia’s dad — Alex (Donald Faison) to get everyone to their cabin and leave his phone at home. But when someone breaks into the cabin, Piper’s fear during the escape triggers every metal object in the basement to start flying around, including the washing machine. And when Piper’s grabbed, the car she’s in gets flipped over for no discernible reason, with Piper again emerging without a scratch.

After that incident, Chris finds a weird key at the site of the car flipping over, which Jo hands to Benny. She decides to keep Piper with her, even if that’s not exactly the legal thing to do.

Our Take: Emergence has a quirky history; it was dropped by NBC at the last second during upfront season, with ABC picking it up as soon as it was available. It makes sense, since ABC Studios produces it. But it’s also a pretty decent show, made better by the presence of Tolman, Faison, Clancy and the rest of the cast.

We know that this show, created by Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas (Law & Order: SVU, Reaper), is going to lean heavily on conspiracy, which is very tough to sustain over multiple 22-episode network seasons. But we also have the feeling that the relationships between all the characters are going to be just as important as anything else. And, because of Tolman, Faison and Clancy, the show should have enough lightness to it to leaven a conspiracy story that will likely threaten to weigh the show down.

For instance, Jo and Alex are newly divorced, and it seems that the only person she can trust with helping her protect this girl is Alex. So, not only is their divorce an amicable one, there’s still a level of love there that will likely be examined later on. Ed’s cancer is obviously going to be a factor, especially after he hears Piper say that his medicine is hurting him rather than helping him. And there’s enough of a level of trust between Jo and Chris that she tells him that she’s not putting Piper in the system, which she says is “very much not legal.” All of these relationships will make Emergence a much richer show that goes beyond just the conspiracy.

And of course, Tolman is just so damned good, with the big emotions and small details of any part she plays, that she could read the Mueller Report into a microphone and we’d watch her.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: Piper is in the bathroom, and she’s blinded by the water running in the sink. She takes a box cutter she had in the pocket of Jo’s jacket, which she wore for the last few days, puts a cut in her neck, and pulls out some sort of marble-sized transmitter, and sends it down the sink.

Sleeper Star: Ashley Aufderheide’s Mia is not just going to be a bystander of a kid; she’ll be there to protect Piper and challenge both her parents as the season goes on. And she seems to be holding her own with pros like Tolman, Faison and Clancy.

Most Pilot-y Line: Only TV nerds like us notice these things, but because the show was created for NBC, the local NBC affiliate’s news was on the TV when it started communicating with Piper. Couldn’t they have been showing some public domain cartoon instead?

Our Call: STREAM IT. Emergence has some sketchy moments, but Tolman’s presence more than makes up for whatever dips there are in the writing.

Your Call:

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream Emergence on ABC.com