TV: Another Bad Day

Enter Day Break, yet another serialized drama with an enigmatic conspiracy at its core. Even if audiences weren’t already tired of the genre (see cancellations and/or dismal ratings for Kidnapped, Vanished and Runaway), Day Break would try their patience all on its own with a premise that’s worn thin halfway through the first episode: Taye Diggs plays police detective Brett Hopper, who has a day worthy of one of Jack Bauer’s on 24, all within the span of about 24 minutes of TV time. He fights with his girlfriend, cuts himself shaving, narrowly avoids getting hit by a bus, discovers his brother-in-law is beating his sister, gets arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, is abducted by the aforementioned enigmatic conspiracy and finally gets beaten up and rendered unconscious on the ground of a rock quarry.

And then the day starts all over again, and that’s when you know you’re really in trouble. Day Break, like the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day, finds its protagonist living the same day over and over again, trying and trying to make things right. Groundhog Day worked with this premise for two reasons: It was a comedy, and was able to mine substantial laughs from its theme and variations (something that good comedy generally does anyway); and it was a feature film, with a clear goal for its hero to resolve in 101 minutes.

With Day Break, by the time you see Brett wake up in the same bed at the same time for the fourth or fifth time in three episodes, you’ll be as annoyed as he is. The structure allows for no character development beyond Brett himself, who retains memories (and injuries) from day to day, so the frustrations he has with his girlfriend, his sister and his potentially corrupt partner are played out over and over again in very similar ways, and just when he convinces them he’s not crazy, that he really is being chased by some very bad men, the day ends and he has to do it all over again.

And it’s not like the mystery that Brett’s uncovering is all that interesting anyway. Aside from the one supernatural conceit of the repeating days, the conspiracy appears, at least in the first few episodes, to be one much like Jack Bauer might encounter, with government agents and secret organizations using murder to cover up nefarious dealings. Unlike 24, or even some of the low-rated conspiracy dramas of the new season, Day Break doesn’t even allow Brett to make incremental progress in each episode; by the time he goes to sleep, no matter whom he’s defeated or what he’s uncovered, it all resets back to Square 1.

And Diggs, all dimples and furrows, makes for a seriously dull protagonist. Not that he’s given much to work with—Brett is so upstanding that he borders on saintly, and he’s about as complex as the hero of a Steven Seagal movie. He speaks like one, too, and the show is a mish-mash of action movie clichés dressed up in a high concept that fails to distract from its inherently trashy, unimaginative nature. Viewers of Lost will do better to just skip this hour of ABC programming until February.