NBC's The Player (#ThePlayer) starring
Wesley Snipes and Philip Winchester is the latest show to tackle the
crime drama procedural and give it a twist. But before we dive into
what the show is about and my review/recap of the first three
episodes, I will again remind you of why I first found interest in
this show and would point you to the #Premiere Week button up top if
you want a more in-depth look at my reasoning--just scroll down to
the NBC section, it's the second to last section.
For starters, the show has Wesley
Snipes in it. You remember, he's the guy from Too Wong Foo. No, you
don't remember that movie? What about Demolition Man? Drop Zone? The
Art of War? The Art of War 2? Come on, you can't remember the guy
from any of those movies? Wow! I doubt you'd know him from some of
his smaller stuff like Passenger 57 or the Blade Trilogy so there's
no use in me even mentioning them. Anyway, he was half the draw of
the series for me. The other half consisted of the idea. Let's dive
into the first three episodes.
The previous game has ended in death
and Wesley Snipes' character calls back to his worker bee instructing
her to find them a new player within the opening minute of the show.
What is the game? You'll understand in a minute. For now, what you
need to know is that they choose Philip Winchester's character Alex
Kane as their next potential player. Ex-black ops, Alex lives in Las
Vegas as somewhat of a security consultant. During the only official
job we ever see him on in the show, he was hired by a rich,
high-ranking middle eastern man on a trip with his family to Viva Las
Vegas. His job was simply to pinpoint weaknesses in the man's room
security. Not only did he manage to get into the room, sit down and
wait for the man and his crew to enter, he also identifies an open
window as a security risk even though they are on the highest floor
of the hotel. He later proves just how correct he was when he has to
leap onto a crane attached to the roof of the building just over the
man's room, slide down it, and Tarzan his way through the open window
and into the rich man's room to stop an assassination attempt. And
there is where the story complicates and where we get the beginning
strands of the connective mystery throughout the show.
Again, this is a procedural
case-of-the-week format, so each week you have a new mystery and
crime; however, like most of these shows in the last few years since
The Blacklist came out, they try to have an even larger mystery to
connect everything and keep you tuned in week after week. Well,
Alex's thwarting of the assassination attempt ticks off the group of
men who want the rich guy dead or in their back pocket. So, they find
out who he is, track him down to his ex's house and supposedly shoot
and kill her in the middle of the night. Two facts here. For one, he
and his ex have a complicated relationship. Technically still
married, they also fall into each other's bed frequently and have
little tension and animosity between them. About the only real sign
to show that there's trouble in their relationship is the fact that
they don't live together. She too served overseas as a medic--this
was how they met as she worked to patch him up physically and
mentally after a battle.
The second thing of note in their
relationship is how I said "supposedly shoot and kill her."
Not only does Alex's non-ex, ex still wear her wedding ring but she
also has a wedding band tattoo (is that still popular with couples? I
know it was big four, five years ago but do people still do that a
lot). On the night she is shot, he comes into the bedroom to find her
dead already, no gasping for air or final words breathlessly spoken.
Then in the morgue when he goes to identify her body, the person has
the same face but no ring finger tattoo. Hmm? He notices this because
he had her wedding ring and wanted to bury her with that on
(complicated relationship, remember). What, then, does this mean?
Either someone at some point between the time he got up to go to the
kitchen to get a glass of water after he and his wife had sex took
the time to not only kill her but laser off the tattoo on her ring
finger, or that woman is not his real wife, regardless of how she
looks in the face. Yeah, dead people not being the actual dead people
you think they are. And we haven't even gotten to the crux of the
show yet.
Through a series of coincidences and a
rather ridiculous car chase/show of power, Alex encounters a woman
named Cassandra King who works for Wesley Snipes' character. On a
parking garage rooftop, all three of them meet and explain to Alex
what is going on. As I stated earlier, the guys whose assassination
attempt he stopped supposedly came and killed his wife. Not done,
they wanted to kill him too or at least scare him off. This time,
they were going to kidnap the man's daughter. How does this involve
the three of them? Well, Cassandra and Wesley want Alex to be their
new Player. The game? A group of unidentified super wealthy men and
women around the world have grown so bored with their riches that
they now gamble on crime. He, as the player, will be who they bet
on--for or against--to see if he can successfully stop a particular
crime in a particular time frame as set by the house. The house
consists of Wesley as the boss or bet setter, Cassandra as the dealer
(she helps the player however he needs her to) and the Player who
works to stop the crimes. They chose him because he is a man who has
acquired a set of very special skills Liam Neeson-style. He jumps at
the chance to get revenge on the people who killed his wife and stop
the kidnapping. And so the game begins.
Learning of the technology and
everything available to the house, Alex starts to put up a wall of
moral resistance. While he knows he's going to be doing good, he
can't help but think that all the gadgetry and Big Brother-esque
surveillance at the house's disposal could be helping the police to
solve or stop far more crimes. Finally the viewer gets the moral
objection and dilemma that we wanted from Minority Report. They have
access to every camera, know every single dollar counted in the
casinos as evidenced by the second episode, know flight plans and
people entering and exiting the city, and have a an unlimited amount
of access to weaponry, money and vehicles including a jet. Finally,
they have the rudimentary skills to impersonate any law enforcement
agency at will and erase or create identities when needed. They are
essentially their own little government. In dealing with criminals,
they have large case files or access to the already established CIA,
FBI, DEA, and etc. files of these people. This is how they know all
about the group trying to kill the rich guy. They know all about Alex
too.
Well, using their skills and Alex's
skills, they manage to rescue the girl in a wild shootout between
lone man Alex and the group of terrorists. Killing most of the men,
he exacts his revenge for his wife, but doesn't feel good about it
and then the morgue/ring thing happens and he becomes super
suspicious.
Meanwhile, Wesley Snipes is working
diligently to make everything perfect and tie up any loose ends he
thinks Alex might pull at before Mr. Kane even thinks of doing as
much. This seems to hint that he is behind the wife's murder but in
the second episode he tells Alex that not only does he agree that he
thinks the man's wife is still alive but that he will help him find
her. And this was after Alex gave one of his hush-hush tech friends a
sample of her DNA to test against the blood of the corpse. It tested
as a match confirming her death but he doesn't believe it and neither
do I. That just means that Wesley Snipes knows what happened to the
man's wife because he has to know. Nothing goes on in the city
without him knowing as evidenced on the second episode when a group
of more ex-black ops baddies roll into town to steal some diamonds
(apparently a theme over at NBC as Blindspot had essentially the same
plot; the Provocateurs at work for you).
Things get interesting when Alex
realizes he worked with the guy but now that the man has turned big
and bad he has to kill him because this new group not only has no
value for human life, but they demonstrate as much by holding a
shootout in the middle of an intersection. But it doesn't seem like
Alex has a great appreciation for life either as he jumps from a
cargo plane mid-flight with no pilot in order to stop the baddie,
this after failing on the first bet. As with most gamblers, the house
offers a special double or nothing bet to see if he can stop this man
from escaping Vegas. In the finale--a straight out of Passenger 57
callback--Alex fights with the man mid-air as they wrestle over one
parachute. He wins and the man plummets to his death into the Nevada
desert and somewhere you could just hear Wesley Snipes saying,
"always bet on black," and that little old white lady doing
the Arsenio Hall "woo! Woo! Woo!" My feeling: what about
that big ass plane going to crash land somewhere? What if it smashed
into a highway, killing dozens? Craziness.
The third episode featured a tangle
with a cartel sniper who killed a group of scuba divers for seeing
something they shouldn't have while on vacation years prior. The
twist? It took place in LA, with Snipes saying that while the house
is in Vegas, crime is everywhere. A new wrinkle to the show, this
takes the possibilities of the show's future to new, maybe
international heights where the stakes can become astronomically big.
But will viewers go for Alex as a hero who seems to always win even
when he doesn't (yes, he stopped the sniper though it can be argued
that Cassandra sniping the sniper was actually a bending of the
game's rules)?
What's my grade? I give this show a B-
to C+. While I like this far more than Limitless and almost on the
same level as Minority Report, I also didn't feel as duped by its
advertising. I did give Minority Report a little more leeway in its
grade because of the sci-fi aspect and the complexity of the idea,
but Limitless and The Player both share fairly simple ideas.
Limitless, the guy takes a pill and becomes super smart. The Player,
a guy has people bet on if he can stop crimes. That's it. It's
nothing more than if you and your friends gathered together to watch
Criminal Minds and bet potato chips and Halloween candies on if the
Criminal Minds crew would solve the case by the end of the hour. Of
course they will. The only difference is the non-jurisdiction allure
to the show and the fact that he can use tactics police and other
badge-d good guys can't. And though he seems to be working for a
corrupt man in Snipes, there's not much that will jump out at you in
the way of "wow!" Again, I feel like this is a show where I
can skip episodes, maybe even weeks at a time and come back and have
missed very little. While that may be what some viewers want, in
comparing this to the other powerhouse on Thursday night which is How
To Get Away With Murder, I'm not sure this snatches viewers from that
and football. Honestly, even with The Blacklist as its lead-in, the
Thursday night 10pm hour on NBC which this show currently occupies
seems like it should have something even flashier. I think this show
would do better on Tuesdays in the same time slot.
Also, while I find the threading
mystery of if his wife is actually dead or not, much more compelling
than both Minority Report's and Limitless' mysteries, I find myself
nearly unfazed by whether or not he gets that answer. I think that is
mostly because of the way his character is played and written. Again,
I don't like to be critical about things really, but I will say that
I find Alex Kane to be the weakest character on the show both in
written presentation and in acting. The woman playing Cassandra draws
attention and captivates as she has mysteries just like Alex and
Snipes. Snipes is great at playing the cool, calm and conniving boss
who seems to lie every time he opens his mouth. But for the titular
character to be the least interesting, I don't think that bodes well
for the show. Just like Agent Weller on Blindspot, Kane has only one
facial expression almost exclusively (like someone just stole his
favorite pair of socks). I'll be checking the ratings for all new
shows at the end of this week to see how viewers are adapting, but I
have a pretty good idea of what I think will be canceled in the next
few weeks.
Should you be watching? This is another
take it or leave it show. I feel like ABC Thursdays are clearly
geared more toward women and CBS has football for the sports lover
which will also see TNT's NBA coverage come the end of the month.
That leaves NBC with the "rest of the crowd" so to speak.
While I highly enjoy Heroes Reborn and The Blacklist (which has
managed to do well) and both are geared more toward men though plenty
of women watch them, The Player stands out as the weakest part of the
night and it ends the night. Even flipping times with The Blacklist
would do it good. It is definitely a more masculine show as I can
literally count on hand the amount of women with speaking roles I've
seen in the first three episodes (4-5 including Cassandra). If you
like the simple, guns a-blazing cowboy style of show, then this might
be it for you. Otherwise, give it a pass.
What do you think? Am I wrong in
thinking that this show isn't as good as the rest of TV on Thursdays?
Do you think it's the best thing on TV right now? Have you even
watched the show? If so, what do you think Snipes' character has to
do with Kane's wife's death/disappearance? Let me know in the
comments below (hint: click the no comments button to comment).
As
always, check out my books on Amazon (if you’re looking for
Halloween scares
check #AFuriousWind, #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or #ThePowerOfTen).
For those interested in something a little more dramatic, check
out #TheWriter.
The final episode of season one of The Writer is OUT NOW. Ahh! That’s
right, all 15 episodes are out now available exclusively on Amazon.
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Until next time, “And I just watch
your show all the time. Never Miss it! Woo, woo, woo!”
P.S. Granny from Passenger 57. Those
were the days, weren't they? When you could just mistake any black
person for any other black person and so long as they were famous it
was OK. Sigh. I'll keep thinking of a proper sign-off.
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