The new show Dead To Me would be an unlikely show to attract my long-term interest, based on the premise alone. Two women at a grief counselling sessions become friends against all odds — one is acerbic, one is light and carefree. One has a secret, one has family issues. And that’s basically it.

So if you’re reading this, I’ll let you know that I have spoiler info at the bottom that is huge for the series, but comes out in Episode 1, so I don’t feel like I’m really revealing too much. It’s hard to review the episode without talking about both reveals.

First off, the acerbic one is Jen, played by Christina Applegate. Maybe you loved her on Up All Night or Samantha Who? or even Jesse. Or maybe even way back to Married…With Children. Blunt revelation — I didn’t like her in any of them. So it wasn’t like I started watching and was expecting to love her. Except she’s pretty damn good here. Good mix of light-heartedness in a couple of places, but she does edgy without being bitchy pretty well. She’s alone now, a bit of anger issues, because her jogging husband got hit by a car, died, and the car drove off.

Second, Jen meets Judy at a grief counselling session in a park next to the ocean. (WTF? Never mind.) Anyway, Judy says her husband died while they were eating dinner, a heart attack at 44. So there’s some “common life experience” going on here, supposedly. But Jen is dark, Judy is light, and they kind of bond a bit while the others seem flighty and flaky, including the pastor running it. A bit of dark humour.

Now Jen is played by Freaks and Geeks star Linda Cardellini, who also did Brokeback Mountain (waitress Cassie) as well as Velma in Scoobie Doo’s live version, but I don’t really know her work. She’s good, I liked her too.

So the bonding goes along and goes along…late night phone calls, late night drives, watching TV shows together, getting high. It’s all good. Right up until the first secret is revealed — ** spoiler ** Judy’s husband isn’t actually dead. And he’s not her husband, it was a boyfriend. So Jen has a shit-freak, and calls her out for faking everything. But Judy’s pain isn’t with the BF, although it is pain. She miscarried.

Jen and Judy get past it, they’re still going to be friends, and Jen offers to let Judy stay at her guest house. Because, well everybody has a guest house, right? Anyway the move-in part leads to the second giant reveal ** spoiler ** Judy’s got a car in a storage locker with a completely banged up front bumper…i.e., we’re to assume she’s the one who killed Jen’s husband. Dun dun dun. So when Jen said Judy had issues, Judy wasn’t kidding when she said Jen had no idea.

But there just isn’t anything “there” for me. The nice friendship bond between the two of them isn’t going anywhere for me. And I can’t see how there is anything there for the long-term. Maybe it could have been a movie of the week. Or even a serious movie with more drama invested. But I just don’t see a hook to keep me.

I’m even going to predict CANCELLATION. Which is too bad, both actresses do a decent job. I just wish they had a better show to work on.

For the show Gone, all I heard about it initially was that it was about an ex-victim who survived an abduction and was now helping find new abductees. Based on that description, it was a coin toss for my prediction, but I had to err on the downside and predict cancellation. Now that I’ve seen the first episode, the coin toss was probably the right metaphor.

The show is a bit different than I imagined. The main character is a girl named Kick…she was abducted and held by a predator for five years, and given a new name. When she’s rescued in flashback at the start of the episode, the FBI swoops in to save her, arrest the guy pretending to be her dad, and her mom runs upstairs and commits suicide. Kick isn’t the girl who was abducted anymore, or the girl from before the abduction, so she creates a new name aka Kick. Fast-forward 15 years and she’s a hard-core fighting machine. She teaches self-defense, is an expert marksman with a handgun, and practices picking locks for fun just to ensure she’s never locked in anywhere again. The old FBI agent who rescued her comes knocking, asking her to join a task force that hunts abductees, and the first case is a missing little girl. The agent thinks that Kick can help because she knows how predators think. She helps them figure out a bunch of stuff that the task team doesn’t know how to instinctively figure out on their own, and they’re off and running. Along for the ride is a young FBI agent who isn’t sure about Kick, another female FBI agent who was part of the original team that rescued Kick, and a friend of Kick’s, another abduction survivor who is also a hacker. There are lots of other people running around but mainly it’s the five of them.

Let’s see…a fast turn-around team that specializes in missing people aka people who are “gone”. Wait…wasn’t there another show about missing persons? No, not the one based on 1-800-Missing with the girl with the visions but the FBI task team that specialized in missing persons. You know, “Without a Trace”?

When the EP started, I had some high hopes. The main character, Kick, is played by Leven Rambin, and she is great. She looked familiar, but was having trouble placing her…maybe The Tomorrow People, I thought, while perusing IMDB until I saw her listed as the girlfriend Riley back in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I like her, I’d watch. Plus I like her character, some interesting threads there.

The old FBI agent is played by a very muted Chris Noth…I hated him as Mr. Big on Sex and the City, loved him back in the day on Law & Order. Doesn’t have a lot to do in the EP, but he’s a comfortable presence. Meanwhile, the young FBI agent, Bishop, is played by Danny Pino aka Scotty Valens from Cold Case that I’ve been binging. He’s usually decent, occasionally not, but again, another comfortable presence. And no hint of the sliminess / fast-shaking from the Cold Case character, so a more honorable character to like. He’s got the tortured past that every character must have, even if we don’t find out what it is in this episode. And sure, he’s likely to be a love interest for Kick over the longer term.

What I found a bit odd was that another Cold Case alumni, Tracie Thoms, aka Kat Miller plays the extra FBI agent that helped rescue Kick back in the day. She doesn’t have much to do in EP1, just like Noth, but another comfortable presence. Equally, Andy Mientus doesn’t have much to do as Kick’s fellow survivor, aka hacker James, and I didn’t recognize him from his role of villain-of-the-week on Flash (as the Pied Piper). Okay, nothing to write home about.

And the lack of anything to write home about is part of the problem. The EP was okay, but I didn’t feel there was a lot of oomph going on outside of a sparring session early on. So I was on the fence about “renewal” or not. Except there’s a small glitch in the matrix. The show came up on my radar as a supposedly new show, but it turns out it’s an OLD show. It was on in 2017-18, lasted a single season, and was *cough, cough* gone.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, easy to know how that one comes out. But the quirk in the matrix made me try to recreate the feed that gave me the show in the first place. Why would it tell me about a 2-year old show that is already gone?

I found another show, a TV series, for 2019 listed as in development. Not likely it. Another one was about a man teleporting around the earth, but it’s a movie, not a TV show. And then I found a 2018-19 show that was originally called Gone and was renamed Save Me, about a man looking for his missing daughter. None of them interest me.

So I’ll take my quirk and predict it will be cancelled (since it already was). Now I just have to decide if I’ll watch the other 11 EPs for a dead series.

When I saw the description for The InBetween last fall, basically that it is a detective show with a person who can talk to the dead, it sounded like Medium and The Ghost Whisperer, or a few other shows in the genre. Most of those shows went for several seasons, and it was a guess but I went with RENEWAL. Now that I’ve seen the first episode, I’m going to predict CANCELLATION, which is disappointing as I enjoyed the show.

In most of these shows, there is one of two things that is part and parcel of episode one. First, there’s the genre where the person is normal and something BIG AND TRAUMATIC happens in episode one, and BAM! They see dead people. Second, or more alternatively, there is a flashback to either a traumatic experience or a lot of backstory to explain how they have dealt with their abilities in their life, usually with the plot device that they’ve always tried to avoid or deny their power, and now something is forcing them to confront it and deal with it. So BAM! They see dead people.

Then, it moves to GHOST OF THE WEEK.

The InBetween doesn’t do that. The premise is that Cassie, a mid-20s-ish woman, has visions. She sees things and she tells her gay adoptive father who’s a police detective. And the visions help him with his cases. In the opener, she sees a woman in a walk-in freezer, lying on a table dead, with her eyes removed. She thinks it is the case he’s working, but when she sees a photo of a missing girl, it’s not the same person. Hop, skip and a jump later, and they find out it is all somehow related. Eventually her visions lead to the bad guy, case semi-closed. However, in the episode, Cassie is also dealing with a young girl who spends time with her and hangs out, even though she’s actually the ghost of a murder victim. The girl’s grandfather went to prison for her murder, and Cassie is helping the little girl come to terms with her death. After she gets a bit of revenge on her pedophile Grandpa.

But the difference in the show is not only what will likely kill it but also what I like about it. The tone and pacing is totally different. Almost a British show, slower, less action. And while I spent the show waiting for the exposition dump of her backstory, it never came. Instead, you get a feel for her almost phoning it in, she’s not actively part of the case or anything. She just tells the detectives what she sees in her occasional visions and they take it from there. It seems almost like she’s passive about it all.

The girl with visions, Cassie, is played by Harriet Dyer. I haven’t seen her before, but she does a decent job. A couple of times, I thought it was Amy Adams but a bit younger. Her adoptive father, Tom, is played by Paul Blackthorne, who I know from watching Arrow. Yet, I never much cared for him on Arrow. I liked him better back on The Gates. It’s hard to get used to the change of accent here, but I like his acting much better.

One small sour note is Justin Cromwell as a new partner for Tom, just moved to town from LA to get a fresh start. You know there’s some sort of big backstory for him, and sure enough, he goes to visit some girl in a coma at the end of the episode. But he’s also a bit inconsistent throughout the episode — skeptical, believer, passionate friend, solid or flaky partner. There’s even a scene where he goes to see Connie, gets in trouble, and goes back AGAIN to see her on his own. Inconsistent character all around.

But the EP ended with a twist. One of the sick bad ghosts pays her a visit at the end of the EP and says they need to talk. I’ll tune in to see, but I don’t think the pace or plotting will garner renewal. Too bad, it has a nicely different feel to the show.