Didn’t We Just Prove How Stupid People Are? #WisdomOfTheCrowd #CBS #3weekroundup #review #recap

Didn’t We Just Prove How Stupid People Are? #WisdomOfTheCrowd #CBS #3weekroundup #review #recap

All pictures courtesy of CBS

It’s funny that in this current political climate, where everyone thinks that the other guy is an idiot for voting and/or believing what he believes, a network somehow found the time to greenlight this show. Even moreso the audacity of them to keep that particular name (or to have changed it to that) is, in and of itself, proving the opposite of this show’s main thrust. So, is this show wise before its time or does its three-episode youth stumble into dumb territory? Let’s find out together.

CBS’s Wisdom of the Crowd stars Jeremy Piven as Jeffrey Tanner, a billionaire tech genius with a sudden hard-on for justice. By this point, if you’ve read this blog before or if you’ve seen some of the recent shows from last season, you will know that, above being too many geniuses on TV, there are also suddenly too many billionaires on TV that promise to magically solve all of society’s problems. But I don’t want to drift into the critique part just yet, so let’s keep with the plot. Piven’s Tanner decided to give up his billion-dollar company to start a new one, a non-profit crime-solving tech firm he calls Sophe. The app to go with the lab is inspired by (but named after) his late daughter Mia who was murdered precisely one year before the show starts. The funny thing: a man was already arrested and convicted for her murder. But Tanner thinks that this man is innocent and that they got the wrong guy. So, he makes a crazy announcement as soon as Sophe goes online. He will pay someone 100 million dollars if they can find the real culprit.

With Tanner’s national press conference about selling his company and starting a new one making waves, a few people pop back into Tanner’s life. First we have Tanner’s politician ex-wife Alex Hale played by Monica Potter. She pops up for a few minutes to reminisce about old times and how our hero was a terrible husband but good father. We also get Mike Leigh who seems to be Tanner’s righthand guy. He is the suit that is always worried about his boss for some reason. Next we have Sara Morton who is not only Tanner’s chief tech officer in his new Sophe company (and presumably in the other company, too) but is also his secret girlfriend/booty call. I say booty call because they don’t seem to live together (she comes to his place, looks into his fridge and is surprised to find no food) and the relationship looks very new.

Tanner and Detective Tommy

And finally, the most important person of all is Detective Tommy Cavanaugh played by Richard T. Jones. The detective is the one who originally worked on Mia’s case along with his partner. As is usual in these shows, he is there to tell the billionaire that he can’t act like an arrogant know-it-all and there’s rules and laws and yadda, yadda, yadda, some stuff about police work. The detective wants back in on the case but is also told by his superiors that he needs to go in order to keep tabs on Tanner, and the billionaire wants his insight. And the detecting begins.

Tanner originally announced the app as something that could help to revolutionize all crime solving, but freaks when another case comes in to distract his team from solving Mia’s murder and getting this innocent man out of prison. So Tanner decides to release some footage of a club/store from the night of the murder. Apparently, his daughter was coming out of some place but there was evidence that a man was stalking the sidewalk outside. The original recording was never used in court but it showed not just the convicted man outside but some other guy, too. Someone recognizes the clip, then hacks the program to show the full video. As it turns out, the video was cutting off after 30 seconds because of the app it was on had strict time guidelines similar to what Vine used to have.

The hacker reveals a video that shows a car from a local rideshare zooming away. Tanner hires the hacker who helps to figure out that the rideshare picked up a few women who had been purportedly raped or sexually assaulted. As far as Mia... So they discover that the rideshare has been frequenting certain bars and getting away with assaulting these women. They figure that the same driver has a connection with someone working in the various bars to get the girls drugged, drunk and easily molested. They reverse-hack the bartender’s cellphone GPS of the guy who had tended at all of the bars where the rapes had happened.

After the detectives talk to him to spook him, they follow him to a park where he meets with the other rapist guy. Using the Sophe app, they get one of the users to use their phone as a listening device so that the volunteer-recorded conversation can be used legally in court. They lose one of the men in a chase and start tracking the other man through crowd-sourcing. But with his picture on everyone’s phone, regular citizens start stalking him like he’s Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. And this is partially why so many people balk at the idea behind this show working. Though they have caught a rapist that may or may not have been the guy, this doesn’t mean that the city nor state will reopen Mia’s case.

Episode two sees Tanner and Detective Tommy taking on yet another case together, despite Tommy’s objection to this whole Sophe thing. While at the police station to talk more about Mia Tanner’s case and a new photo that was sent in by one of the Sophe users, Tanner sees a black couple in turmoil over their missing son. A teenager, the boy has been missing for a day and they are certain that something bad has happened. Naturally, Tanner sees a little of himself in the couple as he can remember sitting in the same interview room a year prior and hearing about how his daughter was murdered. Before the cops and parents know, Tanner sends out a BOLO for the boy and his users point out that there is a FitBit on his wrist that has a GPS. Before his team can, some random man hacks the GPS and follows it to a trashcan where they find a bloody jacket that the kid was wearing. People are doing cop work quicker than the cops.

Meanwhile, Tanner is still working on his daughter’s case while the team is on the kid’s case. Tanner goes to his daughter’s friend who tells him about some sports shop she went to. He also is trying to figure out this picture in which she is seen talking (read: arguing) with a white nationalist months prior to her death.

The detectives discover that the missing kid was a computer coder/hacker who had stolen the answers to various tests and posted them online in a coded video game, selling them online for real money. As it turns out, this kid was kind of bad. He would skip school to go drinking with his buddies and cheated on his tests so he could eventually get into an ivy league college. He even brags about throwing off the curve in the class’ grade. For this, another student got mad at him and accidentally pushed him off a ridge and down into a ravine out in the desert somewhere. But the kid survived the tumble and the group uses base theorem among their Sophe users to figure out his most probable location. They find him barely alive after some back and forth with the search team police captain. It ends with Detective Tommy sending Tanner a picture of a guy who could have been the white supremacist his daughter was talking to in the picture.

Episode three sees Tanner’s team trying to link Mia’s murder with any other crimes. While they find nothing on Mia, they do find three murders that are supposedly over 80% connected. Detective Tommy gives them a non-released detail on one of the cases and the number balloons from three to 14. Do they have a serial killer on their hands? The crimes are spread over eight jurisdictions and 11 years, so what the heck is going on?

The detectives first go to an Asian woman’s parents’ house to ask about her murder. That leads them to another one of the guys that was killed. Before he died, he knew the victim and told her parents that he might have known who killed her. So they stumble around a little as the machine keeps adding more and more crimes that fit into the same profile as the first three. And they finally get to a crime where the victim lived. The detectives go to visit the victim who managed to escape what she thought would be a rape and/or murder. And she ran home to report the crime.

While the detectives and the team are focused on those aggregated potential serial killer crimes, Tanner and the convicted guy in prison are still focused on figuring out who the real killer is. The convicted guy remembers a strange dream while Tanner gets some kind of homemade doll that Mia made while volunteering at some nursing care place. This leads him to the guy in the picture with his daughter who lives as a hermit way out in the woods. He’s fled due to some legal matters and having bill collectors after him for money. But Tanner also finds out that his daughter wasn’t a volunteer at this sobriety house place, but a patient who checked herself in due to depression.

Back to the current case, the algorithm noting the connections finally spits out info that all of the murders took place in, near, or around a construction site, which has changed the landscape of the city. A little more sleuthing spits out that each site used the same sanitation (port-a-potty) services, so they take a trip to that company. As it turns out, one of the workers at that potty place was the one who did it. A serial killer, he collected shoes and wondered what took them so long to catch him.

At the end, while Tanner struggles to deal with the fact that he might not ever find the man who killed his daughter, the guy convicted for her murder gets stabbed in prison and left to die.

What’s my grade? I give it a C+. Is it original? No, not really. This concept has been done in recent years on a myriad of different shows. The basic setup is that billionaire experiences something personally traumatic, billionaire comes into an industry where he can save lives, billionaire steps on the toes of the old guard in said industry, billionaire proves that he is right about the new changes because he is smarter and richer than everybody else in the room and billionaire is humbled out of some of his arrogance with just one case that proves that technology doesn’t make him a god. Both APB and Pure Genius tried this concept last year and it didn’t work, so I don’ especially expect for it to work this time around. The shows are great because they do introduce us to some new technologies that you probably wouldn’t know about even if you are a techie (there’s just so much stuff to keep up with that either becomes a flash in the pan or sticks and stays for a while). But unfortunately most of these shows take the concept and are unable to provide any real answers or solutions to the current problems we have. Wisdom of the crowd falls into the same rut.

That rut is quite evident and speaks to the very nature of man and of the internet as we know it: people are simply not as good as we all might want to think, despite how optimistic we are about humanity. People don’t listen, can be overly aggressive, quickly matriculate a mob mentality and are quick to judge even though the old Biblical saying “Judge not lest ye be judged” is on the tip of the tongue of every religious, atheistic and agnostic person from here to the Buddhist mountains in China. But worst of all is that people lie and for a smorgasbord of different reasons. Some people lie because they don’t want to hurt the feelings of others. Some lie because they just don’t want to tell the truth or incriminate themselves. And some people lie because they want to “be part of something bigger than themselves” as the show sickeningly and incessantly reminds you. These are the people who call tip-lines in real life and give false tips to try to help find a killer or a missing person, if only to feel important for a brief moment. Hardly trying to be a cynic, but it would seem most likely that these types of people would be the ones downloading and using this app the most.

The whole idea, even from the outset, feels rather dangerous and stupid, but when thinking about it more deeply, rings of a superficiality that posits that there are more good people than bad people when there are really more middling/indifferent people than both groups and they don’t sit around all day thinking about good or bad but what benefits them for the moment. This show takes the armchair detectives that most of cop and lawyer television has made the majority of this population into and gives them the power to play Veronica Mars without any repercussions, even when they are put into the line of danger. For instance, at the end of the first episode, when the crowd gathers around the bartender/rapist dude, they take pictures of him on the train and literally are in punching distance from him. With the thought already seeded in their minds that this man is guilty and his supposed confession, this could have turned into a volatile situation. In reality, it would have, either with the man defending himself by trying to escape (usually with a gun or other weapon) or the mob demanding street justice right there. Yet, the show asks you to suspend your disbelief in such a cheap and blatantly eye-rolling way that it almost seems laughable. We have people who are just protesting and screaming at other people in real life, yet get bottles thrown at them, guns pointed at them, punches thrown at them and even get run over by crazy people in cars, yet you’re telling me that this guy who everybody thinks committed a crime gets not a single punch thrown at him. Hell, somebody would’ve spit on him if this was reality and as nasty as that sounds, you know it’s right, reader.

The Girlfriend; She was also on Game of Thrones

And if the lack of believability in the idea wasn’t enough, the lack of true characterization was also a bit of an issue. I’d say that outside of Tanner the billionaire and his tech first lady Sara, we don’t get much building on who these people are. Basic questions like: is Detective Tommy married? Is his partner? What about the tech boys? Are they both gay and, in a very veiled way, flirting with each other? Is that why the hacker guy is always trying to cut down the uptight looking nerdy guy? Or are they each into women and have women at home? None of these questions are answered or even hinted at in the first three episodes, though I do suspect that the two tech guys are gay (they just give off that vibe to me the way they are written). Even Tanner’s financial officer is a caricature of the penny miser steadfastly pinching every penny he can to keep the company afloat as they hemorrhage money. And frankly, what little character development is given to Tanner and Sara is so flimsy that there’s hardly anything to grab hold of and claim as something that you can love about the characters. Do they seem in love? Eh! She’s a strong woman, knows what she wants and has the skills to get it. He’s a grieving dad who is her boss, is the head of a new tech firm and is trying to save the world sans-cape. And the biggest question left out there is what the heck is Tanner’s ex-wife doing on this show and is she ever going to become relevant to the actual plot. Right now, she serves as filler in-between the much more interesting stuff.

But in the end, the show does try to establish itself as a new-age crime drama/procedural in the vein of Criminal Minds, Law and Order and CSI. With the demographic for CBS skewing older, it might be able to find an audience as it does move at the proper pace for a show like this and the crimes get solved with the power of the people. However, unlike some other shows and movies, this is not necessarily a mystery so much as it is definitely a procedural. You won’t have fun trying to solve the crime with the team. You won’t get enough evidence to do that.

Should you be watching? Eh! Probably not. Frankly, I liked FOX’s APB from last season a lot better than this and it got canceled. Where as that show focused on not just the digital world, it also saw the philanthropist billionaire upgrade a precinct’s hardware tech, too, giving them more drones, better guns, better cars, better bulletproof suits and a myriad of cool gadgets, on top of the APB app which allowed people to report crimes and whatnot. While Wisdom of the Crowd expands on that app part, making it more interactive, which I’m sure a second season of APB would’ve done, Crowd never quite feels engrossing enough on a personal level. There’s something missing and I don’t know what. But if you are a fan of crime procedurals and miss the many CSI iterations, then you might want to check this out. Wisdom of the Crowd airs on CBS Sundays in the 8pm EST time slot, though check local listings for NFL interruptions and timing delays. And it can also be caught on demand and on CBS All Access.

What do you think? Have you heard of Wisdom of the Crowd? If not, do you think you’ll check it out for a few episodes? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? What, if any, improvements do you think the show should make? Who do you think killed Mia? And do you think that maybe her mother had something to do with her murder like I do? 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, “Take the suit away and what are you?”

‘A billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.’

P.S. Is that the direct quote? No, I don’t think so, but I didn’t have the desire to look up the specifics Tony Said. It’s funny how I wrote this script long ago about how we’d enter into an age in which billionaire after billionaire will come forth thinking that they can fix all of societies ills. I wrote it for the provocateurs. Out of the many that will come, only one or two will actually succeed and his name ain’t Trump. Anyway, I’ll think of a better, more original sign-off next time.

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