Nowhere Man was one of the genre shows that appeared after the
successful run of Star
Trek: The Next Generation. It had an iffy concept that the fledgling
UPN Network was willing to risk. Thomas Veil is a photographer who had been
in the wrong place at the wrong time and had photographed a group hanging in
a South American country. The night of a photo exhibition which featured the
hanging, he goes into a restaurant bathroom and when he walks out, his life
has been deleted. His best friend has been murdered and he traces it all back
to the photograph.
This setup made for some great twists and turns and plenty of paranoia for the
first ten episodes. After that, the show seemed to become a little lost and
the writers tried to hit the reset button. Everything Thomas Veil had learned
up until then was to be doubted. He may not have even been in South America.
Those changes stretched the credibility of the show and the intensity of the
following episodes wasn't the same. Up until then, the audience had learned
everything as Veil learned it. When the writers chose to make Veil question
everything he had learned, they should have given the audience something to
hold onto. Instead, the audience had probably learned no real answers to the
mysteries and had wasted their time.
Nowhere Man was described by Lawrence Hertzog and the writers
as Twilight
Zone meets The Fugitive. The comparison that really
works may be with the limited series, The Prisoner. That series
had an overall method to its madness and while Nowhere Man had
direction for a while, it soon got lost and the storyline itself looked to be
going nowhere. Still, the first dozen episodes are well worth watching.
