TV Week TV Week

By Jacqueline Cutler © Zap2it

In “Revolution,” producer J.J. Abrams’ epic drama coming to NBC Monday, Sept. 17, there’s a worldwide blackout.

Unlike most, the lights don’t go back on. Ever.

However, there are deeply hidden and coveted vestiges of electricity. The series questions what happens when not just the lights but anything that turns on switches off permanently, and we don’t know why or how.

“I feel like people need this show now,” says Giancarlo Esposito (“Breaking Bad”), who stars as the show’s villainous Capt. Tom Neville. “People feel like we are in danger of the end of the world, and doom and gloom. And the show is about the end of an old way of thinking and a new dawn blooming. We are on the precipice of realizing that humanity is all we have. I see it in my children. I see it in our spiritual essence. We are forgetting what we know.

“We losing our connection to electricity is just an analogy of us losing our connection to each other as well,” Esposito continues. “The deeper reconnection is to have to rely on each other.”

Expect to hear people talk about “Revolution” in terms of a post-apocalyptic or a dystopian society, but no one knows if this blackout was the result of an apocalypse. Life as everyone knows it has changed so dramatically that cities no longer exist.

A few people such as Ben, a mild-mannered guy with a wife and two kids, expected the cataclysmic event that launched the series. He quickly downloads valuable information onto a flash drive camouflaged as a pendant.

Captain Neville and his henchmen come to seize Ben 15 years after the power ceased. The arrest goes wrong, Ben dies, and Neville winds up nab-