Monday saw the debut of two new drama thrillers in the US, CBS’s Hostages and NBC’s The Blacklist, which aired head-to-head in the 10pm timeslot.
The former, which has been picked up by Channel 4 to air in the UK, was roundly trounced by The Blacklist in the ratings, which incidentally will debut in the UK on Sky Living on October 4th. Hostages isn’t quite D.O.A., but with a soft landing don’t expect Hostages to get a solid air date from Channel 4 until it’s fate looks a little clearer.
Until then, let’s have a look and see whether the shows themselves are any good, and if we should be looking forward to their UK debuts.
We’ll start with Hostages, which I have to admit, based on the trailer I wasn’t really looking forward to the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced show. The cast is solid, particularly with Toni Collette in the lead role, but nothing else around the edge grabbed my attention. Collette plays a surgeon who, through a plot contrivance, is set to perform a fairly routine surgery on the President of the United States. But on the eve of the surgery, she and her family are taken by a group of masked men led by Dylan McDermott, who in a very early twist is revealed to also be an FBI Agent. It’s not a bad premise, but it feels a little more suited to a movie than a TV show, and the question I couldn’t shake throughout the Pilot was how they were going to be able to turn this into something that could sustain itself over a full season or more.
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The reason that question never really goes away is that, despite being solidly executed, this is a thriller that’s rarely thrilling. Sure, the episode is centred around a family being taken hostage, but that’s a foregone conclusion from the start, and the rest of the time is just spent with the captors explaining to the hostages exactly why they have to do what they’re told. That keeps things fairly static, and the only real tension comes from seeing whether Collette’s surgeon will go through with essentially murdering the POTUS in the final scenes of the episode. That doesn’t make the episode bad – it still entertains – but it does hold it back somewhat in the excitement stakes.
A lot then rides on the quality of the characters, and writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff has given them all a secret or two to get us interested in them. Collette’s husband Brian (Tate Donovan – The OC, Damages) is having an affair, her daughter Morgan (Quinn Shephard) may be pregnant, and her son Jake (Mateus Ward) is dealing drugs and owes a significant amount of money. Even McDermott’s Duncan Carlisle doesn’t seem to be a cut and dry villain: there’s a White Houst stooge pulling his strings, and the suggestion that he’s only involved because his wife’s sick in hospital.
The problem is, those secrets tend to come at the expense of real characterisation and almost entirely define who the characters are. I also couldn’t help but wonder why they don’t try and use the traumatic kidnapping to come clean to the rest of the family and bury the bad news? In the grand scheme of things, who cares about those indiscretions when the lives of the people you love are on the line?
The fact that these questions prevail is at least testament to the show’s ability to engage, but it also belies its lack of ability to excite, to thrill, to intrigue. The little intrigue that is sustained is quite how they’ll end the episode. Will Collette kill the POTUS? Will she lose her nerve? Well, it’s fair to say that it’s a thoroughly unsatisfactory resolution, and one that will make you groan when you realise how they’re planning on stretching the story out in the coming weeks.
It’s in that final few minutes that things fall apart, but they’re the most crucial of minutes. They’re the ones that might put viewers off coming back next week. I’ll be checking back in to see what kind of groove the show plans to settle into, but I’m not exactly filled with confidence.
Surprisingly it’s NBC who have found themselves with a much better pilot than their usually more-successful competitors CBS in the same genre, and one that looks like a much easier sell, too. The initial ratings seem to suggest so, anyway. The Blacklist is a James Spader vehicle; he plays Red Reddington, an international criminal known as (brilliantly, I must say) the ‘Concierge of Crime’ for his ability to broker deals between the world’s worst criminals. He’s in no danger of being caught, but at the start of the pilot he walks into FBI headquarters and surrenders. His motivations for doing so are unclear, but says he will help the agency take down a dangerous international criminal if they agree to his conditions – namely that he will only speak to Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone). So who’s she? Well, she’s a nobody really. It’s her first day at work after having qualified as an FBI profiler, but Reddington seems to know an awful lot about her. It’s a fun concept – albeit completely reliant on having an actor with Spader’s magnetism in the lead role – and one that immediately has you theorising about his Red’s true motives, and what makes Elizabeth so important.
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Outside of that main pairing, however, the characters are fairly stock. Harry Lennix is the shouty FBI boss. Diego Klattenhoff (Homeland’s Mike) is another overly cocky agent. Ryan Eggold is Elizabeth’s bland, douchey husband – although Red insists there’s more to him than meets the eye, and Jamie Jackson’s main antagonist, Ranko Zamani, is your standard, forgettable threat.
They’re not particularly bad, just underdeveloped, and there will be plenty of time to flesh out those of them that return throughout the series, and the simple fact is that Spader dominates this first episode so much – and intentionally so, I’m sure – that they really don’t need to be anything more. The key is Spader, and he looks to be having a ridiculous amount of fun, hamming it up to the max as he channels Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter (that’s the one and only Silence of the Lambs comparison, I promise), but delivering a performance distinct enough that it comes off more like an homage than an imitation. He’s brilliant and effortlessly watchable, as we know Spader can be, and he develops a nice rapport with Boone’s Elizabeth, who struck me as Sydney Bristow meets Clarice Star…damn, I couldn’t even get to the end of the paragraph.
Yes, okay, there’s just no getting away from the comparisons with Silence of the Lambs, which is particularly ironic given that NBC are responsible for a very different take on Dr. Lecter at present with Mads Mikkelsen doing great work on Hannibal. Some may find the show a little derivative, but there are far worse things to rip off/take inspiration from, and if it is the former that The Blacklist is doing then it’s doing it damn well. The pilot’s fun, it ticks along at a nice pace and does a good job of having Spader’s character constantly surprise the audience. Even when you’re pretty sure he’s a step ahead of everyone else, it turns out he’s two steps ahead instead. He’s an enigma, and he’s the reason we’ll keep coming back.
The story of the week is actually a pretty good one too. Sure, the villain feels a little familiar, but the stakes are high as Elizabeth battles to first stop a politicians young daughter being kidnapped, and then to prevent a chemical weapon being used somewhere in Washington D.C. Boone gets a number of good emotional beats to develop the character along the way, which she handles pretty well on the whole, and her relationship with Red is handled just about right. At this point there’s an awful lot of mistrust from Elizabeth’s side while Red tries to constantly banter with her. They also seem to have pretty good chemistry from the little we’ve seen, which should be important as their relationship develops over the course of the season.
I’m not quite sure what the true nature of their relationship will be – although I’m sure we all have our suspicions, and I can’t imagine it will be that obvious – but you know the show’s going to rely heavily on them working as a pairing. For now, Spader’s the dominant half, and he’ll probably continue to be for some time, but the way Boone’s character is written and her impressive performance as a strong and capable young woman, with a hint of vulnerability, suggests she’ll be more than capable of holding her own. I’ll likely be sticking with this one for some time, save for a dramatic dip in quality, so expect the blog to revisit the show periodically throughout the season.
