Movie Box Review

THE FINDER has already had a pilot of sorts, which aired last season as an episode of BONES.  While the series is based on the character Walter Sherman from the "Locator" novels by Richard Greener, technically it's presented as a jerry-rigged spin-off of Bones, with Walter supposedly being an old Army friend of the Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) character.  (Both The Finder and Bones are "created" for TV purposes by Hart Hanson.)  That Bones episode had a somewhat different supporting cast and also featured Bones cast members, so we'll consider tonight's episode the "real" pilot.

Walter Sherman (Geoff Stults), in all incarnations of the character, is a former soldier who now runs a tropical bar (in Florida for the TV series).  He suffered a brain injury that has wired his mind in such a way that he can make connections between seemingly random pieces of information and use them to track down any person or object that's been lost.  He also has a deep-rooted psychological need to locate such people and things. Hence, he's "The Finder."  His right-hand man, lawyer and muscle is Leo (Michael Clarke Duncan).  Since the original TV episode, he's lost the tough bartender played by Saffron Burrows, and instead liaises with a tough, self-described "smoking hot" cop named Isabel Zambada (Mercedes Masohn), with whom he has the obvious mix of irritated professional respect and sexual tension.  He and Leo, for reasons that aren't yet entirely clear, also have the care of teen gypsy Willa (Maddie Hasson), who's on probation from juvie living in a trailer on their land; Walter and Willa mutually pretend not to care about one another.

As in Bones, the particular mystery of the week is less critical than the banter and relationship between the characters.  In the premiere episode, Walter was hired by the military-school student son of a pilot whose life Walter had saved in Kosovo, and ultimately he proved that the father, while sadly deceased, had been a hero and a caring dad.  

The Finder hasn't quite discovered its voice yet, but then Bones took most of its first season before it hit its stride.  Right now the show feels underpopulated, compared to the ensemble rom-com that Bones turned out to be; with only 4 leads, they're all being asked to do too much.  Also, Walter is an emotionally stunted character in the mode of Brennan on Bones, but his foils aren't yet being given the material to carry his emotions for him, the way the other characters do on that show.  

That being said, The Finder is a perfectly pleasant hour of television for now.  Stults, Clarke and the women are personable and seem like a good fit, and Hanson provides the tone of wry mystery that's worked for him on Bones.  The show will have a limited number of episodes this year, as it plugs the gap in Bones episodes caused by Emily Deschanel's pregnancy, and if it doesn't lose too great a portion of Bones' rating (it will doubtless be helped by having American Idol as a lead-in starting next week, and next week also brings a visit from Bones' John Francis Daley playing his character Sweets), it should have sufficient time to develop its potential and prove whether FOX has found a companion piece for its long-running procedural hit.

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. 

UNFORGETTABLE -  Tuesday 10PM on CBS:  Change the Channel

UNFORGETTABLE is a CBS procedural, which is as specific a term as any that exists in current network television.  Those who adore these shows should by all means tune in; for those of us not in the club, it's the very definition of wearily predictable. 


This one belongs to the Mentalist/Monk/Psych DNA strain, where the star sleuth has a preternatural ability to instantly absorb the tiniest details of a crime scene, unearthing clues no one else possibly could (the tip-off that it's CBS and not USA is because it's humorless). Our heroine is Carrie Wells (Poppy Montgomery, a CBS favorite from Without A Trace), who has an--apparently real--rare condition that permits her to recall every instant she has ever experienced in her life, down to the most random detail, with one glaring exception.  Like Monk and Patrick Jane, she has a calamitous murder in her past; in her case, she discovered her sister's dead body when they were children, and she's never been able to recall exactly what happened that day.  Her search for the killer will be the continuing story thread that runs every so often through the series; meanwhile, she'll solve a crime-of-the-week.

Unforgettable is written by Ed Redlich and John Belucci, both also from Without A Trace, so they know how this game is played.  The pilot crime is more or less interchangeable with the murders on any other procedural.  There's a visual gimmick to illustrate Carrie's powers, a la Psych:  when she uses her super-memory to search for incriminating details, she travels back to the moment she's recalling and watches herself in the present tense, sort of like Ebenezer Scrooge but without a Ghost of Murders Past for company.  Romantic sparks are intended to fly between her and the head of the homicide unit, also conveniently her ex-love; he's played by Dylan Walsh, a long way from Nip/Tuck  Other detectives, complete with ersatz New York accents, include Michael Gaston, Kevin Rankin and Daya Vaidya.  The cast goes through its paces adequately under the direction of Niels Arden Opley, himself a walking footnote in movie history as director of the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (aka the one that's already been eclipsed by the David Fincher remake that won't open till December); Opley doesn't bring anything to the project that a CBS house director wouldn't have done.

There's clearly an audience for a show like Unforgettable (Mitch Metcalf's Tuesday analysis has the series winning its timeslot thanks to those fans, handily beating Body of Proof and--sob--Parenthood); for the rest of us, even the pilot may feel like a rerun we can recite line by line and shot by shot, without the need of a freakish memory.

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.