Custom-designed to take The X-Files’ place on Fox’s Friday-night schedule when that show moved to Sundays, this paranoid cyber-fantasy stars the undernourished-looking Lori Singer as a mousy tech geek whose father Died Under Mysterious Circumstances the very night, back in 1978, when he brought home the family’s first computer. Huddling in her room after work, sitting in front of her computer screen with her virtual-reality goggles on while pretending to fly, Singer accidentally makes a remarkable discovery: If she makes a phone call while online, and someone else picks up, she can merge with that person’s consciousness and enter a heightened, sort-of-real fantasy world. (Or, as she puts it in what has to be the lamest attempt ever at a “The truth is out there”-style catchphrase: “Virtual reality is real!”) Most of the actual creative work on this glum series went into the imaginatively color-tinted fantasy sequences, many of which aren’t half-bad as eye candy. But they’re shackled to a moronic premise at the center of a show that, paradoxically for what was meant to be one cutting-edge piece of work, is built on the romantic, futuristic thrill of the dial-up connection.
