Why I'm not watching Undercovers

I gave Undercovers a shot, but it didn't grab me.

I'm watching a lot of spy shows right now. Chuck and Nikita are both airing new episodes, Burn Notice will be back shortly, and I'm re-watching Alias on DVD. It's not that I'm getting tired of spy shows, because I'm not. It's that if I'm going to add another one, it's going to have to be really, really good. And Undercovers isn't.

As the commercials indicated, the show's mainly about the relationship between the two leads. I've only watched the pilot, but the spy plot was so sloppy that I was convinced it was an afterthought. The show asks you to be attracted by these two people and oh, by the way, here's some guns and kicking and stuff.

I mean, Alias could sure string some goofy stuff together, but it always made sense, at least to the internal logic of the show's world. And it eased you into that world. It didn't lead with Rimbaldi or any other the other, wilder elements that it later became known for. In Undercovers, we're asked to believe that an encrypted flash drive can tell you the current location of the computer that it was last connected to. I have a hard time with that, especially in a pilot episode where I'm not yet invested in the characters or what they're doing. If Alias had tried to feed me that in Season Two, I would've groaned, but moved on, because I was already hooked.

Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw are extremely pretty people, there's no mistake about that. But as Tanner says over at Double O Section, the writers need to work a lot harder on Steven and Samantha Bloom's dialogue:

For this series to work, they will require some genuine banter, not lame jokes about “sexpionage” (a word that Abrams and his co-writer Josh Reims seem to think that they made up–and also seem to think is much funnier than it is–which, here, is not at all). “You look pretty hot yourself” simply doesn’t cut it as romantic repartee; the writers of Undercovers need to brush up on their Thin Mans if they want to figure out how to generate genuine romance between married adventurers.

As it is, I didn't hate the couple, but I also didn't like them nearly as much as I was being told I was supposed to. And with a lame, unbelievable plot on top of that, there's no reason for me to keep watching. I'll hold out for JJ Abrams' show about Locke and Ben Linus as former black ops agents.

TV News: Islands, Spies, and Single Ladies

Hawaii Five-O Theme

For no other reason than that Cal reminded me about it, here's one of the five greatest TV show themes of all time. (For some reason, it doesn't show up on my browser when I'm looking at the blog's front page, but it does when you open the post itself. Just in case you can't see it either.)



For all its Daniel Dae Kimness, if the new version doesn't have some variation of this music, it will have utterly failed.

Off the Map picked up



This was probably a no-brainer, but ABC has agreed to air Shonda Rhimes' (Grey's Anatomy) new tropical-island-doctors show Off the Map starring one of my favorite actors, Jason George (Eli Stone, Eastwick, Grey's Anatomy). [The Ausiello Files]

No Handsome Man for Terra Nova



Well, I'm sure it'll have a handsome man in it, but it won't have the Handsome Man, Kyle Chandler. He's apparently passed. [Hollywood Insider]

Chuck, Undercovers, a buttload of other new shows, and Captain Jack dances for "all the single ladies" after the break.

TV News: Dinosaur shows, JJ Abrams spies, a post-Jedi cartoon, and more

Terra Nova cast



Steven Spielberg's show about a time-traveling family in the age of dinosaurs may have its first cast member. Kyle Chandler (also known in our house as The Handsome Man) has been offered the lead role. As the dad perhaps?

I hope he takes it. Not only is he a favorite actor of mine, he's got some experience running from dinosaurs in King Kong. [The Ausiello Files]

Reign of the Dinosaurs



A while back, /Film had some interesting evidence suggesting that Pixar might be working on a dinosaur movie. No such luck, unfortunately, but they are working on a Discovery Channel special called Reign of the Dinosaurs. The subject matter sounds fun, if not all that ground-breaking. The visuals should be really cool though. [/Film]

Animated Star Wars, Big Bang Blossom, and the family that spies together, after the break.