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The 2002-2003 TV season was a dark time for me – all at once, many of my TV favourites decided to call it quits or got yanked off the air. I was especially hard-hit by the loss of Buffy, a series I still maintain is one of the greatest ever broadcast. But when I heard an Eliza Dushku-fronted supernatural show had been green-lit, with a distinguished team of Buffy production alums including Doug Petrie, David Solomon and Jane Espenson on the wagon, I was sold.
Tru Calling’s premise was set up as a procedural which could have a new story each week: aspiring medical student Tru Davies takes up a job in a morgue, only for the bodies on her slab to suddenly open their eyes, declare “help me!” and instantaneously wind the clock back 24 hours, giving her the chance to save their life. The first few episodes were very much treading unknown ground, and the storytelling was quite basic – there was a lot of Eliza Dushku running around the city (why did she never take a cab?) racing against the clock to prevent tragedy from striking; even as a massive fan of Dushku, I found her character somewhat indulgently overexposed. Unsurprisingly, this format became repetitive after the first handful of episodes, despite some well thought-out cases and a significant peek into Tru’s personal life.
But Tru Calling really kicked it up a gear with the introduction of Jason Priestley’s character, Jack Harper, who though mysterious and seemingly kind at first proved to be the sinister yin to Tru’s yang – he was trying to ensure that the deaths that Tru was attempting to prevent came about anyway. And that was how a programme that could have been remembered as “Hot Girl Runs to Places” became so much more – it grappled with difficult concepts of fate, ethics and determinism, and the further the season went on, the more vicious the expression of that debate became through the actions of the two protagonists. It created along with it a superb arc which culminated in a core-shocking twist at the end of season 1, which redefined Tru’s whole world.
If it wasn’t for its passionate fans, this is bafflingly where network executives would’ve dropped the guillotine – luckily for us, after shelving it for a few months, five more episodes were aired…but the series finale didn’t see the broadcasting light of day until 2008 (of course, if you’d bought the boxset, you would have seen it earlier). And honestly, I’ve still not quite gotten over it. Granted, it took some time to warm up, but the ease at which it compelled me in the second half of the first season earned it my badge of approval. Infuriatingly, Tru Calling aired in a thankless timeslot against Friends and Survivor (both chalking up 20 million viewers apiece), but all things considered earned a consistent audience between 4 and 6 million – by today’s standards, not shabby at all for a cult series.
There’s plenty more it had going for it – a killer theme tune, Zach Galifianakis (!) in his first role as a series regular, an excellent supporting cast (alongside the aforementioned, Criminal Minds’ A.J. Cook and Chuck’s Matthew Bomer) and a set of daddy issues that even Lost would be impressed by. Needless to say, I’m sure the Tru Calling team had some mind-blowing ideas still up their sleeves that they never had a chance to showcase – and at a mere 27 episodes, I wish I could have had more of a glimpse into Tru’s adventures in her rather unorthodox hobby.
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