TV Review: Manifest (2018). This mystery thriller spreads itself too thin, leaving it flat and uninteresting.

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Tv Review: Manifest (2018) by Ben Jeffries (11/10/2018)

Season 1

44 minutes

Drama, Mystery, Thriller, Science Fiction,

Airs Mondays on NBC

Manifest seems like a mystery thriller that’s afraid you’ll stop watching if you know what the mystery is.

Imagine a show that combines a supernatural mystery, a conspiracy thriller, and a fraught family drama. That’s Manifest, created and Executive produced by Jeff Rake (who has worked as a producer on shows including The Tomorrow People and Boston Legal). The show is a surprise hit for NBC, rating consistently in the top 5 broadcast shows on television.

Manifest opens in 2013, when Montego Airlines Flight 828 leaves Jamaica for the 3 hour flight to New York. Despite some turbulence during the flight the passengers experience nothing untoward until they land and discover that it’s now the year 2018 and their flight has been missing for 5 and a half years. As the passengers attempt to reintegrate themselves into their previous lives, some of them also begin to hear voices and experience visions which compel them to act in particular ways. It’s a premise that poses interesting questions: What if you suddenly returned after being missing for five years? What happened to the plane and the passengers during that flight? Would it even be possible to return to your old life after such an event? Where do the visions and voices come from and what purpose do they serve? Only Manifest doesn’t deal with these ideas in a cohesive way, rather approaching them from different perspectives of genre.

On the family drama front Manifest explores some unique situations through it’s focus on the Stone family. Ben Stone, his sister Michaela, and his son Cal were all on flight 828, while Ben’s wife Grace and Cal’s twin sister Olive weren’t. The family situation is tense following the reunion. Grace has had to grieve for a husband she thought dead and raise a devastated teenager on her own. She has a long term boyfriend who has been like a step father to Olive, how does she navigate that situation? From her perspective, she’s mourned a dead husband and son and moved on with her life only to have them show up like nothing happened, does her commitment to her returned husband trump the new life she’s built for herself? When Cal got on the plane, he and Olive were the same age but now she, and everyone else he knew, has grown five years beyond him. The close bond they shared as twins is tested as Olive and Cal get reacquainted. Michaela comes home to find that her fiance is now married to her best friend, the two became close as they helped each other get over her disappearance. There is a measure of tension and a handful of dramatic reveals in the early episodes, but there’s none of the heightened drama that you might expect. There aren’t any yelling matches, or hurt feelings leading to characters acting irrationally or unfairly, no one’s bitter about how unfair the situation is. Despite a few private tears, everyone quietly just adjusts to the new reality in which they find themselves. The show sets up dramatic premises but instead of playing out the drama, it presents the solutions to these problematic situations almost as a given, leaving the show feeling flat.

That underplayed, flat feeling might be a deliberate attempt to balance out the more fantastic elements of Manifest’s plot. After their mysterious disappearance aboard flight 828, Michaela and Ben Stone both begin experiencing hallucinations. First voices, which help police detective Michaela to rescue a pair of kidnapped young girls. Then visions, which provide clues that help them rescue a flight 828 stowaway from being sent to an asylum. What should be a major inflection point for the characters, suddenly developing some type of sixth sense, is treated with the same calm acceptance as the family situation. They decide that the messages, which they label as “callings”, should remain a secret until the Stones can learn more about the situation. There’s not really a “this is crazy” scene where the characters hash out how they feel about the issue. There’s none of the traditional refusal of the call to action where a character learns the consequences of their inaction. There’s no room in the script for that because Manifest has two other shows to be. Everyone kind of just… goes with it.

Tied up with the supernatural mystery surrounding the callings, their origins and meaning, is an X-Files style conspiracy thriller that revolves around government agencies and shadowy organisations focused on discovering what happened to flight 828 and it’s passengers. While the Stone siblings and other passengers attempt to uncover the truth behind their disappearance they’re watched from afar by National Security Agency Deputy Director Vance. As the passengers begin to unearth information that might shed light on the conspiracy they turn up other players involved, like the ubiquitously named mega-corporation, Unified Dynamic Systems, whom the Stones suspect are experimenting on missing 828 passengers. It should be a tense, dramatic sequence as Ben Stone goes “undercover” at an accounting firm to try and trace UDS’s involvement in the conspiracy through their books, but in a series of boring plot conveniences which play almost like a montage, he gets everything he needs in two days. Everything just goes Ben’s way, right up until the moment where he might actually get some answers about what’s going on, at which point the deputy director of the NSA steps in and takes away the thumb drive with Ben’s stolen data on it, only to turn around at the end of the same episode and offer to share the information with Ben. It’s the type of circular plotting that can completely destroy an audiences investment in a series, where important plot development is inevitably followed by another which makes the first one pointless, followed by a third twist that reveals the second one to be a misdirection. The whole corporate espionage affair feels rushed and contrived, as if the writers realised after six episodes that they need to start getting to grips with the shows conspiracy hook before audiences get tired of being kept in the dark, but also had to fit family drama and spiritual revelation plots into the same episode.

Manifest is an ambitious project, essentially attempting to be a handful of different shows at once. Whether it’s the idea of what a persons life would be like if they went missing for 5 years, a familiar David and Goliath/Everyman vs the Government conspiracy story, or the idea that an unexplainable event might give people access to special knowledge which compelled them to help others, any one of these core premises would have been a strong foundation on which to build a show. Manifest is built on all three and as a result it feels thin and underdeveloped. Rather than focus on one central idea and use the others to fill in the gaps around the edges Manifest gives each plot equal weight, meaning all three are under served. The family drama actually feels less tense than a normal drama despite the extraordinary situation in which the Stone family finds itself. The supernatural elements of the show are interesting in the moment, but the script has neither the time or space to interrogate them in an interesting way, leaving them feeling mechanical and frustratingly unexplained. The conspiracy thriller plays like the least interesting episodes of the X-Files, presenting an unknowable, unsurmountable obstacle that makes the ostensible heroes of the show seem powerless by comparison, but at the same time those heroes penetrate the conspiracy with such ease that the conspirators seem unthreatening and incompetent. It’s impossible to tell if Manifest is simply an overly ambitious project, a show designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience, or a combination of the two. Whatever it’s genesis, the final outcome is underwhelming.

Putting aside any problems with the overcomplicated screenplay, Manifest doesn’t provide much else to recommend itself. Visually the show is functional but unremarkable. Shot on Arri Alexa Mini cameras coupled with Primo Zoom lenses, the result is a narrow frame that feels shallow, cramped, and unexciting. The limited amount of digital effects we’ve seen so far work well enough, aided by the fact that they’re supposed to be visions which the audience knows aren’t real. The script is obvious and wooden, a bare bones version of something that could be really interesting if it had been developed beyond the basic mechanics of characters telling each other how they feel. The cast do what they can with the underwritten material: Melissa Roxburgh brings an intensity to the character of Michaela Stone that is engaging to watch, and it would be nice to see her given more to work with than being disappointed and sad. Young actor Jack Messina makes a notable impression as The Stone’s sick son Cal. In his first major role, Messina delivers a solid performance as a seriously ill 10 year old who has had his whole world turned upside down by an event no-one can explain. Judging by the way his character is developing the show has big plans for Cal, and Messina seems like a strong performer which the show runners can be confident they can lean on to carry important scenes.

In it’s attempt to be multiple genre’s at once Manifest ends up feeling overcrowded and underwritten. Whether it’s a surplus of cooks in the kitchen that spoil this particular broth, the lack of a bold enough cutting hand in the early stages of script development, or even a cynical attempt to draw several discrete audiences to the same show, this family drama/supernatural mystery/conspiracy thriller plays as flat, obtuse, and unexciting. Which wouldn’t usually be a problem. Creators should experiment and take the kind of chances that Jeff Rake has with Manifest, that’s how we end up with surprising, amazing television like Lost, Breaking Bad, or Legion. But some shows just don’t work, despite the best efforts of all involved. In most other cases I wouldn’t be bothered by it, but at this point I’ve seen enough of Manifest to develop my own theories about it’s over arching mystery, and my own compulsive need to see how accurate I am is going to force me to watch till at least the end of the season, no matter how disappointing I find it.

4.5/10

Manifest Stars: Melissa Roxburgh, Josh Dallas, Athena Karkanis, J.R. Ramirez, Luna Blaise, Jack Messina, Parveen Kaur, Victoria CartegenaDaniel Sunjata

Created by: Jeff Rake

a Production from: Compari Entertainment, Jeff Rake Productions, Universal Television, Warner Bros. Television

Distributed by: NBC