Sometimes a television show is just a television show, and sometimes it's a canary. A slashed-open, set-on-fire and hung-upside-down-to-die canary.
The 13-episode "Harper's Island," which premieres on CBS tonight at 10, has billed itself as a television event. And it is: network television's first attempt at a by-the-book splatterfest. Agatha Christie, meet "Saw"(film%20_series) for its final-moments-of-torture-porn screams, dripping viscera and blade-meets-living-flesh sound effects. Between the beheadings, bisections, eviscerations, live burnings and hangings, the traditional gore boundaries of network TV are lost amid the blood trails and body count. If only they could have figured out how to do it in 3-D.
It may be shocking, but it isn't surprising. The popularity of the "Saw" franchise spawned the "Hostel" franchise and dragged from the grave slasher classics including "Friday the 13th," "The Last House on the Left" and "Halloween." Who wouldn't want a piece of that audience action?
Clearly CBS does. Otherwise why would director-producer Jon Turteltaub send a group of highly attractive but otherwise disparate group of wedding guests to a remote and picturesque island where, seven years before, a series of gruesome murders took place?
The murderer was caught but, wouldn't you know, from the moment the last passenger steps on the flower-bedecked ferry, the killing starts right up again: two remarkably graphic and brutal deaths in the pilot with subsequent episodes proceeding apace as the guest list and cast dwindle to, presumably, murderer and final victim. But a few episodes in, the natural question becomes not who's going to get it next, but how.
The question is: How will it all play? The gore seems almost intentionally gratuitous -- a body cut in half with lingering shots of the victim's entrails. It doesn't make the show any scarier (everyone knows it's what you don't see that makes a story truly frightening), just more shocking. And not because we haven't seen blood and guts before -- one imagines that the audience for "Harper's Island" has attended its fair share of splatter pics -- but because we haven't seen this before on network TV.
