Tag Archives: series

Series premiere: Law & Order: Organized Crime

The PolyBlog
April 7 2021

“In the nation’s largest city, the vicious and violent members of the underworld are hunted by the detectives of the Organized Crime Control Bureau. These are their stories…”.

And so we embark on a new Dick Wolf drama, Law & Order: Organized Crime with Detective Stabler back in NYC working on a task force. Olivia Benson is around for continuity references and a tie-in to L&O:SVU fans, but she doesn’t have much of a role, just as a friend.

I watched EP1, and I was thinking about watching all of the series as it grows from day 1. I really liked the original L&O, plus Criminal Intent. I’m “so so” on SVU because there is just too much depiction of violence against the special victims, even with the so-called “justice” banner to drive the show. It’s hard to call it “dark” as the show mostly isn’t, but I feel almost like I need a shower after watching some EPs. Now that I’ve watched L&O:OC, I’m on the fence.

Let’s start with the premise

Stabler left SVU, went off to Rome with his wife and kids, they’ve been there 12y, they’re back in NYC for something, and someone car bombs his wife. Stabler is convinced it was mis-directed collateral damage for something he was working on, and he wants to stay in NYC and chase the killers. I watched the opening, and I was so confused. I thought the wife was dead years ago, and now he has a lead, or something. Nope, they’re burying her during the episode. But somehow he just snaps his fingers with his bosses and he’s working in NYC again? Huh? Not to mention there is NO consideration of the trauma of the kids losing their Mom and now suddenly moving back to NYC and losing their own social network too. Whatever.

At first, with the organized crime bent, I was thinking there might be a bit of a Wise Guy bent to it with someone going undercover, but nope, he’s just running around flailing, generally doing whatever he wants with little to no oversight. He has a couple of bosses, but he generally ignores them, and who knows why they keep him around.

The supporting cast on the police side are not big players in Ep1, so hard to say what role they’ll have going forward. There’s a nice line about them “staffing up” a new task force, and there’s a pitch by Stabler for a really good hacker that ten minutes before he didn’t even know who she really was but when he meets with her it’s like their bosom buddies, lifetime pals or something. Weird vibes.

Elliot Stabler is played by Christopher Meloni and he’s solid as Stabler after playing him for so long. The problem? He’s big on anger, not so big on the emotional range. Not a big draw for me.

What might be different

There is one element that makes me wonder if it is different for this show is that it seems unlikely they will simply do case-of-the-week busts, not for organized crime. Usually, OCB-type stories are a bit larger, it takes more to bring down the big guy. Enter Chazz Palminteri as Manfred Sinatra, the recently-paroled aged mobster. Palminteri has played a lot of Italian gangsters, and he’s always great — The Godfather of Harlem, even all the way back to Wise Guy. Spoiler alert though — he’s not the big bad guy.

The actual bad guy is played by smiling, smirking Dylan McDermott and I don’t know if he’s had some bad plastic surgery but he looks TERRIBLE in the show. Like there’s “something wrong with his face” terrible. I don’t know if it is just aging actor stuff, extra weight, but he’s a long way from The Practice. And I can’t take him seriously. He has a few lines where he basically wants to appear angry or sinister, almost menacing, and he comes across as whiny. And HE’S a bad guy? Yawn.

But as I said, it MIGHT be different from other L&O shows if they have longer story arcs.

Thoughts on the show

People who liked Stabler/Meloni are going to show up looking for “ripped from the headlines” L&O-lite. This is NOT going to be your standard “cops for part 1, lawyers for part 2” structure, and I don’t know if it will work for most watchers. It didn’t work for me. If this was back in the L&O heyday, I’d not bet against Wolf’s franchise; in 2021? I’m going for cancellation after 1 season.

Series premiere: Coyote

The PolyBlog
April 2 2021

I imagine most people watching Michael Chiklis on TV think of his show, The Shield. For me, it is a bit softer with The Commish or The Fantastic Four. Maybe a bit of Gotham. I like him, but I prefer the lovable side, not the hard cynical side. Usually.

Here he plays a newly-retired border patrol guy who is asked by his old partner’s wife to go down to Mexico, look at a cabin he was building, and finish it up to sell it off so that the bank doesn’t foreclose on their house. It’s a crapfest of a situation, but he wants to help. He feels obligated to help. Most of his life has been spent seeing everything as black or white, or perhaps brown or white, illegal or legal. Now he’s in Mexico seeing the locals, meeting a few, getting involved in their lives, and he’s not so sure the lines are so straight.

I know very little about the long-term direction of the show. With a title like Coyote, maybe he’s going to turn into a smuggler trying to help those in rough spots get away from the bad guys. In EP1, he’s doing exactly that, even though he tries really hard at first to stay out of it.

I’m not going to rate the rest of the cast, as it’s impossible to tell from the opener who will be sticking around. Chicklis is excellent, of course, and the initial scenes are compelling. Enough for me to stick around. I know it gets darker, there are cartels involved, but for now, I’m happy just to see Chicklis. I’ll predict renewal based on him alone.

Series premiere: Firefly Lane

The PolyBlog
February 17 2021

I didn’t know much about Firefly Lane until I saw that it had premiered. When I looked it up, and saw that it was a buddy premise, I thought, “Sure, why not give it a try?”. And with two women instead of two men, I really wanted to like it.

Katherine Heigl plays the co-lead, Tully, and for a lot of people that would be a giant plus. They loved her in Grey’s Anatomy or State of Affairs. Me? I remember her from Under Siege 2 and I thought she was decent enough there, but well, she was in the background. I didn’t watch GA and I gave SoA only one episode before bailing. I find almost all of her characters come across as almost superficial, particularly when she’s trying to be deep for a moment. I don’t “get” her, and I don’t want to I suppose.

Sarah Chalke is the other co-lead, Kate, and I didn’t watch her in Cougar Town with Courtney Cox or on Scrubs. I do remember her as Stella from How I Met Your Mother and vaguely as Becky from Roseanne. And she’s decent enough, just the character is rather bland. Yet I don’t mean just in comparison to Tully, I mean bland all the way around.

But you know the real problem? I kept seeing the two of them with all the flashbacks, and I thought, “Who cares what happened?” Because “modern day” Kate and Tully are a mess. There’s no giant success for the two of them to want me to know the origin story for them. I saw them meet, I’m pretty much done. I don’t care what happened in between and I don’t care what happens in present-day. Not to mention that relatively speaking, they seem like the same characters then and now. They started as wild child and home-body, so not much of a growth arc to present-day.

Kate’s daughter seems interesting, albeit a cliché teenager. But I don’t care enough about her to watch either.

I also can’t help feeling that someone watched Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in Grace and Frankie and said, “Give me that. But make them 40 instead of over-60.”

It’s Netflix, so the business model is different than normal. I’d normally say “cancellation” without reservation but it is getting buzz. Lots of women are interested to watch in the same demographic. And maybe the other 9 EPs are worth the buzz. But I’m going to pass. And I still think it should be cancelled.

Series premiere: Lupin

The PolyBlog
February 17 2021

I am an idiot, apparently. I thought I knew the history of Arsène Lupin. He is, after all, a famous character in France literature.

Now, in my light defence, I have read Edgar Allan Poe’s short-story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, which is considered by many to be the first modern detective story. The main character in the story? C. Auguste Dupin. Not Arsène Lupin. Oops.

So when I saw that Netflix had a new series starting called Lupin, and it had some reference to the stories, I was expecting him to be a detective. Nope, Arsène Lupin is a gentleman burglar, a master of misdirection and disguise. He can be anybody. Anyone. Any time.

In the opening, you meet a young man who is in debt to a loan shark. He’s working as a janitor at the Louvre. His ex-wife thinks he’s broke. What nobody knows? He’s Arsène Lupin.

A spoiler alert though is needed here. Because I can’t review the story without reviewing his disguise. It’s true he has an ex-wife, a son, and owes money to a loan shark. It’s even true he’s working as a janitor. But it’s all a con so he can get the loan shark to rob the Louvre. He has the perfect plan. It just doesn’t happen to be the plan he told the loan shark and his crew. They double-cross him, but he had already double-crossed them. He steals the necklace, and walks out the loading dock door with it. One young detective is on to him, but is it enough?

The larger spoiler is that the necklace has a history. The main character, who is not really Arsène Lupin but actually Assane Diop, knew the wealthy family that used to own it, as his father was their chauffeur. When the necklace went missing, the father was arrested and charged, and overcome with shame, he apparently killed himself in his jail cell rather than let his son see him in prison. So the theft is apparent revenge for his father’s death.

I loved the show and I loved the main actor, Omar Sy (Jurassic World). He played at least 3 different characters, so to speak, in the show, shifting from one to the other with ease. He was a bit off with his performance as a tech billionaire, a little too casual and cavalier about the necklace being stolen, but otherwise excellent. I can’t wait to see where the show goes.

Netflix’s business model is different than most, but I’m still going to predict renewal. Despite the dubbing, I think people will show up to watch it.

Series premiere: Clarice

The PolyBlog
February 13 2021

The Silence of the Lamb series is hugely popular, certainly iconic, and downright creepy. The SotL movie won Best Picture, the last sequel to do so. And to be honest, not one of my favorites. I like Jodie Foster in it, sure, but I find Anthony Hopkins too over the top to be enjoyable. Yet, I confess, I loved the original Manhunter, having watched it way back on The Movie Network when I was living at home. Hard to belive Gil Grissom from CSI (i.e. William Petersen) was able to pull it off, in retrospect. But I liked it better.

Still, nevertheless, with a new series with Clarice as the main character and her life one year after catching the serial killer, I wanted to give it a go. And, not unexpectedly, it is pretty well done.

There is a LOT of backstory going on in the show, with Clarice having trouble after the events, she’s avoiding the one woman she was able to save, her therapy isn’t going well, etc. But she wants to hunker down in the basement of the FBI doing data entry. Until the mother of the woman she saved is appointed Attorney General, and wants her to be on a taskforce with the agent she bested the last time out. Oh, won’t that be fun!

Clarice is played by Rebecca Breeds, and she has this southern drawl going on that is strangely alluring and a strong presence. She talks slower than her counterparts, slows down the chatter, and you find yourself listening even more. I didn’t watch The Originals, but I’m almost tempted to go back and see her in it.

Her immediate boss is played by Michael Cudlitz, and while he has been in a lot of shows over the years, almost none of them were ones I watched. Yet he was familiar. I was combing his bio, starting to think I was just mistaking him for someone else until I got all the way back to Band of Brothers. Wow, would NOT have linked him to that in a million years as Denver. Anyway, his acting is fine, but his character is a giant cliché. Oh, she’s no good, let’s wash her out, blah blah blah. Cuz, you know, every top notch investigator must be really smart to get that high but a complete idiot for how to deal with subordinates. Riiight.

There are a bunch of secondary characters, including a familiar face from Designated Survivor, for example, but overall, nobody super solid in EP1 who is likely to make it through the season (yep, I’m predicting at least one to die before too long).

Anyway, I’ll find out. Because I’ll be watching and I bet others will be too. Good show.