Kiefer Sutherland’s latest TV series, Touch, premiered on FOX last night. In the series, Sutherland plays Martin Bohm, a single father who’s struggling to raise his special-needs son. Jake (played by David Mazouz) hasn’t spoken since birth, but has a fascination with numbers and can’t bear to be touched by anyone.

However, this being a venture masterminded by Tim Kring, the scope of the show is much larger than Martin and his child. There’s a wider cast, involving an aspiring Iraqi stand-up comedian (Abdul), and characters in far flung places that Kring should probably avoid. Like Dublin, Ireland. Lest you confuse it with another Dublin, the place where Tim’s most one-dimensional characters come from. Or Tokyo.

For the moment, let’s disregard any emotional scarring that Kring may have caused us with Heroes. After all, it’s not like we’re comparing Kiefer to Jack Bauer. Well, we weren’t after he took that first punch to the gut at the gas station. Clearly Martin is no grizzled CTU agent.

The positive aspects of Touch are in the intriguing mix of string theory, mutism and science fiction. Kring’s new imagined world sees people and events as beautifully interconnected. The central storyline demonstrated the potential power of this very effectively – unifying Martin, Jake and the fireman who’d tried to save Martin’s wife during the 9/11 disaster and a set of seemingly random numbers.

Danny Glover made a criminally brief appearance as Arthur Teller, an enigmatic expert on numerically-inclined Austic kids. Essentially, his role was a thinly-disguised pointer for Martin that his child communicates through numbers. Presumably when Touch returns to our screens, Glover’s character will be consulted more by Bohm. (Aside: that was a lucky bit of Googling from Martin – finding the mutism guru on his first -rather vague – search!)

And judging by the early indications, there’s a rich backstory to be mined – from Martin’s failed career as a journalist to his wife being possibly not dead after all! The English oven salesman’s strained relationship and dead child is intriguing – the moment when his lost family photos showed up on the Jumbotron in Tokyo was poetic and serendipitous and filled with emotion. Likewise Randall, the 9/11 fireman whose destiny seemed to be enmeshed with Martin’s throughout this first episode – we can’t help but wonder where his storyline goes from here.

There’s one minor criticism for the show though – having established that Jake can’t be touched (kinda the premise of the show, in a way), the episode ended with Jake throwing his arms around his father. It’s understandable why this was factored in – his father had fond a way to understand his numbers obsession and communicate with him somehow. However, it doesn’t feel like Martin had worked hard enough to ‘win’ the touch from his child. Perhaps that should have been a season finale kind of moment?

Either way, it’s a minor quibble in a strong pilot episode. And it still brought us to the verge of tears, if not actual tears. We’re quite hard-hearted here at Unreality TV. Touch seems to have a wonderful emotional core and despite its sci-fi basis, it doesn’t rely on shock and awe to sell its storylines.

Did you watch the Touch pilot? What did you think?

Follow @UnrealityUSA