Tru Calling

Fox may've blown it again this year with its scheduling of The Simpsons' annual Halloween anthology, but at least they got the timing right for its new Tru Calling. A night in the city morgue with former slayer badgrrl Eliza Dushku? What could be more pre-Halloween?

On the basis of its Thursday premiere, though, it looks as if we won't be spending all that much time in cadaver town: heroine Tru Davies spends more time on the street doing Run Tru Run than communing with dead people. As written by Jon Feldman, Tru Calling is a mystery in reverse. Spunky college grad Dushku, in order to pay for med school, gets a job as forensic attendant in the city morgue. Basically, the job entails charting bodies and checking personal possessions of incoming stiffs who've all died "unnatural deaths." But somehow Tru (who once heard her murdered mother speak to her) has gained the ability to heard the pleas of these newly deceased - and travel back one day to prevent their untimely demise.

"Why do they come to me?" our heroine asks her ne'er-do-well gambler brother. "Maybe because they know you'll listen," her brother replies. Which is all the explanation we're given. While Joan of Arcadia at least has a chatty deity to fall back on, the source of Tru's powers is unexplained (though a couple of times she wonders aloud if her late mother isn't somehow involved). Me, I have no difficulty buying the talks-to-dead-people bizness; it's the traveling-back-in-time bit that strains credulity.

The way director Phillip (Dead Calm) Noyce directs the trip in time is kinda sharp, though: a barrage of jump cuts replaying snippets of the day we've already seen. As a technique it makes more sense than the pointlessly showy fastforwarding we got on Fox's Keen Eddie. In addition to saving the lives of her new dead pals, Tru's time traveling gives her opportunity to improve her own life - and the lives of her family and friends. She pulls her brother out of a deadly poker game to give him a winning ten of clubs; she tries to waylay the delivery of cocaine to her insufficiently rehabbed sister. Feldman & Noyce openly acknowledge the replay-yer-day plot's debt to Groundhog Day: both mornings we see Tru wake to a clock radio playing the same tune - only instead of Sonny & Cher, it's the Donnas.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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