"Touch": Everything is Connected for Kiefer Sutherland's New Drama on Fox

The premise of Touch (TV) seems simple on the surface: we are all connected in one form or another. The butterfly effect; beating its wings a world away to kick off a snowstorm in Albuquerque. While this premise has been done before, it seems that this show, above all, is about heart. And if the crusty, hardened hero Jack Bauer wrung some tears out of you in eight seasons of 24, you can bet that Kiefer Sutherland’s Martin Bohm will really tug at your heart strings in this.

Martin (Kiefer Sutherland) is the epitome of a man who’s taken one too many licks in life, yet soldiers on despite it. He’s a former high paid reporter reduced to a baggage handler at JFK airport after the death of his stock-broker wife in the Trade Center on 9-11. His 11 year old son, Jake (David Mazouz) is mute and shows all the signs of being severely autistic. He refuses to be touched by anyone, and spends his days scratching number sequences into a jillion notebooks, when he isn’t climbing cell towers or taking apart cell phones.

Martin is clinging to his life by his fingernails, desperate for a way to connect to his son like any father would. He sees other children interacting with friends and their parents and envies them. But Jake’s severe regression and tendency to wander off has caught The Eye of the state.

Enter Clea Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a social worker who has surprisingly little knowledge of severely autistic kids. I was surprised that for all she knew of Martin’s case, when she comes to observe Jake at home, the first things she does is try to touch him. Of course, she thinks the kid is better off in State hands.

Meanwhile, the “red thread” of fate or whatever you want to call it, is weaving around the people around the Bohms. Jake keeps seeing the numbers 318 everywhere; on a bus, on clocks, in dates. He also produces the Fibonacci sequence to perfection which dictates the ratios found in nature’s patterns.

In this episode, it is a cell phone that is the catalyst: skipping around the world from New York, London, Ireland, Iraq and Japan, like some bizarre form of Pay it Forward. People record messages, a budding vocalist records a song that earns her a following in Japan. The phone’s owner’s last remaining photos of his deceased daughter catch up with him on a jumbo-tron in Tokyo, and somehow, the phone even prevents a young Iraqi boy from becoming a suicide bomber.

Now, while this all seems a bit convoluted, The Emotions of these minor characters are poignant and vivid, even though we see them in little more than snapshots. Martin starts to see the patterns his boy is trying to show him, and seeks help in the form of Arthur Teller (Danny Glover), a mathematician who believes Jake is tapped into something bigger than anything Martin can imagine. The question is, what does he do with this new knowledge? Act – or ignore it?

Martin even connects, via Jake, with the firefighter who tried to save his doomed wife in the Towers on 9-11, but of course, like any good magic act, all of the dominoes in this game don’t fall together until the end.

All of the ripples (and people) around the world, set into motion by this little boy’s vision have the potential to be very interesting, if they don’t spend too much time delving into quantum entanglements, string theory and all the other higher sciences that will leave viewers scratching their heads. The emotionally driven drama will be what viewers can sink their teeth into, invest in and keep coming back for more.

At the center of this is a father and son, trying to connect as they become involved in the current of unfolding events, and Sutherland is more than believable in that role. His emotions drag you in and hold you taught, hoping, like he does, that in some way the little ‘wins’ will add up to something worthwhile. Mazouz has a quiet intensity about him, making the most of his scenes with little physical expression.

As Sutherland has said, like Jack Bauer, Martin will “never really win, never get what he wants out of his relationship with Jake.” But we can always hope, can’t we?

And hope, I think, is really what this show is about.

“Touch” starts its series run on Monday, March 19 on FOX