Award-winning children’s author and director e.E. Charlton-Trujillo is taking a fresh approach for what she hopes will become the next teen television sensation.  “Fallen” is about a teenaged girl, Jamie Watson, who happens to be a fallen angel sent to Earth to save the world.  Given 26 lifetimes to complete the task, her normal reincarnations are famous women such as Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth I.  But she has failed to save the world 25 times and now has one last chance.  The twist is that she hasn’t been reincarnated into a famous or powerful person; this time she is a middle-class, under-the-radar, angst-filled teen who isn’t sure she wants to continue living herself, much less save everyone else.
Her older brother Gabriel knows who she is and wants to keep her hidden, but a group of powerful beings called the Seekers constantly fight to expose her and hopefully help her along the path towards her own personal redemption as well as everyone else’s.  Of course, we also have the Immortals, dark beings who work against the Seekers and Jamie.

Charlton-Trujillo describes this series as a cross between “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Joan of Arcadia,” popular TV shows with the teen crowd, and from what I’ve seen, that seems like an appropriate description.  Instead of trying to pitch a script or an idea in Hollywood or spend a ton of her own money to film a pilot that can be shopped around to the networks, Charlton-Trujillo has lensed a series of webisodes.  These webisodes are basically three-minute snippets of various segments of the overall story-arc designed to introduce viewers to the main characters and mythology she has created as well as to generate some grassroots enthusiasm amongst her target audience.
Filmed in Cincinnati, the cast and crew are mostly unknowns or relative newcomers, but show a real professionalism in the final product.  The acting is fairly good as most of our cast of characters have a great deal of theatrical experience while many have commercials and music video credits, with some even having a few film credits.

So far there are five webisodes with two more planned before the end of the year.  Since each snippet runs around three minutes, including credits, the viewer is really only getting a couple minutes worth of information, not enough to really follow a detailed plot.  It is important to read the series synopsis before watching the webisodes so you have a basic background for the storyline.  But I don’t think these webisodes are necessarily meant to lay out the complete plot; they are used simply to introduce the viewer to the characters and give us just enough information to keep us interested.  Each is designed in the classic “cliffhanger” style, with each episode ending in an unresolved situation.

The series itself looks interesting and the story is unique enough that it might just catch on.  There's a theme song that plays during the credits as well that is excellent and very catchy—just what a TV series needs.  The director shows that she knows her target audience well, and I think this little web series has what it takes to generate some enthusiasm with the Internet teen audience.

The goal is to shop the series around the networks in January of 2010, and with any luck, we could see “Fallen” as a full-blown series as early as Summer, 2010.  If you would like to view the first five episodes, you can check them out here.