The Event, Channel 4

Meanwhile, your future mother-in-law has been murdered. Your oh-so-nearly father-in-law has been coerced into crashing a plane into the building in Miami where the President of the United States is about to make an announcement likely to fire seismic shocks around the world. Yet, just as the aircraft is howling earthwards and about to smash into the fleeing President and his panicking entourage, it disappears into an electro-magnetic vortex in mid-air. Later, it turns up in Arizona.

They’ve called this new imported American blockbuster The Event, but it’s more like an endless cascade of dramas, crises, shocks and emergencies, all frenziedly sliced up across multiple time schemes. Rather than trying to develop a single original idea, creator Nick Wauters, obviously a cautious investor, has spread the risk by borrowing a bit from several other shows. The notion of an “event” which sets the whole juggernaut in motion recalls last year’s newcomer FlashForward. From Lost he has wheeled in the plane-crash motif, but, perhaps mimicking the “redundant systems” approach adhered to by aircraft designers, he has given us two crashes, one in the present and another in Alaska in 1944. The alert viewer will have been able to glean that the latter was responsible for the former. The Event’s ever-leaping time frame may also derive from Lost, but the way captions keep popping up to tell you the action has gone back seven days or eight days or 13 months is more reminiscent of the impenetrable legal saga Damages. And from that same show comes Zeljko Ivanek (he played lawyer Ray Fiske), reborn as baleful CIA supremo Blake Sterling (trouble in paradise for lovebirds Sean and Leila, pictured below).

In fact it sometimes seems as if there are only a couple of dozen actors in all of American television, and you’ll recognise a few more familiar faces here. Blair Underwood, formerly of LA Law, plays newly elected and delightfully idealistic President Elias Martinez (it won’t last, pal – ask Obama). He keeps discovering unknown unknowns, much to his fury and disgust, such as the fact that the CIA has been detaining the 97 survivors from the 1944 aircrash at a secret facility in Alaska for all these decades. The leader of this mysterious group is Sophia, played by Laura Innes, alias the abrasive Dr Kerry Weaver from ER. And why have they been incarcerated in this disgraceful and undemocratic manner? Because, while they may look as human as you or I, their DNA is subtly different. For one thing, they age very slowly. I can’t see the harm in that really, but the churlish Blake Sterling can feel in his bones that they’re playing a long game, and are planning something big and unpleasant. I hate to admit it but he may be right, though it seems the aliens, or whatever they are, are divided into hawkish and doveish factions.

A series like this is planned with so many story arcs, false trails and digressions that you need a few episodes to really get a sense of whether it’s working or not. This opening double shot kept you hooked, but mostly through sheer density of incident rather than characterisation or fluent plotting. Throwing a bunch of startling ingredients in the viewer’s face to keep them boggle-eyed and off balance is one thing. The hard part is keeping them all in play while revealing how they fit into a coherent narrative with shape and purpose. If you want to know if The Event can manage this, all you can do is keep watching.

• Watch The Event on 4oD