Awake, which comes on NBC on Thursdays is probably my favorite new show. The premise is fairly simple but the way it's played out can get very, very detailed and can sometimes be hard to follow. Basically, police detective Michael Britten gets into a car accident with his family. His wife has survived and his son has died, but the twist is, when he closes his eyes to go to sleep, he wakes up and his son has survived and his wife has died. So he's living two lives, one with his wife, mourning the loss of their son, and one with his son, where he tries to connect with him the way his mother did, but can't seem to.
He sees two therapists who each insist that the reality he's living in with them is real. If he truly accepts one reality, that means that he has to accept that one of them is dead, which, as you can imagine, he doesn't want to do.
To make things even more complicated, as a police detective, his investigations in one reality end up affected or helping his investigation in the other. That's where it can get complicated because it can get hard to remember which reality he's in, the one with the son, or the one with the wife and which case he's investigating. I discovered, watching the second episode, that the reality with his wife is tinted with a yellow/orange tone, the one with his son, a more blue/green tone. I just realized that at the end of the last episode so I'll see if it helps when I watch the next episode.
Each relationship he has, with this wife, and then with his son, is so interesting and heartbreaking. He was sharing with his wife that he was seeing his son, but it was too much for her to deal with, so now he only discusses his interactions with them with his therapists.
In the second episode you realize that his lieutenant is somehow involved in some sort of plot involving Michael. We don't know what it is, or if it's related to his two different realities, yet. It almost had an Adjustment Bureau feel to it, if that makes sense.
I definitely recommend watching this show, it's fascinating and smart, which means it'll probably be cancelled, so, you better watch now to let NBC people know we do watch it and please don't cancel it!
