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"FacebookPinterest\n\nFrom bitter and harsh experience, I know how foolhardy it can be to rave up a new TV series when all I've seen is the pilot. Or worse, to pan one, considering how my kinder friends haven't let me forget that yer fools-rush-in reviewer initially trashed The West Wing and dismissed The Wire as a dull Stephen Bochco knockoff with more four-letter words. (Mea culpa, mea culpa.) So I'll proceed with due caution and just say that the premiere ep of CBS's Under The Dome, airing Monday, does a swellaciously lively, taut job of sucking viewers in.\n\nNot having read Stephen King's 1,088-page novel, I don't have a clue what'll happen to the denizens of the small Maine town of Chester's Mill now that forces unknown have sealed them off from the rest of the world inside a humongous, see-through hair dryer. Thanks to series producer Brian K. Vaughn and pilot-ep director Niels Arden Oplev, though, I sure as crap want to find out\u2014and that's not because of the gimmick, which isn't exactly unprecedented. Sci-fi forebears aside, even The Simpsons Movie put Springfield under glass on President Schwarzenegger's orders.\n\nTruth is, I'm pretty sure I'd be interested in these people even if nothing at all, y'know, paranormal was going on. Often the case with King at his best, that's a quality the premiere maximizes. Compared to the way so many expansive TV dramas bungle the getting-to-know-you bit while dawdling over the what's-the-point big reveal, the old-school vividness and economy of Under The Dome's thumbnail intros of a dozen-plus flavorful characters\u2014simultaneously cluing us in to their vital info and tantalizing us with quickie hints of intriguingly relevant (but how?) back stories\u2014may remind you of Jaws. Praise doesn't come much higher than that.\n\nSo maybe it figures that Steven Spielberg is one of UTD's ec producers, even though that's no guarantee of ace TV. (Two words: Terra Nova.) Anyhow, whatever role Unka Steven played in cranking the Rubik's cube, Vaughn\u2014who created the top-notch graphic novels Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, among other credits\u2014and Oplev, who directed the original The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, don't waste time springing the malevolent big fishbowl on us. It slams down out of the literal blue all of eight minutes in, scything a luckless cow in half (Damien Hirst, call your office) and knocking birds out of the sky when they smack into it. Then it's a small plane's turn, with quick-thinking Dale \"Barbie\" Barbara (Mike Vogel) hustling polead local teen Joe McCalister (Colin Ford) out of the way of the falling debris.\n\nBarbie may not be an ideal white knight, however. We've first met him when he's burying some poor bastard in the woods before trying to high-tail it out of Chester's Mill. Translation, he's even more compromised from the get-go than Sawyer on Lost\u2014which Vaughn also worked on, and it shows. Likewise trapped are a lesbian couple (Aisha Hinds and Samantha Mathis) driving their seizure-prone daughter (Mackenzie Lintz) to some kind of teen boot camp.\n\nAmong the locals, the top dog is Breaking Bad's invaluable (here, too) Dean Norris as city councilman and used-car dealer \"Big Jim\" Rennie, a superficially affable type who's all too happy to go Rudy Giuliani on everybody's keester once he catches on he's in charge. (Enjoyably, he's introduced reading a bio of Winston Churchill, Giuliani's own fave\u2014and soon ostentatious\u2014role model on 9/11.) Then again, Big Jim has also been up to some funny business involving propane that's got him at loggerheads with troubled Sheriff Duke Perkins (Jeff Fahey, first-rate). As for Junior, the councilman's son (Alexander Koch), he's one of those sensitive hunks who turn out to be more than a wee bit creepy. That's bad news for his girlfriend Angie\u2014Britt Robertson, whose young-Hayden-Panettiere vibe could make Panettiere herself feel prematurely AARP-bound.\n\nThe King touch is that the dome doesn't create troubles so much as it exacerbates, ahem, pre-existing conditions. The disaster just concentrates everyone's mind, as Samuel Johnson used to say about the prospect of imminent hanging. But that's no surprise, since I'm a long way from being the first crit to figure out that what distinguishes King the most as a horror/fantasy novelist isn't his sense of the extraordinary so much as his love of the humdrum-American ordinary. That's the virtue he's got in common with The Simpsons' Matt Groening, in so many ways the flip side (in every sense) of King's coin. Somebody's PhD thesis about those two friends' Venn-diagram common ground is one I'd like to read someday\u2014and for all I know, there are already dozens.\n\nLike I say, I've got no idea what I'll think by August. But I haven't been this kind of sucker for a pilot since The Walking Dead. Among other things, anyone who wants to know what good directing is should check out how the establishing two-shot of Big Jim and Sheriff Perkins tells us they're antagonists while they're still shooting the breeze like faux pals. Anyway, whether Under The Dome can keep it up is anyone's guess, but right now it looks like awfully good broadcast TV. You remember broadcast TV, don't you?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-reviews-stephen-kings-under-the-dome>