Jarod (Michael T. Weiss) is a Pretender. As a five-year-old in 1963, he was taken from his home and "adopted" by The Centre, a mysterious Delaware-based think tank. Why Jarod? His superior intellect--Jarod can "pretend" to be anything he wants: doctor, lawyer, engineer, astronaut and, as he quips in episode five ("The Paper Clock"), "I'm working on Indian chief."
Thirty years later, once he realized his efforts were not being used for good, Jarod escaped from the Centre. Psychiatrist and surrogate father Sydney (
Carnivàle's velvet-voiced Patrick Bauchau) and sociopathic sidekick and Emma Peel lookalike Miss Parker (
ER's Andrea Parker) have been trying to track him down ever since. Theyre assisted by the technically proficient, if socially inept Broots (
Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Gries). Each and every time, Jarod eludes their grasp, but not before helping some stranger who's been dealt an injustice (just as he once was). Along the way, he hopes to figure out who he is and where he came from.
Each of these 21 episodes moves deftly from Jarod's lonely past to his more satisfying, if precarious present (the human "science project" was constantly videotaped as a boy, hence the abundance of footage from his childhood). It's a worthy successor to paranoid thrillers like
The Fugitive and the unjustly obscure
Nowhere Man (from
X-Files creator Chris Carter), and the droll performance of Weiss (
Jeffrey) adds a dose of levity to a concept usually painted with a darker palette.
The Pretender ran on NBC for four seasons and was followed by two TV movies,
The Pretender 2001 and
Isle of the Haunted.
--Kathleen C. Fennessy
Reader Reviews
Classified as a drama, "The Pretender" never took itself too seriously. Classified as a science fiction show, "The Pretender" never quite fit the mold. Classified as great television, "The Pretender" lives up to it's billing.
