Stop me if you've heard this one before -- and if you've been watching ABC for the last few years, you have -- but ABC's "Defying Gravity" is about a group of young professionals being trained in a dangerous specialty with a high wash-out rate, where the main character has an infirm parent and frames each episode with metaphor-laden narration, and where the male lead (an authority figure) and the female lead (one of his students) have a drunken one-night stand the day they meet. Yes, "Defying Gravity" is more or less "Grey's Anatomy" in space (or, as my friend Dan Fienberg has dubbed it, "Grey's Astronomy"), with a splash of "Lost" and a cast of familiar faces from recent ABC dramas. But the game of Spot the Similarities (which also extends to "Virtuality," the unsold pilot that Fox aired earlier this summer) is by far the most interesting thing about it.

Set in the middle of the 21st century -- not that you'd know it from the clothes or the music -- "Defying Gravity" tells the story of a crew of astronauts beginning a six-year mission to tour the rest of the solar system. At the same time, we get frequent flashbacks to how the crew trained and came together -- sometimes professionally, sometimes romantically.

Our veterans are Ron Livingston ("Office Space") and Malik Yoba ("New York Undercover"), who both survived an infamous mission to Mars where they were forced to leave crewmembers behind, while the rookies include Laura Harris ("Women's Murder Club") as Livingston's one-time fling, and Paula Garces ("The Shield") as a co-pilot who's also filming a TV documentary about the mission.

"Virtuality" also had a character producing a reality show in real time during a years-long voyage, but that show was more hard sci-fi, where "Defying Gravity" is a soap with a space backdrop. "Virtuality" was interested in questions of how people would deal with the psychological pressures of spending years in the same confined space with the same small group of people, where "Defying Gravity" is just in a hurry to get to the zero-G sex scene. (Not that they can do more than imply on ABC, of course; it's not much racier than James Bond and Holly Goodhead making love in a space shuttle in "Moonraker" 30 years ago.) The two-hour premiere has hints of a possible alien conspiracy behind the mission, but that's clearly taking a backseat to whether Livingston and Harris will hook up again during the trip.

Livingston's a good enough actor (I've been rewatching him in "Band of Brothers" this summer) that, if he can't make all the recycled material fresh, he can at least keep it engaging in a handful of moments.

But "Defying Gravity" -- an international production with American actors -- feels too slight, or silly, to treat as anything but the cheap, disposable summer programming it is.

Source: http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/07/defying_gravity_review_sepinwa.html

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