'Touch' brings Sutherland back to Fox

Jake is obsessed with numbers, scribbling endless strings of them on paper; their meaning is obscure, although they seem to be part of a "Fibonacci sequence," the mathematical basis for whirling patterns in things like pineapples and galaxies. In the opener, Jake runs away from his special-needs school, and Martin, working as a baggage handler at JFK, finds him atop a steel tower in a remote industrial site. Child protective services are called, and a social worker, Clea Hopkins (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), gets involved.

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Jake is almost like a new "hero" and "Touch" an imaginative -- in some ways, ingenious -- extension of that NBC series. But Kring has stripped the comic book sensibility by grounding it in the real world, and by turning Jake and his father into plausible real-world people, filled with grief, sorrow, worry and, in Jake's case, the tragic impenetrability of autism. There are some tragicomic brush strokes to remind us that we're not in "24" anymore. Martin, for example, won't climb a tower because he admits that he's afraid of heights. His wife also died at the World Trade Center.