NBC didn’t have a ton of luck with this summer’s “Rosemary’s Baby” miniseries remake (with movie star Zoe Saldana) – but now CBS is ready to launch a miniseries that looks like “Rosemary’s Baby In Space” (with movie star Halle Berry).
But wait! Is “Extant” about an astronaut who gets knocked up by a dreamy extraterrestrial or is it about an astronaut dealing with her creepy robot son back on Earth?
“Extant” was created by Mickey Fisher, who apparently wrote and directed the 2004 boxing drama “The King of Iron Town” and the 2006 softball comedy “Summer Nuts.” Both projects seem to be motion pictures, but I’m not certain either has seen the inside of a cinema.
"Extant," which launches on CBS July 9, is also from Steven Spielberg, whose company continues to give us summer sci-fi hourlongs “Falling Skies” and “Under The Dome.”
... as is the case with “Under the Dome,” the new series dilutes its own mystique with too many plodding plot devices and stock characters. …
... Watching “Extant” is like following commonly recognizable road signs through a plot. …
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says:
... It’s an entertaining pilot, full of surprises that should hook viewers and get them engaged for the subsequent 12 episodes. But there’s also the question of whether the show sets about spinning too many mysteries at once. …
The San Francisco Chronicle says:
... There are more questions than answers in the pilot of "Extant," which, in this case, is a good thing. The seeds of dramatic conflict have been planted, and we're going to come back the next week to see how all of this plays out. …
... If it's unfair to saddle current episodes with future concerns, CBS has only itself to blame. The network sucked us in with Hostages and Under the Dome, both of which collapsed after strong starts. On the other hand, Extant does have at least one asset neither of those shows can claim: Halle Berry. If she's not enough to tip the scales toward "benefit of the doubt," who is? …
... looks well suited to making some noise, despite a pilot that’s heavy on tantalizing threads and not much else. Of course, the disclaimer would be that the same Amblin-CBS collaboration birthed “Under the Dome,” which proved a summer hit in 2013 but left a bad taste behind for many by playing too many “No, honest, you’ll get an idea what’s going on next week” games. …
... If Extant wants to be vague, it's doing a great job. Most of the hour seems like a murky dream without much technical assuredness — just visuals that hints at "something sci-fi like in the future" and lets it go at that. … After an hour of minor hints that the government has outsourced space travel and humantics development to the private sector, viewers may start believing that Extant is being vague on purpose — because it doesn't know what it's doing, or what story it's telling. …
9 p.m. Wednesday. CBS.
