THE new Fox drama, Touch, is a high-concept premise wrapped around a couple of old and cheesy TV chestnuts - the gifted, troubled, misunderstood child who can predict life-changing events; and the reassuring fairytale of ordinary people who can right the problems of a chaotic world.

This is Touched by an Angel rolled into The Sixth Sense for a post-September 11, 2001, digital world in which an unlikely chain of events somehow manages to connect a kid in Baghdad wired to a vest filled with explosives, a burning school bus in New Jersey, a down-on-his-luck everyman obsessed with the lottery, a couple recovering from personal tragedy and a call-centre wage slave perched for Susan Boyle-style overnight fame. All of it is shamelessly over-egged with heart-on-the-sleeve earnestness that's heavy on schmaltz.

Eleven-year-old muppet Jake (David Mazouz) hasn't spoken a word his entire life (though this doesn't prevent him serving as the show's narrator). His mother died in the September 11 terrorist attacks and he has retreated into his silent cocoon of numbers and patterns, which are embedded with the codes of predetermined events that will play out soon.

As the episode opens, Jake has skipped school and perched himself, again, atop a telephone tower.

Hard as he tries, his devoted, widowed father Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland in his first major TV role since 24) cannot reach out to him - figuratively or literally, as Jake refuses physical connection.

Though confounded, Martin not only faces the challenges of his wayward son but the cold-hearted officials who want to take him away.

For Martin knows that the permutations of numbers and inexplicable connections that are ticking away inside Jake's head are codes that can predict seemingly random events and tragedies.

Lest this mumbo-jumbo of chaos theory, paranormal phenomena and New Age musings about ''paying it forward'' become too confounding, there's Danny Glover as Arthur Teller, an expert on gifted children, who sagely tells Martin that ''the whole cosmic wheel of humanity comes down to just electromagnetic energy and connections'' and that Jake's diagnosis represents ''an unnecessarily outdated evolutionary speed bump''.

A thankless role is Gugu Mbatha-Raw's Clea Hopkins, the social worker assigned to the Bohms who wants to lock Jake in an institution. The pilot takes us down a wildly far-fetched scenario that hangs on a lost phone that gets passed from person to person and country to country, each time taking on a new significance and portent.

It also sets up the backstory of Martin and Jake's emotional and material struggles, mostly in a couple of clumsy scenes where Martin meets the social worker, looks up Teller (''mutism and cellphones'' typed into the search engine delivers him to his door) and receives a random phone call from a September 11 fireman.

The plot is a stretch and Touch is not subtle, with its surfeit of unlikely coincidences and lapses of narrative logic, not to mention a misjudged take on post-September 11 conspiracies. Pleasure in this hoo-ha depends on one's willingness to swallow an unusually large suspension-of-disbelief pill, or a simple longing to soak up mawkishness about personal tragedies and the path of healing.

The series was created by Tim Kring, previously responsible for the attention-grabbing Heroes, which also milks the concept of seemingly ordinary people with superhuman talents whose lives are interconnected in wondrous ways.

But that show has a comic-book sensibility and broadly drawn characters that allows it to enlist a range of stories.

Touch offers no such light relief, just mawkishness, earnestness and questionable reflections on the state of the world.