Surface Left Its Core Characters and Its Audience Hanging. Fans Should Demand More!
If familiarity counts at times of great duress, as countless network executives have insisted over the years, it would seem NBC could do much worse than to bring back its cheesy popcorn thriller Surface for another season.
Though hardly a Nielsen smash, Surface was a proven self-starter Mondays at 8 p.m., it appealed to a young audience and it seemed to be custom designed for a
second-run on corporate sibling Sci Fi Channel, an ideal platform for in-house, home-grown cross-promotion. Further, Nim, the baby creature featured in the series, is
a marketing director's dream -- a natural model for fast-food kids' meals, a toy line and souvenirs at NBC Universal's gargantuan theme parks.
If Surface isn't slated to return, NBC or Sci Fi should at the very least produce a television movie that wraps up its storyline. When last we saw its core characters, they were stranded atop a North Carolina
church after the entire East Coast had been flooded by a tsunami -- the rising waters filled with genetically engineered, man-eating sea monsters. Fans will (and should) raise hell if their loyalty to the show isn't rewarded with a pay-off or closure of some kind. And if NBC doesn't come through,
burned Surface fans should stop watching the network, as so many others have done.
Again, I ask… given the current sorry state of all things NBC, why would it be a bad idea to return a franchise with a loyal core audience that could be utilized on two networks? Given its track record
of late, a second season of Surface would seem a surer bet than many of the brand new series the network will try to launch in September from its very weakened position in the marketplace and the ratings race.
