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 t a Spanish restaurant in Brooklyn a couple of years ago, my waiter was a cute guy with dark hair who recommended good wine and flirted with me. Two weeks later I bumped into him at a party uptown and we made out on the balcony overlooking Fifth Avenue. It turned out he lived with a friend of mine from college, whom he met through a roommate search on Craigslist. If I were a character on Six Degrees, which premieres tonight on ABC, I'd be heading into the first commercial break. According to the show's narrator, "there is a theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person through a chain of six people. No one is a stranger, for long."Although the six-degrees-of-separation hypothesis has been debunked, there's undeniable romance in the idea of an invisible network of connections. Six Degrees' first episode opens a camera sweeping through Manhattan and onto six characters whose lives are about to intersect. Carlos (Jay Hernandez) is a cop who books Mae (Erica Christensen), the young blond woman who climbs on a truck, flings off her shirt and gets arrested for indecent exposure. Carlos develops a crush on Mae and tries to track her down, enlisting the help of Damien (Dorian Missick), the black limo driver with a gambling problem. Mae is running from a dark past, so she goes undercover as a nanny for Laura (Hope Davis), whose husband recently died in Iraq. Laura meets high-powered advertising exec Whitney (Bridget Moynahan) over pedicures. Whitney finds a postcard of photography by Steven (Campbell Scott) and wants to use him for a fragrance campaign. Steven, a recovering alcoholic, can't imagine what Whitney wants from him. "Your portraits," she tells him. "People on the street full of emotion, the world bustling around them." And you get the idea that's what the writers want to do — paint a portrait of modern urban life, with the six-degrees thing as the hook.
"No." "Ohhh," says the geek, smiling slyly and leaning against the door frame, "you read my blog, you're a fan." "Uh, no." There's New York for you — the blogger assumes the guy at his doorstep has something to give him, be it love or computer equipment. Hope Davis is completely believable as Laura, the townhouse-dwelling mother who still wears her ten-year-old Sonic Youth T-shirt, chuckling as she calls herself a "punk goddess," weeping as the New York Gives truck carts away her dead husband's vintage suits. Erica Christensen will always be the girl from Traffic, smoking crack out her bathroom window and passing out in a drug den, so she's in comfortable territory as a determined runaway. The performances elevate the script, which isn't conspicuously good but only fitfully terrible. In one scene, Steven tries to get a gallery to show his old prints. The owner is haughty and rude, the stereotype of an art-world fancypants. Trying to convince the guy to show his work, Steven says, "All I can do is start over." The snob answers, "No one's going to help you, Steven. You're going to have to help yourself." Later, Damien's criminal-kingpin brother dispenses this fresh gem: "You can't escape what you are." Six Degrees is less aspirational than Sex and the City, the other show that counts New York as a protagonist, presenting a broader range of characters and a world beyond lunching and dating on the Upper East Side. (Seinfeld likewise viewed the city through a keyhole.) But as a true reflection of New York or any contemporary city it's still too limited. Four of the six main characters are white. There's one Hispanic guy, and a black guy who, according to the voiceover could be found "on any street corner, trying to clean up [his] act." In the most intense scene, Carlos punches out angry bookies who are about to maul Damien. Carlos's reaction? "I feel more like myself than I have in . . . I don't know how long." Nice — let the non-white characters do the fistfighting, save the fancy photography for the Caucasian guy. Then there's the faulty premise that people are all connected and strangers can affect your life. They're not, and they generally don’t. New York is a city of isolated packs made more insular by technology. By overlooking this, the show comes off as naive. Urban sidewalks are clotted with people listening to iPods, emailing on Blackberries, text messaging from cellphones. Technological innovations decrease direct communication but increase the web of our connections. Six Degrees only acknowledges the internet twice: once when a character discovers an illicit online-dating profile, and again when the aforementioned computer geek uses the word "blog." In the other discernible nod to technology, Mae uses a payphone. A show about modern ties should explore all the ways we connect. That said, Six Degrees shows promise as a noirish soap that presents its characters' interconnection as a mystery to be solved. The show occasionally evokes the city's energy through their choices — as Mae is being booked for indecent exposure, she says she tore off her shirt because "It had just rained. All the lights and colors were all over the street. I wanted to be a part of it." I probably wouldn't skip The Wire for Six Degrees, but it might lift some of Sex and the City's Manolo'd fog. That's reason enough to give Six Degrees the benefit of the doubt for a few weeks. Luckily for ABC, I've developed a connection to my DVR. n° 
©2006 Sarah Harrison and hooksexup.com. |
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