The spring TV season had finished. Peter Bishop was from an alternate universe, Richard Alpert was still timeless, and we had exhausted the new Doctor Who series. I turned to Hulu and had a TV show autoplay when I loaded the program. It turned out to be pretty darn good. It was called The Listener.
The basic premise of this show is that there is a young paramedic in Toronto, Toby Logan, who has a gift. Or a curse. He can hear other people’s thoughts, as if his brain was powerful enough to act as a radio reciever. Through the years, he’s learned to block it out, but one day he gets a burst of thought so intense it literally shakes him. Intense emotion, as it seems, breaks right through his barriers, and he “sees” a young woman in a car accident.
When he actually encounters her overtuned car, Toby and his partner Oz help her and get her to the hospital. After reading her thoughts and emotions, he realizes that not only was there another person in the car, her young son, but that there was a man trying to kill them. Using his gift to track down the man, he catches him just on the brink of murdering the young woman and realizes that his gift really is a gift after all.
View a promo video on YouTube.
This show is surprisingly good. Toby is a completely believable main character; he has a mysterious and confusing past, but he doesn’t dwell on it. He has a good sense of humor and really does act like a twenty-five year old guy. He can’t seem to get the girl, even though he can read her mind, and he manages to rile up the local detective on a daily basis.
His “sidekick” Oz is endearing as well. He’s Toby’s best friend and is the only one who knows about Toby’s gift for quite a long time. I wish they’d do a little more character development on him, though; we didn’t really know much about him until we met his family in a more recent video.
The show is mostly “monster of the week,” with a common theme of Toby’s past tying each episode together. I think it’s refreshing how they don’t dredge up his past every couple of minutes or on each and every episode; I guess the shows I’ve been watching as of late (Lost, Fringe) are so constantly fixing on everything that happened in the past that it’s nice to just touch on these things every so often. Just enough to tease you… just enough to keep you interested.
I think this is a great summer show. Not heart-stoppingly amazing, but it’ll get me through to the fall season with some good-looking and likeable characters and interesting storylines.
