Awake - Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

At the end of each airing season, a bunch of shows just coming off of their freshman years get canceled. Usually, I don't feel too badly about this. It's not that there aren't brilliant shows that had really terrible first seasons (yes, "Parks and Recreation." I am looking at you), but most brand spanking new shows aren't going to be all that great. It would be nice if such shows were nurtured like the lovely snowflakes they have the potential to turn into, but people don't typically have that kind of patience for this sort of thing. This is true of cable television (fare thee well, "Luck." Some day, David Milch will get to finish a story he comes up with), but network TV has it infinitely worse, and the casualties this year were brutal, even by the typical year-one slaughter standards.

Dozens of shows were taken off the air, but the one that's going to torture me is "Awake," a show about a detective who - after a terrible car crash kills a member of his family - embraces an elaborate delusion of living in two separate worlds rather than be faced with the reality of the death of either his wife or son.

First, we have to understand the man behind the curtain, Kyle Killen. This guy has written three things in his entire career. 1) A show called "Lone Star" about a scheming would-be oil tycoon living two lives, by two names, and with two women. This show aired was hailed as one of the best pilots of the year in 2010, but alas, after two episodes it was promptly canceled. 2) A movie entitled "The Beaver," the story of a troubled husband and executive who adopts a beaver hand-puppet as his sole means of communicating. 3) "Awake."

Three credits to his name, but damn if they don't make an impression. Each of these people - the lying womanizer, the mid-life crisis guy, and the grieving husband/father - has had a million stories already told about him, but in each instance Killen put an added psychological twist that made these tropes interesting again. 

In the case of "Awake," Killen also decided to tackle another trend - the procedural drama. The lifeblood of network TV that keeps CBS as the most-watched station for the 1000th year in a row, it is also (in my opinion) the least fun. Yeah, "Law and Order" was an institution and all, but there are only so many times you can have two people in the middle of a conversation find a dead person before it gets old, you know? But, hell. Procedurals are reliable. People watch these shows in mass, and in order for a network to make money, that's what's important. 

So, background established, let's talk about the rollercoster event that is "Awake". 

When we meet him, Michael Britten has already been living two lives for several months. Going to sleep in one world where his son Rex died in the crash, only to wake up in another where his wife Hannah has been lost, he is a man stuck in a particularly impressive form of denial. To distinguish one life from the other, Britten wears either a green (Rex) or red (Hannah) bracelet at all times while he lives out his lives, and the show is shot with these colors super-imposed in their respective timelines to help the audience keep track along with our protagonist.

To council him through this decidedly odd phenomenon are his shrinks - one for each world. In the red world, Dr. John Lee is reinforces the inherent insanity in this extreme form of denial, trying to nudge Britten toward rejecting the fantasy of this other life in order to finally confront the loss of his son. In the green world, Dr. Judith Evans instead encourages her patient to try to view his imagined parallel life as a coping mechanism which allows him insight into his psyche as he navigates becoming a widower and single father.

Meanwhile, between alternating counseling sessions, awkward father-son moments and watching his wife re-paint his entire house, Detective Britten must also detect. In the green world he remains with his familiar partner, Bird Freeman, while in the red he is saddled with a rookie, Efrem Vega, to keep an eye on him and rat him out to the police chief should he show any signs of cracking. 

Week by week, Britten solves crimes in his respective realities while maintaining connections to the two people he loves most. Psychosis enough there, right? By the time we come into the story, however, these two realities have started to converge in subtle ways. Rarely do these connections manifest themselves in any obvious fashion (the killer in red land is also the killer in green land - AHA!), which is part of makes this show so smart. The subconscious isn't straightforward, and neither are the events and clues calling to each other as we jump from world to world. The name of a storage facility is the same name of a doctor integral to his other case. A casual reference from Hannah about Rex's favorite band helps him realize that his son is sneaking out of the house. A suggestion from one partner leads to an insight about the other. These parallel quirks escalate as the series moves forward, and the writers become bolder as we delve further into Britten's traumatic experience.

Guys. It's so cool. 

And what's so impressive about it is that - with the exception of a few early episode missteps - the show takes all of these insane, conceptual ideas they're playing around with in stride. It's a series that seems perfectly happy to expose us to confusing, unsettling, and mysteries aspects of its concept without feeling the need to then explain or justify them to the audience. It doesn't try to expand on HOW this is happening Britten - that's much less important than letting us infer WHY it's happening. The most obvious example of this is trying to discern which world is real, which for many shows would be the entire point of the series. "Awake," not so much. To Britten, both worlds are real, and that unsteady certainty is what transfers over to the audience. The point isn't to identify the truth, but to keep it suspended so we can continue to explore the connections between the conscious and unconscious.

What results is a show that is infused with a fascinating mythos that could be endlessly explained and re-explained so as to provide even further mysteries (ala "Lost"), but chooses not to. Unfettered by the weight of feeling the need to 'solve' Britten's experience, instead the series just let's us revel in an intriguing, multilayer character study and examination of grief. 

Guys. It's so cool. 

But, unfortunately, Killen couldn't really sell the 'procedural/psychoanalysis/character study/family tragedy' thing very well to viewers. As a result, the show ends after 13 episodes, but I must say that it ends damn well. Concluding in a far more conceptual place than where the show begins, the final installment still embraces the ambiguity that is totally fitting as a finale for the series, and in fact makes the whole collection seem more like an excellent mini-series rather than a show gone before its time. 

Which, fair readers, is why I'm pimping this show to you all now. "Awake" is worth watching even if it is short-lived because it's so damn satisfying. In 13 episodes it embodies an unique perspective, a likable and sympathetic cast of characters, and a fully-realized concept without all of the pretense that can get in the way of entertaining storytelling. Plus, it ends without any sense of urgency. Rather than racing to provide the concrete answers whilst still offering up some emotional pathos, "Awake" revels in it's own uncertainty without feeling like it's cheating the viewers of a completed story.

Which is to say nothing of the amazing Jason Isaacs as the show's lead, the nifty directing, the fact that the procedural aspects of the show were actually entertaining...

Just watch this show. You'll be said that it's over, but very happy you watched it. And, most importantly, you will validate my own opinion. Which is the entire point of this, obviously.