“Under the Dome” (9 p.m. Central Mondays on CBS), a 13-episode series based on Stephen King’s novel, starts with a rapid-fire opening hour where we meet the main characters and learn the nature of the dome the covers the small town of Chester’s Grove, Maine.
CBS might’ve been better off to start with a two-hour premiere, because — despite a flurry of action and information — there’s no specific intrigue to the dome so far. A force-field dome just appears with a boom — cutting a barn, many trees and (in a very cool special effect) a cow in half. We later find out a woman lost part of her arm as a result of the dome instantly materializing. All told, 12 people are killed, either by occupying the space where the dome materializes or by crashing into it in a vehicle (we see a semi get flattened, and a plane caught on the inside of the dome goes ka-blooey).
Speaking of ka-blooey, the sheriff (Jeff Fahey, the pilot on “Lost”) is about to reveal something he knows — either about the dome or the tankers full of fuel being stockpiled by car-dealer-turned-City-Councilman “Big Jim” Rennie (Dean Norris) — when his pacemaker explodes, no doubt from touching the dome wall one too many times.
Unlike in “The Simpsons” movie, where the feds put a dome over Springfield for the safety of the rest of the country, I get the feeling that “Under the Dome” wants to make it clear that the dome is not a government operation. One character is convinced this can’t be the work of the government “because (the dome) works.” Also, I feel like that’d be a boring answer, as would aliens, or the idea that everyone is in purgatory. There’s a bit of a second-rate “Lost” vibe here, and — like early episodes of that series — we’re just learning the ground rules so far. For example, the dome is completely soundproof, and no radio, TV or cellphone signals can penetrate it (the local low-wattage radio station is the only one that works in Chester’s Grove).
Will “Under the Dome” simply be an exploration of how people would behave in this bizarre situation, where they’ll eventually run out of food and supplies, and where it will never rain? If so, I suppose I should do a character roundup.
As the episode opens, out-of-towner Barbie (Mike Vogel) is burying a guy in the woods that he was forced to kill after some sort of exchange went south (he says as much to a colleague via cellphone). Then the dead guy’s wife, newspaper editor Julia (Rachelle Lefevre), asks Barbie to stay at her place. She thinks her husband, a doctor who never works on Sundays but tells her he does, is outside the dome and cheating on her.
(By the way, Barbie should put those digging skills to use to see if he can dig under the dome. I assume the writers plan to address the question of how far down the force field extends in an upcoming episode.)
Norrie, an out-of-towner with two moms, has a diabetic attack. That plot point gets slightly more interesting when a perfectly healthy kid goes into an identical seizure, mumbling about stars, later in the episode.
And from the silly category — as in “Season 2 of ’24’ When Kim is Held in an Underground Bunker by a Psycho” Silly — Angie (Britt Robertson, of “Life Unexpected” and “The Secret Circle”) is held in an underground bunker by her psycho ex-boyfriend. The way she breaks up with him at the beginning of the episode is harsh (he says he’s loved her since third grade; to her, it’s just a summer fling), but he quickly becomes the bad guy of the piece. I’m glad to see Robertson in a series again, but I wish her character was more likable.
After one hour, “Under the Dome” has potential, but it hasn’t delivered enough mysteries yet to hook me. It’s dangling the bait, though, so I’ll give it another nibble next week.