Reviewed: Amazon Studios' 'The After'...

Gigi Generau (Louise Monot ) wakes from a bizarre montage-like dream and after sharing some facetime on her phone with husband and daughter (who are away in New York), heads off to an audition. It's fairly unsuccessful - she's deemed too young and sexy for anything other than a naked bondage victim -  but as she leaves she finds herself stuck in a lift that suddnenly appears to malfunction and plummet several floors. Also in the lift are a police-officer Marly (Jaina Lee Ortiz), an elderly woman called Francis (Sharon Lawrence), a drunk Irishman, McCormick (Andrew Howard) and David, a man dressed as a clown (played by Jaime Kennedy). Realising that no-one seems to know they're in there, they finally manage to break-out and into the building's locked underground garage.

Things go from bad to worse when they encounter a lawyer Wade (Heroes' Adrian Pasdar), his 'date' Tammy (The Vampire Diaries' Arielle Kebbel) and an escaped felon called D. Love (Leverage's Aldis Hodge) who initially takes Gigi hostage. But if things are 'worse' now, they're about to get 'worser'. Because whatever shut down power in the building isn't a localised phenomenon. Finally breaking out of the building we see a scene of utter chaos. Helicopters crashing, buildings on fire, crowds running through the streets. SOMETHING has happened, though another police-officer strangely says it all started the day before.  As the group of misfits try to escape the chaos, they're about to find challenges dealing with this 'apocalypse' and with each other. But there's also a strange connection between them all and before the night is out, they're about to find out they're in more trouble than they could ever have imagined...

The After, the second Amazon drama pilot released today online (the first being Bosch), walks a line between potentially interesting and completely derivative. It's hard to come up with a modern show that DOESN'T feel like we've seen some of it before and, indeed, networks don't need any encouragement to ride a trend or genre into the sunset at the first opportunity. Procedurals are somewhat interchangable unless there's a specifcic hook but close behind them seems to be the 'I survived the Apcalypse and all I got was this losy t-shirt' format in which ordinary people have to face personal demons while something on the scale of the 'end of the world' surrounds them. The After gives us a positive checklist of such ingredients. You don't need to look closely to see echoes of forerunners such as LOST, Flash Forward, Skyline, Signs and Cloverfield. And 'A laywer, an actress, a clown, a hooker and a police-officer walk into a bar...' sounds like a punchline waiting to happen. 

British actor Andrew Howard, while capable in the physical side of  the McCormick role, really has no excuse for a terminally bad Oirish accent full of 'fooking this and fooking that...' dialogue that feels as if it has been scripted from a pack of Lucky Charms - though the drunk Celtic stereotype is already there from early scenes. It may go over the heads of domestic audience, but British viewers are likely to wince.

On the plus side, this once again feels as good as any network show in basic production values. Though Kennedy is at first unrecognisable as the clown and Lawrence is cast/aged far beyond her years, the ensemble here - a mixture of veterans and some newcomers - do fairly well with the material given. There's swearing and some some nudity (though predictably it's female and from a distance or with more chaste angles) and both feel a bit opportunistic and a marketing ploy - but that's the only sign this isn't part of a prospective primetime line-up on the main channels. But after several seasons as a mainstay of Leverage, it does take a while to accept Aldis Hodge saying 'motherf*cker... and frequently at that). 

With its disparate elements, it's impossible to say exactly where the show would go after this pilot. Whether simply taking its time to dish out details and answers to its mysteries (this is, after all, the brainchild of Chris Carter, a man used to NOT answering questions long before J J Abrams and Steven Moffat began trading in ambiguous mythology) or whether that direction is still being considered and left with lots of room to wriggle, cannot be verified as yet.  

A lot of whether this show could generate a following would be shaped in any episodes to come. There's enough here to spark some interest, but like a lot of the shows that preceded it, it could rise quickly or plummet just as fast depending on the quality of scripts and over-all direction chosen. As a web-series it's superior to a lot of things already out there, but if it wants to compete with mainstream television The After might need a little fine-tuning and something to distinguish it from similar material that's come and gone before...

You can watch the pilot now - free of charge - at LoveFilm  or Amazon...