Tuned In

Just Drive, She Said

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FOX

The Amazing Race has been in a bit of a ratings slump the last couple seasons, but the show is not beyond rescuing. Say, for instance, you made Phil Keoghan a murderous, criminal S.O.B., the front for a shadowy organization that ran the race for the entertainment of powerful interests. Say some of the racers had their family members kidnapped and held hostage to coerce them to compete. Say there were no speed limits, no limits altogether really, and the players were allowed–nay, encouraged, nay, compelled–to kill one another.

More interesting than a “Family Edition,” right?

Fox’s Drive, which gets a two-hour double-pump debut Sunday night, aims to do with The Amazing Race what Lost did with the concept of Survivor. Actually, that makes this witty, absorbing, if totally implausible entertainment seem both more ambitious and more simplistic than it is. It picks up in Key West, Florida, where various paired-up teams have assembled to start an illegal cross-country road race that’s been going on for decades. Some are there willingly, some are not so; all are aware that there is $32 million to be won and, possibly, their lives to be lost.

As on TAR, the pairs break down into telegenic types: the long-lost brothers, the father and teen daughter, the abused mom and baby, the Iraq veteran and his hot girlfriend. The trip is broken down into legs, the endpoint of each of which is delivered in the form of text-message clues. After two-hours, no one has to perform a folk dance or eat three feet of sausage to get past a Roadblock, but we can always hope.

The central figure is Alex (Firefly’s Nathan Fillion), a Nebraska man whose wife has been kidnapped. The ransom, he soon learns: he races and wins, or she dies. (An anonymous figure apparently has a lot of money riding on him.) He pairs up, not too willingly, with Corinna (Kristin Lehman), a mystery woman who may have the key to winning the race or may be using or even spying on him. No one knows whom to trust in this mystery: the road is full of moles, other drivers and even coffeehouse waitresses who are really agents of the mysterious race bosses.

There are no otherworldly phenomena as in Lost, but creator Tim Minear (Firefly, Wonderfalls) gives you plenty to puzzle on anyway. Such as: why would anyone spend the zillions it must have taken to create a CIA-level conspiracy in order to run, surveil and keep secret what amounts to a giant human cockfight? It doesn’t add up.

On the other hand: giant human cockfight? Awesome! Drive is an audacious, exhilarating enough concept, and its pace and writing snappy enough, to make you want to believe. Some of the characters—the teen daughter, the ex-con—are flatly written, although two hours is barely enough time to flesh out the vast cast. But Fillion, maybe the most underrated leading man in Hollywood, takes command of the screen every time he’s on, and as in Firefly, he gets plenty of Han Solo-esque dialogue that builds and breaks the tension at the same time. After coming to the race late (there was a Powerpoint presentation at a hotel before the start), Alex gets in an argument with Corinna about whether they should cheat. “How do you cheat at a game that has no rules?” she asks. Alex: “I don’t know! [beat] I missed the orientation.”

Unfortunately, I can’t comment on one thing that may make or break Drive: the visual effects. Driving scenes can be among the cheesiest on TV, because it’s hard to convincingly direct action between two actors who are sitting on a bench seat on set, and to green-screen in scenery that doesn’t look fake. The effects weren’t complete on the review screener I saw, so I have no idea whether the sometimes-corny-looking scenes I saw were final. In the meantime, I’m along for the ride.

Oh, and for anyone who didn’t get the reference, here’s some extra credit viewing to hold you until Sunday: