Television: Doom Is Big, and All Is Lost

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None of these series matches Lost's mix of character, wit and story, but the grim Invasion at least has the story part down, and keeps the horror at a nicely restrained simmer, as when Mariel's daughter tells her, after her return, "Mommy? You smell different." It also has the most obvious Katrina parallels--a storm hits, but the horror comes after--and there were some suggestions that ABC hold the series, which it wisely (if unsurprisingly) rejected. After 9/11, viewers gladly tuned in to watch 24's Jack Bauer nab bad guys within a day, as we chased bin Laden for four years plus. Turning natural disaster into sci-fi, too, is a way of rationalizing terror and human failure. In Invasion, a character tells a reporter, "TV's important because it distracts people from the truth." The line was probably not meant as a compliment. But sometimes there are worse things a show can do.