I've only watched the first epsisode of Six Degrees, though two have now aired, so this review will be a little behind if you've been watching.

Six Degrees (9,00C, ABC, Thursday)

Everyone's seperated from everyone else by no more than six interpersonal connections, so they say. "They" being the narrator, who chimes in with this purported premise of the show. The problem is that instead of the characters being seperated by no more than six connections between people, they've instead got six characters seperated by a very few degrees, so this title, Six Degrees, really doesn't make much sense in context. Anyway, that's nitpicking. So there's six leads, three male, three female. There's ex-junkie Photographer guy, Advertising Lady, Erika Christensen as an ex-con who works now as a nanny, an assistant district attourney guy, Hope Davis as a journalists' war widow who's trying to get her shit together and a down on his luck gambler who drives a car and may or may not go to work for his drug-dealing brother.

In the first episode, Christensen meets ADA guy, then decides to try and run from her criminal past, goes to work for Hope Davis who befriends Advertising Lady who wants to work with ex-junkie guy. ADA guy asks Driver guy to help him out as he's trying to find Christensen and helps him fight off his bookie's goons. Driver guy's brother, meanwhile, gives him a photo of Christensen to look out for in his travels around the city, though he and ADA guy don't know they're looking for the same person. Advertising lady tries to hire ex-junkie photographer guy who yells at her about being a sell out, but then we find out that's just because he has lost his photography mojo, which he gets back in taking a picture of the sobbing Hope Davis as they cart away her husbands belongings, which she's just gotten around to boxing up. Got all that? Oh, and advertising lady's fiance is cheating on her. And ADA guy and Christensen run into each other on the train right after he gives up looking for her.

See, complicated and random, which = deep, right? THAT = DEEP, RIGHT?

If you're a first year a Swathmore, maybe. However, right now it's mostly just convoluted. And pointless. Which is not to say that people meeting semi-randomly in New York can't be done well--one of my favorite books (John O'Hara's BUtterfield 8) does it magically. It also did it seventy years ago. So they better do somehing new and interesting with this setup in order for it to be worth noticing. They haven't yet.

And the acting's pretty bad, particularly from the usually solid Christensen. Hope Davis couldn't be not-amazing if her life depended on it, so she, of course, does a great job, but her and photographer guy are the only two characters that aren'tsort of crappy blank slates right now. And sure, they could fill them in. They could. Will they? I dunno, yet.

The bigger question is, will America fall for complicated and random = deep? That they will is the lesson that show-runners seem to have taken away from LOST, but the farther we get into LOST the more it's looking like it's anything but random, and it may turn out to be drastically simple rather than manically complicated. A show like this, which strives for a level of versimilitude? Will it work without even the hope of a reasonable explanation as to why these rediculous coincidences happend / continue to happen?

Overall grade: C-, so far. I'll be the first to admit that if they do some good character development, though, it could be good. And the first to point out that if they don't, it will flame out horribly, unless everyone is dumb (which they are).