I used to review the TV shows I watched. Over the last three years, that hasn’t happened as much, because there was nothing I felt was worth even talking about.
And now, things are a little different.
So, a few TV shows to discuss.
RJ Decker
I did not see this coming.
ABC flooded every conceivable channel and outlet with commercials for this show. I could not escape the ads if I tried. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what it was.
On a whim, I decided to try it.
Thank God I did. It’s been the highlight of the TV season. It really has.
And I knew it was going to be awesome from the moment I saw “Based on the novel Double Whammy, by Carl Hiaasen,” with executive producer, Carl Hiaasen.
If you don’t know Carl Hiaasen, his entire career as a novelist has been “Florida man, the novel.”
Now we have Jim Rockford meets Florida Man the TV show.
RJ Decker is a news photographer who beat up the wrong thief. A beautiful woman seduces him before his last day in court … and before she perjures herself to throw him in jail.
Now that Decker is out, he’s acting as a Private Investigator. He’s living in the pool house of his ex-wife and her new girlfriend, who is a cop. And we proceed from there. The way it’s handled, I’m not sure this scenario would have worked any other way. Also, they don’t hit you over the head with it. It’s barely mentioned unless utterly necessary to the plot. It’s less a “gay is normal and not weird” and more a “Florida is abnormal and very weird.”
You know what makes this stand out? IT’S SMART. It assumes that you’re smart too. Our hero observes something, makes a deduction on it, and we move forward. We’re not lingering on it, we’re not pretending that you the viewers are stupid. We’re not pretending the characters didn’t see what was right in front of them.
It’s also entertaining. These people are likeable.
The Hunting Party
After several false starts, NBC has finally gotten their reformulation of The Blacklist.
The premise for this show is simple: The government has faked the death of hundreds of serial killers in order to throw them into a super secret government prison called “The Pit.” There, scientists experiment on the killers in order to “fix” them.
Of course, nothing could possibly go wrong with this idea, right?
Until an explosion hits The Pit and unleashes a whole wave of inmates on an unsuspecting populace.
To hunt down and recapture these psychopaths, we have “the hunting party,” with a profiler, a CIA operator, and a soldier who was a Pit prison guard.
It’s interesting that NBC’s solution to recreating the Blacklist, only with Criminal Minds instead of Bond villains.
Believe it or not, I have enjoyed this show. Granted, I needed to get over a few things. Such as “WHY AREN’T ALL THESE PSYCHOS CHIPPED AND LOJACKED WITH GPS!” But it really just boiled down to “we have an illegal but inescapable jail, why don’t need to chip our prisoners! They can’t escape!”
F***ing government.
There are more than a few moments where you’re going to look at this and go “F***ing government.” I’ve lost count of the number of stupid experiments that the government has done in real life. The Hunting Party feels like they’re going to take every stupid idea and apply them on guinea pigs, only the guinea pigs are less sympathetic.
Part of the entertainment value is seeing how much the results of the “treatments”—usually it’s a matter of “We’ve got an evil and broken monster … let’s see how we can break him EVEN MORE.”
Apparently, NBC is dumping money into this show. Kelsey Grammar showed up as a Jonestown like cult leader.
Now, I don’t quite know where this show is going. But so far, it’s been entertaining.
Wild Cards
CW has something good on. Who knew? It’s called Wild Cards, a Canadian production that’s being broadcast on CW.
The premise is simple enough, it’s one part Castle and one part White Collar.
SHE is a career criminal, raised by criminals. She grew up robbing the great places of Europe… and being raised by television and media. She has an amoral viewpoint and more pop culture references than the show can footnote. They literally don’t even try. After she cons her way onto a case, she ends up being a consultant (Think Richard Castle or Neil Caffrey).
HE is a cop in the doghouse— or in this case, harbor patrol. He’s tightly wound, and he has a dead brother who’s murder is unsolved. He’s more tightly wound than Kate Beckett ever was.
So you can see where I see overlaps with other shows.
High Potential
When the show begins, Morgan Gillory is a janitor at the LAPD, and is compelled to correct the murder board in homicide. She’s a single mother of three, and a high IQ … with all the personality quirks that go with it.
After that, it feels very much like the closest they get to Murder, She Wrote. You know, a quasi-police procedural where there’s a Castle-like consultant. This is very much The Mentalist, without the carnie showmanship. Also, the actress playing Morgan Gillory, Kaitlyn Olson, does not have Patrick Baker’s +10 charisma.
And having David Giuntoli from Grimm play one of the killers was just entertaining.
Watson
Morris Chestnut was the black sidekick from Under Siege 2. And he really, really wanted to play a doctor. He had at least one show where he was a Florida medical examiner.
Now, he’s playing Watson.
Watson is supposed to be the post-Sherlock life of Doctor John Watson, only he’s an American doctor, and they’ve all but deleted his military experience. (It was mentioned in one episode. Never again.) He’s now back home in Pittsburgh, a geneticist playing diagnostician with a team of medical experts to help him solve medical mysteries.
Yes. Watson can best be described as House, MD… but without the sadism or the humor. Unlike Hugh Laurie’s psychopath with a medical degree, I don’t want to horribly murder any of the characters.
It’s … okay.
The best actor here is Peter Mark Kendall who plays “the Croft brothers.” The personalities, the mannerisms, the body postures, are so distinct, I sometimes believe they’re played by two actors.
The follow up is Eve Harlow—who I am certain is someone I know from elsewhere, but her IMDB resume tells me different.
I don’t know. She looks like someone… anyway. Next show.
Best Medicine
Did you ever see the UK TV show Doc Martin? This is the American attempt to recreate it. They even hired to play the original Doc Martin to play the lead’s father.
Premise: a tightly wound, antisocial surgeon (redundant, I know) moves to a small town that he has fond memories of so he can hide his recently triggered hemophobia.
Do I like this series? Yes. I watch this for the medical mystery of the week. That’s it. It feels very much like Royal Pains. I like our Doctor. I sympathize with him.
But they’ve made the “small fishing village in Maine” into a freak show. Because small towns apparently filled with retards, racially diverse gay couples, “the kids are too smart for this town,” blah blah blah. And every other episode is a yearly festival that no one told him about until five minutes ago.
If you’re from a small town, you will probably find this offensive. I only watch this on DVR, and fast forward so much, I can get through a 42 minute episode (sans commercials) in 30 minutes or less.
Sheriff Country
I gave up on the series Fire Country in the first episode. It’s a rare thing for me to do. My family trained me to give a series at least three episodes before giving up on a TV show. It’s a TV Guide reviewer policy my family adopted decades ago. I presume TV Guide no longer exists.
Anyway, Fire Country was so heavy in the soap opera nonsense that I gave up on the whole thing.
So when the spin-off Sheriff Country came out, I said “Aw Hell No.”
But it had Morena Baccarin. And I like her. She’s hot. She can act. I just wish she was in shows that didn’t suck.
Sheriff Country is no exception.
Okay, that’s a little harsh. I only recently gave up on it, despite several plot threads that nearly killed any and all interest in the show. But no, at long last, it killed my interest stone dead.
Our Sheriff’s father is played by W. Earl Brown, a veteran of Deadwood. He’s the most interesting, colorful character in the show, and is probably the main reason I put up with Sheriff Country for so long.
CIA
If you look at my review of FBI, you know I had no hope for this spin-off series going in. But I wanted to see Tom Ellis at work in something other than Lucifer.
Tom Ellis went from being Satan to being a CIA agent, and he didn’t have to change character much. That joke writes itself.
It’s stupid.
So, so stupid.
The Joint Terrorism Taskforce, what’s that? We don’t need no stinking task force. We’ll just slap a random FBI guy to a CIA office in the middle of Manhattan and that’ll suffice for CIA to run the streets of America. Yeah. Sure.
Iran’s best assassins are women. Obviously. (Episode two. Honest. That was the plot.)
Sure, let’s send the boss into Hong Kong to exfiltrate a NOC hunted by China. (Literally episode three.)
Of course AfD are white supremacists. No, why bother pretending to research international politics on a CIA show? Our viewers are too stupid to know better…
Someone please stop putting Dick Wolf’s name on everything.
Boston Blue
Remember Blue Bloods? It followed a family of New York City cops (and an ADA) in their day-to-day lives? It featured Mark Wahlberg as Danny Regan?
Well, for real-world reasons (a New York City hiring freeze), Danny’s son has become a cop in Boston. When he’s injured in the line of duty, Danny is on the first shuttle up.
The premise of this series revolves around another family of law enforcement… only instead of Boston Irish, this family is black and Jewish, and grandpa is a Baptist preacher. In Boston. How does this work? In a highly convoluted manner and beggars belief.
I have gotten halfway through season one … also on fast forward.
I thought this was going to be a train wreck from minute one.
Why?
Danny Regan’s Boston partner is the lead actress from Star Trek: Discovery, Sonequa Martin-Green. That was strike one.
Is it crap?
It’s not as much obvious crap as I was concerned it was going to be. The saving grace of this show is Mark Wahlberg and Ernie Hudson,1 and surprisingly the actor playing Sean Regan. But this is a perfectly good waste of actress Gloria Reuben, who I remember being a much better actress than this. But there are some lines not even Wahlberg and Hudson can make work.
Again, this is another show I watch on fast forward. In fact, the more I watch of this show, the more I fast forward. There’s only so much I will put up with for characters I like.
Death in Paradise
If you like Agatha Christie-like puzzles, you should be watching this show. I’ve seen every season of this show at least four times, and these puzzles still get me sometime. Even when I remember the solutions, I sometimes don’t remember whodunit.
And part of the fun is the culture clash, since every lead detective is from the UK, and dropped into a Caribbean environment that they don’t quite gel with. And of course, we have a rotating cast of actors, because UK shows don’t keep casts like American shows. The first detective is downright Victorian. The second looks like a Weasley cousin. We have an Irish Columbo, a hypochondriac and a jerk at different time.
It’s a fun comedy mystery.
NCIS
It’s still on. It’s still an entertaining police procedural. And I like Gary Cole.
And I must admit, their 500th episode was surprisingly good, with a beautiful twist I didn’t see coming.
NCIS Origins
I think this show is finding its footing. The excellent actor they hired for flashbacks of young Doctor “Ducky” Mallard has made two appearances this season—probably for sweeps week.
And they dedicated an entire episode to a dog, who has more acting range and facial expressions than their primary actress.
Other than that, I think my original review holds up.
Tracker
If you remember The Bone Collector, it had a quadraplegic forensic expert solving murders. It’s based on a Jeffery Deaver novel.
Jeffery Deaver also created Colton Shaw, who is his attempt to copy Jack Reacher. Only Shaw is a bounty hunter, using his prepper skills from his youth to find missing people.
In the TV show, Shaw is played by Justin Hartley, who was in Smallville as Oliver Queen. The producers hired some DEI rejects for background grunt work.
The first season, I gave up on in the first thirty minutes. The women who find him work are an old lesbian couple, who were written to be annoying. His lawyer is an ex who is a raging bitch. And there was the obligatory hacker to be used as a shortcut, because computers are magic. He, of course, was racially ambiguous.
Fast forward a little and I found that Jensen Ackles was being hired to play Shaw’s brother. I gave into temptation and tried it just for Ackles. The lawyer ex toned down the bitchy. The ancient lesbians were being phased out, as was the hacker.
Overall the show is okay. It’s another show that I am heavy handed with the fast forward button.
No, I don’t stream if I can avoid it, and I hate commercials.
That’s all I have for today. Unless you want me to discuss older TV shows I have on disc.
Again, feel free to ask me anything in the comments. If you get an email, you can ping me through the comment button at the top.
And please, feel free to buy a book, or leave a book review. Either would be greatly appreciated.
Of course… for both of them.
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