It was. . .fine.


Pro:

• Setting is fairly well done. It's neat to see suburban cul-de-sacs turned into pseudo-farms and major cities being slowly reclaimed by the environment.
• Several cast members seem interesting and likeable. Miles and Aaron in particular provide some decent dialog and comic relief. Maggie could be fun, too, going forward.
• The twist at the end (you've probably seen it in commercials, but I won't spoil it just in case) is an obvious one, but it's enough to set the stage.

Con:

• With the exception of the ending twist, the plot doesn't have a very strong start. It's basically "let's go find Miles," and then they do, and that's that. If I watch another episode it will be due to the series' premise as a whole rather than anything introduced in the pilot episode. I still want to know why the power's out and how it can be turned back on, I just don't care a bit about anything that happened in episode 1.
• This sort of builds on the last complaint, but several of the events that happen to move things forward seem very contrived. The first scene in particular had me rolling my eyes and there were several more that seemed unlikely enough to be bothersome.
• Cast members not mentioned above are by turns irritating (see Charlotte, Danny: angsty young teens) and one dimensional (see Captain Neville -- insurance adjuster turned ridiculously evil militia captain). The teens aren't as bad as those in, say, Terra Nova, but they still need to settle down quite a bit before they'll be watchable.

Anyway, I'll probably watch another episode or two but I can't say that I'm very impressed just yet. I think this show could do well, though, if they'll just stick to the plot elements. I'll definitely watch if they'll keep giving us the history of the blackout (what caused it, flashbacks to early days just after the outage), solid progress towards fixing things, etc. I'm just afraid that they're going to try to use the power outage as a backdrop to a swords-and-bows character drama, which is something that I definitely will not watch.

Summary: Your opinion of "Revolution" after watching the pilot will probably be the same as your opinion going in. You get introduced to all of the show's elements but you probably won't care much about anything in particular. Personally, I'm withholding judgment on the show until I see how seriously they're going to take the power outage.