Nowhere Man
Entry updated 19 November 2023. Tagged: TV.
US tv series (1995-1996). Lawrence Hertzog Productions/Touchstone Television for UPN TV network. Created by Lawrence Hertzog. Produced by Peter Dunne. Directors included Michael Levine, Tobe Hooper, Steve Safford and Ian Toynton. Writers included Erica Byrne, Dunne, David Ehrman and Joel Surnow. Cast includes Megan Gallagher, Bruce Greenwood, Jay Arlen Jones and Murray Rubinstein. One 65-minute pilot plus 24 45-minute episodes. Colour.
Photojournalist Thomas Veil (Greenwood) discovers that his entire life has been "erased"; his wife Allison (Gallagher) claims not to know him and is living with another man, his best friend dies suddenly under mysterious circumstances, his credit cards no longer work, and no one seems to know him. Veil believes the conspiracy against him is connected to a photograph he took about a year before in South America, which seems to show US soldiers hanging four men. He still had the negative, and must elude operatives trying to destroy this evidence. After being pursued around the US, Veil learns that prior to the first episode he was captured by a group called Project Marathon, and given a set of false memories (see Memory Edit). He had actually been a US government agent code-named "Gemini", assigned to investigate Project Marathon and working for yet another group called the Heritage House. Veil discovers that his photograph has been altered, and that it formerly showed four US Senators being murdered, presumably by Project Marathon agents. In the season's final instalment, Veil captures a high-ranking FBI official who kills himself rather than reveal the nature of the conspiracy; but Veil obtains a videotape explaining the purposes of Project Marathon, and again throwing into doubt what he thinks he knows about himself. Had the programme continued, his investigation into his own past and Identity would no doubt have continued. Though critically successful, the series' ratings were never high and it ceased after one season.
Creator Hertzog has acknowledged that The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and the two television series The Fugitive (1963-1967) and The Prisoner (1967-1968) were influences on Nowhere Man. [GSt]
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