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Did you catch the premier of Haven last week? Syfy’s new Friday night drama is showing some real promise at the onset.

The show is slated for 13 episodes and is based on a novella called The Colorado Kid by Stephen King. As such, I expected it to be a mini-series kind of a format. I was surprised to discover by the end of the first show that it is episodic, with a self-contained story each week that falls into a larger, season-long picture. So far, it looks like Haven is going to follow the familiar “Freak of the Week” format used by such shows as Smallville and the X-Files.

All that means that if the show is good maybe it doesn’t have to end after thirteen episodes. It seems like movie studios could make a two hour movie out of something Stephen King scrawled on a cocktail napkin. So why not stretch a 179 page novel-lite into an ongoing series?

In truth, a better label would be “Inspired by the general premise of a Stephen King story”, but that wouldn’t sound as good on a commercial. After seeing just one episode, I can tell that the show will bear little resemblance to the novel, other than the setting in a small town in Maine where strange things happen. Other than that, the show and the book appear to have little in common. The two older newsmen are in both, but the central character in the show (FBI agent Audrey Parker) bears only a passing resemblance to the female protagonist in the book (newspaper intern Stephanie McCann).

Having said all that, judging Haven by its own merit and not by its fidelity to the source material, the pilot episode is very promising. Judging Haven by the gold-standard of Freak of the Week shows, the X-Files, there is promise that it could be very good indeed. While the long-term success could be hampered by the central role that location plays in the show (how many weekly freaks can show up in the same town?), Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Smallville managed to thrive for many seasons under that same restriction.

It’s too early to give Haven the full thumbs up, but it’s worth checking out now so you can get onboard from the beginning. Haven airs Friday nights on Syfy with multiple replays throughout the week.