Manifest

The fall season must be around the corner, because the networks are starting to tease us with footage and trailers for the upcoming premieres of their fall series, and NBC is no exception. Today they brought us the entire FIRST ACT of their brand new series ‘Manifest,’ which focuses on the intriguing story of a flight that sets off from Jamaica for New York, hits some turbulence, and then somehow lands five and a half years later, with everyone aboard having no idea that any time had passed, and also not aging a day.

The series is executive produced by Robert Zemeckis (‘Back to the Future,’ ‘Flight’) and stars Josh Dallas (‘Once Upon a Time’), and the entire first 9 minutes are available for viewing now below:

 

As the video shows, the show jumps right into the thick of things, setting up Josh Dallas’s family, with his parents, wife, and daughter (who is the twin sibling of his son, who happens to have cancer) opting to stay on their original flight while he, his son, and his sister choose to take a later flight so they can get $400 flight vouchers which they plan to use to return to the Mayo clinic to continue to get treatments for his sick child. On the ride home, while he and his sister discuss the pressure their parents are putting on her to accept her boyfriend’s marriage proposal, the plane hits “extreme turbulence,” (a term I hope to never hear in my lifetime) and when they land, they know something odd is going on as their plane is diverted to a small airfield where they de-board on the tarmac and are met by officials who inform them about the time jump and that they have all been missing for years. The act ends with the sister learning that their mother died in the years they were missing, the twin son freaking out that his sister aged 5 years in his absence, and everyone on the plane just beginning to come to grips with the fact that they got on the plane in 2013 and it is now 2018.

All in all, not a bad start, but this is a still a sci-fi show on NBC, and while it looks pretty good, fans (and yours truly) are still worried the network might give it the ax just as we start to really enjoy the series, so I’m not gonna fully commit just yet.

What are your thoughts on the first act? Are you willing to give the show a try? Any idea on why they called it ‘Manifest?’ Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!