I’ve never been much of a devotee of Lost, though I did watch the first season when it was on television. One character that was memorable was Josh Holloway’s Sawyer, pretty much the TV equivalent of X-men’s Gambit – a charming, handsome arsehole hiding dark personal secrets. Holloway was destined for great things (actually turning down the role of Gambit in an X-men movie because it was too close to Sawyer, go figure) but never got far, save for a few welcome appearances in movies like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. He holds a special place in my heart for being one of the first vampires to be seen and killed in Angel (his second on-screen role), so I’ve always wanted to see him do well.
And here he is in new TV show Intelligence. The story centres around Holloway’s Gabriel, a spy
with a high-tech chip in his head, making him a hot spy commodity. To protect
him, his boss Lillian (Marg Helgenberger) appoints young Secret Service agent Riley
(Meghan Ory) to protect him. I’ll avoid the puns regarding intelligence and
lack thereof. The biggest criticism to be made is simply that it’s a TV show.
It’s very much a TV show.
Rather redundant to point out, I know. But the pilot is
rather aggressive in its mainstream genre TV mediocrity. The characters don’t pop, the settings are
bland (save for one set-piece involving a shootout in a paintball room, which added some much needed colour). The dialogue is stilted and unrealistic, the performances underwhelming and the plot
predictable. The word ‘safe’ springs to mind.
Gone is the Holloway charm. Characters are reduced to caricatures
(geeky, wisecracking nerd anybody? Tough but fair boss?) and the romantic
tension/friendly rivalry between Holloway and Ory is both boring in its
execution as it is chemistry-free. The whole thing is frustratingly pedestrian
and again, ‘safe’.
The whole thing could do with an injection of
tongue-in-cheek fun. If the characters are to be caricatures, at least paint
them with broader, more colourful strokes. Let Holloway do what he does best,
let him be a lovable rogue, occasionally sleazy but sexy and mysterious. Play
up the fact that a pretty brunette is body-guarding a tall surely superspy,
perhaps cast someone who looks less capable as juxtaposition to her actual
ability. Spice up the dialogue, sprinkle it with self-awareness; doing so will
remind the audience that ‘hey, nothing here is original but we’re having fun
anyway’.
What’s even more frustrating is how Intelligence is all very
obviously shot in Canada. From the faking of snowy Canadian mountains for
Pakistan in the pre-titles sequence, to the abandoned warehouse that I
recognise from not only Stargate SG1
but Fringe as well, the whole thing
reeks of corner-cutting and low budgets, which is not what you expect from a
pilot.
That leads to the one successful thing of the show: the
chip. The chip allows Gabriel to hack the Internet and various communications
with the power of his mind. The conceit allows him to combine all available
evidence to create a virtual recreation of a crime scene that he can walk
through. This is used to good effect at the beginning when he relives his
wife’s supposed defection to a terrorist organization and her participation in
a massacre. Moments like identifying a terrorist as his wife by having a
wedding video in a little window playing next to her face as she guns down
civilians is a novel way of displaying background information to the audience. They’re
also very beautifully rendered, so I guess we now know where the budget went.
The show runs the risk of this being too much like BBC’s Sherlock, what with available
information on screen for both the character and the audience to observe, and
with Gabriel being a super know-it-all in every situation because of his brain,
they’d need to work very hard to not draw comparisons to that superior product.
The show is already too much like a combination of Chuck and Person of Interest,
it would serve them not to imitate further.
So the show has much potential, if it had a ground-up redo
of everything from characters, acting, dialogue and plot. While I do like the
central conceit of the show there isn’t much for me to keep watching. Many
recent mainstream genre pilots do very little to challenge audiences and do
something interesting. Not all shows have the leeway of cable shows like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, sure, but many shows have created great work in a
mainstream context, for example, Joss Whedon’s oeuvre.
Ultimately there is very little here to justify my continued
viewing. Much like the pilots of Agents
of S.H.I.E.L.D., Almost Human and
Sleepy Hollow (the most fun of the three), the conventions of mainstream
genre TV have changed so little since the 90s, where such conventions are so easily identified that the whole thing feels monotonous. What you’re left with
is shows that will either get cancelled in no time or will drone on with
nothing interesting to say for a few years before vanishing, either way they’re
not worth your time. I mean, Almost Human
has Karl Urban in it and I still wont watch it. It’s a tragedy when shows that
have something to say get cancelled (like recently with the amazing show Boss with Kelsey Grammar) but if Intelligence goes the reasons why are
right there on the screen.
*Stars
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