By: Mary Fran Bontempo

resurrection“I see dead people.”

The line is from 1999’s The Sixth Sense, not ABC’s new series, Resurrection. But it could be.

Because suddenly, the people from Arcadia, Missouri, are seeing lots of dead people. Not as ghosts, but as living, breathing, resurrected humans. At least they look like humans.

They talk like humans, too, and are complete with all of the memories of their past lives, whether they’ve been gone for over 30 years, as with young, seemingly innocent and newly returned Jacob Langston, or the more recently departed–13 years–and much more sinister, Caleb Richards.

The show begins with Jacob waking and gasping for air in the middle of a rice paddy somewhere in China. He’s traumatized, but gets flown back to America, where he becomes the problem of J. Martin Bellamy (played by House’s Omar Epps), an immigrations officer and former cop with a secret past himself. Bellamy delivers the boy to his stunned parents and then sticks around to try and figure out what the heck is going on when Caleb Richards similarly returns from the dead, intensifying the mystery.

These newly returned souls create all sorts of problems for those who never left the land of the living and things get even weirder when Jacob’s tomb is opened by Bellamy and Jacob’s all-grown-up cousin and local doctor, Maggie (Devin Kelley) and his remains, well, remain right where they were put 32 years prior.

The “normal” townsfolk from Arcadia are a little off to begin with, and the show reads like a cross between a soap opera, with secret affairs and murder, and Twin Peaks, with the supernaturally weird and creepy, as a new/old body shows up to mess with everyone’s heads and hearts.

It’s fun and just twisted enough to keep the viewer guessing and alternately delighted and repelled by the prospect of anyone returning from the dead.

Good thing? Bad thing? Watch ABC’s Resurrection, airing Sundays at 9 p.m. to find out, and catch up on previous episodes on demand.