Eureka
9
Sci-Fi
Years ago, I wrote about a guy who claimed to be an ex-spook whose cover was U.S. military man but in actuality he was working with Central American drug lords on behalf of the ol' US of A. At least, that was his story, but it wasn't his only one. See, even though he lived in Orange County, he worked in Los Angeles, and the city charter there compels not only every resident, waiter and car washer to pimp their own screenplays, but government workers like this guy as well. And so he told me he had TV network “interest” in a series he'd created about a neighborhood in a suburb where the CIA secretly places former agents and others whose identities needed to be changed. The show would be about the challenges these folks faced dealing with everyday life. My source claimed his fictional story was based on a real secret CIA neighborhood in Texas. Well, I never saw his show on TV or the movies, but this new Sci-Fi series sounds awfully close. The backstory is the Pacific Northwest town of Eureka was created by President Harry S. Truman, with guidance from Albert Einstein, to safely house government scientists, not spooks. In tonight's pilot, a federal marshal (Colin Ferguson) is just passing through when a secret experiment gone awry in Eureka's lab strands him in the town—and now casts him as the audience's eyes and ears as the real goings on there. Playing the head of the local double super-secret research facility is Greg Germann, who used to be on Ally McBeal and turned up at last April's Newport Beach Film Festival in the award-winning little indie gem, Self Medicated. And Max Headroom (a.k.a. Matt Frewer) plays Eureka's “biological containment expert.” But the name of my old interviewee is no where in the credits, meaning he could've been rubbed out, for a reason far more grave than the possibility he'd spill state secrets: cutting him out of the profits.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.