A marine biologist, an insurance salesman and a teen-aged boy find their lives fundamentally changed by the emergence of a new, and often dangerous, species of sea life, while government agents work to keep the affair under wraps.
The stern-faced Lake Bell's independent-minded oceanographer is too conventional a protagonist, while the series' government cover-up thread feels globally warmed over.
It is a Spielberg pastiche through and through but it is an excellent one, and an improvement in some ways on that tired master: less sentimental, more authentically down to earth, not so darn big.
The government wants to hush up what's going on. Whatever. Surface tells the mystery in such a scattershot way that viewers might not care about the answer.
It's hard to take a bad shot of Lake Bell, but the show does what it can to diminish her considerable charms by saddling her with a kid and then shoving her into a submarine.
