Will He Or Won’t He? The Suspense Is Killin’ Me #KevinProbablySavesTheWorld #3weekroundup #recap #review #ABC

Will He Or Won’t He? The Suspense Is Killin’ Me #KevinProbablySavesTheWorld #3weekroundup #recap #review #ABC

All pictures courtesy of ABC 

Back at it once again, ladies and gentlemen. This time I’m coming to you live and in words on a beautiful Ohio day. Today we will be looking at ABC’s new dramedy Kevin (Probably) Saves the World. So, is this show definitely going to end up in your must-see list or should it probably go quietly away? Let’s find out together. 

Kevin (Probably) Saves The World is a long-titled show starring Jason Ritter (son of the late John Ritter) as the titular character Kevin. In a rather somber and sullen mood, Kevin has to move back to his Midwest hometown after some of life’s devastation hit him hard in New York (talk more on that later). With no job and minimal money, he moves in with his twin sister Amy (played by Joanna Garcia Swisher) who is dealing with her own recent life-shaking event. Her husband died not but 18 months ago, making her a single mother to her daughter Reese—an angsty teenager who is still deeply affected by her father’s untimely passing. Now, while Amy absolutely adores her twin brother and is happy to have him back home (especially now that he can be a man around the house and maybe she can stop missing her husband so much), Reese is hardly thrilled about her hardly-there uncle suddenly interrupting their lives after having not seen him since her dad’s funeral. He barely even calls his sister and he’s generally an all-around bad uncle/brother.

Well, Amy is a highly successful engineering professor at the local college, which I’m guessing is quite prestigious in its own right because of the reputation she has. One night, a government helicopter lands on her front lawn (this is the Midwest somewhere and she seems to have a farm so its a big stretch of empty land on all sides of the house) and beckons her come ala Amy Adams in The Arrival. She is then flown to a secretive meeting in which she meets with some of the top generals in the US government to help figure out what’s going on with this most recent astronomical phenomenon. As it so happens, 36 meteorites fell to earth all on the same day/night across the globe. Where this number could conceivably be expected in a full year, such a number for one day is unheard of. So the government wants answers and all she can say is what the falling objects are not: some pre-arranged attack by another country. They give her the coordinates of the last one to land and she freaks because they are the coordinates for her house.

While she is doing that, Kevin has to try to watch over and bond with his niece Reese. She doesn’t want to be bothered and throws the reason why he’s really there in his face. And then they see the light of the falling meteorite, have to go out to see it, and he subsequently touches it like an idiot. The shock of it literally sends him flipping and flying through the air. Then, in some hallucinogenic malfunction, he next finds himself in the car stopping back at the front of his sister’s place with Reese yapping about what he was going to do with the meteorite. He has no idea how they got back home though he’s been driving for the last few minutes, and didn’t realize that he was the one to pick up the meteorite (its about a boulder’s size) and put it into the car. They both go in to go night-night, and then as soon as Reese falls asleep, Kevin hears something strange outside from his car. As he goes to see what it is, he realizes that the meteor seems to have turned into a black woman who tells him that she is there to help him save the world. And he faints.

He awakes the next morning to the black woman making him some kind of juice smoothie which he at first starts to ignore the taste of, then is moved nearly to tears at how good it is. Yes, this is actually important to the plot. He discovers that the black woman, played by Kimberly Hebert Gregory, is named Yvette. Who is she? Well, it’s complicated. To understand who she is, she has to tell him who he is. See, the world, at any given time, is supposedly protected from destruction and complete moral decay by 36 righteous people. No, they’re not politicians or the Pope or anything like that but average people whose efforts somehow manage to impact the whole of humanity. Think of them as the small group of righteous in the story of Lot, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham. For those that don’t know that Bible story, then go read it, but the refresher course is that God was going to destroy the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah but Abraham had his cousin Lot living there and didn’t want to see his family member killed. So Abraham, whom God loved, bargained with God in ever-decreasing numbers that if X number of righteous or good God-fearing people lived there, then God wouldn’t destroy the city. I think in the story he got down to ten and God agreed not to destroy the cities if he could find 10 righteous people. God had to destroy the cities.

Kevin and Yvette

Back to Kevin, he has a special task because not only is he one of the righteous but he is the last of the righteous. Apparently, the other 35 have gone missing. Are they dead? Did someone take them? If they were taken, then who took them and who would know they were the righteous? And in this little mystery you find a glint of why the critics like this show so much. So Yvette’s job is simply to protect Kevin and help guide him on his journey to find the other new 35 righteous. Yes, she’s basically his guardian angel but doesn’t prefer the term because nobody likes to go by the label of what they are anymore. But I digress.

But Kevin sees this as a big problem. Outside of the fact that he doesn’t believe anything she’s saying and thinks she’s a dangerous home intruder, she acts almost as if she doesn’t know why he was back home in the first place. The reason he came back to live with his loving twin sister is because he tried to kill himself back in New York. As we learn over the course of three episodes, he lost his job, went pretty broke and broke up with his girlfriend all in the course of a very short time, not to mention he lost contact with his sister and, as her twin brother, felt really bad about that. So he decided to end it all with some pills, but survived. He sees himself as being far from righteous.

Yvette knows all of this but must convince him that he is one of the righteous and that she is real. They run through a few scenes of the regular “Dude, I’m totally an angel” shtick—only Kevin can see her, she does some cool magic to save him from disaster, et cetera. And he starts to believe her, but still doesn’t want the job. It’s even stranger to him when she tells him that once he finds another righteous person, he’s simply supposed to hug them which will maybe reveal their righteousness to themselves or something. But he can’t tell them that he’s one of the righteous. In fact, he can’t tell anyone that he’s this special person and every time he tries to tell his sister, he only blurts out an embarrassing truth like how he once tasted her birth control pills when they were teens.

For the most part he wanders through the first episode getting reacquainted with his old town and listening to Yvette about what he’s supposed to do. He sees his old girlfriend who is now a teacher at the high school—in fact, she is one of Reese’s teachers—and has an awkward exchange with her. In the end, he’s just trying to be a good twin brother and uncle as he tries to bond with the important women in his life. He makes a few confessions to his sister and apologizes for not being there enough after her husband’s death. Amy asks for his help with Reese because she anguishes over how her daughter has seemingly checked out of life since her father’s death. She doesn’t like doing any of the stuff she used to, including playing soccer. Well, Kevin discovers that the reason she doesn’t want to play soccer anymore is because that used to be something she did with her dad a lot and now that he’s gone, she doesn’t want to do it without him. But he convinces her to choose something else that can be her new thing all to herself and she chooses theater.

Reese and Kevin

Finally, as he is about to leave to go back to New York and get out of Reese and Amy’s lives thinking that coming back was a big mistake, he runs into this guy in the airport who he can’t help but think is one of these righteous he is supposed to meet. After a long speech about how he felt crappy as a person and a brother because he stopped talking to his sister after her husband’s death because he didn’t know what to say and didn’t want to burden her with his problems, he asks to hug the guy only to find that the guy has been deaf the whole time. But he’s selling pencils to fund his travel or something—I couldn’t read the banner on the pencil. Well, Kevin buys the pencil, then empties his pockets to give him hundreds of dollars. The guy, in turn, hugs him and there’s light and it all seems magical like he’s just accomplished 1/35^th of his mission.

And then he gets back and Yvette tells him that the guy wasn’t one of the righteous. But Kevin does magically see some butterflies come out of his closet which Yvette can’t see and he knows that he’s on the right track. And his sister finally reveals that when he tried to commit suicide, it felt like he was leaving her and like she somehow failed as a sister. But all is not lost because Kevin is on a new path now.

Episode two is all about Kevin trying to figure out how to help people in order to make his righteousness power stronger so that he can ably find the other new righteous. Well, Yvette has to strip him of his love of earthly possessions and positions his car to be crushed by a monster farming truck so that he has to walk everywhere. She also has him doing remedial exercise out in the rain in order for him to feel as one with the beauty of God’s creation—yes, there is a God on this show. Her advice is to listen to the universe and what it wants for him. But Kevin tries to take a more proactive approach which you really can’t blame him for, even though it’s quite stupid. He puts out some of these hoe-like fliers that says he is willing to do “anything for free.” He and his sister get into a twin tiff when she confronts him on the fliers because she thinks that he’s throwing his life away and not taking things seriously and he thinks that she’s lollygagging on things too, like fixing up this old truck that he could really use to drive around.

To skip to the end of the truck storyline, the vehicle needed a carburetor which could’ve easily been gotten from some of the members in the town. Amy, however, didn’t want to get it because she didn’t really want to fix the truck because working on it was something that she and her husband did together. In the last 18 months since his death, she’d go out to tinker on it and talk to it as if her husband was still around. If she fixed the truck, she worried that might have to stop. Kevin convinces her that that won’t have to stop, he’s always in her memory and other heartwarming platitudes, and they fix the truck with a donated carburetor that the policeman who has a crush on Amy gifts her.

Back to the main story for the episode, Kevin passes out his fliers and tries to post them in his local friend’s bar but can’t seem to post one on this board with this other poster already there talking about a local brewery. It’s the universe’s sign. Well, Kevin goes to this brewery and asks the young guy working at the register if he needs help right now with anything and the guy keeps turning him down. The young guy went to the same high school as him and grew up in the town and now works at his father’s brewery and is about to take it over in a few years as his father is pretty old. The father calls the police on Kevin for being a general nuisance and it isn’t until Kevin meets the son again at the local bar that he realizes what he is supposed to do. See, the son is the only child of his parents which makes leaving a family business pretty difficult when your dad wants to pass it on to you. But the son hates beer, can’t stand it, doesn’t even drink it whereas his father’s passion is beer. He’s wanted to break away and pursue his own passion for years but hasn’t had the courage to tell his father. Kevin tells him that he’ll help him tell his father that he wants to do something else.

Well, before Kevin can come to the brewery the next day to help, the son has already told the father and the dad is cool with it. He even hopes his son finds his passion, too. And then the dad drops to the floor under a heart attack. Oh my god, Kevin has helped kill a man. But as it turns out, had he not had a mild heart attack then, he would’ve had a bigger one later that would’ve ended him. So the guy thanks Kevin in the hospital and says that a bigger beer-brewing company has wanted to buy his outfit for a while. All is well.

Episode three starts with Kevin sleepwalking his way from the house all the way to Amy’s college in a total Weekend at Bernie’s-style trampling. Stalking a balloon, he finally awakes in the early morning and finds that a crowd has gathered around him while he stands on the edge of the on-campus health services building. He grabs the balloon and comes off the building but only after his sister sees him standing up there and panics that he’s trying to kill himself again. She calls his shrink while Kevin sets out on another universe-led mission.

See, Kevin goes into the health services building where Amy has tried to set up a meeting for him with the on-campus therapist. But as he walks in with the balloon in hand, the woman working the front desk sees the message on the balloon and says, “Hey, Pookie is my nickname.” And I was like, “Whaaaa!” Totally expected for that nickname to be that of a black person’s, but I digress. As it happens, she’s planning a wedding and is so stressed about it that she probably needs some counseling herself. Well, Yvette tells Kevin the answers to three of the woman’s hypothetical, rhetorical questions and the lady is like, “wow, you’re right. You must be really good with this wedding stuff.” And now Kevin’s helping with a wedding.

While Kevin helps with a wedding, his shrink comes to town as he was on his way to some conference in the area. He stops to tell Amy that none of this was really her fault and she shouldn’t feel how most family members feel after someone tries to commit suicide: like they’ve failed. He also says that Reese is a normal teenager and she shouldn’t worry about her grieving process either. Speaking of, Reese has been doing some spying on her uncle and seems to be putting things together about him always talking to himself. From her looks, she suspects that his frequent convos with no one are not some mental break but something deeper, even though she can’t see Yvette.

And as far as Yvette, she is visited by another one of the non-angel angels. After she revealed to Kevin that coming to guard him is a one-way ticket out of paradise, we as viewers really feel for the other angels who are currently on earth. The mission of the other 35 is now lost because the other righteous are gone. But even worse, they’ve all lost hope in trying to figure out what happened to their righteous. They’ll, conceivably, just roam the earth forever or disappear out of existence. The network of support Yvette thought she’d have is nowhere to be found. And we see a slight twinge when her other angel friend suggests that it is great that she has Kevin. Yvette says that 36 righteous couldn’t have just disappeared and that is yet another clue or just a slip-up that deepens the mystery about where the righteous went and if Kevin even is one of the actual righteous.

Back to Kevin’s thing, as he goes through with helping plan the wedding, he learns that the woman is already married to a firefighter but they didn’t get a wedding the first time because the lady had cancer and it was a quickie thing where she thought she’d die in six months. Well, now that the cancer is in remission, she doesn’t want to be married anymore, even though she thinks she married a really great guy. Kevin now has to figure out a way to break up the marriage so they both can be happy. Well, the guy is still very much in love with his lady and is only dissuaded from that love when she lies instead of confessing the truth, and says that she’s having an affair with Kevin. Kevin catches a punch to the face in front of his therapist.

Kevin awakes and goes to find the woman standing on top of the same building he almost fell off of earlier and learns that this is where the firefighter husband proposed. Well, she confesses again that she didn’t feel like she could tell her husband how she didn’t want to be married anymore, but doesn’t know that Kevin invited the firefighter to come. The husband hears the whole conversation and they make amends and are satisfied to break off the marriage for now and get a good laugh in at how Kevin is so not the woman’s type—not enough muscles and she really likes the man-beef. Kevin has yet another small vision/experience that shows him on an island somewhere with tons of shaman-masked people dancing over him, and Yvette tells him that just like the butterflies and water before, this has something to do with him finding the other righteous. He must continue to build his spiritual powers.

What’s my grade? I give this a A-. Yes, this show is, at times, goofy, but it is also heart-warming without being overly sentimental, deals with suicide in a way that I have dealt with suicide in past comedies (none of those are published, by the way) and, despite the sometimes adult subject matter, is really a family show so far. I like that even though it is technically a case-of-the-week show, it is not a cop show and it has enough family drama as well as two overarching mysteries to keep any viewer’s attention. The questions of what happened to the other 35 righteous, what or to where are Kevin’s visions leading him, and if Kevin really is supposed to be one of the righteous or not are all not heavy on the plot, yet are so apparent and relevant to the series that they can entangle many viewers.

With that said, don’t expect the highest of writing techniques displayed here. Because of the spiritual element of the series there is always going to be a lot of convenient coincidence that drives the plot forward. So long as you keep it in mind that random things will happen just to benefit the plot and/or the characters, the show should be enjoyable. The acting is pretty good and the connections between characters is natural and fluid similar to what a small Midwest town would feel like. To me, this show is like eating a piece of warm apple pie on a cold fall day during the holidays. There’s something uniquely comforting about the raw truthfulness of the show.

I haven’t done this much this season but throwing on my TV programming-executive hat for a moment, I would have to say that I can’t understand why this show is not on ABC Sundays rather than the unfriendly, unpopular Tuesdays spot. Yes, I know that ABC is trying to gear up for American Idol to come on in the Spring block on Sundays for three hours, but Kevin Probably Saves The World is the most Sunday-oriented show that ABC has produced since Resurrection went defunct a few years back. It has the religious element, humor for the family, good values and plays for a full hour that takes you on an emotional journey into people’s lives. The stuff that they currently have on Sundays with Toy Box and Shark Tank, while nice unscripted shows, are hardly what will draw eyeballs when people are readying to go to work and want something wholesome for the kids. But you know what, I digress. We will see if anything shifts on the schedule and how well this and American Idol does over the coming season. But I would definitely hope that this stays around for the full season.

Should you be watching? Yes. This is not a This Is Us kind of drama that digs exceptionally deep into the emotional background of each character, but it does scratch a little deeper than the surface. It also isn’t on the level of Stranger Things as far as weirdness goes, but it does have a quirky charm to it in which the actors shine (especially Jason Ritter) and the plot moves forward in every episode. Kevin (Probably) Saves The World airs on ABC Tuesdays at 10pm. Also catch it on ABC On Demand and ABC.com.

What do you think? Have you heard of Kevin (Probably) Saves The World? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll tune in now? If you do tune in, make sure you catch the show from the first episode or else you will be lost. If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? What do you think they can improve on the show? Do you think that Kevin is really one of the righteous or is Yvette trying to pull a fast one? And on what episode do you think that Kevin will finally meet another righteous person? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking

If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “OK, I don’t know if I said this before but it is possible that I maybe could be, uh... a wealth African prince from a land of milk, honey, nectar and bounteous gifts untold. That’s not a dealbreaker is it?”

‘Uh... What?’

P.S. I don’t know if I should mention how they are still actively trying to write and produce another Coming To America or if I should totally ignore that and say something meta about the show like how is it that Kevin keeps moving farther into the island on every episode? First he only saw the butterflies, then he was out in the ocean, then he was on the island. Next, he’ll be deep in the jungle, then on the side of the volcano and we all know what happens on tiny islands with volcanoes. We’ve all seen that Tom Hanks movie and Hanks would never lie. He’s a white American angel!

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Being Different Isn’t Always Bad #Gifted #FOX #3weekroundup #recap #review

Being Different Isn’t Always Bad #TheGifted #FOX #3weekroundup #recap #review

All pictures courtesy of FOX and Marvel 

And the reviews for this season’s new shows just keep comin’. Today we are looking at FOX’s new comic book superhero show The Gifted. So, will this comic book drama send-up make us all feel blessed to be in its presents, or should this gift have come with a receipt for easy return? Let’s find out together.

FOX’s The Gifted is one of their first expansions of the X-men brand into the television realm. With last year’s Legion on FX a quasi-success, the execs over at FOX decided they needed to keep expanding their ever-growing X-men universe. But while Marvel Studios properties like Agents of SHIELD, Inhumans and the Defenders spin-offs are all definitely concretely connected to the more expansive cinematic universe and in very defined and deliberate ways (even if the fandom wants more connectivity), The Gifted waffles on where it wants to fit into the X-men film universe. And with the jumbling of the X-men timeline in the films and Hugh Jackman no longer playing Wolverine, maybe it’s a good thing that this show only timidly references the X-men and what happened to them. However, before I start this review in earnest, I would venture to say that the show takes place in some years before the events in the film Logan, meaning that it is not part of the official timeline of the other past X-men films, including the most recent Apocalypse. I know other articles and critics have stated what timeline the studio has implied it is or what they think, but I’m gonna go with the one in Logan. Note: I have not seen Logan but read plenty about it. OK?

Lorna

The Gifted follows one family that meets up with a band of mutant renegades, for lack of a better word. We begin by showing the renegades. A lizard-eyed woman played by Jamie Chung, Blink is fleeing from a detention center where we can only assume that they kept mutants. As she tries escaping from a brigade of police down an alley, we see her powers of transportation. She jumps into a portal and jumps out across the city where the renegades are actively looking for her. Blink has never met these three before yet they know that she is a mutant and want to help her. The group consists of Eclipse the leader—he is a being of pure hot-white light with the skin-cloak of a human; John Proudstar who seems to have some sort of electric power and/or a tracking power that allows him to sense when other mutants are in the vicinity; and Lorna Dane who has a metallic power similar to Magneto’s where she can bend, push and manipulate any metals in her area (Note: After researching the show further, I learned that Lorna is supposed to be Magneto’s daughter). Lorna and Eclipse are dating and it is revealed early on that Lorna is pregnant with his light-goo baby, but this is only after she is captured. See, while trying to rescue Blink, the cops come and surround the place. The group manages to escape out the back but a cop shoots Eclipse to show all of his light about to pour out. Lorna goes all “don’tchu be messin’ wit my man” and tries to kill the cop and his backup. And in a devastating case of when keeping it real goes wrong, she is captured while the others are forced to get away.

Then, we finally catch up with the family. We learn from the offset that in this family of four, the son is being bullied at school. The bullying is so bad that his parents have had to get involved. His father Reed Strucker (played by Stephen Moyer of True Blood fame) is some high-powered attorney who has been dealing intimately with mutant cases for a few years now. Apparently, as we are to understand, something huge and destructive happened with the X-men. They are gone and there was some sort of mutant war that eradicated most of the mutants and killed tons of innocent people. Again, this could be referring to the fight between Magneto’s side and Professor X’s side in X-men: The Last Stand from the first trilogy or something to happen in a future movie, or something in the Days of Future Past timeline, but I’m going with the pre-Logan timeline. Anyway, now people are all rather freaked about mutants and there are a lot more stringent laws and protocols that dictate how mutants are supposed to be dealt with. He’s part of that enforcement but is hardly the bad guy that the trailers and commercials for this show make him out to be. Don’t be fooled!

Eclipse and Reed Strucker

Anyway, Reed is married to Kate Strucker who, for all intents and purposes, is not shown to be much of anything. Even though it is revealed in the second episode that she is a nurse she plays very much like a housewife, and a characterless one at that. The only interaction or dialogue she ever has is concerning the children. She’s, essentially, a Care-bot 5000 who would cease to exist upon her children’s deaths. I would have liked it if we got to see and hear more about how she feels about mutants as a whole. Just the concept of mutants. But maybe this show is too focused to round out the characters as she isn’t the only one who plays a little flat.

Reed threatens the head school guy with a lawsuit if they don’t try doing something about the bullying, but quickly eases back into the caring, goofy dad—the model for what we all want as a father or the man we want to grow to be if we are already into adulthood. He’s stern but kind and tries to be fair. Yet he, like his wife, is fiercely protective of his brood. Such are Mr. and Mrs. Strucker.

Then we have the daughter who, I’m guessing, is the eldest though I’m very unsure about that as they look and play the exact same age to me (about 15). That’s neither here nor there. The daughter is Lauren Strucker who is shown as the assumed All-American girl-next-door type who has a modicum of popularity (people know her but she’s probably not this year’s prom queen) and a boyfriend which gives her added social capital. I’d like to tell you more about how she plays into the normal teen dynamic but they only spend about ten minutes of showtime (if that) in high school. Both she and her brother are thrust out of that world and into the full adult world before the end of the episode. Lauren is a mutant who has had her powers for at least three years (preteens, maybe longer) and never bothered to tell her parents. In the first episode, I’m not even sure she had told her brother before his incident. Her power has something to do with pushing and/or perception. I still couldn’t tell as she can make things move with her mind but she can also leave this weird bubble-glass looking anomaly in front of people so that they can’t walk forward any further. It’s very undefined.

Lauren’s brother Andy is the one being bullied. Your typical wiry, mop-headed wallflower, Andy fields the barbs of three large jock bullies at high school. While he seems to want to be protective of his sister as the brother, she is more protective of him. Wow! It’s strange that I’m actually struggling to write his bio as I thought it would flow easy like his sister’s did, but outside of him having been bullied there’s nothing all that amazing or noteworthy about his character. We don’t know if he’s a nerd, a gamer, a computer geek, or just a loser with no discernible talent before getting his powers. We do know that he isn’t as popular as his sister and that’s about it. He sneaks out with his sister (his sister is out legitimately) to go to the school dance. There, he sees the bullies who take him into the locker room shower and spray him with ice-cold water.

And then he starts to scream.

His screams nearly bring down the entire gym just a few feet away. The screams bend the metal showerheads, burst the tiles and send the bullies flying back into the lockers. His sister intuitively knows that it’s her brother and runs to him to calm him down. They escape back home but with the bullies having not been knocked unconscious and left able to see the whole bizarre event, it doesn’t take long for the police to show up at the Strucker family house. Those special guidelines for mutants kick in and the kids must go with them. Mama Strucker refuses, they push her to the ground and the kids get pissed. Lauren reveals her powers to her mother and they barely escape after the police get held up by Lauren’s weird bubble-glass power. They have to call Papa Strucker to tell him that the kids are mutants and he’s all like, “Lady-dude, whaaaaaat!” Mind blown.

Meanwhile, before the whole school incident, Reed was in the prison where they are keeping Lorna. The standard hard plastic case just like with Magneto, he informs her of her pregnancy as even she didn’t know and she loses it. On the other end, Blink tells her new homies at the Mutants Underground HQ that she can’t teleport into Eclipse’s girl’s cell because if she tried to use her powers to go somewhere that she hadn’t previously seen, it could be disastrous and end up slicing her in half or something like that. And then Eclipse gets a call from Reed. On the run with his family, Reed is willing to leave the country to go somewhere with laxer mutant laws like Mexico but needs help in figuring out how to hide, duck and dodge the cops until they can make it to the border. He is willing to trade whatever favors he can with the Mutants Underground leader to help get the guy’s baby mama (oh yeah, Reed reveals it to Eclipse) out of prison before she pops.

So papa Strucker and Eclipse have an agreement. His family is going to go with the Underground Mutants network to get them to safety while he stays behind and works whatever magic he can to get Lorna out of prison. But before they can get to the hideout, they are ambushed by a bunch of cops led by Jace Turner. I’m not really sure if he’s a detective or what, but I do know that he works on the special services mutant containment team and deals with these “freaks” on a regular basis. He and his people corner the family and here, both I and the show will jump back to mention that Eclipse left the mutant HQ without telling his bro that he was leaving, and forcing Blink to keep his departure a secret. Only after Blink tells Proudstar do they leave and, serendipitously meet the family and Eclipse right when the cops have both sides of the street blocked. Where’d they come from? Don’t know. How do they expect to escape the cops on foot? Also a mystery. But we let it go in favor of a cool action scene.

Instead of hopping out of their cars and giving chase, the cops undo this strange briefcase thing. In it, it has the tentacle robots from The Matrix, and I was like, “Wow! How the hell did FOX get permission to use the tentacle robots from The Matrix trilogy on their show?” These things puff their tentacles out into a ball and roll across the floor to chase after the family and mutants. And you’re thinkin’ “This seems like a job for Blink’s teleportation port-hole powers.” So, she creates a portal but struggles to keep it open and we are cemented with the idea that she is very new to her powers, which begs the question of how old she is supposed to be as, up until now, we’ve really only seen the majority of mutants realizing they had these powers in their teens, not generally well into adulthood, but I digress.

Blink opens a portal, everyone but Reed jumps through. Andy does his weird yelling smash-power thing and stays just long enough in the building with his father to see Reed get shot in the lower back.

Episode two starts with the end of the portal jump again. Everyone is freaking out for their own reason. The family is going crazy because they just saw Reed go down with a bullet and don’t know if he survived as he is still in that abandoned warehouse where the police would be coming to get him shortly. But Eclipse and Proudstar are freaking because Blink passes out and convulses a little as she can’t handle what just happened. She had never done a jump that far before. She traveled miles and held the portal for everyone to go through. They have to get her back to the HQ where they find that something more ailing is wrong with her as she has lost consciousness and is randomly creating portals. She creates a portal in the middle of the road somewhere that sees a truck try to swerve to hit it and the entire rear of the pickup cut off in the portal and came sliding through to the mutants and family’s side, nearly running a few of them over. Now, not only is Blink so sick that she needs to go to the hospital (and we learn that Mama Strucker is supposedly a nurse though we’ve seen none of her nursing) but a few of the others are injured too, but they’ll be alright. The portal opens again but Lauren is able to close this one with her powers.

Meanwhile, their father, who was taken down by the sentinels, ends up in an interrogation room with Jace who wants to know where the kids went. He ain’t sayin’ nothin’. So they try to charge him with colluding with terrorists because he went against protocol and showed Lorna her health report that said she was preggers. Speaking of, Lorna who has an X name of Polaris, adapts to the prison where a shock collar is put on all of the “muties” to discourage their power use. Some mean bee-otch that has control over the other mutants inside but is all human tries to make her do her bidding. When she threatens to beat the unborn baby out of her, Lorna powers through the shock collar to throw a metal table at her. Congratulations, you’ve won a trip to solitary.

Back with the group, Kate leaves with Eclipse to go steal some medicine for Blink. They use Kate’s supposed nurse’s rep to get the drugs. Eclipse reveals his taped-over gunshot wound from the first episode to get them into the back. The doctor patches him while Kate steals the drugs and they barely slip out the back to get back to the Underground HQ. They return to find Blink’s portal sickness has worsened to where portals are randomly generating all around the building and a SWAT team was trying to breach through the one where the truck came through. So Kate plays hero against all odds and runs in to give Blink the proper dose of meds. She has to jump through portals to get down to her as the stairs are gone and the building’s a mess. She gives her the meds and things immediately clear.

Back in the police station, Jace threatens Reed’s mother who he dragged in for questioning, too. Reed insists that he wants to make a deal in which he goes down for any and all crimes and his family are kept safe. But Jace wants the Mutant Underground as part of this deal. Reed must decide whether to give up the very people he just entrusted his family with or not, but he doesn’t take long to make that decision.

Episode three sees the family and the mutants at odds with how to best do things. Kate and the kids leave in the middle of the night to see if they can’t rescue Papa Strucker and use the system to get him free from wherever he is. The mutants are trying hard to train Blink and push her to learn how to use her powers so that she will be inclined to use them to help break into Lorna’s prison. But while Kate struggles with old friends not having any loyalty to let them stay at their houses for a while, another mutant named Dreamer (played by Elena Satine) proposes that they do a mind dive into Blink’s psyche to implant some dreams and memories that would spur her on to think that Lorna was her best friend. This way Blink would have someone and something to focus on when trying to control her powers.

Meanwhile, Reed gets rigged with some kind of high-tech bug that will help Jace track him back to the Mutants Underground. He goes to the same bar where he met Eclipse and gets the owner to take him toward the mutant safe house. But he isn’t the only one going. A mother and daughter are also going in search of a new life after the husband/father was taken by the special sentinel services police. The mother is able to take away the pain of Reed’s gunshot (an immobilization bullet, not a real one) and he changes his mind about doing this. He is thrown out of the transport and gets a talking from Jace.

Well, the rest of the Strucker family goes to Kate’s brother’s house and spends the night. But before they have breakfast in the morning a group of angry pitchforkers come to the house after seeing a picture of a trophy that Andy messed up real bad with his powers. They manage to get into the car but then they must escape. But to escape they need a portal, so Dreamer gives Blink a forced memory that makes her think she was once/still is in love with Proudstar. The memory is actually one of Dreamer’s real memories because she wants to jump Proudstar’s bones on the daily. Once again, the day is saved, but Proudstar is pissed and Kate learns that Reed is still alive and is determined to see him again.

What’s my grade? I give it a B. This series has the potential to be great but, like I’ve said so many times before about judging a show by one episode, the pilot for this show rather sucked. It seemed clunky, bounced along too quickly, gave minimal character development and never quite did the plot justice. Also, I’d say that the overplayed mutants and/or superheroes on the run has been done so many times before that it almost feels bland here. There’s nothing to distinguish this from pretty much every other X-men film ever in existence. Hell, in fact it goes so far as to be similar to the Man of Steel movie which was more of an X-Men/mutant film than a Superman film. When executing a motif, plot, storyline, cliché or whatever, you have to try to be inventive and innovative with making the idea feel new. This doesn’t make the idea feel new in any way. At least here, unlike on ABC Marvel’s Inhumans, you get to see cool powers getting used every episode. But they’re both on-the-run shows, which isn’t as drawing as the execs might think.

The acting is decent from all involved, though they haven’t really had to stretch themselves much. The series has been rather bland for the most part. Have they bothered to make the political stance of how people abnormally fear and hate that which is different? Yes, but not in any meaningful way that hasn’t been explored in all the other X-Men films. Wait... Now I know what it is about this show that bothers me: it’s essentially a watered-down version of an X-Men film, except without a wolverine and without a Professor X. I would give a strong nod to Andy and/or Lorna becoming the Magneto of the show (being just like her father. Damn that dude was laying a lot of magnetic pipe in his life, and he’s still mad as hell after getting all that free love. Sad). I also think the most likable character on the show is at a tie between Blink and Lauren. But outside of that, there’s almost no difference between this and one of the movies, save for the quality of the special effects and people not having costumes. The storyline isn’t exceptionally deep and hardly makes good commentary on refugees fleeing their own countries, but it’s a time-killer and it has the power to be something great. All the elements are there. Again, it’s just like every single X-Men movie ever made: the potential to be great but most don’t quite make it.

Should you be watching? If you like the X-Men films and what they’ve done for the last two decades, then chances are you will like this TV version even if it doesn’t have your favorite named characters. But if you were here looking for another Legion or something similar to the Marvel-Netflix shows, then look elsewhere. This is family fun with little substance, but does manage to keep your attention with a plethora of characters to like and identify with. The Gifted airs on FOX Mondays at 9pm EST. Catch up on FOX on Demand.

What do you think? Have you heard of The Gifted? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out now? And if you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? What do you think they can improve? How do you think Blink’s new love interest in Proudstar will impact the team and the family? And will Andy finally lose it and kill someone at some point, causing his family to have to abandon him? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking

If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “We’re gonna go on the run. Only take the essentials.”

‘OK. Should we take our cats?’

“Yes to Mrs. Pettibone, but not Mr. Fluffykins. That cat’s been a real dick to me.’

P.S. That’s not even from a movie but I totally wish it was. Seriously, though, how many movies/shows are we going to see in which we have the X-men mutants trying to hide their powers or fight for equality? It’s getting tired and not adding anything new to the actual fight for equal rights and justice in this country or around the world.

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Such Is The Law #LawAndOrder #MenendezMurders #TrueCrime #3weekroundup #review #recap

Such Is The Law #LawAndOrder #MenendezMurders #TrueCrime #3weekroundup #review #recap

All pictures courtesy of NBC 

Another new series, another three-week roundup. This time we’re gonna take a gander at NBC’s latest Law and Order incarnation, Law and Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders. So, is Dick Wolf’s jump onto the latest true crime’s craze absolutely killing it or is this show already spoiled rotten? Let’s find out together.

Law and Order True Crimes: Menendez Murders focuses on the real-life crimes of Erik and Lyle Menendez who, in the late 80s early 90s made national news for the brutal murder of their parents Kitty and Jose Menendez. Set in the high-priced neighborhoods of greater Los Angeles, the crimes occurred on a spring night when the two brothers executed a premeditated shotgun shooting of their parents inside of their shared family home. The two were killed in the living room in front of the TV. The boys then went on to try to first cover up the crime, then confess to it and go to prison for it. This is the story of their arrest and conviction as told through the eyes of the people involved.

Lyle on the left, Erik on the right

OK, so we start the series with the brutal reenactment of the murder from that night with Lyle and Erik gunning down their parents. We then switch to the detectives coming to the scene to start pursuing justice that night. Being a Law and Order series, by now you all have to know how this show operates. Regardless of the focus or city: we will follow the cops first, then the lawyers. And yes, while the perspective of the victims/criminals is shown, it is not at the forefront of the series per se. Our two detectives in this case: Detectives Les Zoeller and Tom Linehan, two white guys that look like they belong in a slightly serious Starsky and Hutch remake. From go, they both suspect foul play in the crime. Something is off about the boys’ story about coming into the house and finding their parents like this. While the boys don’t necessarily throw out a definitive answer to what happened or what they think happened, it is strongly implied that they think maybe this was some kind of robbery. The detectives almost always have their eyes on the boys due to the strangeness of the crime scene. Nothing is missing which rules out a robbery, at least nothing important. The bullet shells are also gone because whoever shot them picked up the casings. That is strange because neither detective has ever seen a professional assassin do that, yet, somehow a second theory arises that this could’ve been a professional hit on the couple because of some ties that the father Jose had with the mob. That doesn’t jibe with anyone, but the cops will continue to investigate.

We officially meet our victims/criminals in Erik Menendez (played by Gus Halper) and Lyle Menendez (played by Miles Gaston Villanueva) during their initial police interview later that night. While both look shaken, only Erik looks truly grief-stricken and unable to control himself. Lyle is a lot calmer and a lot more collected than his brother. From that very moment, he portrays a sense that he possibly had something to do with his parents’ deaths. Still, the police have little to no evidence to go on to convict or even pursue Lyle or his brother, so they move forward in their investigation.

Jose actor on the right

As the investigation starts to unfold, we learn about Jose (not so much about Kitty) and the domineering personality he had. Jose was of Cuban descent, arrived to the country with virtually nothing and was a self-made millionaire who had done tons of things to make his money. He, at one point, was even a film producer. But he had many dark secrets. A man obsessed with appearance, he always wanted to appear perfect, which includes appearing perfect as a father. For this reason, he was abnormally cruel under the guise of tough love. He made the boys do a lot of stuff that they didn’t want to do and, as is revealed in the first episode, even paid for a professional tennis sponsorship for Lyle’s girlfriend to go to Europe for the summer just to get her away from Lyle. She wasn’t good enough for him. Naturally, the boys acted out under their father’s control. One had been accused of plagiarism while in college which caused him to not only have to leave the prestigious Ivy League school (Princeton) but had his dad donate a large sum of money in order to cover up his son’s failing. Erik was believed to quite possibly be gay, something which Jose found disgusting. Jose hated that his son wasted his time trying to write films and saw it as a vain hobby. This was the man they called father.

At this point in the series, we get our first break from the traditional Law and Order format. In steps Edie Falco (of Soprano’s and Nurse Jackie’s fame) as Leslie Abramson. Make no mistake, while this series is based around the Menendez brothers, it is really about Leslie Abramson. Falco anchors the show with a weighty performance of a headstrong always-sure attorney who is in the middle of adopting a child with her husband while defending headline-grabbing clients. We get our introduction to her at the end of a case in which she defended a young man who killed his father after years of abuse. She pretty much won.

Anyway, Leslie sees the boys on TV and hears about the case and immediately knows that the boys did it without ever seeing a lick of real evidence. She’s that good. And just like Johnny Cochran’s character on FX’s American Crime Story: People vs OJ Simpson, Leslie is already salivating at the possibility of defending the boys if and when the investigation comes around to them needing a good defense attorney.

It should also be pointed out here that, in another break from the traditional Law and Order format, the focus is looser than loose on the Order side of the prosecution. While we are treated to snippets of the lovely Elizabeth Reaser as Pam Bozanich, for the first three episodes she is shelved from the audience to tend to the retrial of another high-profile case. The details of that case don’t matter. What does matter is that after that case is lost in episode three (I’m jumping around a little here), all of the lawyers on both sides know that the next big case will not only get massive media attention but it is going to be even harder for the defense to get a not guilty and/or a plea bargain because the DA’s office won’t want to look like a fool losing two big cases in a row. All that to say that we see very little of the prosecuting attorneys for the first three episodes.

Left to Right: Lyle's Lawyer, Erik's Lawyer, Prosecutor Pam Bozanich

Back to episode one, as everything is winding up, the boys are waiting on an insurance payout and on the legal un-miring of the will so that they can get their inheritance. The problem? The will becomes part of the investigation once one of Jose’s family members says that Jose had threatened to write his boys out of the will and that he did change it very recently. The problem is that the detectives can’t find the new will, only the old one. What they do finally find on a computer that had recently been wiped (again, this is early 90s, late 80s so we’re talking the big boxy computers that you pretty much had to be a nerd to know how to use) is a document which has barely a full sentence of words that says something about the will. Is it a new will? Sorta, but hardly anything they can use.

Then there is the boys’ strange actions after their parents die. Lyle takes his brother out to go buy stuff for the funeral. The problem? They buy the most expensive stuff they can find. We’re talking tailored name-brand suits, expensive gold watches, cars, and Lyle even wants to invest a couple hundred-thousand dollars in a new business venture all within a span of a few months after the murders. They are supposed to be in grief but don’t act it. They even seemed pissed that they can’t go into their house to get their tennis stuff only a day or two after the murders because one of them has a very important tennis lesson that was on the calendar before the murders.

When they are finally allowed to go back to the house after the cops have cleared it for evidence, Erik is the one who goes in with his uncle and looks into the room in which they committed the murder and starts bawling uncontrollably. Here we see the first big crack in Erik’s facade. Whether he was justified in the murder or not, he feels nothing but guilt and remorse over what he’s done.

Episode two explores Erik’s guilt even more. While the cops are still investigating and Leslie is still prowling on the outskirts, waiting to see if anything pops with the Menendez arrests, Erik visits his old therapist. Both Erik and his mother frequented head doctors on many occasions, much to the dismay and disgust of Jose (again, he wants perfection). And here is where their problems truly start.

The doctor is the shadiest one of them all and his actions lead to the direct downfall of the boys. Dr. Jerome Oziel (played by Josh Charles) is also another domineering figure. But while Jose is physical and sinister, Oziel’s manipulations are more mental. He is just someone trying to get ahead and will use people however he sees fit. He has a crazy mistress, played by Heather Graham, who always comes to his office to sit in his waiting room and torment him with her presence. She likes to get the D in-between his many sessions with patients. She, oddly enough, becomes the most important character within this Menendez drama.

After a few more weeks/months of bumping along in his grief, Erik can take it no more. He finally confesses to his doctor that he and his brother killed their parents. Thinking he is covered under doctor-patient confidentiality, he even confesses his confession to his brother, and Lyle tries to threaten the doctor. Well, the doctor turns it back onto Lyle and Erik and threatens that he’ll be forced to go to the police with this information because it is part of an active investigation and it could lead to more murders. They have to pay him 5,000 dollars per session in order to buy his silence, and that’s regardless of whether they actual come in for the scheduled session or not.

Meanwhile, the doctor loses control of his side chick as Heather Graham’s character goes so crazy that she sticks her head into an oven to try to kill herself. Somehow and for some reason (granted, I know this is real life but if this were fiction I would’ve let the chick die) she convinces him that if they can’t be together 24/7 she will definitely kill herself. The problem: Dr. Oziel is married with children. Yet, he thinks it necessary to move his mistress into his family house. Now let’s be real, people. If this were not based on a true story and you read this crazy situation in a novel somewhere you would be losing your shit on how utterly ridiculous it was. Again, she’s not in a guest house and isn’t a nanny/surrogate or some other live-in help you might see in one of those Hand That Rocks the Cradle ripoffs, she is just some “patient” of his that needs deep psychiatric treatment.

But get this, this crazy heifer gets mad at him for no reason and tells his daughter that she is sleeping with him and that she is going to replace their mother because she and Oziel are in love. And she goes ape on the wife. So Oziel kicks her out. She threatens him that if she gets kicked out then she will run to the police and tell all about the Menendez brothers’ secret (I know it seems I skipped something, but we’ll get to it in episode 3). He returns threat by saying that if she does try that, she will be dead in a day. Well, she matches his threat with her own bit of crazy and does tell the police leading to episode three.

In episode three the questions and stretch of disbelief abound. First off, if you were questioning how Heather Graham’s character knew about the Menendez brothers’ secret, then you are not alone. Not only did she know about their confession but as it turns out in episode three, she knew intimate details like where they bought the guns and where they supposedly dumped them. I was sitting there watching this thinking, “Why in the hell would this Dr. Oziel tell this crazy woman all this stuff? Like, she knew more about it than his wife. What kinda strange f-ed up pillow talk is this?” But I digress.

Dr. Oziel Got A Side-chick Problem

After the arrest of the boys at the end of the second episode, the third finally sees Leslie unite with the boys and take stage as their lead counsel (technically she is only representing Erik, but is lead for both). A team of women working on the boys’ side, they are trying to figure out why the boys did it after Erik confesses to his lawyer that he did it and the tapes of every following therapy session with Dr. Oziel are confiscated and submitted into evidence. They have a prelim hearing about allowing the tapes to be used in a trial in which the doctor’s mistress testifies and swings her buxom breastsss around like a British flag girl waving the Union Jack the day the troops came home. This nut—the same one that the case would hinge on if the tapes were disallowed—says that her doctor-boyfriend is using mind control on her from the hallway to intimidate her. Hilarious!

Anyway, to the luck of the prosecution, the tapes are allowed into evidence for the trial. Unfortunately, the detectives can’t find the guns as they aren’t where the mistress said they’d be. But they do find the store in which the guns were purchased and discover that one of the boys, to purchase the guns, used the ID of their college roommate who had “lost” his ID months before the shooting. Just another great bit of evidence for them that this was premeditated far in advance, which speaks to the brutality of the crime and why they deserve the death penalty.

Then enters the media in a big way. Diane Sawyer (the actress that plays her looks nothing like her) does a special on the boys, framing them as spoiled rich kids who killed their own parents for an inheritance, tainting the jury pool like a mickey fickey. Even Kitty’s family now believes that the boys killed their parents in cold blood because they are just ruthless killers who wanted the money. But Leslie doesn’t think the story is that simple.

Leslie gets her own therapist into the jail with the boys to figure out the true motive behind their murder. At first the therapist gets the same stuff: their father was overbearing, he made a prematurely balding Lyle start wearing a wig in high school to keep up appearances, he quizzed them at dinner and hated any perceived imperfection. Finally, they get a breakthrough and the team of ladies are conflicted about it. The breakthrough: Erik admits that his father used to sexually abuse him and his brother and continued to do it from his young age of 5 all the way through to before they killed their parents. And the light suddenly changes.

What’s my grade? I give it a B. I can’t say that it reinvigorates the Law and Order franchise, however it does make a worthy edition. But American Crime Story: People vs OJ Simpson this is not. Where that felt similar to a long film, this feels like a network TV show. Edie Falco and most of the women give great performances, and I also find the actors playing the brothers to be quite good too, but everyone else is a bit of a wash. Heather Graham has played the same kind of smiley, ditzy, big-breasted look-at-me bimbo in every role, which makes me feel more like she’s really just playing herself at this point. Yeah, I know she was raised in a very strict religious upbringing and this is her 20+ year way of rebelling against that, but maybe she should try a role that is devoutly and sincerely religious if only to show that she has range as an actress and is more than just a pretty face, because right now in her career... she isn’t. The detectives are white wall paper and, as I said before, they have yet to show much of the prosecuting attorneys’ lives.

Speaking of, the writing is less personal than American Crime Story. It focuses heavily on the crime and the mystery of why they did it, which is fine. But it doesn’t much explore the inner-workings and lives of the people around the case. For instance, if you saw People vs. OJ Simpson, chances are you remember the Marcia, Marcia, Marcia episode. It was brilliant in how it showed the personal struggle of defense attorney Marcia Clark to get the case right when it seemed she could do no good: she didn’t look nice enough, she didn’t look professional, what was with that hair, she didn’t look smart enough, she seemed like a rookie, and for god’s sake what the hell was with her hair? Here, we get little of that. While we have a full defense team of women, they almost seem interchangeable and their lives are inconsequential. What sort of biases do they bring to this? How do they think this will effect their families? (Side note: this was remedied in later episodes). Granted this was pre-OJ so the media circus wasn’t quite as bad, but this trial was still the hottest ticket in town until OJ came along I would argue. There seem to be too many moving parts for the directors and writers to focus on one thing.

And finally, some may have a disdainful bias against how the show is framed. Make no mistake, the show is definitely shining a sympathetic light on the boys. Whereas some other dramatized true crime stories in recent history have tried straddling the line between whether you should feel pity for the accused or even if they actually committed the crime, here the brothers are painted as victims of the circumstances. So whether you believe this narrative that the brothers were sexually abused by their parents (I thought I read somewhere that the mother participated at some point too, then just became dissonant at the fact that her husband continued) or not, the show doesn’t give any benefit of the doubt that their story could be a lie or that Jose could’ve been anything other than a villain. We see this just in how they film the flashbacks. Filmed in black and white, Jose is almost always in a dark buttoned-up suit like the devil with a snarl on his face, save for the abuse scene in which he wore a white robe but was still menacing enough. The show asks that you feel sorry for them, emotional coaching at its finest.

Should you be watching? Sure. It’s not a storm-the-barn yes, but if you are a true crime fanatic and are craving a short 10-episode fictionalization of past crimes to tide you over until American Crime Story returns in 2018 with Versace’s murder, then you should check this out. Is this going to be the best interpretation of the Menendez murders? I doubt it. With these stories trending now, I won’t be surprised if another program decides to take a shot at the Menendezes, too. I’m bad, I know. And if you are a fan of NBC stalwart Law and Order: SVU then you should love this. Really, the series has a mixture of all of the previous Law and Order iterations in it. Come for the crime, stay for Falco and the rest of the ladies.

What do you think? Have you heard of Law and Order True Crime: Menendez Murders? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Where could they improve in the series? And do you like that they took the boys’ side in this or would you have liked to see more of a well-rounded story? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking

If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “Sometimes he burns me so bad that I could just... just... I could just kill him!”

P.S. What movie and or novel first made that line famous? On another note, man, I wonder if Lyle is completely bald now? And what about Erik? Is he also bald? This thing about being forced to wear a wig in high school is so fascinating to me for some reason. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time.

P.P.S. Seriously though, what is it with these true crime fictionalizations and hair? I mean, what the hell was up with Marcia’s hair. Seriously!

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