THE WHISPERS: Monday 10PM on ABC – If Nothing Else Is On…
What would the horror genre do without its creepy children? Whether possessed by some sinister entity, born to be supernatural embodiments of evil or simply homicidal, the mix of presumed innocence with wicked actions has always been a fundamental thriller trope, no doubt for psychological reasons buried deep in the minds of adults. ABC’s new summer series THE WHISPERS has as one of its Executive Producers Steven Spielberg, and although his name has appeared on many TV projects over the years through his various studio entities, this one seems particularly in his wheelhouse, considering that his own interest in bewitched boys and girls dates as far back as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Poltergeist and even E.T. (In a nice “it all comes around” touch, one of the supporting players on The Whispers is Dee Wallace, who was the mom in E.T., and there’s also a vessel found in the desert, thousands of miles from where it should be, that recalls the opening sequences of Close Encounters).
Notwithstanding Spielberg’s branding on the project, The Whispers was developed for TV by Under the Dome writer/producer Soo Hugh, working with showrunner Zack Estrin, and it takes off from Ray Bradbury’s short story “Zero Hour.” (The pilot had a certain amount of recasting and reshooting, and its direction is credited to both Mark Romanek and Brad Turner.) It includes plot points from any number of otherworldly chillers. The titular whispers are heard by those seemingly unwitting children as invisible friends who provoke them to do terrible things–in the show’s opening sequence, one little girl carves a hole in her treehouse floor for Mommy to fall into. (Since this is primetime network TV and not a Blumhouse movie thriller, Mom survives.) Those whispers are connected with whatever presumably alien beings pulled a military flight out of the air near the Arctic Ocean and deposited it in that desert so far away.
At the center of it all is our heroine, FBI child psychology expert Claire Bennigan (Lily Rabe), who instantly realizes, despite the dubious pooh-poohing of those around her, including partner Jessup Rollins (Derek Webster), that there’s more going on here than some unbalanced preteens. It just so happens that Claire’s husband was piloting that flight plucked out of the air 3 months earlier–and because The Whispers has no compunction about piling on the coincidences–or are they?–the officer who’s been led to the desert site of the plane is Wes Lawrence (Barry Sloane), with whom Claire had been having an affair. Also, that strange vagrant (Milo Ventimiglia) who was seen near the park where the kids had been acting strangely, his body covered with mysterious tattoos and suffering from amnesia? Had you figured out midway through that sentence that he’s Claire’s missing husband? And inevitably, the first episode ends with Claire’s deaf son Henry (Kyle Harrison Breitkopf) being cured by the mysterious force and signing on to do its bidding.
Delivering a moderately compelling pilot for this kind of hokum is the easy part, setting out all the mysteries without having to explain or develop anything. The tough task for The Whispers will be unfolding its story without being too silly, soapy or predictable. The generally solid cast should help, especially since Rabe knows all about keeping a straight face no matter how crazy things get from her seasons on American Horror Story, but the fact that Estrin’s last 3 shows were the flop fantasies Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, Zero Hour and The River isn’t much comfort. This is summer TV, of course, so the bar is low, plus the series has a fair lead-in from The Bachelorette and there’s not much competition to beat from NBC’s reality series The Island and CBS’s reruns. So circumstances are aligned for those children to keep their eerie blank-eyed stares in gear, at least for this off-season. Whether The Whispers will eventually be worth shouting about remains to be seen.
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