The Cassutt Files
Alien Autopsy

Threshold is gone. It's time to determine the cause of death of this show about extraterrestrial invasion ... yes, the "Cassutt Files" version of an alien autopsy.

After a disappointing—not disastrous—run on several Friday nights between the new Ghost Whisperer and the returning Numbers, Threshold was shifted to Tuesday at 8 p.m., where it vanished overnight. Production ended after the initial order of 12 episodes—just another casualty of the television wars.

Or is it more than that? There are certain holy grails in Hollywood ... objects that are sought after, dreamed about, fought over, but never really achieved:

Net profits.

Job security.

The perfect weight.

Is it time to add the sci-fi procedural television series to that list?

Don't blame CBS. Staying in first place is vital for a network and corporation, and when your Friday-night ratings drop between your 8 p.m. show and the 9 p.m. show ... then go up between 9 and 10—well, you've got to take action.

C.S.I. Sci-Fi

Audience flow was clearly a problem for Threshold. Ghost Whisperer is set in a small town, with a comforting message ("We go on beyond the grave") and—most important—a really attractive female lead in Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Threshold was edgy, high-tech, high-concept, with an ensemble cast ... theoretically a nice bridge to the series that followed it, the edgy, high-tech, crime-based-but-star-driven Numbers.

It could have worked. Failing that, one scheduling choice would have been to make a swap, putting Threshold at 10 p.m. following Numbers—but my guess is that the affiliates, who want the greatest possible audience fed into their local late-night news, would have protested.

The desire for a sci-fi procedural—like the desire for calorie-free tiramisu—is logical and understandable. Legal, medical and especially forensic procedurals have become the mainstays of network drama. You have House and Bones on Fox, Crossing Jordan on NBC, C.S.I. and its spinoffs and NCIS on CBS.

How is a procedural different from a classic police or detective drama? It is a series that emphasizes process over character. Which isn't to say that they don't have interesting people—I tune in to watch Greg House and Gil Grissom at work.

But it's the work that drives the series. You rarely go home with the characters; you stay in the lab or the hospital or the crime scene or the courtroom. You glory in the interaction between members of the team, not in their personal problems—unless problems at home directly affect the investigation.

And, yes, there were procedurals in the past. As far back as the 1950s, Dragnet emphasized the process over character. Quincy was a forensic series in the late 1970s. But a more typical example of a police show was Columbo.

The rise of the procedural is partly due to improved special effects. C.S.I.'s signature shot is a bullet or some other death-causing object burrowing through various kinds of human tissue. Higher production budgets give the procedurals almost astonishing production values, by the past standards of television.

With this history, it was only natural that someone would try to meld the form with science fiction.

Hence Threshold on CBS last fall.

X still marks the spot

Threshold was created by Bragi Schut under the auspices of David Goyer and the team behind the Harry Potter movies (Hayduke Films) together with Brannon Braga of Star Trek fame. It dealt with a "red team" of analysts called to action to deal with a unique alien invasion, where entities from beyond our planet are somehow changing us.

(Disclosure: I interviewed for a job on the series and didn't get one.)

The idea is cool and timely—something in the zeitgeist, because Dean Koontz's 2004 novel The Taking played with the same sort of invasion.

The episodes followed the team's attempts to discover, then contain the growing contamination.

There were two problems with Threshold.

First, it didn't remain true to its original premise: The series' "red team" had headquarters in a giant building more suitable to a corporation, instead of trailers or World War II Quonset huts, yet it seemed under-populated. The people you did see in the hallways, or on site, were rarely doing work that made sense. It was unrealistic, hand-to-earpiece, "sanitize-the-area" action. There were attempts to play these events realistically—one brilliant episode dealt with the threat of public exposure of the Threshold team—but too often they were buried in TV action moves that were a decade behind the times.

The larger, fatal problem was the content. The mechanics of the alien invasion itself—who was doing this, how they were doing it, why, and what we could do about it—were rarely clear to me ... and I had read the pilot script.

X-Files may have done it as well as it can be done. It certainly had the feel of a procedural ... two FBI agents tracking unsolved, mysterious cases ... the stories (especially in the early seasons) had very little to do with their lives outside the investigations.

What kept X-Files from being a pure procedural was the nature of the villains: They were a marvelous mixture of creepy horror figures and sci-fi bad guys that did not—as far as I could ever see—have a unifying set of operating rules.

You couldn't use your knowledge of forensics, law, medicine to solve the cases. Indeed, sometimes the point of an X-Files was that there was no solution ... there was only escape.

It was here that Threshold failed as a procedural ... the alien mythology was never developed enough so that an audience could play along.

Theoretically, you could create a race of aliens whose biology, technology and sociology are so thoroughly developed that the operating rules would be clear to anyone.

But don't plan on doing that in a normal television development schedule, with a pilot written in December, filmed in March, and a series in the works from June.

It would take a writer or a team working for a year at least, maybe longer.

Even then, how does an audience absorb the rules without being bombarded with lectures and deadly exposition? Is this the place for a show that exists in two forms? Broadcast drama and Internet?

And, if you do succeed (and Threshold was this close), you still have to stay on the air long enough to find an audience.

Well, then, the third item on that list of Hollywood holy grails is: Forget the sci-fi procedural, just find me another X-Files.

Either way, it looks like an impossible task.