Quick thoughts on episode two of "The Unusuals" coming up just as soon as I push an old lady off a roof for you...While I'm often wary of TV dramas that proudly wear their quirks on their sleeves, I enjoyed "The Unusuals" pilot because I felt there was a strong balance between the wacky and the serious, particularly in Jeremy Renner's delivery of the speech about passing the badge number from cop to cop until it kills one of them. (I found it much more interesting than the comparable speech in the "Southland" pilot.)
Episode two, unfortunately, felt much higher on the comedy(*) than the moments I could wrap my hands around. I still think Renner, whom I vaguely remember from "SWAT" and little else, is an actor I look forward to watching (he could be Nathan Fillion's slightly disturbed younger brother), and Adam Goldberg and Amber Tamblyn on-hand still have some goodwill on reserve with me, but I fear that the show is going to head into unwatchable David E. Kelley territory sooner rather than later.
(*) And it doesn't help that "The Unusuals" is the latest ABC show to fall victim to that network's plague of Please Start Laughing Now music. It's getting to the point where, when I hear the tinkly piano, I immediately set my jaw and prepare to not laugh in defiance of the network's belief that I'm too stupid to recognize comedy without some secondary audio cue. The scene where Casey's trust fund manager showed up was particularly egregious on this score.
Another problem is that the ongoing mystery element of the show hasn't really grabbed me yet. I don't care that the Christian cop used to be a bad guy, or that his friend was responsible for getting Walsh's partner killed, or even the possibility that Walsh himself might be dirty. That part of the show feels obligatory in a way, as if either the creator or ABC felt a slice-of-life series about weird NYPD detectives wouldn't be compelling enough without some kind of larger story arc. Not every show needs it. "The Unusuals" needs something, but this isn't quite it.
I'm in it for a few more episodes, but my enthusiasm waned quite a bit after watching this one.
What did everybody else think?
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