The Best Series
That Never Aired

Some films are lost. Meridian is something stranger: a film that was found, briefly, by eleven million people on a Sunday night in the spring of 1989, and then mislaid by all of them at once. Aston-Reeve Television aired it a single time, as a two-hour “special presentation” and not-very-secret backdoor pilot, lost it to whatever it was scheduled against, and quietly declined to order the series. For twenty-six years it has survived mainly as rumor and as a fourth-generation VHS dub with the tracking forever rolling.

Lantern Releasing’s new 4K restoration is therefore a small act of resurrection, and — I did not expect to write this — a genuinely moving one. Let’s be clear about what Meridian is and isn’t. It is not a lost masterpiece. It is a glossy, overstuffed telefilm that wants to be six shows at once: a legal procedural, a conspiracy thriller, a bickering-exes romance, a civic-corruption exposé, a family melodrama, and — in its final reel — a steam-and-catwalk action picture. That it nearly holds all six in one hand is why a small cult has kept its memory warm. That it occasionally drops one is why you’ve never heard of it.

“A boundary tells people what they own. A meridian tells them where they are.”

Arthur Vance — the film’s absent father, and its real subject

It opens, as these things should, in the rain. A municipal surveyor flees the City Records Annex clutching a film canister and an old brass survey marker, ducks into the half-built skeleton of “Meridian Center,” and presses an envelope into the hands of a maintenance foreman named Marcus Reed. “Find Vance. Tell her the line was moved.” A black sedan disgorges men. Reed wakes beside a corpse with the murder weapon in his hand and the police arriving with suspicious punctuality. It is a cold open of real confidence — the kind of three-minute hook a network hoped would sell a series.

Watching from a warehouse roof is a freelance photographer with a long lens and worse timing; he gets the sedan but not the killing. If you grew up on the rain-and-neon commercial-noir of Manhunter or that year’s Black Rain, the grammar is instantly legible. What surprises is the patience. Director Marshall Greve — a reliable Aston-Reeve journeyman who, a commenter below reminds me, owned exactly one fog machine and used it in every production — lets the scene breathe in a way American television had mostly stopped doing by 1989.

We meet Nora Vance (Geneviève Roark) in arraignment court, dressed far better than anyone at Harbor Legal Aid can afford, looking briefly like the conservative ingénue the era loved to punish. Then she opens her mouth. Instead of a speech, she calmly proves that the arresting officer’s report places her clients at the corner of two streets that do not intersect — the paperwork was photocopied from another arrest. Charges dismissed. It is a wonderful, very 1989 way to establish a heroine: not through passion but through precision.

Roark is the reason the cult exists. She plays Nora as someone who smiles only when she has caught you lying, and the camera adores the cruelty of it. There is a straight line from the women-led legal thrillers the multiplex was running — Jagged Edge (1985), Suspect (1987), Physical Evidence earlier that same year — but Nora is sharper and less imperilled than any of them. With L.A. Law at its zenith and Moonlighting in its final, exhausted season, a glossy, fast-talking lawyer-heroine was exactly what a network wanted in development. Why Roark made two more features and then vanished into regional theater is the great unanswered question of the disc’s liner notes.

Beneath the procedural is a ghost story about a father. Nora’s sister Claire (Regina D’Amico, all denim and teased hair and CBGB flyers) sings in a downtown band and wants Nora to stop relitigating the past. Their father, Arthur, was a municipal surveyor who claimed a nineteenth-century survey point had been deliberately moved to redraw waterfront ownership. He was ridiculed, suspended, branded a drunk, and then driven through a barrier into the river. Ruled an accident. Nora never believed it.

If this architecture sounds familiar, it should: Meridian is Chinatown (1974) scaled down to a Movie of the Week — the same stolen civic resource, the same dead patriarch, the same horrible discovery that a city is just a set of agreements about where the lines go. Where Polanski had water, Greve has a brass benchmark and a number, thirty-nine inches west, that Arthur scrawled over and over in a notebook. The film is smart enough to know the reference and humble enough not to pretend it can match it. It just wants a little of that dread, and it earns more of it than a telefilm has any right to.

Enter Jack Mercer (Peter Halloran), the photographer from the rooftop and, of course, Nora’s old summer fling — a man who once took a foreign assignment instead of a relationship and has been mailing apologies from war zones ever since. Halloran is TV-handsome in the slightly anonymous way of the period (somewhere on the spectrum between a young Pierce Brosnan and whoever your local affiliate had hosting the late movie), and he’s smart enough to play second fiddle to Roark, which is the only correct choice.

Their reunion supplies the engine the pilot really runs on: the bickering-former-lovers current that Moonlighting had made the defining television flirtation of the decade. “You always preferred the headline before you knew what happened,” she tells him, and you can hear a writers’ room betting the series on this exact rhythm. The photographer-as-accidental-witness is its own grand tradition — from Blow-Up down through De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) — and the night they outrun a tail by diving onto a departing city bus is the most purely charming five minutes in the film, breathless and laughing and lit like a perfume ad.

The middle hour is where Meridian earns both its admirers and its eye-rolls. An elderly tenant, Mrs. Lindqvist (Lucinda Wall), produces a 1963 photograph proving a seawall marker was bodily moved thirty-nine inches and every subsequent map redrawn to match — transferring eleven waterfront parcels from an 1889 charitable trust to the developer now pouring concrete. A nun, a parish ledger, an underground steam conduit, a falsified map that routes the pile-drivers straight into it: the plot keeps producing rabbits until you stop counting hats.

It is too much story for one telefilm — pilot-itis in its purest form, a script frantically seeding a season it will never get to harvest. And yet the central idea is so good, and so eerily contemporary in 1989 (this is the city of Working Girl and Wall Street, where everyone is quietly rezoning everyone else), that I forgave the clutter. A boundary tells you what you own; a meridian tells you where you are. The film keeps that distinction sharp even when the plotting goes soft.

To reach the developer’s offices, Nora and Jack crash a black-tie celebration in the unfinished tower, and the picture briefly remembers it is a romance. Hiding from security on the dance floor, the banter turns sincere; he admits he came home tired of documenting other people’s lives, she tells him staying in one city is not the same as having stopped running. This is the Someone to Watch Over Me register — Ridley Scott’s 1987 glass-and-class Manhattan thriller — and Greve, who clearly spent his whole budget here, shoots it like he means it.

Upstairs, Nora meets the widow who controls it all, Vivian Ashford (Eleanor Pryde, magnificent), and the film locates its actual theme. “There is a difference between guilt and refusing to look,” Vivian offers. “Not to the people under the building,” Nora answers. That exchange — complicity as a comfortable choice rather than a cackling crime — is more adult than the genre usually bothers with, and Pryde plays it like a woman appraising her own reflection and not enjoying the price.

The best scene in the picture is, fittingly for a show that wanted to live in courtrooms, a bail hearing. ADA Stiles (Esteban Reyes, doing terrific weaselly ambition) lays out an open-and-shut case; Nora dismantles it brick by brick — a moved body, a falsified call time, a sergeant’s log — until she lands the line the whole film has been loading: the murder was phoned in minutes before the coroner’s time of death. Someone reported the crime before it happened.

It is pure Perry Mason-by-way-of-L.A. Law catharsis, and it works because the film has earned its paperwork. Charles Voigt’s broken-down Detective Pulaski — who cut a corner ten years ago and has been rotting over it since — gets the evening’s other great beat when he finally confesses. “Then find out,” Nora tells him about the men he’s protected. “You’ve had ten years.” If the series had been picked up, Voigt is the actor I’d have tuned in for.

And then, gloriously and a little ridiculously, Meridian stops being a legal thriller and becomes an action movie. The villain — Howard Glass, the developer’s counsel, played with soft menace by Harry Birnbaum — orders the midnight pile-driving that will erase the benchmark and rupture the conduit, and the finale relocates to the abandoned ferry terminal: catwalks, leaking steam, a jammed pressure valve, the whole 1980s subterranean-Manhattan playbook that Ghostbusters II would mine for laughs that very summer.

It is tonal whiplash, and it is also kind of wonderful. Glass takes Nora at gunpoint on the pier and delivers the thesis villains in this genre always do — lines exist only because powerful people agree where to draw them — and Nora throws his own movie back at him: “That’s a boundary. A meridian tells you where you are.” Then Jack’s camera flash goes off in the man’s eyes and Pulaski cuffs him. The photographer’s gimmick paying off the plot is exactly the tidy, satisfying machinery a backdoor pilot is built to deliver.

The resolution is generous without being naive: the city does not become fair, but Marcus walks free, the trust gets its waterfront back, Arthur’s testimony enters the public record, and Vivian Ashford makes the first honest decision of her life in front of the press. Crucially, Nora is allowed to not need the victory to belong to her father. Arthur’s taped instruction — “Do not spend your lives proving I was right. Make them look at what is there” — is the most quietly radical line in the picture.

It ends, of course, on a freeze-frame — Roark turning into the wind, Jack’s shutter falling, a final box of Arthur’s files reading MERIDIAN IS ONLY THE FIRST. Then the title card that breaks your heart in hindsight: MERIDIAN will return. It never did. Watched in 2015, that promise plays like an artifact from a parallel television season — the show that would have run four years on a Tuesday and that some of us would have loved. The restoration cannot give us the series. It can only make the pilot ache like one.

Lantern’s 1080p Blu-ray, drawn from a new 4K scan of the original 35mm camera negative, is a small miracle for anyone who only knew this from tape. Presented in its broadcast 1.33:1 — the correct, full-frame television ratio, and bless Lantern for resisting a fake widescreen crop — the image finally reveals what Dean Albrecht’s photography was doing all along. The waterfront blacks hold; the sodium-vapor reflections on wet asphalt are dense and noise-free; the gala’s mixed tungsten-and-blue lighting no longer smears. Grain is present, filmic, and unmolested by the over-aggressive noise reduction that ruins so many catalog discs.

Audio is a clean LPCM 2.0 stereo track that mostly behaves; Lawrence Quill’s end-credit cue — brushed drums, a sustained synth pad, and a brass figure that pointedly never resolves — comes through with real warmth. The extras are where Lantern over-delivers for a film this obscure: a generous retrospective doc, a featurette on Aston-Reeve’s doomed series ambitions, Roark’s 1988 screen test, and a booklet that reprints the actual network presentation memo. For a telefilm nobody remembers, it is an absurdly loving package.

Screenshots below are captured from the disc and compressed for the web — as always, the Blu-ray looks better than anything your browser can show you. Click any frame to enlarge.

Disc Screenshots 10 frames · Lantern Releasing BD