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Lost launched an entire mythology on the wings of an airplane disaster, and so did Fringe. Now comes new conspiracy thriller The Event, which also milks post-9/11 anxieties about terror in the sky for dramatic tension in its opening moments.
Debuting Monday at 9 p.m./8 p.m. Central on NBC, The Event tracks a chain of events that lead hero Sean Walker (played by Jason Ritter) to the pilot's cabin of a jet that is being steered for reasons to be explained by his fiancee's grim-faced father (Scott Patterson).
Last fall's similarly impressive opening salvo for FlashForward failed to sustain the series beyond a single season. Whether The Event survives or perishes, it will surely not be the last in a long line of conspiracy-themed TV dramas.
In the '90s, The X-Files masterfully exploited civilian paranoia about shadowy bureaucracies as series creator Chris Carter tapped into long-simmering suspicions that the U.S. government methodically conspires to withhold information about alien incursions.
But after 9/11, secretive governments and extraterrestrials suddenly seemed far less threatening than terrorists, not just in Hollywood but on the nation's streets. As reported in the The Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series, 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies operating in about 10,000 U.S. locations dedicate themselves to surveillance or data analysis. Employed by 2010's bulked-up intelligence-industrial-complex, 854,000 people currently hold top-security clearances.
With all that cloak-and-dagger activity taking place in the real world, it's no wonder that paranoia, intelligence-gathering, privatized black ops and bureaucratic in-fighting have gained fresh currency as small-screen fodder.
Check the gallery for a sampling of post-9/11 TV dramas fueled by a decade's worth of prime-time paranoia.
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Above:
The Event
Key organization: The White House Conspiracy theory: The president of the United States (Blair Underwood) visits a secret holding area in Alaska and meets a prisoner of unknown origins (Laura Innes of ER). Setting aside its over-reliance on the now-tiresome gimmick of multitiered flashbacks, The Event's pilot episode looks promising.Follow us on Twitter: @hughhart and @theunderwire.
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