Fox has announced ordered a 13 episode season of Touch, a new supernatural drama from Heroes creator Tim Kring, which will star Kiefer Sutherland.
The show was announced some time ago, but now as Sutherland’s name gets tied to it, Fox has chosen to order an entire season at once.
This isn’t terribly surprising, considering that Sutherlands last show, 24, which he created himself, was one of television’s most successful shows for 8 years, and only ended because Sutherland chose to walk away.
This new role will certainly be a change of pace from his depiction of Jack Bauer, though Sutherland’s fans know that he wasn’t always an action star. He’s well capable of playing dramatic and character-driven roles.
Kring also has a track record to live up to, with his successful superhero series, Heroes, which, while it may not have had quite the ratings of 24, was an important landmark show, as it made the networks and audiences aware that fantasy plots would work on television again, spawning the recent crop of fantasy television.
The official synopsis of Touch is thus:
At the center of Touch is Martin Bohm (Sutherland), a widower and single father, haunted by an inability to connect to his mute 11-year-old son, Jake (David Mazouz). After multiple failed attempts at keeping Jake in school, Martin is visited by Clea Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), a social worker sent to evaluate Jake’s well-being. Everything changes when Martin discovers that Jake possesses the gift of staggering genius – the ability to see things that no one else can and the patterns that connect seemingly unrelated events. Jake is indeed communicating. But it’s not with words, it’s with numbers. Martin meets Arthur Dewitt (Danny Glover), a professor and an expert on children who possess special gifts when it comes to numbers. Now, it’s up to Martin to decipher the meaning and connect the numbers to the cast of characters whose lives they affect.
The first season will run through the summer of 2012.
