In the US: Tuesdays, 10/9c, USA Network. Starts 13th July
Piper Perabo should have had a great career in the movies. Okay, Coyote Ugly wasn’t exactly a great starting point, but she’s a good actress, she did well in The Prestige – exciting things should have happened but didn’t. Maybe it’s because most people confuse her with Jennifer Garner.
So it’s good to see her getting her own TV show, Covert Affairs, even if it does appear the producers were trying to remake Alias and got her confused with Jennifer Garner as well.
In Covert Affairs, Perabo plays a new recruit to the CIA whose language skills and aptitude for the job get her rushed into the field by her occasionally helpful bosses Arthur Campbell (The OC‘s Peter Gallagher) and his distrustful wife Joan (Kari Matchett from Leverage and 24). While out and about, she gets to have fights and car chases, while putting on array of accents to fool the police, FBI and even, sometimes, the enemy. No wigs mind. That would have been too obvious.
But since this is about a “single woman [with a] double life” (as the show’s posters and ads say) and the show is called Covert Affairs (emphasis on the second word), we also have possible romantic interest for her in the form of the helpful Auggie Anderson (Jake 2.0/Ugly Betty‘s Christopher Gorham), the smooth Jai Wilcox (Sendhil Ramamurthy from Heroes, but only from episode two) and whomever her unknowing sister (Anne Dudek from House and Mad Men) sends in her direction. If only she weren’t pining for that guy she met on vacation all those years ago…
While it’s not quite up there with Burn Notice, Covert Affairs just about manages to blend humour, romance and spy action to create something that while not unmissable, should make any pangs you have for the return of Alias disappear.
