TV is the New Reading

‘Eli Stone’ feels a bit floppy this season

There have been a few episodes of “Eli Stone” already this fall, but the show feels a little like a hand-tossed pizza three feet across – it’s been sort of floppy and hard to get a handle on.

The first season ended with San Francisco lawyer Eli Stone waking up from a surgery that removed a brain aneurysm. It was the same aneurysm they found in his father’s brain and his father had spent his whole life in an alcoholic stupor to escape having Visions, which the aneurysm seems to bring about.

These Visions started appearing to Eli after his father died, and manifested as spectacular song-and-dance numbers, and Eli got caught up in them, which was embarrassing. They also guided him to take on pro bono cases, which gained him a little notoriety in his office when his cases started conflicting with long-standing clients. Together with breaking off his engagement with his boss’s daughter, Eli’s life was really unstable and he opted for surgery.

Well, the surgery was a success, but three months later Eli’s brother, a surgeon, started having the Visions. There was some question, however, as to whether Eli had ever stopped. As the second season opened, he was meeting with a therapist, played by Sigourney Weaver, who was ostensibly counseling him back toward work readiness following his brain surgery.

I say ostensibly because as the show progressed, it became clear that she wasn’t really there, and Eli was in fact talking to some Higher Power. The Higher Power told Eli that if he didn’t carry the Visions, his brother would have to. In the end, he begged to have the Visions restored to him. The aneurysm disappeared from his brother’s MRI and reappeared in Eli’s head (ta-dah!)

Vision, Vision, who’s got the Vision is only part of the floppiness this season. Katie Holmes appeared as a potential love interest, for a second or two, because her character was on her way overseas, and Eli couldn’t tell if he was meant to go with her or if she was supposed to stay with him. Also, when his brother had a Vision of his boss trapped in a stairwell, Eli had to convince far too many people about how to rescue him, including his ex-fiancee, his boss’s daughter, who was even more stubborn about these sorts of things than she’d been in the past when, apparently, all of Eli’s Visions had been panning out and saving lives.

Meanwhile, there’s the whole question of whether a semi-psychic headcase who bursts into song occasionally should be assigned cases in the first place, especially when his Visions are so incredibly vague to begin with.

Well, better a lawyer than a surgeon, anyway.

In short, it feels like too much of this show is written to heighten tension and pad out the hour. Eli’s ex-fiancee is incredibly difficult to read, his boss runs between having faith in Eli and dismissing him – which is all the weirder for Eli having saved his life – and even the song-and-dance numbers have been a little blah this season, so ... there’s that.

The writing needs to step up. In that it’s become clear that Eli is getting these Visions from a Higher Power, that Higher Power needs to get a lot less vague, and the show needs to take on some actual direction and fast. So far this season, the characters in “Eli Stone” have been running about like ants in a disrupted anthill. A little more direction and focus would be nice.

“Eli Stone” airs 9 p.m. Tuesdays on ABC.

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