Ellen Gray: 'Virtuality' sets a reality show in a sci-fi setting

VIRTUALITY. 8 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 29.

FOX TOMORROW leads viewers on a two-hour walk down a road not taken as it presents "Virtuality," a sci-fi pilot from "Battlestar Galactica" producers Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor.

The crew of the research vessel Phaeton is headed for a distant star, a 10-year round-trip that's being monitored back home by viewers for whom the journey is also a "reality" show.

As well as, just possibly, the best hope for the people of a planet that's rapidly becoming uninhabitable.

Or so we're told.

Back here on present-day Earth, "Virtuality" is a show Fox hasn't picked up as a series, and its two-hour pilot, which was directed by Peter Berg ("Friday Night Lights") is just that, ending in a way likely to frustrate anyone who's followed the action up until then.

Talk about your cruise to nowhere.

And yet for anyone who loves science fiction and Moore's brand of allegory, "Virtuality" could be an intriguing two hours.

Just don't count on its scoring, on a Friday night in the summer, the kind of ratings that would change minds at Fox.

Lighter than "Galactica" - though, really what isn't? - the show is about much more than the virtual-reality programs crew members employ to escape their metal tube. (And, yes, the similarity between these and the series finale of ABC's "Life on Mars" did not go unnoticed.)

It's also about the world outside the programs, where reality may be being manipulated even further, in ways that are obvious and not so obvious.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who starred as an immortal in Fox's "New Amsterdam," plays the Phaeton's commander, Frank Pike, whose fantasies are far from futuristic. Six months into the trip, he's chafing at the demands of the show-within-a-show, "Edge of Never: Life on the Phaeton," and at the product placement that dictates which logoed T-shirt he wears on a particular day.

He's also facing a decision on whether to turn back or proceed past the point where that's no longer an option.

His crew, as telegenic and diverse a group as ever beamed onto a starship, has presumably been chosen as much for their appearance and potential conflicts as for their scientific skills, and between those conflicts and the ones that arise when they put on their virtual-reality goggles, there's enough drama to put ant-farm shows like "Big Brother" to shame.

Take, for instance, Dr. Roger Fallon (James D'Arcy).

The ship's psych officer, he's also raking it in as the on-site producer of "Edge of Never," in whose name he's perfectly willing to mess with crew members' heads. Because whatever happens, the show must go on.

It's difficult at this stage to parody "reality" television, which has taught us to accept lying and manipulation as part of the game, but "Virtuality" does its best, losing touch with actual reality only at the moment when an exultant Fallon tells his show's host, computer scientist Billie Kashmiri (Kerry Bishé) that "Edge" has just set a new ratings record - 5 billion viewers. On Fox.

Now that's the kind of science fiction you'd think a network would want to get behind.

What would you expect from an HBO show that bills itself as a "dark comedy" about a high school basketball coach with a large penis?

Long before I saw it, I expected I might wince, then laugh, and then wince some more.

What I never expected, though, was to feel so sad.

"Everything's falling apart," Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane) tells us in the opening moments of "Hung" as we see a stadium being dismantled and a minivan turned into scrap metal.

"And it all starts right here in Detroit, the headwaters of a river of failure."

Laughing yet?

Ray teaches and coaches at a suburban Detroit high school, and while his locker-room discourse on the life of the dung beetle - which may be the funniest thing in the pilot - isn't exactly of the "clear heads, full hearts, can't lose" variety, it is erudite.

Maybe a little more so than Ray otherwise seems to be, though the idea of a creature that carries around its own ball of excrement probably hits a little too close to home for him to appreciate the metaphor.

Dmitry Lipkin, who created "Hung" with wife and writing partner Colette Burson, also gave us the dark, and occasionally very funny, FX series "The Riches," a show about a family of con artists that owed much to comic Eddie Izzard, who made Lipkin's tale of identity theft on a grand scale seem plausible.

Jane is utterly believable as the hapless Ray, who, during the show's first four episodes, lurches from one disaster to another. But his character's a little too weighted down - and, no, not by the equipment you never actually see - to make his leap into male prostitution seem like anything but a plot device forced on him by writers trying a little too hard to make a point. *

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