Kiefer Sutherland was a fixture on television for 8 seasons of 24, and when the series came to an end in 2010 there was a lot of hope that he’d one day return to the small screen. It didn’t take very long for those dreams to come true, as the new Fox series Touch hits the air starting next week. The catch is that the pilot airs next week, but the series doesn’t start airing regularly until March. Will it be enough to draw fans tot he series, or will people forget about it a few weeks afterwards? We’ll soon find out.
In Touch Kiefer plays Martin Bohm, a widower and a father to an autistic, mute son named Jake (David Mazouz). Ever since his wife died Martin has had difficulty holding down a job, and he finds it increasingly difficult to take care of his son. Even though he pays his son as much attention as he can and desperately attempts to find a way to communicate with him, social services still threatens to take his child away. In the meantime seemingly random events are occurring all around him (his son changes a man’s lottery numbers, a cell phone begins a journey around the world, a teenager attempts to obtain a new oven for his parent’s bakery), events that all find a relationship to the number 318. As he continues to try to find a way to communicate with his son, Martin finds that his son is trying to communicate with him, and trying to tell him what is going to happen in the future. Martin finds himself in a race to decipher that communication, so he can change the world for the better.
The first episode of Touch feels like a short movie. Everything ends up where it began, and everything comes together nicely. It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where everything relates to everything else to give a clear picture. This first episode is so good that it blows you away in the end. Kiefer Sutherland plays his typical sort of role, and you really feel like you can relate to him. David Mazouz is great as Jake as well. It will be interesting to see which of the characters will continue on throughout the entire series, but odds are you haven’t seen the last of Danny Glover or Gugu Mbatha-Raw who play a professor who understands numbers and the social worker who comes to see Jake’s special gifts for what they are respectively. It’ll also be interesting to see what sort of idea they have for an entire series, and not just an individual episode because if they stick to this formula it may get tiresome after awhile.
When it airs on the 25th of January you may want to give Touch a try. It’s worth the hour, and you really will be blown away by how good it is. As for the rest of the series, we’ll see when it starts airing in March.
Tags: david mazouz, jake bohm, Kiefer Sutherland, martin bohm, touch