CBS seems to have a tendency to make series about "brilliant billionaires" who will put their minds and effort and means and cash for saving people. A noble cause, or so it seems...
Another CBS series with such a fellow was "Pure Genius", a show that I think I personally killed single-handed because I wrote a very critical review for it, the opposite of what a 90-95% of other reviewers wrote while giving to it ratings full of 9s and 10s. They basically were writing that that show "gave them hope". All I was seeing (and CBS producers as it seems) was a cheap melodrama.
So, after a long prologue...what is "Salvation" all about? Well... a large meteor has a 97.2% probability of hitting the Earth in 186 days! Not an impossible scenario. Believe you me. It happened at least 5 times before, with the last one, killing the previous rulers of the planet, the all-mighty dinosaurs.
Not original at all, but how this series holds to its premise? Well not bad for the time being. You have some relatively strong-minded characters: - a billionaire genius who initially thinks that the best course of action is to build an arc and populate ...Mars (dumb idea for so many reasons) - an MIT student who might for a while thought that its best to live intensively his remaining 3 months - a Pentagon officer who is the poster boy of secrets and conspiracies and - his press secretary with whom he had an affair, but she will probably play a crucial rule to the salvation (or not) of the Earth.
There were some things that bothered me but minor. It's not a "big" series despite the theme of the global damnation, but is not small or boring either.
I wonder if the writers have already think how this is going to end. You see 186 days until doomsday can't easily span in a series for the long run.
Anyway...not great...not bad either. I see the reviewers before me are divided and polarized. It's one of these cases. We will wait and see. For now and based solely on the pilot, I say...give it a chance.
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