Lower Decks

One of the great things about the DVD era is that it can make it exceedingly easy to catch up with TV shows you skipped on original broadcast. Now, I know a lot of programming is also available on the Internet, but I’m, well, just a tad old-fashioned. It may be why I was still thinking of a show called ‘Day Break’ at all, why I was excited to learn it was finally released on DVD, even though I had never watched it before. Now, I can’t imagine having ever overlooked it.

One of my favorite shows of the new millennium was ‘Boomtown,’ a crime show that followed the story from multiple angles, frequently backtracking to show the same events from different perspectives, giving the series an uncommon amount of depth. ‘Day Break,’ if you’ll remember it at all, was a short-lived series from the 2006 season, featuring Taye Diggs as a man who kept repeating the same day over again. It’s a fine idea that could have been very predictable, but what it actually ended up being was a show that combined the ‘Boomtown’ approach with an ‘Alias,’ every-week-ends-in-a-cliffhanger conceit that kept things interesting in every possible way. Like ‘Prison Break,’ a show that launched the previous season, it featured a vast conspiracy Diggs’ Brett Hopper had to figure out about a murder he was supposed to have committed. As the day repeated, he was able to retain every memory (and physical scar) he acquired, which meant every time he started over again, he knew what he might do differently, because he was always learning something new. Like ‘Groundhog Day,’ there were certain things that always happened (a woman he saved the first time from being run over by a bus, a highway accident he heard about on the news that spread diapers across the road). As one character liked to say, “Decision. Consequence.” In essence, that’s what the show was about, but there was so much more.

Moon Bloodgood, who was featured in last summer’s ‘Terminator Salvation,’ was among the supporting cast as Brett Hopper’s girlfriend, whose ex-husband was played by Adam Baldwin, familiar from ‘Firefly’ and other cult shows. Mitch Pileggi, from ‘The X-Files,’ and Victoria Pratt, who has starred in a number of series, including ‘Mutant X,’ were also among the cast. You begin to find each member of the cast as a familiar friend as you watch.

Originally, only six episodes were broadcast. Seven additional episodes are included in the set, which doesn’t exactly conclude the story (it does finish out the original conspiracy in thirteen episodes, far more quickly than ‘Prison Break’ accomplished, which might be a fine selling point in itself, perhaps), but does give plenty suggestion about why Hopper’s day was repeating, thanks to another supporting character whose arc apparently concludes after about half a dozen of the episodes, but who appears in the last frames, after Hopper has finally stopped waking up to the same day (for the moment, anyway). Because Hopper doesn’t spend a lot of time (or doesn’t have the opportunity) to reflect on the reason why the day kept repeating, the viewer almost doesn’t even have to watch the series with that in mind, but merely as a thriller, and a very good one, featuring a number of unexpected twists and turns.

I remember that I was interested in ‘Day Break’ when I first heard about it, but for some reason never got around to watching it (like ‘Journeyman,’ actually, another similar show). Given the renewed proliferation of serialized programming, certainly ‘Flash Forward,’ whose high concept is not all that different, either, and hard to figure out as lasting more than a single season, maybe it debuted a few seasons too early, back when it was still possible to take something so innovative for granted. At the time, ‘Lost’ had gotten over its initial hype, viewers were skeptical that ‘Prison Break’ could sustain a second season, and ‘Heroes’ was just getting everyone excited about how quickly it could develop an arc. ‘Day Break,’ however, even if it wasn’t as flashy as ‘Lost’ or ‘Heroes,’ probably told a more compact, compelling story, one whose impact is perfectly captured in the tiny amount of episodes it was able to produce, which are now preserved for posterity. I watched its nine hours in one continuous sitting, which might be the best way to do it. It’s like a long movie, or a mini-series. Taye Diggs carries the early episodes almost single-handedly, but eventually the rest of the cast starts to carry their own weight, too, as the story builds.

Really, though, ’Day Break’ is just a lot of fun, a must-see, a refreshing change of pace in genre programming, the rare example that truly breaks the mold. Think of it as ‘Lost’ on a small scale.