Dead end shows

Here are some great ideas for TV shows.

* A middle-aged mother, once married to a CIA agent, learns that her son has been kidnapped in Rome and she sets out to find him.

* A young woman changes her name and assimilates herself into an upscale social circle in order to destroy the older woman who connived to put her father in jail, where he died.

* A family travels deep into the Amazon jungle with a camera crew to find their missing paterfamilias. Call it “Heart of Darkness,” with videotape.

* After getting into a car accident with his family, a cop lives in a dual-reality — one in which his wife lives and son dies and vice versa — and has to pick one.

* In 1963, both prisoners and guards disappeared from prison and have reappeared in present-day San Francisco. They are being tracked by a government agency.

These are the plots of five dramas that premiered this season, “Missing,” “Revenge” and “The River,” all on ABC, “Awake” on NBC and “Alcatraz” on Fox.

Each series seems to be founded on a shaky premise. If the mother finds her missing son, if the vengeful ingenue ruins her female nemesis, if the family runs smack into dad, if the man figures out which reality is the actual one the show’s over, there’s no more show, right?

“You kind of get that feeling with a lot of pilots you see or read. You think, ‘That’s great, but where does it go?’ ” says Gregory Poirier, creator of ABC’s “Missing.”

It’s a question that several series, including “Missing,” are trying to address this year.

Each series sends its stars on a specific quest. You wonder how long the process is going to drag on. Is “Alcatraz” really going to spend years tracking down dead convicts causing contemporary mayhem?

In the glory days of television, when there were only three networks and shows typically aired 39 episodes — compared to today’s 22 — ABC could run “The Fugitive,” about the quest of escaped prisoner Richard Kimble (David Janssen) to find the one-armed man who killed his wife and thereby clear his name, for five years and pull huge ratings.

Not so today. With “The River,” “Alcatraz” and “Awake” facing cancellation and renewals still pending on “Revenge” and “Missing,” taking the audience’s attention for granted is a dangerous thing.

Just ask fans of “The Killing,” who had a collective freakout when Rosie’s murderer wasn’t revealed in Season 1. The ratings for the Season 2 premiere suffered a 20 percent drop and network executives have gone on the record saying the case will be solved this season. Let’s see if there’s anyone left watching.

For every series that has handled a problem plot — “The Fugitive,” “24” come to mind — there’s been an equal number of shows (“Kidnapped,” “Life on Mars”) that died trying.

Succeeding with a potential “one-note wonder” plot “is a challenge,” says Marc Berman, editor-in-chief of the Web site TV Media Insights.

“There are writers out there that can always come up with something, because the networks aren’t going to give up something that’s getting an audience,” he says. “Writers can always come up with an angle. It doesn’t mean that the show’s going to be successful in its second season.”

It’s telling when Poirier says that the “I’m a mother looking for my son” concept — so convincingly stated by Ashley Judd in “Missing” previews — is “a very strong first-season idea, but I’ve always thought of [the premise] as a first season idea and not an endgame.”

One tactic “Missing” has devised to circumvent its own problematic plot is to actually be “two shows at once,” says Poirier. “We’re an action-adventure show, but we’re also a show about a family.

“We don’t feel like we’re trapped, that every season has to be about this woman looking for her son. We have other options if we’re lucky enough to need them,” Poirier says. The show can explore “the things that have brought them to this point and [leaves room for] a lot of potential story lines down the road, even if Becca were to find her son.

That, of course, does not mean that by Season 12, they’ll resort to Becca saying, “ ‘Where did I put my keys?’ We have more intelligent ideas in mind than just that,” he adds.

While “Missing” sees its premise as a jumping-off point, “Revenge” takes the opposite tack — opening up the possibility for comeuppance to all the characters on the show.

Series creator Mike Kelley made sure Emily wasn’t the only one with an ax to grind — even if the prospect of her revenge initially hooked fans.

“We made sure we populated the world with enough interesting characters that you get caught up in their stories as well,” Kelley says, noting that their agendas and private lives are fair game.

At the same time, he says, “We made sure we had a lot of places to go so that we didn’t get trapped.”

That means “Revenge” can truly live up to its name. There can be the close-ended “take down” of the week or an episode that delves into Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) and David Clarke’s (James Tupper) history, before she was involved in branding him as a terrorist.

“We’re trying to make sure the show lives in a bunch of different places — in flashback, soapy drama, the individual take-downs — that we feel like we’ve got a lot of fertile ground that will sustain the show into the future, interminably so.”

Kelley says he knows exactly how he wants the series to end and ideally how many seasons it’ll take to get there, although he won’t reveal that number in case ABC has a different number in mind. (No matter what, you’ll learn if Emily succeeds in her revenge efforts or dies trying.)

“We have so many places to go we can extend [the story] or pull it back, depending on the public’s interest in the stories we’re telling,” Kelley says.

“Before I embarked on this journey,” he says, “I wanted to know that I could extend the life of ‘Revenge’ to be a satisfying series and if I didn’t think I could do that, I wouldn’t have taken on the series.”