Brimstone Review from Spectrum magazine, Vol. 1 #17 (March 1999)

For years, going all the way back to when The X-Files was on Friday nights, Fox has been trying to find a successful series for the evening’s first hour. The network has made many attempts (M.A.N.T.I.S., VR.5, Strange Luck, Sliders, The Visitor), but none has attracted a large audience (usually for legitimate reasons—most of the shows weren’t very good.) Last fall, Fox gave another series an opportunity: Brimstone.

Unlike, say, the WB’s remarkably dull Buffy clone Charmed, Brimstone was hardly a slapdash affair. Peter Horton, well-known as Professor Gary Shepherd on thirysomething a decade ago, starred and produced, and prolific film actor John Glover co-starred. But the series couldn’t survive beyond the initial thirteen-episode order—in late January, Fox announced the show’s cancellation.

Peter Horton played Ezekiel (Zeke) Stone, who returned from Hell to track down a band of souls who escaped the fiery underworld. The series exhibited the trademarks of Fox science-fiction/fantasy shows: atmospheric, moody, brooding series that seem to be trying to say something profound, but somehow the profundity gets lost in all the backlighting and night fog. The scripts may or may not make any sense, but the casting is usually well done: real actors (David Duchovny, D.B. Sweeney, Carl Lumbley) play the leads, and the supporting cast performs adequately enough.

Brimstone turned out to be an intriguing, though darker, spin on ground already better covered on American Gothic three years earlier, and that series hardly thrilled the general viewing public. American Gothic tried to create a series in which the star was, essentially, the Devil, who was battling the forces of good to corrupt a small town. Brimstone raised the bar by, for all practical purposes, making all the leads evil (to varying degrees) and dispensing with any battle against goodness. It’s no wonder the series sunk to the underworld of the Neilsen ratings.

The show was probably doomed from the beginning, and one can only wonder why the network executives didn’t see it immediately, or if they didn’t why they didn’t take steps to make changes. One major problem was broadcasting the series during Friday night’s first hour (8:00 P.M. Eastern). Obviously they thought it would make a nice companion piece for Millennium. Obviously this thinking was wrong. Fox’s continuing attempt to air SF/fantasy shows in this time slot consistently fails—they need to try something else. But more than that, Brimstone was the darkest and grimmest of all the attempts (in this or any time slot, for that matter), making it particularly risky (at the very least; inappropriate may be the better word) for airing at such an early time. A weekday 9:00 time would be even better, and 10:00 the best, though of course Fox does not air network programming during this third hour.

In fact, the series was originally scheduled for 9:00 Tuesdays, which would have been an interesting experiment: it would have immediately followed Buffy over on the WB. Though Brimstone was targeted for an older audience, the two series have enough in common that some channel-switching might have happened. This wouldn’t have garnered enough viewers to save Brimstone (Buffy, while a success for WB, would be a failure for Fox with the same ratings), but it might have gotten the ball rolling.

Instead, in what must have been a sudden decision, Fox pulled the two horribly-rated half-hour sitcoms (Living in Captivity and Getting Personal) that preceded Millennium and plugged in Brimstone. Local and national TV guides didn’t have time to note the change. And there is more evidence that the entire process of getting the show on the air was disorganized. While virtually all the network programming began in late September, Brimstone started a month later, but the additional time didn’t seem to help. “Encore” was scheduled for the second episode (Oct. 30) but was suddenly replaced with “Heat”, bumping “Encore” to the following week. Then “Slayer” was listed for the fourth episode (Nov. 13) but bumped until a month later. “Repentance,” scheduled for Nov. 20, was moved up one week. Because the series was essentially episodic, these changes didn’t cause serious harm (see sidebar on page 8), but they did suggest a production team (or network programmers) in chaos.

But even more important than the scheduling problem was the entire basis of the show—a ludicrous foundation that made an intelligent show virtually impossible. Here’s the premise: one hundred thirteen of the most “vile creatures” of Hell escaped, creating quite a problem for Satan. So he taps current Hell resident Ezekiel Stone and offers him a deal: an opportunity to return to Earth in exchange for tracking down these hundred and thirteen and sending them back to Hell by, uh, re-killing them. (Or destroying them. Something like that.) Stone has a special qualification for the job: in his previous life he was a cop, and apparently a pretty good one. But some guy raped his wife, and when Stone caught the man he lost control and killed him. During a later arrest Stone was killed and, because of the murder he committed, sent to Hell himself.

When Stone tracks down these escaped “creatures” (who are inhabiting quite human-like forms while on Earth), he can’t just kill them any old way. He has to shoot out (or in some other way destroy) their eyes (yuck!) because, as the saying goes, “the eyes are the windows to the soul.” Each time he eliminated an escapee, one of the strange hundred thirteen tattoos covering his torso disappears, letting him know without doubt that he is slightly closer toward accomplishing his goal. (Supposedly he will receive some ultimate reward upon completion of his mission. No doubt the producers figured they’d worry about that in the unlikely event the series lasted one hundred fourteen episodes, or almost five seasons.)

One way to determine how well or poorly a premise is thought out is to take the foundational principles and extend them beyond the specific given plot and ? Basing adventures in the real world makes this part of the creative process easier. (Homicide, for instance, is designed to take place in the real world—primarily Baltimore.)

Just because a story takes place in the United States, for instance, doesn’t mean it is working within the same cosmology as Homicide. Brimstone is ostensibly another cop show—albeit with a supernatural twist—that wants us to believe it takes place in the real world, but it adds a preposterous twist. Demons have (as we just noted) “escaped” from Hell. This may not seem like such an outrageous thing, but it is, because it necessarily brings to mind all kinds of relevant questions: What kind of a place is Hell such that it can be escaped from? What kind of an entity is the Devil such that a mass escape can happen without his knowledge (until it’s too late to stop it)? And what kind of a being is God such that He’s created a system whereby He sends people to Hell, and they can escape! (In the pilot, the Devil mentions that escaped have happened before—this is not a first-time thing!—but just one at a time, never in groups.)

This is not a world in which we would want to live—not just for the obvious reasons, but because it is a world that makes no sense at its very core. More than that, actually: it doesn’t just lack sense; it has ludicrousness built into the foundation. Okay, you say, so does Three’s Company and Friends and Gilligan’s Island and Baywatch, but as light-weight comedic fare, they’re supposed to be ludicrous. Brimstone is weightier (or at least supposed to be): just consider the theme. Beyond that, the Devil (yes, he’s a character in the show, played by John Glover) is always philosophizing about something or other relating to life, good and evil, or whatever else pops into his head. The monologues are a bit like those things Len Wein used to write for the old Phantom Stranger comics in the seventies (the ones with the great Jim Aparo art), but the Phantom Stranger is Immanuel Kent compared to the Devil’s observations, which are about as profound as the Teletubbies. Even the eyes-as-windows-to-the-soul thin isn’t given any intelligible explanation. The expression is a metaphor. Sure, shooting someone in the eyes will probably kill them, but the escaped Hell creatures can be killed only that way. Why? Umm, because of the metaphor. This has the illusion of being an explanation without really being one. It’s a cute, flippant response to a serious question the premise poses, and as such doesn’t work.

There is also the basic structure of the conflict: there are no “good guys” to fight the demon creatures. We aren’t asking for conflicts to be reduced to simplistic terms, but some overriding moral principles would be helpful. All we see are the Devil’s guys. If hellish “creatures” really have escaped from the netherworld, wreaking havoc on the Earth, couldn’t God (or His emissaries) send them packing in two shakes? Sure, but that would complicate this TV universe a little too much. Somehow in Brimstone there’s a Devil but (for all practical purposes) no God—a structural absurdity on the face of it. So the battles feature evil versus evil. Except that Stone serves the function as “good guy” protagonist. Except that he, too, is a condemned murderer. Except that he’s basically a nice guy. Except that he hasn’t really repented, because if he did he wouldn’t really belong in Hell. Except. Except. Except. Quite simply, the producers want it both ways. They want Stone to be the good guy while working for the Devil, and in a weird sort of way they want the Devil to be good. But not really, because he’s always going around giving bad advice to screw up people’s lives. Confused? Such is the cosmology of Brimstone.

The problem, then, is this: Brimstone has created this confusing, ludicrous fictional world, but it doesn’t seem to know that it has. So the producers don’t bother explaining things because they don’t seem to recognize the problems. The first episode mentions that the Devil has to retrieve the escapees because even he has to answer to a “higher power” (presumably God), but he’s not so concerned that he’s going to go after them himself, or at the very least send more than a single guy to have to track down over a hundred people spread out over the world. (Fortunately, so far they seem to have concentrated in Los Angeles, where Stone is living.) Nothing—absolutely nothing—in this series makes sense.

One problem, however, was anticipated by the producers: where’s the logic in having evil pursuing evil? Viewers were sure to ask: doesn’t it make more sense to have the forces of good apprehending evil? Brimstone tried to answer this obvious question with a scene in “Repentance.” Maxine (who writes novels in her spare time) complains of writer’s block, so Stone offers her a “story idea” that actually describes his situation—that souls escaped from Hell, and the Devil got a former cop to track them down. Maxine (like, apparently, many viewers) isn’t impressed with the scenario:

Maxine: What kind of Devil is that? He can’t even get his own bad guys.
Stone: No, you see, the Devil, he has no power on Earth. Only in Hell.
Maxine: That’s crap. The Devil can do anything.
Stone: No he can’t.
Maxine: Oh, you know what would be better? God sends the cop.
Stone: No, the cop’s in Hell.
Maxine: No, you change it. The cop’s in Heaven. He’s partying, he’s having a good time, everything’s cool, right? God walks over to him. He’s like, “I want you to go back down to Earth.” And the cop’s like, “No, I don’t want to go back there; I like it up here.”
Stone: No. That’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous.
Maxine: No. No it isn’t. That’s conflict. It’s a better story. Oh, you know what? There’s like a bunch of cops. Right? It would be the God Squad.

The “God Squad” suggestion obviously pushes Maxine’s idea to extremes, but up to that point she has a legitimate criticism that gets only the mild response of “That’s ridiculous” from Stone. Why is it ridiculous? Perhaps the producers thought it was self-evident; we don’t. The particular conversation as described by Maxine is silly, of course, but her idea addresses a central unanswered problem: accepting the premise that one hundred thirteen souls escaped from Hell (a huge premise to swallow, but for the sake of the argument—), who would be first at setting it right, God or Satan? Sure the idea that God would tap a former cop to round them up is equally ridiculous. The producers understood the former, but not the latter. There’s also that strange bit about the Devil not having any power on Earth. Say what? Surely that line is inexplicable on the face of it, without any elaboration needed here.

The producers tried to correct some of the problems with the twelfth episode, “It’s a Helluva Life.” Taking It’s a Wonderful Life as a template, the writers have the Devil leading Stone through his past to prove that the cop really wasn’t a “good guy” at all but was on the road to Hell long before he committed murder. At this point the show nearly sinks under the depressing weight of the necessary conclusion created from the given foundation: there are no good guys at all in the show (among the leads, anyway.) Then, in an interesting twist, an angel appears (also played by John Glover) and shows Stone how many lives have been saved as a result of the detective’s former and present work. He even hints that Stone is unwittingly doing the work of God and that his “work is appreciated.” The idea of alternative presentations showing the duality of an individual is intriguing (what David Lynch could have done with the premise!) but by this time Brimstone was such a jumbled mess that the episode didn’t do anything to help straighten things out. (The episode did, however, present one of its most powerful scenes. At the end of the episode, Stone watched a distraught—but alive and safe—Rosalyn from a distance after he kept her from being killed as an innocent bystander during a bank robbery)

If the producers could have arrived at some sort of coherence to their premise, the rest of the elements were in place for a fine series. Visually, the show looked great, with a creepy blue lighting scheme that almost made some scenes look like they were shot in black and white. The dialogue was above-average, and the individual cases that Stone tackled were generally interesting. In the September 12, 1998 edition of TV Guide (the fall preview special), Brimstone’s co-creator Ethan Reiff is quoted as saying, “The tone is like a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Homicide”—a pedigree we can admire. To a large extent, they succeeded (though TV Guide’s editors weren’t impressed: The only way TV could be darker than this is if it were turned off altogether. Perhaps that’s not such a bad idea.”).

The casting was fairly good, including some guest-star surprises such as Michelle Forbes, Louise Fletcher, Richard Brooks, and Curtis Armstrong, in addition to Jerry Hardin (Deep Throat during the first season of The X-Files) and, playing Stone’s wife Rosalyn (often in flashbacks), Stacy Haiduk. Unfortunately, casting Glover as the Devil was a major mistake. He comes off as neither evil personified nor (a la The Screwtape Letters) immense evil masked by sauveness, but simply as a smark-alecky junior high school kid. Lori Petty had an amusing, and occasionally recurring, role as the desk clerk at Stone’s apartment and became his official assistant in helping him navigate the modern world.

Best of all, though, was Peter Horton’s work as Ezekiel Stone. Given the somewhat confused origins of the character, Horton managed to make Stone interesting. He alternated between relishing his new lease on life (including opportunities for love and simple pleasures, in addition to returning to his former profession), and the near-impossibility of his task. And because he was “out of the country, down under” (as he says in the first episode) for fifteen years, there were plenty of opportunities for some jokes along the way about his ignorance of modern developments (faxes, the Internet, interleague baseball games, etc.) much the way Mark Frost’s Buddy Faro series did this season.

One major recurring character, Los Angeles Detective Sergeant Ash, was well played by Teri Polo (Northern Exposure). The interaction between her and Horton provided a sizzling “love interest” between the two characters. Interestingly, the series quickly altered the relationship by revealing, in the episode “Ashes,” that Ash was not only one of the fugitives from Hell, but the leader of the escape. As an L.A. detective, she (like Stone) was tracking down the escapees, though of course her reasons were different. Because of ancient animosity, she was at war with God, and any of her cohorts who didn’t want to go along with her future plans, she (apparently) destroyed. It doesn’t really make sense (why would she waste her time with them?), just as other things don’t make sense: How did she manage to land the prestigious job of detective sergeant so quickly since her escape? Or more importantly, why didn’t the Devil assign Stone to eliminate her immediately, instead of watching the relationship of the two detectives gradually blossom? In any event, Polo created an intriguing personality, and no doubt the character would have returned if the series had continued.

Brimstone’s theme was written by Peter Gabriel, though it was surprisingly unmemorable. Part of this may be because it’s difficult to hear—Horton’s voice-over recounts the premise of the show, obscuring a good deal of the music.

The series ended on February 12 with some sort of closure. In a bizarre Valentine’s Day episode, Stone overcomes his reluctance and plans to tell his wife Rosalyn that he is back on Earth. He eventually decides his plan is unwise—that she is in danger as long as he is nearby—but not before (1) learning that she still loves him, and (2) leaving her a snow globe of a wedding scene (and labeled “Forever”). It was a fine, melancholy episode that displayed the series at its finest and showed the possibilities the show had. Perhaps in time the producers would have worked out many of the problems and reinvented the show. Unfortunately, they won’t have that opportunity. Brimstone is gone, but with any luck some producer will see Horton’s work in the show and formulate something that will better utilize his undeniable abilities in a serious mystery, fantasy, and/or cop show. Brimstone could have been it, but poor groundwork (and some bad scheduling) sank the opportunity.

To Hell and Back to NYC and L.A. and NYC and L.A. Brimstone appeared to be a strictly episodic series at first. Each episode Det. Ezekiel Stone would appear in some city or other and catch one of the escapees from Hell. Of course, this prevented much of a recurring cast (usually deadly for a series), so the stories eventually settled in Los Angeles. (Apparently that’s where Hell’s refugees liked to hang out.) But the series definitely began in New York City. At what point did the stories move to the West Coast? This should be an easy question to answer, but from what we can determine Fox aired the episodes out of order. With minimal continuity between episodes, this makes it a challenge to find the proper order. The episodes aired in this order: pilot, “Heat,” “Encore,” “Repentance,” “Poem,” “Executioner,” “Slayer,” “Ashes,” “Lovers,” “Carrier,” “Faces,” “It’s a Helluva Life,” and “Mourning After.” However, as mentioned in our article, episodes were constantly being replaced at the last minute with episodes different from what had been published in newspaper TV supplements and TV Guide. The shuffling of episodes did create one strange glitch. The stories began, as we said, in New York City, where Stone was returned from Hell. But “Heat,” the second episode aired, definitely took place in L.A. Stone then turned up in a New York suburb for “Encore.” “Repentance,” airing fourth, also seemed to take place in New York, but in retrospect it had to take place in L.A.—but it must follow “Slayer” (because Father Horn was in town; so was Maxine). The next episode was “Poem”—at the time seemingly the first L.A. story. “Executioner” definitely took place in L.A. “Slayer” was confusing because it seemed to begin in New York (the main villain appeared to make a vague reference to events in “Repentance”) but Sgt. Ash appeared, along with Maxine, placing this episode in L.A. Perhaps this is more work than we should do for a minor canceled series, but we’ve put together our list of what we thing should be the proper order of the episodes. This isn’t official, and we haven’t gone back and studied every scene for some remote clue (which may not exist anyway; it’s possible, of course, that the producers were just being careless of lazy). A few things are definite. Det. Ask worked in Los Angeles. Maxine ran the desk at Stone’s L.A. hotel/apartment. Father Horn’s church was in New York during the pilot, but in “Slayer” he has taken a Greyhound bus trip to his new assignment “near the airport.” The city was not named but was probably L.A. 1. Pilot. Easy. It takes place in NYC. Stone meets Horn. 2. “Encore”: NYC suburb; Horn appearance. 3. “Poem”: Stone arrive in L.A. (Chinatown) and meets Ash. 4. “Heat”: An L.A. college; Stone runs into Ash again. 5. “Slayer”: First Maxine; Horn in town; Ash appearance. 6. “Repentance”: order of #6 and #7 might be reversed. 7. “Executioner”: Ash appearance. 8. “Ashes”: Stone battles Ash. After this, the episodes seemed to follow in proper order.