If Dirk Gently ever ditched the holistic detective business and created a TV show based on his belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of things, it’s a fair bet that the result – minus any autobiographical details like pizza and angry secretaries, and with the offbeat humour replaced by stirringly human tales of fortitude, redemption and love – would be Touch.
For those who are, er, out of touch with Sky1’s latest import, the premise is this: 24 star Kiefer Sutherland plays Martin Bohm, a widower struggling to communicate with his mute son, Jake (David Mazouz), who combines a curious resemblance to Daniel Roche from Outnumbered (hey!) with the ability to see the past, present and future through combinations of numbers.
With the assistance of Jake’s social worker Clea (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who Doctor Who fans may recognise as Martha’s sister) and Arthur Teller (Danny Glover), an expert on children who share Jake’s gift for numerical clairvoyance, Martin tries to make sense of his son and the complex, mystical sequences of digits that bind the world and our lives together. It sounds complicated, and it frequently is, but this exploration of the wonder and tragedy of serendipity is also one of most poignant, affecting series that the US has produced in a long time.
In the appropriately named Entanglement, Martin misses an important evaluation of Jake at his care home when a stolen laptop leads him, via a street chase, to an impromptu meeting with a gun-toting girl on a bus who abruptly takes him hostage.
Jack Bauer would have whipped out his cell phone and jammed it up her nose, but despite sharing the CTU legend’s whisper-to-an-even-hoarser whisper way of talking, Sutherland’s latest character isn’t that kind of guy. They’re cut from the same cloth, but while Jack always managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the numbers end up putting Martin in the wrong place at precisely the right time.
‘I’m not trying to be a hero, trust me,’ he says to Marisol (Zulekya Silver), who’s brought the piece aboard the bus to kill them man who murdered her father and brother. ‘But I have to believe that nobody’s supposed to die today.’
Happily, nobody does. Not the computer-thieving pickpocket Hector (Rolando Molina), who’s just trying to prove to his daughter he can be as good a dad as her stepfather; not the Saudi woman giving birth in the back of a car half-inched by Norah (Emily Ghamrawi), who is anxious to avoid being paired off in an arranged marriage to foreign student Sami (Amir Talai) even though she wants to emulate him and study abroad; nor even the young boy for whom Sami – who’s working at a hospital in Canada and keeps missing his chances to chat up the girl of his dreams whom he keeps bumping into on the subway – is trying to find a bone marrow donor.
Of course, the kid’s sister (and eventual transplant saviour) is Marisol, because everything is connected. Her brother survives, Norah’s arranged marriage is cancelled, Sami finally gets to see the girl he fancies and even Hector manages to do something good for his daughter without having to nick anything else. If you’re not bawling with happy warmth at this point, then the cassette made for Jake by his late mother will leave you watching the end credits through a happily blurry haze.
Touch never lets its tug-of-war-champion-grip on the heartstrings slacken, even for a second, and while its emotive climaxes may feel a little too schmaltzy for the avowedly cynical, there’s something authentically touching about the small, everyday happy endings that Jake’s statistical soothsaying and Martin’s low-key anti-Bauer actions produce.
There’s also a great deal of satisfaction to be gained from the way the complex bunch of apparently disparate subplots are tied up as impressively as an MP in an S&M dungeon, and from the way a primetime American show is brave enough to have huge chunks of dialogue in subtitled Arabic and French.
Touch is (literally) quality television by numbers.
Aired at 8pm on Tuesday 17th April 2012 on Sky1.
> Order the Season 1 boxset on Amazon.
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