Manson story harshes the vibe in 'Aquarius'

Aquarius, alas, doesn't hold water.

That's a particular shame, because so many things about this NBC summer series (Thursday, 9 p.m. ET/PT, * * ½ out of four) might lead you to expect better. It has a terrific, proven TV star in David Duchovny, well-teamed here with True Blood's Grey Damon, and leading a cast that includes promising actors such as Emma Dumont, Brian F. O'Byrne and Gaius Charles. It has a fabulous setting: Los Angeles in 1967, a time and place fraught with sexual change, racial tensions, and the society-dividing Vietnam War.

And it has Charles Manson, which is where, unfortunately, Aquarius goes awry.

The problem isn't so much the performance by Game of Thrones's Gethin Anthony as Manson, though he's not always as convincing as he needs to be at conveying either the threat Manson posed or the magnetism he supposedly possessed. It's that the Manson who will, in two years, commit the Tate/LaBianca murders looms too large for this smallish vessel to contain — making Aquarius feel less like a prequel and more like a dull footnote. The Manson you see here is more of a future threat than a real, present person, so you may end up feeling Aquarius would have worked better had it just renamed its villain and gone on from there.

Manson sparks this story by luring a teenage girl, Emma (Dumont) into his "family." When she goes missing, her mother turns to her ex-boyfriend, LAPD detective Sam Hodiak (Duchovny) for help, over the objections of her powerful, politically connected husband (O'Byrne).

A World War II vet and old-fashioned cop (the TV kind that can't understand the need for these newfangled Miranda warnings), Hodiak is unable to penetrate the counterculture hiding Emma. So he forces a young undercover cop, Brian Shafe (Damon), to help him — which he does, despite his objections to Hodiak's old-school methods.

While some attempts to recall the tenor of the times feel strained, there are intriguing moments in the generational, racial and sexual clashes swirling around the central story. Unfortunately, whenever the show meanders its way back to that central story of Manson and Emma and their newly formed family, momentum stalls and interest drains.

And in a dry summer, that's a loss NBC can't afford.