Like the late Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin, Cole had incorporated his family into his work, and six months after he disappears and is presumed dead, it's his widow, Tess, and their son, Lincoln, who are brought together by Cole's former producer, Clark Quietly (Paul Blackthorne) to search for the missing star, whose locator beacon has inexplicably gone off in the Amazon.
Everyone has their reasons for making the trip. Tess believes her husband's still alive and needs her. Lincoln, who's less certain on both these points, seems to be working through issues of his own. And Clark? Clark figures there's at least one more episode to be wrested from "The Undiscovered Country" and is funding the search-and-rescue mission in return for the right to capture every scary - and private - moment of it on film.
Cole's catchphrase had been, "There's magic out there," and the river in question being one frequently associated with magical realism, surreal and scary moments come with the territory.
Co-created by Oren Peli, whose low-budget thriller "Paranormal Activity" first brought him to Spielberg's attention, "The River" makes effective use of the idea that sometimes it's the things you can't see so clearly - or at all - that are the scariest. (If only ABC hadn't extended that philosophy to its online screeners: Those for tonight's two-hour premiere, viewed by critics on a password-protected site, obscured many of the occasional subtitles with legal warnings.)
Fans of "American Horror Story's" kitchen-sink method might wish for more fake blood, but I prefer more subtlety, and "The River's" second hour, particularly, struck me as plenty creepy.
Still, I'm not sure how long I'll want to follow a missing-person story, even one set on the world's second-longest river.
