During the height of Lost’s popularity, television networks churned out similar “mystery box” sci-fi shows seemingly by the dozen, aiming to capture the same cultural cachet and big ratings as the ABC thriller, but nearly all failing to come even close. Premiering Monday, Sept. 24, on NBC, Manifest would have fit in perfectly during that era, which is perhaps thematically appropriate for a show about people who mysteriously travel to the present from 2013.

Like Lost, Manifest begins with a commercial flight that goes astray, in this case Montego Airways Flight 828, which leaves Jamaica on April 7, 2013, experiences a moment of extreme turbulence, and then lands smoothly in New Jersey ... on Nov. 4, 2018. For everyone on board, only a few hours have passed, but in the outside world, it’s now five and a half years later.

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That’s a pretty intriguing hook for a TV series, but the first episode (the only one available for review) spends most of its time shrinking this expansive sci-fi premise into cheesy family melodrama, focusing almost exclusively on only three passengers out of the nearly 200 on board the plane. “All I know is it’s the day my life changed forever,” says Michaela Stone (Melissa Roxburgh) in voiceover at the beginning of the episode, and Manifest is full of corny, obvious lines like that, which the actors do their best to make convincing.

Melissa Roxburgh as Michaela Stone, Josh Dallas as Ben Stone, Jack Messina as Cal Stone in Manifest

Michaela, her brother Ben (Once Upon a Time’s Josh Dallas) and Ben’s 10-year-old son Cal (Jack Messina) decide to accept travel vouchers in exchange for taking a later flight home to New York City from their family vacation in Jamaica, thus putting them on the ill-fated Flight 828, while Michaela and Ben’s parents, Ben’s wife Grace (Athena Karkanis) and Cal’s twin sister Olive go on ahead of them. So when the plane finally lands, they discover that Michaela and Ben’s mother has died, Olive is now a teenager, and Michaela’s fiancé Jared (J.R. Ramirez) is now married to her best friend. Despite all of that, they jump back into daily life with remarkable ease, with almost no references to how the world has changed in five years.

What’s happening to everyone else who was on the plane? Creator Jeff Rake (The Mysteries of Laura) doesn’t pay much attention to them, and aside from the Stone family, the only other series regular from Flight 828 is medical researcher Saanvi Bahl (Parveen Kaur), whose in-development pediatric cancer treatment has become a medical success story in the five years she was away. Could it possibly be the key to curing Cal’s leukemia?

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Parveen Kaur as Saanvi Bahl in Manifest

Obviously it could be, and the show makes sure to spell that out in painstaking detail, in case it’s not clear that these characters are now connected by some mystical force. “I’m not ruling out that just maybe he came back to be saved and I came back to save him,” Saanvi tells her boss, who’s more concerned about a potential purchase from a giant, and undoubtedly sinister, pharmaceutical company.

Michaela and Ben have also started hearing voices in their heads, with vague yet insistent hints about imminent danger. Michaela finds it surprisingly simple to return to her old job as a cop (despite some unspecified scandal in her past), and her premonitions help her to solve a kidnapping case. Probably the most disappointing direction for Manifest to take would be to turn into a show about a psychic detective, but Michaela’s position on the police force will almost certainly drive future stories.

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More than a detective show, though, Manifest is the embodiment of those mass-produced signs emblazoned with generic positive sentiments about life. It’s Everything Happens for a Reason: The TV Show, with Michaela discovering that her mother’s favorite Bible verse shares a number with the Montego Airways flight and with a key location in the case she ends up solving. “This is bigger than us,” Grace insists to Michaela, but the show has trouble following through on that idea.

The government investigation into the returned flight is halfhearted and loosely defined; a news reporter claims that “a multitude of government agencies” are on the scene, but the show only offers up a handful of people in hazmat suits. When the episode closes with a montage of other Flight 828 returnees experiencing potential psychic impressions, it feels like an afterthought rather than a preview of exciting developments to come.

In addition to Lost, Manifest recalls the hokey but mostly enjoyable USA Network series The 4400, about missing people who suddenly reappeared years later not having aged, and with nascent supernatural powers. That show developed an intriguing (if convoluted) mythology, and Manifest might get to that point eventually as well, although there isn’t much in the first episode that makes it seem like it will be worth sticking around to find out.


Premiering Monday, Sept. 24, at 10 p.m. ET/PT on NBC, Manifest stars Melissa Roxburgh, Josh Dallas, Athena Karkanis, J.R. Ramirez, Luna Blaise, Jack Messina and Parveen Kaur.