Once upon a time, there was a televised drama called LOST. It showed the networks what HBO had been demonstrating for years, that continuing, serialized dramas had merit, and that audiences would hang in from week to week following an ongoing storyline if that storyline were mysterious and captivating enough.

Cut to all of a year later, when network executives, prone to caution and following the examples set by others, decide that nearly every new drama must offer up a mysterious, ongoing storyline. Ahh, but will they ever hit on “captivating” with all these knock-offs? That’s the big question, and one so far answered here with a resounding “no,” based on the pilot episode for THE NIGHT STALKER.

However, one poorly conceived remake shouldn’t turn me, or any of you, off of the idea of a new drama just because it follows the pedigree set forth by LOST. After all, if that show worked so well, it stands to reason that another solidly written show could twist the formula just enough to make it work again, right? That’s what we’ll look at over the next two columns, anyway.

Storylines about aliens always find their audience, and with THE X-FILES a few years off the air, it’s time for another stab at a good mysterious, alien-themed show. At least two, in fact. Up first here is NBC’s FATHOM. The early promos for this drama, airing on Mondays on NBC this Fall, showed some interesting bits about potential sea creatures coming up from the depths to do… something. FATHOM suits the show well, despite the fact that there’s a comic book (and potential comic-based movie) with that same name.

Um… as it turns out, no one at NBC looked too closely at this other property that shares the same name. Until someone else, who I’d imagine holds a law degree, approached them and pointed this fact out. Enter the newly rechristened SURFACE, airing on Mondays on NBC this Fall. Sure, you and I both know that SURFACE is a pretty terrible name (I personally think DEPTH would’ve worked better on a couple levels), but it is what it is. FATHOM has sunk, and in its place is SURFACE. It was obviously important to NBC to keep a one-word title, since the show’s opening credits appear almost exactly in the same fashion as LOST’s do. Like I say, originality, they name sure ain’t network television, for the most part.

The show opens in San Diego, with a group of teens, waterskiing at night in a boat they pilfered from one of the kids’ fathers. One dunk in the water later, and the kid whose boat they’re in, Miles (Carter Jenkins), is left floating in the darkened water when he comes face to face with… something.

Cut to the South Antarctic sea, where a lost nuclear sub suddenly appears stranded on the ice, some 5,000 miles away from where it went missing. This is where the show’s parallels to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND really start to kick in. First, we have the seemingly supernatural re-appearance of a lost and very displaced craft, and then we meet the wizened old scientist-with-an-accent, Dr. Aleksander Cirko (Rade Serbedzija) who knows more than he lets on to the Navy. It turns out that the sub, meanwhile, has no crew and a fried electrical system, but still has plates filled with half-eaten food and other signs of the crew.

Suddenly, strange sightings start happening in other places across the planet (mostly in the United States, where all the action happens on most TV shows). In Sausalito, we meet a spunky oceanographer played by Lake Bell, who plays the show’s star, the much more unfortunately named Daughtery Carstarphen. She’s a hard-driven single mom who is forced to leave her kid with his more normal father and step-mom while she hops into a bathysphere to explore the ocean floor 5,000 feet down. While in her craft, deep down in the ocean, she runs into… James Cameron. No, wait, that’s not right. She runs into… something. She’s not quite sure what, but even as she peers into a crevasse that’s over 8,000 feet deep, her sensors show something coming up from those extreme depths. Suddenly, a burst of pressure and sonics almost knock her out, but not before she glimpses some glowing, fluorescent creatures coming up from this fissure.

At the surface, her skeptical crew listens to her claims of a creature with a giant pectoral fin, a “higher mammalian species,” but they dismiss the reports. There’s no such thing as sea monsters, right?

Meanwhile, studying the nuclear sub, our intrepid old foreign scientist notices huge scarring on the outside of the sub—“a bite mark,” he says. Which means he either knows much more than he’s letting on or he’s a huge crackpot who’s first inclination upon seeing stressed metal that was hundreds of feet under water is to blame a non-existent giant sea monster.

Soon, the government has taken over the oceanographic institute in Monterey and banned even plucky Lake Bell from helping, until she proves her pluckiness and begs her way in.

Meanwhile, Miles, who’s about to take over the role last played by E.T.’s Elliott, and his geeky friend, head back out to the bay in San Diego to see if they can find any sign of the creature he glimpsed while waterskiing. Instead, they find the surface of the water just littered with slimy, fluorescent eggs of some sort. He takes one home and drops it in his parents’ over-sized aquarium. Which is all well and good for a day, until his absent-minded mom wanders by the tank and says “hmm, where’d all the fish go?” Which catches Miles’ attention, right before the giant fish tank shatters, trashing their living room. Only Miles notices a small creature scurrying away and upstairs into his sister’s room. He manages to capture it, still unbeknownst to the sister or mom, and, shades of E.T., keeps it. Not that we know what “it” is yet.

The sightings continue apace—a couple of spear fishers in the Gulf of Mexico run across something monstrous while underwater near an oil rig, and one of the two stupidly fires his spear into its hide, right before he’s dragged off into oblivion. A couple days later, the carcass of a giant sperm whale—they think—is found in South Carolina, and spear-fisherman #2 is compelled, a la Richard Dreyfuss in CET3K, to leave his family to head down to the Carolinas and see what this thing is.

A mammoth tooth is also recovered down in SC—it stands maybe 2-3’ tall, and appeared, our old, wizened scientist tells us, “as if it fell from the sky.”Since it was found in the water, it would seem more likely that it appeared as if from a giant sea creature, but as we’ve seen, he’s prone to hyperbole. Finally, at the end, off an island in Belize, a boy and his granddad are night fishing (not in the way Kevin Smith defines “night fishing,” thankfully). They see a shooting star. Then they see hundreds of shooting stars, all glowing and plopping down from the sky and landing in the ocean.

So… sea creatures? Alien monsters? Heat shields from the space shuttle? We shall see…

If the show persists, and it’s got a good enough hook for now to do so, I’d expect the adventures to all get much more personal—the production value on this pilot was pretty impressive, the kind of thing that can break the bank on even a successful show. But it’s all definitely eye-catching and attractive, like the first hour of a mid-range movie. Which is part of the problem—this pilot very much felt like the first half of what could’ve/should’ve been a two-hour debut. But I suppose that the fact that it left me wanting to see more isn’t a bad thing. I’m usually a sucker for sea creatures, and the fact that these might also be aliens, which portends all kinds of other things beyond just the discovery of a new species, leaves this show with a worthwhile mystery. INVASION, the next drama in our two-part look at the new crop of shows inspired by LOST, seems to be a much more straight-forward alien invasion show, so next week, we’ll see how that concept works in comparison to this one. But so far, I’m giving the advantage to SURFACE. Everything but its name, that is.