TV Review: Traveler

Admittedly, summer is not the optimal season for television viewing. It’s the time of year when our attention turns to outdoor sports, barbecues, swimming pools, tanning and, in general, playing chicken with skin cancer. It’s always been sort of an unspoken rule that TV sleeps through the May sweeps, not to be awakened ‘til the ballyhoo of the fall season.

Those rules are changing. Partly because cable has altered the landscape of programming, and partly (and perhaps more importantly) because the Internet has made traditional scheduling much more fluid, the networks are venturing into summer programming that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. Granted, most summer fare consists of mindless game shows and third-tier reality series, but now and again a series like Traveler comes along that makes you realize summer isn’t all fun and games.

For Jay Burchell (Matthew Bomer) and Tyler Fogg (Logan Marshall-Green), it’s a summer they certainly weren’t expecting. I wrote about it here when the series had its sneak peek premiere 10 May. Three grad-school buddies embark on what is supposed to be a cross-country last-hurrah road trip before entering into their workaday futures. But when one of the trio, Will Traveler, convinces Jay Burchell and Tyler Fog to rollerblade through an iconic art museum in New York City, the first leg of the road trip takes a very twisted turn. An explosion rocks the museum, and Jay and Tyler suddenly find themselves prime suspects in an act of domestic terrorism. Worse, they gradually realize that their friend Will Traveler set them up to cover up his own involvement in the bombing.

I’m not going to recap every scene in the two hour premiere that debuted 30 May — you can see all two hours of it at ABC.com. But I will tell you this: Traveler is the most frenetic series you’ll see on prime time this summer. The more the plot unwinds, the more twisted it becomes. What begins as a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time morphs into something much more insidious, in which nothing is as it seems on the surface. All we know for certain is Burchell and Fog are the only innocents in what is a shadowy conspiracy involving the top levels of government. We only get pieces of information in tiny fragments, and even those are not to be trusted. In fact, we can’t even be certain that Fog or Burchell are the innocents they appear to be.

Article Author: Ray Ellis

Ray Ellis is a freelance writer who has been dissecting pop culture and its effect on how we view ourselves for over twenty years, ruffling feathers and dragging unsuspecting pedestrians along for the ride whenever possible.

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