As anyone who watches with any regularity can attest, television viewing can be something of a crap shoot during the summer months. In the summer absence of the hit shows we all got hooked on during the fall — 24, Lost, and after this past season, Heroes all come to mind here — summer is that notorious time that the networks trot out their replacement fare.

For television, this usually means that the summer months are relegated to something like a science experiment. Since presumably no one is watching anyway, the networks will often use this time to try out the shows they weren't so willing to take a chance on during the fall season. Generally speaking, these replacement programs will fill space for a few weeks before becoming completely forgotten by the time the big guns are rolled out for fall.

One summer series which has refreshingly bucked this trend is USA Network's The 4400. Now in its fourth season, the sci-fi drama has drawn not only decent ratings, but has even developed something of a devoted fan base. Set in Seattle, the show's premise revolves around a group of 4400 individuals who mysteriously vanish, then are returned unharmed, unaged, and newly gifted with various paranormal abilities.

Early on in the show, the implication was that these people had been abducted and returned by aliens. More recently, this assumption has shifted somewhat to where it now appears to be a future version of ourselves who took these folks. They have also been tasked with a mission to save mankind from some unknown future calamity.

Since my personal nitpicks about this show number so few, I'll dispense with those here and now. As I said, the show is set in Seattle. But as someone who was born and raised here, I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the show isn't filmed anywhere near Seattle.

Since becoming everybody's favorite hippest town in the world — between Microsoft, Starbucks, and grunge in the nineties — many movies and shows now have stories and plots that originate in Seattle. Some, like Greys Anatomy for instance, do it right by either filming here or at least getting the local references correctly. The 4400 occasionally gets this part right too. More often though, they miss the mark.

Personal hometown gripe aside though, The 4400 has become a major summertime guilty pleasure for me. I've always been a sucker for sci-fi anyway, and over the course of four seasons now, this show has taken some very interesting twists and turns.

Take the series' two principal characters, Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch) and Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie), for example. Working as investigators for a government agency called NTAC (National Threat Assessment Command), the pair are tasked with keeping tabs on the 4400. It seems however, that Baldwin and Skouris also have more than a few personal ties themselves.