I'm glad that Fox is giving the show time to find an audeince. Many shows stumble out of the gate but get better (Star TRek Next Gen for one). The Tru folks are working on improvements so I wouldn't give up on it yet:
www.eclipsemagazine.com/m...toryid=828(it's a long article but heres a snippet) {quote]“Tru Calling” – A Star Vehicle That's Catching Up To Its Star
Posted by S_Wiebe on 2003/12/11 16:11:44
Despite an overcrowded pilot and a couple of shaky episodes,
"Tru Calling" is showing significant signs of improvement - to the point where it is now a better bet than most of its creaky competition on Thursday nights.Tru Davies has a problem. She works graveyards in a morgue, and every so often, one of the bodies she prepares for autopsy asks for her help. Then, she wakes up and replays the previous day – hopefully saving the person whose body she saw the previous night. “Tru Calling” is a mix of “Early Edition”, “Groundhog Day” and a dash of “Run, Lola, Run” – pun intended – with Davies, a poor, university grad, running everywhere in her effort to save lives.
The pilot episode introduced Tru [Eliza Dushku] and her siblings, Harrison [Shawn Reaves], who has a gambling problem, and Meredith [Jessica Collins] whose addiction is cocaine. We also meet her best friend, Lindsay [A.J. Cook], and Davis [Zach Galifianakis], the guy who hires her at the morgue. It also gave her her first “assignment”, a young lady who turned up at the morgue looking like she had been executed.
Between Tru’s backstory [she witnessed her mother’s murder, ten years before, and couldn’t do anything to prevent it], and setting up her relationships with her siblings, best friend, and boyfriend [a weasel who, thankfully, was gone after the second ep], there was enough material for a one-hour drama – but we got her first talking corpse along with two red herrings, before we got to the big finish. It was, frankly far too much material – a ninety-minute pilot would have been much better.
And then there were the intros and extros to each act – a kaleidoscope of images run at a near strobe light intensity that could cause seizures in any epileptics unlucky enough to be watching.
Fortunately, with all the necessary exposition done in the pilot, subsequent episodes have been lean enough that they have been able to tell good, solid stories. Indeed, each new episode has been an improvement over the last until, finally, the show has become almost worthy of its star – and make no mistake about it, Ms Dushku is going to be a star.
The cast has terrific chemistry and the scripts have gotten much tighter. Even the intros and extros have been scaled back to the point where they are merely annoying – not hazardous to your health. Tru’s siblings have had some good moments. Harrison is deserving of special mention because Tru has confided in him and he keeps trying to get her prove it – despite her having done so a number of times [of course his idea of proof is getting the winning ponies for the day’s races…]. Shawn Reaves makes Harrison a charming scam artist/gambler, but also lets his real feelings for Tru come through in unguarded moments.[/quote]