Movie Box Review

Despite ABC's attempts to claim otherwise, REVENGE is more "hittish" than true hit.  Although it premiered with strong ratings in the low 3s, it's since come down to numbers in the mid-2s, usually beaten by CSI in their shared Wednesday 10PM timeslot.  But these days, a 2.4-2.5 rating at 10PM is nothing to take lightly, especially compared to other ABC drama entries like The River, Pan Am and (based on its premiere) GCB, none of which could crawl much above a 2.  So while series creator/showrunner Mike Kelley said all the right things at today's PaleyFest session devoted to the show about how he hopes the series comes back for a 2d season, and that there are no guarantees in this business, Revenge has an excellent chance--barring an April/May collapse--to be back.  

The Revenge gathering was notably less boisterous than last night's Vampire Diaries craziness (amusingly, a new caution had been added to the pre-panel introductions today asking fans not to rush the stage when the session was over), as befits its more affluent, and dare I say somewhat older, audience.  Nevertheless, there was enormous enthusiasm for the show's antagonists, vengeful Emily Thorne (Emily Vancamp) and her nemesis Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe), as well as the show's resident hunks Daniel Grayson (Josh Bowman) and Jack Porter (Nick Wechsler) and Emily's oddball partner in vengeance Nolan Ross (Gabriel Mann).  Apart from them and Kelley, participants in the panel included producer Marty Bowen, and performers Henry Czerny (Conrad Grayson), Ashley Madekwe (Ashley Davenport) and the series ingenues, Christa B. Allen (Charlotte Grayson) and Connor Paolo (Declan Porter).  

Only the first 15 minutes or so of the next unaired episode (which won't be seen till April) were screened, and there weren't a lot of full-scale spoilers, although Kelley allowed a cast member to confirm that a terrible thing happening to one character in that 15 minutes was the doing of another character (which had been set up in some dialogue in the portion that was screened). What Kelley did provide was a surprisingly detailed blueprint of how the rest of the season is going to play out structurally. So, STRUCTURAL SPOILER ALERT: 

The episode that was partly screened, Episode 17, will continue where the previous episode left off, with Daniel in jail for Tyler's murder (if you don't know who Tyler is, catch up) and the preparations for his trial.  Then the show will jump forward several months from September to December, and Episodes 18-19 will cover Daniel's trial, up to and including the verdict.  (The prosecution case will take up "2 minutes" of Episode 18, and from there on the focus will be on Daniel's defense.)  Episode 20 will be something different for the series:  an hour set entirely in the past, dealing with the period in 2002 when Emily was still trying to decide if her father's version of his arrest and conviction was true and when she was meeting her future targets for the first time.  Episode 20 will also include sequences flashing even farther back, to the beginning of the romance between Victoria and David Clarke (Emily's father--pay attention).  Then Episodes 21-22 will lead up to a season-ending cliffhanger, and also set things up for what would be the main storyline of Season 2.  Kelley provided little information about what this would be about, except to note that Daniel Grayson will no longer be the passive character he's mostly been so far, and that the enigmatic Takeda will figure into these episodes.  Kelley added that the plan for next season would be to follow the same structure as Season 1:  a central storyline occupying the first 13-15 episodes, aftermath episodes for the following 4-6 weeks, then an hour or 2 resolving some issues and setting things up for the future.

The panel was mostly breezy and light-hearted, although Stowe made it clear that while she's having a good time playing Victoria, she takes her character very seriously.  (She and Kelley have collaborated on an as-yet unseen backstory for Victoria.)  Most questions were about the storylines, for which Kelley's go-to answer was "If it's not impossible, it could happen."  (This included a query about whether Emily's father might actually be alive.)  The only complaint any of the actors seemed to have was that their respective stories didn't allow them to interact with some of the other characters as much as they'd like (Nolan with the Graysons, Ashley with Emily, etc).  The panel did clear up, though, that there's no way Nolan will turn out to be Emily's brother, however sibling-like their relationship may be.

Coming up at PaleyFest--deep breath, please--on Tuesday night:  the return of MAD MEN.

 

Here's some welcome if unsurprising news:  F/X has renewed JUSTIFIED for a 4th season.  The show, now at the midpoint of Season 3 (the finale airs April 10) drew a 0.9 last week in 18-49s, which isn't Walking Dead crazy high, but is still a very solid number for a scripted cable series (outscoring such prominent shows as Royal Pains and Psych), and up a bit from last year.  

While the show isn't quite at last season's creative level--replacing a spectacular villain like Margo Martindale's Mags Bennett is no easy task--Justified is still one of the smartest, most entertaining crime shows on the air, with terrific lead performances from Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins as his sometimes homicidal frenemy Boyd Crowder.  It would be too bad, though, if the recent news that Natalie Zea (who plays Raylan's ex- and sometimes not-so-ex-wife) has taken a network pilot means she'll be bolting the show.  Luckily, with cable production schedules being what they are, that's not necessarily inevitable.

AWAKE -  Midseason on NBC:   If Nothing Else Is On...


NBC's AWAKE is sleepier than it sounds.  Its premise is certainly intriguing:  Detective Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) is the driver in a terrible accident, with his wife Hannah (Laura Allen) and teenage son Rex (Dylan Minnette) in the car.  When he returns to consciousness, he finds himself straddling two separate existences, one where Hannah was killed and Rex is alive, and the other where the reverse occurred.  When he goes to sleep in one life, he instantly wakes in the other.  Both appear to be entirely real--he continues to carry out his job, solving separate (but with clues that are somehow linked) crimes with different partners (Steve Harris and Wilmer Valderrama); his partner in one world exists as a cop in the other.  Also, he attends psychiatric sessions in each world with a different shrink (Cherry Jones and B.D. Wong), each of whom tries to convince him that his or her reality is the true one.


So what's going on?  Well, Awake isn't saying, because that would be the end of the show.  In the pilot, written by Kyle Killen (unfortunately best known for writing two recently ambitious failures, Lone Star on TV and The Beaver in theatres), we simply watch Britten bounce from one plane of existence to the other, missing whomever's deceased in that reality, attending his therapy sessions and doggedly working at his job.  Where his wife is alive, she knows that he "dreams" of their son; in Rex's world, there's an attractive potential love interest in his son's tennis coach (Michaela McManus). In both worlds, Britten is a very sad man.

It must have all made for a great pitch meeting, but on screen Awake doesn't add up to much.  Unlike alternate reality movies like Sliding Doors or Groundhog Day, there's no overall story arc to the different realities, at least none that's revealed in the pilot.  (There's a hint that Michael might be more responsible for the accident than he can admit, but it doesn't go very far.)  Rather, Awake is reminiscent of ABC's shortlived 2006 Day Break, where Taye Diggs had to keep living the same day over and over until he could change what would happen, or what the movie Source Code would have been like if we never found out what was going on with Jake Gyllenhaal.  Technically, it's not that dramatically stagnant, since Britten will have new crimes to solve and his personal life will move forward in each reality, but those things alone aren't very satisfying.

Awake isn't helped by the muted style with which it's been made.  Director David Slade (he did the last Twilight movie, and before that the vampire-fest 30 Days of Night) keeps everything very low-key; there's an almost hushed tone to the therapy scenes.  Frankly, the material didn't need or deserve that level of respect.  Isaacs is an excellent actor (he's probably best known as Papa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, but he did superb work on Showtime's Brotherhood), and no supporting cast that features Cherry Jones lacks for firepower.  But rather than the two worlds seeming real in Awake, neither quite does; each of them feels somehow sketchy and undeveloped.

NBC hasn't yet announced where they'll place Awake on their schedule, and it's going to be a tough show to slot:  a serious, slow drama that isn't likely to skew young.  Perhaps in later episodes, Awake will find a way to introduce more compelling storylines and variations on its theme; for now, it's two parallel versions of "not that interesting."

Read more about TV's new shows at THE SKED PILOT REPORT.

FX's Elmore Leonard-inspired crime drama JUSTIFIED really hit its stride in its second season last year, and now it's back, trying to build on that very solid success.

WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  The redoubtable Mags Bennett (Emmy-winner Margo Martindale) has gone to her grave, and so has her corrupt sheriff son.  (Her other son, the more psychotic Dickie (Jeremy Davies), is in jail.)  Along the way, Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and his ex-girlfriend Ava (Joelle Crowder), who's now married to Raylan's frenemy Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), were both shot.  Boyd intended to kill Dickie for shooting Ava, but Raylan arrested Dickie instead.   Also, Raylan's ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea), with whom he's back together on an unmarried basis, is pregnant.

WHERE WE ARE:  Justified is in no rush to jump into its third chapter, and the season premiere, written by series creator Graham Yost and Fred Golan, and directed by Michael Dinner, eases its way in, serving mostly to introduce a new set of villains.  They're led by Robert Quaries (Neal McDonough), a smooth but ruthless representative of the Detroit Mafia who sees opportunities in Raylan's part of Kentucky.  Also on hand is Fletcher "Ice Pick" Nix (Desmond Harrington, from Dexter), who has his own version of the kind of game Javier Bardem liked to play in No Country For Old Men.  And at least temporarily, old bad guy Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns) is part of the black-hat team.  

A crime show that manages to find a truly great villain sometimes dispatches the character at its own peril--just look at Dexter, which has spent 2 seasons trying to recover from the loss of John Lithgow's chilling Trinity--and few villains in recent years have been as terrifying and nuanced as Martindale's Mags Bennett.  (The next show to face this challenge will be the Gus Fring-less Breaking Bad.)  At first glance, Quaries seems like a much more standard piece of bad-guyery, all expensive suit and corporate-type strategy despite his hidden pistol; a representative of the 1% rather than Mags' 99%.  But Justified has earned every benefit of the doubt, so we'll see if he develops some shading.

More promising is the down-home story.  The show has taken the interesting tack of having Raylan come back from his shooting a little less than his best, and even though we know in the end he'll come through, it has the effect of making him warier and more vulnerable than he's been before.  Meanwhile, Boyd has already manipulated himself into a position to take revenge on Dickie Bennett (the fact that Raylan didn't see that coming is another sign that he's not the man he used to be), and Ava has proven herself an extremely worthy surrogate for Boyd during his jailhouse absence.

Justified is a great sleeper of a show, demonstrating weekly that a rural setting and genre storyline don't preclude incisive writing or smart plotting, and its ensemble cast has some of the best chemistry on television. It's a pleasure to welcome Raylan and company back.

Previously... On ALCATRAZ:  San Francisco cop Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones), whose partner was recently killed, finds herself embroiled in a mysterious case in which an Alcatraz inmate from 40 years ago, apparently long dead, has turned up not having aged a day and committing new murders.  Rebecca learns that all the Alcatraz prisoners who were supposedly transferred to San Quentin when the prison closed in 1963 actually vanished, and now they're popping up, on violent missions no one can understand.  By the end of the hour, she's joined the top-secret Federal task force investigating the crimes headed by enigmatic Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), himself a former Alcatraz guard.  Also on the team are scientist Lucy (Parminder Nagra) and multi-tasking geek Alcatraz historian/comic book author Diego (Jorge Garcia).  Also:  Rebecca learns that her own grandfather was the back-from-the-dead Alcatraz prisoner who was involved in her partner's death.

Episode 2:  The first hour of Monday's 2-hour premiere was the original pilot, with the second hour the initial regular episode.  Somewhere during the process of producing the season's episodes, Executive Producer Elizabeth Sarnoff, a writer on uber-producer JJ Abrams's Lost who co-created the series with Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, and who served as showrunner, was removed for the traditional "creative differences."  It's not clear when or whether that change will be reflected in the tone or content of the show.

Episode 2, written by producer Alison Balian and directed by another Lost veteran, Jack Bender, demonstrated the limitations of the show's concept.  The series is, not unlike Abrams's CBS series Person Of Interest, trying to meld a procedural with a continuing (and in this case somehow supernatural or sci-fi) storyline.  But the nature of the concept, in which every week's criminal comes from the same pool of former Alcatraz prisoners, allows for a limited amount of variety.  And the fact that the show is going to be very tight-fisted with its mythology (in this hour, there was no new information until a big reveal about Nagra's character in the last 30 seconds) means that there's very little to chew over.

Like most procedurals, Alcatraz so far has little appetite for characterization:  Rebecca is gritty and determined, Emerson Hauser is aloof and clearly knows more than he'll admit, Diego is humorously neurotic and brilliant.  We'll see if the episode's news about Lucy means some additional insight into her, but more likely any knowledge will be hoarded and parsed out along many episodes, since Rebecca and Diego don't yet know what we do about her.  The individual episodes are professionally executed but not particularly interesting (this hour involved a sniper with OCD who killed people because his mother had chosen to live with his teen sister but not him), and since the criminals don't seem to know themselves how they were transported from the 1960s or who sent them, there's little to glean from them.

Alcatraz has an intriguing concept, but so far it's mostly unmemorable.  The show will need to find something to engage viewers if it hopes to sentence them to a long sentence in front of the set.

In this season of paired projects (Grimm and Once Upon A Time, The Playboy Club and Pan Am), it makes sense that we have two series produced by JJ Abrams:  CBS's fall Person Of Interest and FOX's midseason ALCATRAZ.  Of the two, Alcatraz has by far the more potential, but it's a ragged piece of work that'll need quite a bit of improvement before it hits the air.

Alcatraz posits the idea that in 1963, when the Bay Area maximum-security prison was shut down, the inmates were not transferred to other facilities--instead, they vanished off the face of the earth.  The mass disappearance was kept secret by the government, and only now, almost 50 years later, the criminals are beginning to reappear, not having aged a day and on mysterious missions to kill contemporary people for reasons even they don't understand.  Spooky!  And worthy of the co-creator of Lost (Alcatraz is written by Elizabeth Sarnoff, a Lost producer, along with Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, both junior writers on Kyle XY).  So far so good.

Alcatraz loses its grip when it tries to build a series structure around the premise.  For the millionth time, we're back in the storyline where a gritty local detective (Sarah Jones as Rebecca Madsen) starts investigating the murder committed by one of the reemerged convicts, and despite being warned off by mysterious federal agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), she doggedly pursues the crime, until she proves herself instrumental in tracking the killer down and by the end of the pilot, she's been added to the task force.  Naturally there's a quirky expert (Jorge Garcia--hi, Hurley!) and a intense techie (Parminder Nagra), and naturally there are vague hints that Rebecca and her uncle (Robert Forster) may have more connection to what's really going on than they realize.  It's all terribly routine, and the rudimentary dialogue doesn't add anything to the pilot's by-the-numbers plotting, not to mention the problem of balancing between the time spent with our heroes and with the guest star villain, who's part time traveler and part cipher.

The casting is also lacking.  Jones is very pretty, but not exactly ideal as an up-from-the-streets cop, while Neill's done this kind of untrustworthy authority figure countless times, most recently in Happy Town and Daybreakers.  Garcia has earned a giant amount of audience goodwill, but they might as well have called his character (a professor who creates his own Alcatraz-themed comic books) Hurley and be done with it.  Nagra, who was a solid part of the latter-year ER ensemble, gets little to do.  In the pilot, none of them mesh into much of an ensemble, and the direction by Danny Cannon, a CBS procedural veteran, has a minimum of visual panache.  

Episode 2:  Person Of Interest has an original slant on the procedural, and in the second episode, written by series creator Jonathan Nolan and Executive Producer Greg Plageman, and directed by Richard L. Lewis, the series continues to be intriguing.  Finch's magic machine has popped out the ID of a teenage girl who, according to the files, was murdered with her family 2 years earlier.  Since the magic machine can never be wrong, Reese sets out to investigate, and sure enough, it turns out the hired killer who shot her parents allowed the girl to live.  Now, however, her life is in danger once again, because she's in line for a huge inheritance that the people who killed her family can't let her claim.  The story, like the pilot's, was quite cleverly worked out as long as you didn't think about it too much. 

The new KILLER ELITE takes little from Sam Peckinpah's 1975 action movie apart from its title (Peckinpah used "The" in his) and the general notion of mercenaries and ex-spies double-crossing each other.  This isn't a huge loss, as the 1975 version was part of Peckinpah's "fascinating but not good" period that also included Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (he essentially turned the movie into an allegory about Hollywood), which occupied the years before his career entered its final decline.   The 2011 reboot, directed by Gary McKendry in his feature debut, is considerably less fascinating and no better.

The script, written by McKendry and Matt Sherring, is based on a non-fiction book called "The Feather Men" by Ranulph Fiennes (in what was presumably a shared joke, that name is given to one of the assassins' targets in the film).  The fictionalized premise is nothing if not convoluted.  in 1980, Danny (Jason Statham) is a mercenary who's had a crisis of conscience and retired to a farm in Australia, where he re-meets a comely lass (Yvonne Strahovski, from Chuck) he'd known as a boy.  Of course, no movie mercenary is allowed to stay retired for long, and soon a sheik has kidnapped Danny's best friend Hunter (Robert DeNiro), and the ransom is that Danny has to perform the task Hunter was originally hired to do:  assassinate 3 British ex-SAS agents who had each killed one of the sheik's sons in the Oman war years earlier, but not before getting each of them on tape confessing to his particular killing.  Oh, and each murder has to look like an accident.

Danny, with the help of 2 associates (Dominic Purcell and Aden Young), gets to work eliminating the killers of the sheik's sons.  But the killings soon arouse the attention of the "Feather Men" (because their touch is light as--figure it out), a fellowhood of former SAS agents whose enforcer is Spike (Clive Owen).  Spike sets out to track down and kill the assassins.  

None of this, as directed by McKendry, is very exciting.  There's one rote action scene after another (the one fun scene, where Statham has to fight while bound to a chair, is showcased in the trailer), and the attempts to juice things up in the last reel with a succession of double-crosses doesn't help.  Also, the third act hinges on Danny, who had previously been completely honorable in all his actions, doing something sneaky that's both unconvincing and stupid, because inevitably he's going to be found out.  Danny is the only character who gets any kind of development, and his story is completely cliched; Spike is a complete cipher, making the duel between the two one-sided.  The nature of the plot means that Statham's talent for grim humor is rarely in play, and while Owen seems committed to his role, he only shares one scene with Statham in the first two-thirds of the film.  DeNiro seems to be enjoying his paycheck in a small role, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbale is pungent as the mercenaries' untrustworthy agent.  

Killer Elite is competent enough, but it mostly feels as tired as its characters are of the grind of killing and chasing other killers, and it's hard to feel very gripped by the proceedings when the only stakes are whether the expressionless Danny will get his fairy-tale girl.  The picture doesn't have the spark of Statham's Crank movies, much less the quality one associates with Owen or DeNiro (we do still associate DeNiro with "quality," right?).  The first movie to be released by the new distributor Open Road is hardly an auspicious start; Killer Elite couldn't be more skippable.

Until now, LAW & ORDER:  SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT has been unique to the franchise in not having undergone a periodic reshuffling of its cast.  For 12 seasons, SVU had been the only one of the series to be star-driven, anchored by the team of Chris Meloni and Mariska Hargitay.  But Meloni and NBC were unable to agree on a new deal this year, so in its 13th season, the last remaining member of the Law & Order dynasty is introducing 2 new characters in his place. 

In truth, the season premiere wasn't much of a transition episode, producer Dick Wolf not being one to make much of such changes.  One of the new actors, Danny Pino, won't even arrive till next week, and the other, Kelli Giddish (recently star of NBC's flop Chase) stayed mostly in the background, except for a silly scene where she--probably illegally--engaged in "small talk" with a suspect who had legal representation.  Hargitay got an emotional moment at the very end when her character found out that Meloni's, under investigation by Internal Affairs, had decided to retire, and that was it.

Beyond that, even by Law & Order standards, the episode was a just-barely veiled "ripped from the headlines" version of the NY Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case, the fictionalization mostly limited to making the DSK character Italian instead of French, and allowing the case to proceed to an (inconclusive) trial, with no major twists in the story itself to speak of.   The L&O formula, unapologetically old-fashioned in this era of fast-paced, high-tech crime dramas, will attempt to do battle with the newly revitalized CSI and ABC's fun soap Revenge; we'll find out with tomorrow's ratings how much kick the old jalopy's still got.

Poe's spin on a supernatural procedural, while different, can't find its way to being fun or compelling.  Like most--although not all--of its busted pilot brethren, the show that emerged from development was nevermore worth putting on the air. 

The Sked's Verdict:  The Network Was Right

Had it managed to become a full-fledged series, PARTNERS might have been a decent fit with ABC's other female-oriented crime shows like Castle and Body of Proof, but based on the pilot, its only points of distinctiveness were probably too gimmicky and contrived to work.  

The title characters Mattie (Scottie Thompson) and Jess (Annie Wersching) are, of course, partnered as police homicide detectives, but that's not all.  In Edward Bernero's script (he was longtime showrunner on Criminal Minds and co-created Third Watch), they're also--unbeknownst to all--half-sisters.  But wait, there's more.  Their mother is in prison for having murdered Mattie's father, which is also apparently unknown to the entire police force.  And as we find out at the end of the hour (I don't think there can really be a spoiler alert for a busted pilot), actually--unbeknownst even to Mattie-- Jess was the shooter, protecting her younger sister from the molestation she herself had suffered.  

That's an awful lot of baggage for an otherwise routine cop show.  And "routine" is the right word, because the pilot hardly puts the show's best foot forward plot-wise, relying on the oldest "twist" in the murder-mystery book:  if a married man's mistress is murdered and it turns out he didn't do it, who else would have had a motive to kill his lover?   Exactly.  Add the usual cliches of hero cops leaping into action without backup, doubting but ultimately supportive superior officers, and miraculously obtained warrants, and you have a show that's familiar for all the wrong reasons.

The only bright spots in the pilot are the two stars:  Thompson was the highlight of NBC's short-lived Trauma, and Wersching was a key part of 24's last 2 seasons until the sin of having sex with Jack Bauer led to her character's immediate death.  Even though the sisters are unoriginal (Jess is happily married and follows the rules; Maddie is rebellious and devoted to the single life), the actresses are good company.  Not good enough, though, to make Partners worthwhile.

Partners, which was produced in-house by ABC Studios, could actually have had a chance to live on a cable network, but presumably USA, TNT and Lifetime had full slates of their own and/or couldn't make the economics work.  No great loss:  the Partners pilot didn't have the look of a show with much potential to be memorable.

IDENTITY is so clearly a Jerry-Bruckheimer-for-CBS procedural that it comes as a shock to realize that it was neither produced by Bruckheimer nor developed for CBS.  In fact, Mark Gordon's company produced the show for ABC Studios and the ABC network, which must have remembered at some point that it was in fact ABC and passed on the project.  Even as ersatz Bruckheimer/CBS fodder, the pilot wasn't very good.



John Glenn's script (he wrote the silly but successful Shia LaBoeuf vehicle Eagle Eye), centers on an elite FBI squad--it's always an elite squad--organized to stop identity theft and related crime.  The members cover pretty much all the crucial cliches:  steely leader (Angela Bassett), by-the-rules guy who's skilled but a bit of a fuddy-duddy (Orlando Jones), single woman computer genius (Bree Turner), liaison to the "young people" (Jay Paulson)... and, of course, the reckless, intuitively brilliant agent (Colin O'Donoghue) who drives By-The-Rules Guy crazy and who has something to hide.

The pilot cheats--as, no doubt, the series would regularly have done as well--by choosing as the villain an identity thief who's completely insane, a multiple murderer with a very personal motive for his crimes, which probably isn't the norm for this particular kind of illegality.  This allows for a certain amount of story breadth, although hardly any of it is convincing.  Director Gary Fleder provides the required high-tech war room set  with many computer and video monitors, and quick flashback cuts to the various crimes, but none of it can make the pilot seem less generic than it is.

The cast does its job.  Bassett is an actress of enormous strength who nevertheless needs something to play (she was quite good as the senior doctor toward the end of ER's epic run), here she's just used for her air of authority.  At least she was used for something, which put her one up on the other actors--Turner's part is limited to the kind of singleton quips that make you wince for the actress.  Only O'Donoghue is given any kind of storyline, and that one is fairly dumb.

IDENTITY's biggest problem was that it didn't have one--the pilot feels like the script itself should have carried the subtitle "A Busted Pilot."  The chance for identity crimesolvers to have their own primetime network TV series will have to remain on hold for another season.

If it's a procedural, this must be CBS.  HAIL MARY was one of the pilots that had initial buzz around town, and it boasted a casting coup with Minnie Driver in the lead (her first network show after doing The Riches for FX), but it's not hard to see why the show didn't go anywhere.  The crime dramas the network went with instead (Person of Interest, Unforgettable and The 2-2 for midseason) may all be problematic, but they have more promise than Hail Mary manages.

The concept of the show, written by Jeff Wadlow (he'd done one other busted pilot the year before) is simple:  Sandra Bullock's character from The Blind Side as a private eye.  It's not quite that literal:  Mary Beth Baker (Driver) is a school guidance counselor in Atlanta when we first meet her, still nursing her grief more than a year after her teen son was murdered with heroin found on the body.  Like Bullock in Blind Side, Mary Beth is all honey-toned charm, and adorably incompetent with computers, but underneath she's relentless and hard as nails.  (Religion isn't specifically referenced in the pilot, but Mary Beth says cute things like "Rice Cakes" and "Shut the Front Door!" instead of cursing.)  She's positive her son wasn't involved with drugs and that his troublemaker best friend K.Z. (Brandon T. Jackson from Tropic Thunder) is responsible, but she has no proof, and the cops and the detective she hired (Stephen Tobolowsky) are sick of her.  Of course she starts her own investigation, which results in her losing her job, which leads--ta dah!--to her becoming a full-time detective on her own.  And along the way, not only does she realize K.Z. isn't the killer, he actually becomes her crimesolving partner.

Minnie Driver certainly has the charisma, looks and talent to be a TV star, but not in Hail Mary.  The sweet-but-tough-Southern-belle-detective slot is already filled by Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, which is a much better show.  The plotting of this origin-story pilot is awful, filled with unlikely coincidence and little detective work, and Mary Beth's instant 180 degree turn on K.Z., from a solid year of believing him to be her son's murderer to making him pancakes, is completely unconvincing.  (If Driver is playing Sandra Bullock, Jackson is doing Eddie Murphy circa 48 Hrs, a type that feels awfully dated.)  No one else in the supporting cast gets to do much, not even the usually fun Tobolowsky.  

Only Driver knows why she chose Hail Mary this pilot season, when there must have been other projects courting her.  The character and storyline are mediocre, and Brad Silberling's place in the director's chair hardly seems like enough of a draw--although he's a feature director with movies like Moonlight Mile and City of Angels to his credit, things have been tougher lately with Land of the Lost and the Lemony Snicket movie both flopping.  (Apart from some decent location footage, there's not much of interest in his direction here.)  Driver can console herself with the knowledge that busted pilots flutter in the air for a moment, then more or less disappear; if she wants to do TV, she'll have more and better chances.

THE 2-2 is the deluxe version of Rookie Blue.  It's got a superb pedigree, with a script by Richard Price, acclaimed for his novels ("Bloodbrothers," "Clockers"), screenplays (Sea Of Love, The Color of Money) and television work (The Wire aka The Greatest Cop Show Ever).  The pilot director is James Mangold, whose features include Walk the Line and Knight and Day, and who's just been announced as the director of the Wolverine sequel.  In addition, the show was developed at Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Productions (DeNiro starred in Price's Mad Dog and Glory).  For all that, there's nothing particularly distinctive about the series they've all made.

This being CBS and not ABC, the tone of the piece is more procedural and less soapy than Rookie Blue's.  (We only get one illicit romance.)  And as the participation of Price and DeNiro would suggest, we're on the streets of New York, not in Canada.  But it's essentially the same group of newbie cops, under the supervision of a crusty-but-benign veteran (Terry Kinney).  The 6 cops have backstories, which include a stint in Iraq for Leelee Sobieski's "Whitehouse," a NBA career that ended with a blown knee for "Jackpot" (Harold House Moore), 14 years as a local newspaper reporter for "Lazarus" (Adam Goldberg), etc.  At the start of the episode, they're all told clearly to stay quiet and follow orders--which of course they don't, leading--who would have guessed?--to armed confrontations and unnecessary danger.

Very little of this is surprising or exciting.  The only character immediately suggesting any depth is Goldberg's, who at one point doesn't behave as a TV cop is supposed to.  The rest are foolish and brave, overeager and stressed-out.  If they weren't easily differentiated by gender and ethnic background, they'd practically be interchangeable.  With Price in charge, there's some better-than-average writing, as when Jackpot, who had been a hero (and an arrogant one) to his high school pals, meets one of them on the streets years later., and when he runs into an elderly woman who has strong opinions about his pro basketball career  Mostly, though, it's rudimentary, predictable stuff.  None of the actors manage to stand out, and Mangold's direction is professional but anonymous.

CBS, of course, lives off this genre.  They haven't yet announced a day or time for The 2-2, but it could fit in with any number of their other procedurals.  What may hold it back, though, is its lack of any uniqueness:  the CSI shows have their high-tech jargon, Mentalist its titular protagonist, the new Unforgettable its heroine with her freakish memory--but The 2-2 is plain, down-the-middle police work.  When you finish watching it, you feel like you should fill out a timesheet.