Showtime’s Meadowlands was a bit of surprise for a number of reasons, the first being that it is a British show. This means there are a few bits of lingo that are kind of hard to understand. At one point a character says that she binned something-which means she tossed it, and it sounds like she bent it, which does not make a lot of sense. The name of the British show is Cape Wrath and was shown on Channel 4. I am guessing they changed the name because everyone in America would just assume it was set on an island off the coast of North Carolina.
Imagine that the plane from LOST was a prison ship and instead of a tropical paradise it crashes on Wisteria Lane.
Our heroes are a family of four that arrive in the Meadowlands community blindfolded and without any idea what to expect. “A new house, a new life for all of us.” Showtime is trying, and they had realy cool sci-fi shows before, like The Outer Limits and Dead Like Me. Dead Like Me is rumored to be making a comeback, we’ll have to wait and see.
Like LOST we are given little glimpses into the lives of the characters through flashbacks, but these are tiny flashbacks, that don’t make a lot of sense. Our hero is not a good man, but I am never certain what it is exactly that he has done, other than it has to do with a fire. The main thrust of the story is that Meadowlands is not what it appears to be. It is a sort of prison/laboratory, where the people are the unwitting rats. There is a feeling of the classic British Sci Fi show the Prisoner here, except that everyone has a new name and not just a number.
The main surprise for our heroes is that everyone else in Meadowlands is in some kind of witness protection program as well, except that many of them seem to be the criminals that are under protection and not the witnesses. Maybe they are all criminals, it is never made totally clear.
There is a sort of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village feel to it as well, where we are lead to believe that it is set on another world, or another time, and that turns out not to be the case. The world of Meadowlands is a closed world, and it’s best that way, for all of us. At the moment it looks like one season may be all be we, but maybe Showtime will step up and give a second season that answers some of the many questions from the first.
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