• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 12, 2016

“Ridiculous” is the word that comes to mind when watching “Second Chance,” a new Fox drama premiering Wednesday night in which a dead man is brought back to life.

It's one of those shows -- which are so in vogue these days -- in which you are expected to accept all kinds of far-out science supposedly based in fact, but in actuality it's the stuff of science fiction.

In “Second Chance,” the dead man who gets another chance to live is a 75-year-old retired sheriff who lost his job 10 years previously in a well-publicized scandal. He gets this “second chance” because the chemical makeup of his earthly remains makes him a prime candidate for reanimation.

At least, that's part of the “explanation” for how his revival becomes possible. The other part of this equation has to do with a troubled genius -- an Indian-American man who lacks social skills but is so smart that he has figured out how to bring dead people back to life by immersing them in some kind of huge aquarium.

Luckily, his beautiful twin sister is a genius too -- one of these garden-variety Internet smarties who launched a social networking Web site called Looking Glass and -- voila! -- she is rich and celebrated. She is also dying of cancer, which can evidently be cured using her brother's life-giving innovations. So she’s rich enough to fund her brother's experiments into the science of giving life to corpses. What a family, right?

Speaking of families, the dead sheriff’s son is an FBI agent played by Tim DeKay. So when the sheriff comes back to life, he gets to help his son in an ongoing investigation about a string of bank robberies.

But wait -- there's more! The sheriff does not come back to life as a 75-year-old. Instead, he's a much younger man now with super strength. So -- bad guys, beware! 

It's complicated, right? Not exactly the stuff of the proverbial “elevator pitch,” in which a TV show’s concept is so simple to understand it can be described in the time it takes to travel a few floors in an office-building elevator.

Somehow,  these very complicated TV show scenarios seem to get accepted all over the place in Hollywood, but then rejected by audiences (see: “Minority Report,”  a very complicated show that was also on Fox and cancelled soon after its debut this past fall).

Other critics have likened this “Second Chance” scenario to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” first published in 1818. I have no real take on the similarities between the two, since I haven’t read the original (though I have long meant to get around to it). 

If the scenario in “Second Chance” is anything like the famous “Frankenstein” movies of the 1930s, then there are some parallels in their stories about eccentric men of science “creating” these living beings who then face challenges when they try and readjust to the world of the living.

While watching a preview DVD of “Second Chances,” however, I kept asking myself: Who cares? And I coined a new phrase -- the “Who cares? TV show.” These are shows in which a very complex premise is presented in a great effort to generate your interest in the plight of its characters -- in this case, the “second chance” sheriff, the twin geniuses and the FBI agent whose father has been brought back to life (although the FBI man doesn’t know it yet).

But in the end, you shrug and say to yourself: Who cares? Or more to the point, you ask yourself: What else is on? 

“Second Chance” premieres Wednesday (Jan. 13) at 9 p.m. Eastern on Fox.