TV is the New Reading

FOX’s ‘Past Life’ not worth coming back for

Critics have been ragging on FOX’s new production of “Past Life.”

Some take issue with the theological implications of reincarnation -- although many of these same people are just fine with “Medium.” That is, souls can seek justice beyond the grave, just not from the vantage point of someone else’s body.

Others have called it absurd, which I’ll just point out isn’t enough, in and of itself, to stop a show from getting made. Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari are probably still getting residuals from “Bosom Buddies,” after all.

In “Past Life,” the lead actress, Kelli Giddish, plays Kate McGinn, a woman with a Ph.D. in this and that who has managed to wrap the intractable, ephemeral world of past-life regression within the thinnest veneer of scientific inquiry. She recognizes the symptoms of past life events surfacing in someone’s current life (somehow), and can guide the person experiencing these symptoms to what they are meant to do.

She’s also quite beautiful, and when she used her feminine wiles to gain some additional information from a teenage busboy, the show became every stupid thing it was hoping to avoid: Some slinky tart being all mysterious and playing guessing games about the Other Side.

Process

Oh, she’s ever so gifted. As Corinne, a young woman distressed by her past life experiences, is fleeing her offices because she thinks McGinn is a loon, McGinn says:

“You can feel the visions coming on, but you don’t know what causes them. They started out of flashes but they’ve gotten more intense, more detailed, They’re scary, but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is the pain they make you feel, not being able to control them.”

Corinne turns: “How did you know that?”

McGinn answers: “Because this is what I do.”

And oh yeah, Corinne’s sister brought her in and told you her symptoms.

Incidentally, if I and my sister were to suddenly lose my parents and my sister were then to freak out and drop out of college and start hallucinating and overdosing on pills, I do not suppose my first instinct -- or that anyone’s first instinct -- would be that she was suffering from some past-life trauma.

But here’s Corinne in McGinn’s office. And in part because when you’re a hammer, everything in the world looks like a nail, and in part because it’s what the script says to do, McGinn’s team investigates this girl’s home and finds April 14 written on everything and sunflowers everywhere.

They punch “April 14” and “sunflowers” into a search engine and someone’s execution is set for that day. And it turns out that a lawyer is concealing evidence under attorney-client privilege that would exonerate a death-row inmate. He taped a confession implicating his client, the head of a country club, in a woman’s murder in the ’80s, hid the tape and then died trying to recover evidence.

Meanwhile, Corinne is born and is living her life and this innocent man is riding out the appeals process on death row. Corinne is apparently the reincarnation of this lawyer guy, and her flashes of someone else’s memories are his.

These memories guide them to the death-row inmate, the country club, the quarry where the evidence was disposed of, the lawyer guy’s file room and ... the tape itself! Which they’re allowed to just play out in court and save the day! And arrest the country club guy, who we didn’t like anyway! Hooray!

Reactions

First, how hard is it for Richard Schiff to find legitimate work? Since closing out his stellar performance as Toby Ziegler in seven seasons of “The West Wing,” I’ve seen him in half an episode of “Burn Notice” and he was in an episode of “In Plain Sight” with co-Winger Mary McCormack, both on USA. Isn’t there a stage production of “King Lear” somewhere he can shine and be magnificent in for the next several years? His turn as ... whatever he’s meant to be in this production is way beneath him.

Secondly, I’ve been watching “24” long enough to recognize fake tension. When the 14-year-old sister calls Corinne and says the social workers are coming in three days to take her away, and the inmate will be executed in three days, then tomorrow, and then in a matter of hours, you begin to notice how constructed this entire production is. That the past-life soul will be able to communicate exactly the information needed in exactly the amount of time needed for these people to help whatever needs helping. Nonsense! Even if the client is simply experiencing repressed memories of something else entirely or self-medicating through a grief process, several years could go by before anyone learned anything useful.

Surely we all have motivations that would be hard to trace on the face of it. But I guess my first thought isn’t that it must be some past-life regression surfacing and taking over. Or my second thought. We’d have to run through several thoughts before it would ever occur to me that some past-life experience was influencing me at all.

Also -- and I need to be very clear about this: Random past-life interpreters shouldn’t be allowed to just rifle about through old files in law firms. If there’s not a rule against that they need to make one. Sure, in this case, a guy was released from death row, but generally, it seems to me that no good could come of it.

“Past Life” airs, for now, Thursdays at 8 p.m. on FOX.

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