I’m watching The Gifted — about a family (normal parents, mutant teens) on the run when the teens’ powers are made public — on the strength of the fact that Amy Acker stars. She’s never let me down, from Angel, Alias, Dollhouse, to Person of Interest. Admittedly, I started the show using her presence as an excuse for impulsive behavior, but I hope I can brag later about her being a good tip for taking a chance on bland-seeming, maybe-this-time-we’ll-get-it-right shows.

And the series does indeed start off bland. Even the color palette: soft grey, beige, washed out. It could be a deliberate choice, affording the writers a dull baseline from which to shock, thrill and develop, or it could be an attempt to use the quotidian as a fresh take on tired mutants-on-the-run fare.

In the first episode, the main “adult” characters (Acker and True Blood’s Stephen Moyer) and their children had no real agency. They’re running. This makes sense — in real life. The characters have to find their way to the center of the group tasked with getting mutants to safety. Like a new job: you sit down and shut up, the team gets used to you, you get used to them, you find a way to make a contribution some time down the road when you’re not so foreign and in a year, you’re jumping off cliffs, running along rooftops, whispering into your earpiece, “I’m in,” dealing with the deaths of major assets, and, basically running the entire resistance as its heart and soul. As you do.

And (though compressed) this kind of process starts to happen, a bit, in the second episode. Acker is a nurse and is critical to getting supplies for an out-of-control mutant whose powers are waxing destructive as she thrashes in a delirious fever. The daughter, and to a lesser extent, the son, help contain the ailing mutant’s unconscious destructive powers and earn a little respect from that, and the husband, captured by the Big Bad, appears at first compromised, but then asserts some double-agency or at least steadfast determination even in what seems to me a hopeless situation.

So, it’s still in the getting-the-team-together stage and I’m interested to see where they go, or, rather, if they go somewhere interesting.

Reminds me a little of The 100, which started out as a CW-style teen-triangle kind of show with an SF edge, but within four episodes turned into a drama of impossible moral decisions.

We can always hope.