Groan.

korereviews

I really want to like this show: another quality spy thriller like Homeland would be great - and that's obviously what this aspires to be. And it has a lot going for it - some great actors, good locations, what seems like a healthy budget. Unfortunately, there seems to be some people at the helm who make terrible decisions.

First: the overall aesthetic of the show is about 20 years out of date - as evinced most painfully by the choice of Bowie's "I'm afraid of Americans" (released in 1995 - and it sounds like it!!!) for the title music. Ugh. This song was dated about two minutes after its release, and age hasn't made it better. Also, the fast-edit style a la Jason Bourne movies might have seemed cool back in the early 2000s, but now it just feels cheezy - like watching your dad trying to act 'cool'.

Second: While the cast is generally good (I tuned in mostly because Rhys Ifans was in it; but Richard Jenkins and Leland Orser are also excellent and help prop up the show). I'm a bit divided on Richard Armitage as the lead - he's a solid actor, but feels miscast here. I just don't buy him as an intrepid spy with a dark past - he's too stiff and uptight-looking. He was convincing in North & South (mostly because he played a stiff and uptight Brit), but not so much here. Also: having two British actors (Armitage and Ifans) play American leads is problematic. Viewers outside North America might not notice, but their accents don't really sound natural. I wish they'd just played them as MI5 agents - would have been more convincing and there's really no reason for the show to focus on the CIA. A properly Euro-centred version of Homeland would have felt much more authentic and would have avoided these issues. Plus: some of the actual American actors they have in the show are awful and drag the overall quality down: of course this season Ashley Judd, but also Michelle Forbes.

Third: By far the weakest part of this show is the writing, which tries to weave a complex LeCarre-style narrative but frequently resorts to idiotic clichés, radically implausible character decisions and actions, and general eye-rolling dumbness. Examples from season 2: -the way large chunks of exposition are hamfistedly inserted into the dialogue between Daniel Miller and a female agent in the opening scene of S02E01, making for one of the most awkward "conversations" I've ever heard (-she might as well have been saying "Here are some things from season 1 you might have forgotten about that I need to remind you of in this first episode of season 2").

-how Miller and the German undercover agent have a conversation right outside Ganz's office - who for all they know might be standing with his ear to the other side of the door, or have the hallway bugged - about how the latter will surely kill Miller if he's found wearing the wire he was about to go in wearing (-and in fact these sorts of scenes - where characters who are supposed to be highly trained super-spies do obviously careless things which never seem to cause suspicion or get them caught - recur in every episode; I'm no expert, but this doesn't seem like professional tradecraft...)

-terrible continuity errors, like in S02E02, where Ganz says to Daniel, as they stand in his office in BERLIN "You will take me to your source NOW!" and the scene immediately cuts to a shot of them driving up to that source's house IN SOUTHERN SPAIN!!!!!! (that one actually caused me to laugh out loud). Wow - when Ganz says NOW, he's not foolin' around - I guess they teleported... (actually, they mention later that they flew; so I guess we're meant to believe that Miller, Ganz, his daughter and his henchman drove straight to the airport - where they somehow already had tickets booked for this location in Spain that Ganz hadn't even known about till Miller mentioned it - and then flew there together, rented a car, drove to this house... anyway, you get the idea - the show is plagued by nonsensical transitions like this).

Overall, non-US productions that try to imitate American-style programming are always worse for it. Here it results in some of the worst aspects of the show, like pointless nudity and sex, bad accents and casting choices, terrible editing, dumbed-down storytelling, and generally just a lot of empty, stupid clichés and posturing in place of intelligent writing. Like I said, I WANT to like this show. I was surprised that it got a second season and was hoping things would be better this time around. They could have something good here, but need to get some better producers and writers on board.

score 7/10

korereviews 9 November 2017

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3854264/