Morena Baccarin in Lame NBC Thriller – The Hollywood Reporter

It’s not that I can’t understand why NBC would be interested in game over as a pilot.

The plot has superficial similarities to shows like Black list And the blind spot, which has been a staple of the NBC schedule for years. star Morena Baccarin He is an Emmy nominee with a resume filled with many fan favorites. Co-star Ryan Michelle Pathé feels like the kind of young, up-and-coming talent she wants to keep before he rises to the “Yes, Best Broadcasting” category. And in pioneering director Justin Lin, you have someone with a track record of delivering impressive introductory polish broadcasts.

But – and this is a point I feel I make once or twice a year – the inefficient pilot process of broadcasting is designed so that when you actually do pilot work and you see that none of the traits that might have caused the pilot to make sense with the actual pilot was found, presumably to go forward. The game over The pilot is bad and Episode Two offers no evidence of a course correction to improve things, so I’m ready to move on, even if NBC isn’t.

Created by Nicholas Wootton, game over It is a very familiar game of cat and mouse. We begin by delivering an exaggeratedly mysterious Russian mercenary Elena Federova (Baccarin) to a secure military facility on Long Island. The strange thing is that I’m not quite sure why they brought her or where from, but almost immediately after she arrived, everything started to fall apart. This came as a surprise to the team of distinguished bureaucrats who questioned Elena, a group that includes the Attorney General (Kelly Aucoin), the head of the FBI (Mark Espinosa) and the Secretary of Homeland Security (Gina Stern). New York suffers a series of daring bank robberies with no apparent connection other than that Elena, who is in custody, keeps her smile as if she knows something.

FBI agent Val Turner (Pathy) is called in the first case, who crosses paths with Elena in The Gambia, when Elena’s hired army takes out a local warlord and then Elena tries to expel Val.

Val knows that with Elena, every chart has layers, which is something we also get to know because Val says it to anyone who’s going to listen half a dozen times in the first two episodes. This means Val is always several steps ahead, which you’ll find really exciting if you haven’t watched a thriller since then. jackal day. Not all cat-and-mouse thrillers about a brilliant criminal and tough law enforcer match up, but other than the vague emphasis on fairytale-related rhetoric, nothing about Elena and her master plan—not to mention, well, endgame—the least distinct. When Elena and Val bump their heads, two people tell each other that they have a lot in common and are both admirably intelligent rather than writing showing us that they have things in common and that they are admirably intelligent.

It’s not like that Black list or blind spot It was a very good show at any point, but they both had obvious things going for them.

With her attractive hook tattooed woman in a duffle bag, blind spot It had a built-in structure into the week that allowed viewers to play at home, at least to some extent. Since the whole point of the Elena/Val dynamic is that they Googled each other, game over The audience should sit back in relative boredom and watch them realize that the answers to the things were things they already knew. It’s a sadly constructed drama.

Even at its weakest points Black list – before I stopped watching – it was always based on the scene of James Spader chewing, which becomes predictable but never boring. at game over, she’s supposed to do a similar job for us and Karen fully enjoys her smirk, but burdened with inconsistent Russian accent – partly her fault and partly the fault of the writing she encourages – and a wonderful personality who can’t express her brilliance in any amusing way. There is nothing funny or sadistically sinister about Madame Smirksalova and the process of revealing to viewers that our opponent may just be a second hero who removes any potential rough edges. You don’t make sure it works, and you don’t root it until it’s thwarted. Mostly I just rooted for something fun to happen.

At least Val is constantly insisted, and that’s a hallmark. All of Val’s colleagues at the FBI have some suspicions about her because her husband, a fellow agent of some sort, has been imprisoned on corruption charges. But the show has no interest in letting viewers have a second experience of the mystery around it, so it’s a stubborn, noble and boring exclusive, if played decently within those standards.

The rest of the cast may also not exist. They’re pieces of cardboard that sometimes say awfully written things like, “She’s a criminal, and criminals by definition are stupid, otherwise they wouldn’t be criminals.” This filler is neither accurate nor amusingly worded, but it does represent all the dialogue in game over. The only supporting exception might be Costa Ronin who is generally watchable as Elena “Late” – he’s not dead, but people think he is – Sergey’s husband, but you wouldn’t watch this show for him.

Finally, though, there’s the disappointment with Lynn’s lackluster post. Although his notable TV credits include episodes of social communication And the real detectiveLin gave the pilots ScorpioAnd the SWAT And the Magnum B Visual pizza on a CBS budget. at game overThere is no fixed set or memorable gimmick in the pilot. Even when, in the first episode, Val gets a call to go on a second bank robbery and decides that instead of turning around at the next light, she’ll flip her car around, there’s no fun dodging oncoming traffic and certainly nothing by constant entertainment.

No visual ideas here, no narrative ideas and no core renderings to keep you watching while you wait for those other themes to appear. I don’t know what is the end game for us and I don’t care. However, the end game for my review is to do what the NBC development process failed to do: spare viewers an obvious idle.