Z/Web

Not a movie but a short-lived TV series from X-Files creator Chris Carter. This series was just released on DVD — all nine episodes. Apparently six of those never even aired on TV as the series was canceled after just three shows! Was really pisses me off about that is that though I am an ideal candidate to watch this show — I loved the X-Files, I’m a big Chris Carter fan, and I love science fiction — I never even heard of this show until it was released on DVD! That’s ridiculous. Why the hell wouldn’t Fox promote the show? At least tell us it’s a Chris Carter show! That would get me to tune in. And canceling it after just three shows? That’s really dumb. Why even bother to make it in the first place with such a lack of commitment? As you can tell, I am rather vexed by this. That a show that appeals to me as much as the premise of this one and I never even knew it existed is just lame. I don’t blame myself, I blame the morons at Fox. When I first saw this DVD set released I thought it must have been some weird Chris Carter cable show that only aired a few episodes — I’m shocked that it was on a major network and I never heard of it. Just ridiculous.

Of course what makes that even worse is that the show is very good. It died too early to say if it would be great, but judging from the quality of the nine episodes, I’d say it started out good and was getting better and better (the ninth episode was my favorite). It’s a real shame the show died before it was born. While this show came out the same year as Matrix: that death is real (i.e. you die in VR you die in real life); that certain people have “magical” abilities to modify “reality” within the game and “cheat” (i.e. heal bullet wounds, walk through walls, etc.); and the whole mystical “the one” silliness. Harsh Realm adds a couple new improbably technology wrinkles to the mix. First, that the Realm is an exact duplicate of the real world, down to the mole on your grandmother’s neck and the fact that Aunt Sylvia loves strawberries and whipped cream, and second, that many of the “people” in the Realm are virtual characters (not real). Preposterious! No way even the military has storage capability to simulate the idenitities and behaviors of six billion people, let alone have some way to scan every human being and know everything about them. And virtual characters that act like real human beings? For that to happen the computer would have to understand language — it would have to be human. We are hundreds of years from anything like that, if ever. But beyond those two conceits, the show’s entertaining. It has an anthology, Twilight Zone feel to it. Since anything goes within virtual reality, stories have a wide range, often not having anything to do with the previous episodes. That’s probably part of the reason the network balked at the show: anthologies are difficult to attract an audience because the stories are completely different every week. For instance, one episode of Harsh Realm had the two main characters stumble into a WWII simulation and get stuck, unable to escape, reliving the same battle over and over again. In another (my favorite), the two get caught up in a feud between two families living in the radioactive rubble of NYC who are after the same pile of gold (which turns out to be radioactive).