The Premise
"Emergence" is a 2019 ABC network drama from Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, the team behind "Reaper" and "Agent Carter." Allison Tolman plays Jo Evans, a Long Island police chief who finds a young girl (Alexa Swinton) at the site of a bizarre accident. The kid has no memory of who she is. Around her, electronics glitch and unexplained things happen. Jo takes her in. Owain Yeoman, Donald Faison, Ashley Aufderheide, Clancy Brown, and Terry O'Quinn round out the cast, which is the show's biggest asset by a wide margin. It ran one season, 13 episodes, before ABC pulled the plug in 2020.
The Case For
Allison Tolman. Full stop. She's been quietly one of the best actors on television since "Fargo" season one, and here she's asked to carry an entire mystery box on the strength of ordinary decency, and she does. She plays Jo like a real cop and a real mother, not a network archetype of either. Alexa Swinton, as the girl, avoids the uncanny-child-actor thing. Terry O'Quinn showing up in a sci-fi mystery on ABC is a wink to the "Lost" crowd, and he's used well. Butters and Fazekas know how to slip humor and warmth into genre material that lesser writers play straight and grim. Donald Faison as Jo's ex-husband is a smart casting choice; they let him be funny and grounded instead of the standard antagonistic ex. The pilot in particular does mood work most network dramas can't be bothered with.
The Case Against
It's a network mystery box in 2019, which means the show is stretching a two-hour movie's worth of plot across a full season, then setting up more. The pacing has that familiar ABC drag where every episode ends on a hook the next one soft-pedals. Some of the mythology is generic — shadowy corporation, cryptic symbols, guys in suits — and the show never quite decides how weird it wants to be. There's a version of this made for streaming that's eight episodes and much tighter. And the cancellation means whatever payoff was building never lands, so anyone who needs closure should know that going in.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you liked early "Fringe," the softer stretches of "Lost," or the family-plus-strangeness vibe of "Believe" and "Touch," you'll be fine here. It's a good show to fold laundry to. Anyone who's been burned one too many times by network mystery shows that got yanked mid-arc should probably stay away, because that's exactly what happened. Viewers who want their sci-fi lean and mean will find this too domestic. Viewers who came for the domestic drama will get impatient with the conspiracy stuff.
The Ruling
BACKGROUND TV is the honest tier. The craft is real — Tolman is doing lead-actor work worthy of prestige TV, the writing has genuine wit in the family scenes, the pilot direction from Paul McGuigan sets a tone. But the structural problems are network-shaped and unfixable: an over-extended mystery, a stalled middle, and an ending that isn't one because the show got canceled. It isn't preaching at anyone; it's just a decent procedural-adjacent thriller that never gets to finish its sentence. Put it on while you cook. You'll like Jo, you'll like the kid, you'll get pulled into an episode here and there, and you won't feel robbed when you tap out. Better than its vote count, worse than closure — exactly.