America's TV critics hooted and hissed at an advance screening of this pilot film to the most expensive series ever produced for US TV at two million dollars an episode. They predicted an early watery grave for producer Steven Spielberg's attempt to emulate the success of Star Trek underwater with a super-sub keeping the peace among underwater colonies in the year 2018. But they were forced to drink bilge water when it was watched by 67 million homes, ensuring it overnight success. The star is Roy Scheider, who Spielberg brought to prominence in his 1975 classic Jaws, as the police chief battling a great white shark and even more hostile town officials, as the commander of the 1000ft-long seaQuest DSV. Britain's Stephanie Beacham is the chief science officer, and the show boasts the strangest piece of villain-casting in former Charlie's Angel Shelley Hack. The film is a carefully balanced mixture of derring-do and Spielbergian special effects, the most notable being a hologram computer projected onto a wall of dry ice smoke. But the human cast look set to be upstaged at every level from the vessel's very own dolphin. Much of the kudos for this pilot rests on the shoulders of 70-year-old veteran director Irvin Kershner, whose career goes back to the dawn of TV, now known as the master of sequels following the success of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and RoboCop 2 in 1990.


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