First of all, is it just me, or does it feel like J.J. Abrams is taking over genre film and television? It's probably just me, but with the "Star Trek" reboot, "Cloverfield" and now this, it just seems like he's Hollywood's king geek. Second, I actually think this show might be pretty good. The Variety article also says that CBS and ABC have similarly themed shows in the works, and frankly, I have a lot more faith in Abrams to produce a quality genre show than I do in Jerry Bruckheimer and Zak "X-Men: The Last Stand" Penn, even if Kurtzman and Orci are the guys who wrote "Transformers." Unfortunately, FOX as a really lousy track record when it comes to giving its sci fi shows a chance to gain an audience.

It also strikes me that Abrams is a much better successor to the "X-Files" tradition than he is to the "Star Trek" tradition. Anyone who has watched "Alias" or "Lost" knows that his shows excel at creating mountains of unanswered questions and labyrinthine mythologies that are difficult to keep track of without the aid of charts and graphs.