The Details

The Event

NBC, Mondays, 9 p.m.

With last season’s spectacular failure of FlashForward, combined with the long-overdue mercy cancellation of Heroes, you’d think TV networks would have learned their lesson about serialized genre shows built around ill-conceived mysteries. But NBC has put the full force of its hype machine behind The Event, a show so irritating that at times it seems like a parody of these vague, portentous shows in which everyone talks in code. Even the title is deliberately generic, telling you as little as possible about the actual content of the show. The first episode, too, sacrifices storytelling for intrigue, jumping around in time just when something significant is about to happen, and never allowing characters to refer directly to anything. By the end of the episode, there’s at least an idea of what the titular event is, but it’s a few seconds of payoff for an hour’s worth of being jerked around.