'Touch' Starring Kiefer Sutherland Premieres on the Fox Network

The new Fox TV series "Touch," which stars Kiefer Sutherland as a harried father of an apparently autistic child, is one of the strangest shows to appear on network television. It is also one of the most confusing.

Spoilers surely follow.

Sutherland plays Martin Bohm, a man who used to be a reporter but who is now taking a series of menial jobs. His wife had been a stock broker who had the misfortune to be in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Bohn has been trying to raise his emotionally disturbed, mute son Jake ever since, but the pressure is starting to wear on him.

Jake has started to ascend a cell phone tower every day at exactly 3:18. He is also compulsively writing down numbers and exhibiting a number of other strange, disturbing traits. This has attracted the notice of Child Protective Services in the form of Clea Hopkins, who at first comes across as an officious bureaucrat, but turns out to be sympathetic.

Things take a turn when Bohm is told by Arthur Dewitt, a scientist of some sort played by Danny Glover, that Jake is somehow a product of the next state of evolution. He is able to see the interconnection of people and things across time and is able to articulate that interconnection through numbers. Unlock the code of those numbers and one can start to understand what is going on in Jake's head.

Something happens on March 18 at 3:18 P.M. that is not only unexpected, but also leads to a kind of closure for Bohn concerning his wife. It also results in the rescue of 25 children from a burning school bus.

There is also a saga of a missing cell phone that affects the lives of a British businessman, still mourning the death of his young daughter, an aspiring Irish singer, a bevy of Japanese girls, and an Iraqi boy whose family is in need of an oven to keep the family bakery up and running. These people are part of that great interconnection that Dewitt is taking about.

The episode was often confusing, especially concerning the epic of the cell phone. But the series looks interesting to merit a second and perhaps a third look when it starts airing in earnest this March.

Source: Touch, Pilot, TVRage.com