Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Debris’ On NBC, Where British And American Agents Chase Down Debris From An Alien Spacecraft

Conspiracy thrillers involving aliens, governmental agencies and evil bad guys are a crapshoot. Even the standard-bearer of this genre, The X-Files, couldn’t maintain interest in its conspiracy through its entire original run, and especially during its revival a few years ago. So every new series that delves into such a story is something we have to enter into carefully. Debris is a new series that involves alien debris sprinkled throughout the Western Hemisphere, investigated by a joint British-American team. Read on for more.

DEBRIS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of Manhattan. A man enters a hotel and waits in a room. When there’s a knock on the door, he opens it up and says, “you’re early.”

The Gist: The man is there to sell a weapon of sorts to Anson Ash (Scroobius Pip), who illegally deals with these sorts of things. He also has an intriguing piece of metal in a plastic bag that he offers to Ash, as well. That’s when SUVs pull up and CIA agent Bryan Beneventi (Jonathan Tucker) and MI6 agent Finola Jones (Riann Steele) come out.

As the man runs, he hastily puts the bag in the drawer of a hallway table. During the chase, he jumps to his death and Ash gets away. We see a housekeeper find the bag, with the metal shard falling out. When she touches it, she somehow phases through the floor and lands in the ground-floor ballroom, killing her.

Beneventi and Jones know what that shard can do; it’s a piece of debris from an alien spaceship, a crash that was captured on the Hubble telescope. Pieces have been falling all over the Western Hemisphere, and the two of them are on a joint task force to find and study as many of these pieces of debris as possible. Jones is continuing what her late father, who was shown the footage of the crashed spaceship, started. Beneventi is former military and has a different perspective on this debris; while Jones thinks that Earth was chosen to receive this “gift” from the extraterrestrials, and Beneventi wants to make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

When they’re summoned to a field to find a woman’s body levitating off the ground, blood dripping out of one eye. When Beneventi releases the body from the fence she’s stuck in, it leads them to a group of swirling bodies. Further investigation leads them to another floating body, near a large piece of debris. When Jones goes to take a closer look, she starts to see a vision of her recently-deceased mother, as if this debris reads a person’s emotions and manifests them. In this case, a woman grieving over her dead son returned to the debris so many times that the son became real, but needed bodies to feed off of to sustain itself.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The X-Files, but more their conspiracy episodes than case-of-the-week episodes.

Our Take: Debris creator J.H. Wyman isn’t a stranger to slowly-unfolding alien-influenced conspiracy dramas, having been a producer on Fringe and Almost Human. His track record makes us think that we’re going to see something similar from Debris; Beneventi and Jones tracking down a different piece of debris every week and seeing the various mind-blowing affects of the debris, and then in the background there will be the ongoing investigation of just where this ship was coming from and what these aliens wanted from us.

Here’s the problem we found with Debris, though: Things moved so slowly in the first episode that we had a hard time getting invested into the mystery or the two people investigating the debris. There was too much convoluted plot to help us really figure out what the potential or danger of this debris was, and truly see how both Jones and Beneventi are approaching this investigation.

We do know, from calls between Jones and her boss as well as Beneventi and his boss, Craig Maddox (Norbert Leo Butz), that there’s an inherent mistrust between the organizations, but we figure that over time, the reluctant partners will begin to trust each other despite that. But, by the end of the first episode, Maddox is already ordering to keep a massively impactful piece of information from Jones, and it just feels that things will just get more convoluted from there.

There’s also the matter of Ash and his henchmen, who somehow are able to transport themselves out of danger by swallowing some sort of pill. It doesn’t always work, as we see one of his people transport himself right into a highway support column. But it looks like Ash represents the “wrong hands” that Beneventi is afraid will grab the alien technology and cause mass destruction. We’re also not sure who Ash represents, but we know that who he associates with will have a big impact on the story, for the same reasons why Beneventi can’t tell Jones what he knows.

It’s a lot to keep track of, and it feel like Wyman isn’t revealing quite enough in the first episode to get us to care. In spite of our reservations, we do appreciate a network conspiracy thriller that’s not full of clunky lines and have weekly cases that are at least well-thought out instead of perfunctory (hear that, Clarice?). It’s just that we’re not sure that chasing down this debris will be engaging enough for us to keep watching.

Sex and Skin: All business in this first episode.

Parting Shot: After Maddox talks to Beneventi about who was with Ash and his henchmen, he goes to an area where a team of scientists are examining the pieces of debris they’ve assembled to this point.

Sleeper Star: Norbert Leo Butz is too good of an actor just to play an officious boss, so we’re interested to see how he fits into this whole conspiracy going forward.

Most Pilot-y Line: Beneventi gets the daughter of the “patient zero” to try to talk her out of this state, because this manifestation of her dead son has Jones in his control. “Can she hear me?” she asks him. “She has to,” he says. That’s one of the few clunkers in the first episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re marginally recommending Debris because we like Tucker and Steele’s chemistry and there’s potential for the stories of the week to strongly support the greater mystery as the season goes forward. But it could also collapse under its own weight. At this point, we’re just not sure which way it’ll go.

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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Debris On NBC.com