Day Break

Day Break debuted on November 15, 2006 and was cancelled on December 15, with only six episodes aired. The remaining seven episodes were eventually posted on ABC’s website and in 2008, TV One aired all 13 episodes. The show starred Taye Diggs as Brett Hopper, Moon Bloodgood as Rita Shelten, Victoria Pratt as Andrea Battle, Adam Baldwin as Chad Shelten, Meta Golding as Jennifer Mathis, and Ramón Rodriguez as Damien Ortiz. Hopper is framed for the murder of an Assistant District Attorney and tries to clear himself and find the culprits while living a Groundhog Day existence. The series originally aired on ABC in the U.S. The show is available on DVD, but it is not currently available for streaming.

When Steven Silver mentioned that he was looking for people to write an essay about television/streaming shows that had been cancelled too soon, one show immediately came to my mind even though it was cancelled a relatively long time ago (2006) and, as far as I know, doesn’t have a fan base or was even very popular. It never got enough viewers; that’s why it was cancelled after 6 episodes. I believe it represents a perfect storm of factors that made its cancellation extremely memorable and eminently suitable for a write-up. Two thousand six was a primitive time when the TV networks were still largely in control of viewing content. The show Lost had ended its second season in May and had demonstrated how profitable a continuing, non-episodic show that

relied on a central mystery could be. In fact, many consider Lost to be a pivotal work that was reshaping how people viewed prime time television, destroying the myth that each episode had to be able to stand by itself. Unfortunately, Damon Lindeloff and Carlton Cuse, Lost’s showrunners, were riding high, providing clues and frustrating viewers desperate to know what was going on on The Island, and the puzzles and mythology of the show were a large part of its appeal. For various reasons, ABC decided Lost would take a hiatus in its 2006 schedule and its Wednesday, 9:00 pm timeslot would need a temporary replacement. They looked for something that Lost’s viewers would find appealing during a Lost hiatus. Lost had already paved the way for the creation of a number of Lost-like knock-offs. Invasion (ABC, 2005-06) and Threshold (CBS, 2005-2006) are the ones that stand out. Both ended after one season and, if I remember correctly, prematurely. There would be many more over the years, and it could be argued that Lost’s format now dominates. I was clearly a sucker for it. I had just retired from my day job and had acquired a DVR from Dish Network that gave me the time and ability to watch these shows on my own schedule and watch them I did. The TV show Jericho also premiered in 2006 on CBS and I hope someone has chosen to write about it in this publication; Jericho’s history is an epic story of cancellation and rebirth. ABC chose Day Break, a show with a promising premise to take over Lost’s slot. The elevator pitch must have been something like Groundhog Day meets LA Confidential. Throw in elements of Memento and Choose Your Own Adventure books and you’ve got a great Lostian show with a mystery at its heart that would, presumably, keep viewers coming back. I had no expectations when I tuned into the first episode. The opening title showed a series of letters tumbling over one another to eventually reveal Day Break, hinting at a cryptographic puzzle that might reward a slow motion replay at some point. The first scenes feature a handsome diverse couple, Brett Hopper and Rita Shelten (played by Taye Diggs and Moon Bloodgood) waking up at 6:17 AM, obviously in love, and beginning their day. In 2006, this might have been a moderately ground-breaking thing in itself. Various normal, everyday events are shown, specific enough that that they can be referenced later when they repeat. During the course of the day, we find out Hopper (yes, he time hops) is an Angeleno cop. On the way to work he witnesses a bus crash that kills a woman and, sometime later in the morning, is arrested for the murder of Assistant D.A. Alberto Garza. He is questioned and we are introduced to other police personnel that work with him and are now interrogating him, and a number of familiar faces appear. Mitch Pileggi, playing the sleazy head investigator Detective Spivak, instantly adds a bit of X-Files mystery to the proceedings and Adam Baldwin, playing the supercilious Detective Shelten (Rita’s ex-husband), adds an amusing note. The day ends when Hopper is abducted by mysterious forces and ends up in a very science-fictional looking canyon surrounded by rows of machinery where an ageless, pre-Breaking Bad Jonathan Banks tells Hopper ominously that “actions have consequences” and he is injected with some chemical. Then, suddenly, it’s 6:17 again and the day repeats, with Hopper slowly realizing what’s happening and altering his behavior to change the results. This day also ends with Banks in the canyon and the injection. By the end of the first episode, I was intrigued and wanted to see where they were going with this idea. Moving the pieces around into different configurations created an interesting puzzle. But most of all, I want to know what their explanation would be for why this was happening. The end scene, which was beautifully staged, suggested that this would turn out to be science-fictional in some way, or at least that there would be an explanation. The next five episodes expanded on this premise, with each day presenting variations on the theme and each day adding a little more to the solution of the puzzle. The acting and writing is first rate, and many of the secondary characters stand out and prevent the essentially repetitious nature of the drama from curdling. More and more details of the underlying LA government’s corruption and subsequent murder of Garza are revealed as the day is examined from various angles. I can’t say how many times I’ve seen Los Angeles’s government presented this way, most recently in the excellent Amazon series Bosch, but it seemed like a good set-up to allow Hopper to discover the wheels-within-wheels nature of the conspiracy to frame him. And, just as Hopper confronts the Banks character on his home turf in episode six, the show is cancelled. Poof. No ending. Not even another hint about the larger picture of what’s going on and why the day is repeating. Very frustrating.

As it turned out, the show had not been cancelled entirely, just moved to the nascent ABC.com, but for whatever reason I didn’t follow it there. At this remove I’m not sure if I didn’t know about it or my crappy Verizon DSL Internet service wasn’t fast enough to watch videos. I have to say that for the vast majority of 2006 viewers, ending the run on ABC effectively killed it. Eventually, years later, I did have the bandwidth and the will to watch the remaining seven episodes. I have to conclude it didn’t really live up to my expectations. The show does retain the energy and intelligence of its beginning and, surprisingly, the gimmick of days repeating never gets tiresome. Some episodes have a different feel to them; there’s even an episode where instead of investigating the forces framing him, Hopper and Shelten head off for repeated vacation days in Mexico that, unfortunately, grow wearying for him. The nature of the conspiracy grows clearer and clearer. Hopper confronts his own past and that of his family in a way that is satisfying, and all the bad guys are apprehended and get their just desserts. At one point, Hopper determines that three weeks’ worth of repeating days have passed so it’s possible the total elapsed time is about a month. Interestingly, the idea that the events in one repeating day do have some influence on the next (aside from Hopper’s memory and any wounds he acquires) is broached but never fully explored. I couldn’t follow what was going on well enough to know how much fudging was going on in the various timelines, but if there were inconsistencies, this effect could be used to explain it. It’s an interesting concept but it’s underdeveloped. As in Groundhog Day, what’s going on in a science-fictional or fantasy sense (SPOILER) is never explained. When Hopper addresses the interpersonal and family issues tied up in the events that led up to the day that started repeating, it just stops. The next day begins. Left dangling is a tantalizing thing that never gets explained. A character is introduced in one of the first episodes who seems to be deranged and has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, but there’s evidence that he is also enmeshed in the same repeating day. One of the last things we see in the last episode is him, now on this new day shaved and in a suit, looking on knowingly. Whether he had something to do with the day or whether the writers stuck him in to produce a Lostian frisson, we will never know. After a few iterations, we don’t see the end of the repeating day; presumably many end with Hopper in the canyon. But what about the others? Some things are demystified: At one point, in the seventh episodes, one of the big machines in the canyon is revealed to be a dump truck. All in all, I would recommend Day Break despite my disappointment. It does present an interesting puzzle, and the show plays fairly with its complicated premise. What could be a somewhat cliché police procedural is torn apart and reassembled in such a way as to revitalize the elements. My guess is that it was cancelled because the general TV audience of 2006 was not willing to play along and didn’t want to expend the effort. One newspaper called it “even more infuriatingly baffling than the series it was spelling.” If you enjoy that sort of thing, you’ll like Day Break. It’s still available on DVD.