Things That Make You Go "Whoa!"

Most satisfyingly, it’s the rare sci-fi show that is courageous enough to admit that its interest in the future is marked by a mixture of wonder, concern and bewilderment. That doesn’t mean it’s slapdash about where its fantastic tale is going. In fact, at times it feels like the most rigorously plotted and well-conceived continuing story on the tube. (It’s dazzling how story arcs lean one way then veer the other, without losing emotional threads.) I believe co-creator/executive producer Scott Peters and the writers want to keep The 4400 from becoming an enigmatic morass like Twin Peaks or long stretches of Lost, but they’re not so interested in tidiness, either. This excellent, hard-charging but sensitively drawn series has the right prickly attitude toward notions of destiny: Do you work at it, or let it happen? What constitutes a legitimate threat to our well-being? What kind of world is most appealing to us? And, perhaps most trenchantly, what happens when something looks like good and like evil?

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Investigator Tom Baldwin, center, with telekinetic Richard, right, and life-force manipulator Shawn. (Photo by Justin Stephens)

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More About

• Diana Skouris
• Tom Baldwin
• Tom Everett Scott
• Medicine
• Emergency Medicine

TNT’s new series Saved is about paramedics, but it feels like it needs its own ambulance call, and I’m not sure there are any emergency procedures that could breathe life into it. The wonderful actor Tom Everett Scott has a stubbly charm playing a roguish, underachieving EMT with gambling debts and a rich doctor daddy pissed at him for avoiding medical school. But it seems like too little too late now that House and Rescue Me have cornered the market on cranky, acerbic, self-destructive life savers. After one hour of forced camaraderie, forced edginess and forced pathos, it could barely muster the energy to distinguish itself, although the show boasts one style device I found both intriguing and worrying. Each patient Scott’s character comes across is given a seconds-long whiplash-edited back story comprised of flash pictures of the life that led to this crisis moment — Happy! Unhappy! Bottle! Alcoholic! Collapse! — and while one could argue it zippily approximates a real paramedic’s snap judgment as to how somebody got to be out cold on the floor, it also felt sadly indicative of where storytelling is headed: all high and low points, none of the shading that colors in the real picture. It’s in those moments where a series can set itself apart.?

THE 4400 | USA Network | Sundays, 9 p.m.

SAVED | TNT | Mondays, 10 p.m.