TV reviews

In the US: Sundays, 8/7c, CBS

First of, let’s ignore the Barrometer for a moment and put Wisdom of the Crowd to the rarely deployed but equally important test used only with crime procedurals – the TMINEMIL test. Yep, I got my mother-in-law to watch the show, as being a fervent lover of the genre, she is precisely its target audience. She loves it, so Wisdom of the Crowd clearly hits the right notes with the right people.

But how about you? Assuming you’re not one of ‘the right people’, is there much merit to Wisdom of the Crowd? The show’s format is that social media tech entrepreneur Jeremy Piven wants to find out who really killed his daughter, so decides to use a crowd-sourcing platform to data mine all the evidence, discover clues and connections the police missed, and get input from experts and witnesses the police never knew about. However, his platform turns out to be very good at unearthing crimes that the police have missed or don’t know how to solve and before you know it, Piven’s helping detective Richard T Jones with his enquiries and vice versa.

Episode one showed us there’s more to the show than the simple bog standard CBS procedural. Sure, it has everyone standing around in front of their desks, instead of sitting at them, staring at monitors (good job Piven’s helper monkeys are all young); occasionally the show will Numb3rs up and flash some science oddly (“We can use Bayes Theorem to make connections!”), too. But the police do the things they’re good at, the techies do the things they’re good at, and that’s it – no CSIs conducting interviews here.

Wisdom of the Crowd usually also has a fair idea of science and computing’s limitations: “Can’t you get your computer to analyse the images?” “Actually, computers are quite poor at visual recognition and it’s better to get people to do it.” It knows that a lot of the time, people talk nonsense and know nothing and that you have to mine through the chaff to get to the real information or people who might know what they’re talking about, with episode two giving us ‘crowd winnowing’ with a missing boy to come up with guesses from trackers, rangers and the like for where he might be.

The wisdom of viewing?

But that’s basically the show’s gimmick. It’s a superior gimmick and the cases are more varied and smarter than the usual procedural inanity. But as with all procedurals, that’s neither here nor there. Whether you watch is down to the characters and maybe a faint glimmer of a series plot.

In terms of story arc, episode two steered a little away from the hunt for the killer of Piven’s daughter, but still touched base with it, and episode three carried on with it strongly, so it’s a lot more dedicated to its story arc than The Mentalist was, for sure. There’s also an ongoing question about how Piven can afford all of this, given the staff and resources he’s using, with the suggestion he might need some cash or even have to sell up. Which is new for this kind of show, which always posits some unlimited bucket of cash for its advanced agencies.

As for the characters, you’ve got flashy but driven Piven and that’s about it. The only characters with any real animus are Piven’s ex-wife (Monica Potter) and Jones, but ultimately they’re just there for a bit of variety, rather than because anyone actually cares to give them backgrounds and stories of their own. Everyone else is a delivery vector for dialogue and plot, rather than someone you’d necessarily want to spend time with or at least get to know.

So is that enough to make me want to keep watching? No. Almost, but not quite, I don’t think, although it’s borderline. All the same, it might be for you. Certainly, compared to the rest of the crime procedurals on the market, particularly those from the CBS, this is the only one I could contemplate watching regularly. It’s also already one of my mother-in-law’s favourites. Give it a whirl if you like procedurals or want to try one of the better ones. Otherwise, I’d say that there’s probably something else more to your taste that you could watch instead.

Barrometer rating: 3

In the US: Wednesdays, 9/8c, CBS

Surprisingly, it turns out there’s life in SEAL Team after all. CBS’s entry in this year’s military format skirmish, it sees David Boreanaz (Angel, Bones) playing the leader of a SEAL Team who go around shooting whichever people the CIA’s Jessica Paré (Mad Men) deems appropriate. Episode one saw them head off to Africa to kill one of those ‘high ranking ISIS commanders’ that are all the rage these days; episode two saw them head off to Syria to root out some chemical weapons; and now episode three has given us some SE Asian pirates to take on. Simultaneously, we follow the antics of a SEAL trainee (Max Thieriot) as he goes through training and selection.

What’s characterised SEAL Team are all the things you can usually count on from CBS in spades. The budgets are huge, storytelling is efficient and the dialogue is semi-authentic. On top of that, the direction’s first rate, if a little influenced by first-person shooters, with night shoots, night-vision shots, drone shots, body-mounted cameras, underwater shoots and more. And it’s intelligently written, not just knocked out through find-and-replacing names in old The Unit scripts, giving us professional people at all levels of command, and characters who can quote Tennessee Williams and intersectional gender studies without the writers feeling they need to explain it all to the audience.

Bland

It’s all been smart, very patriotic, reverential to the services… and bland. Because for all the acronyms, tension and efficient killing, actually caring about the characters has been difficult, since their backgrounds have been the same old, same old. Boreanaz has difficulty dealing with the death of one of his comrades in arms, his marriage is falling apart and he doesn’t think much of his therapy sessions with 24‘s Reiko Aylesworth. Thieriot has to cope with the fact his dad used to be a SEAL and wrote a book about it. But that’s as much characterisation or background as anyone had. It’s all been about the job. And the only real serial element of the show has been Thieriot’s training ordeals and the alternating progress and decline of Boreanaz’s marriage.

Fortunately, episode three moves things along a little. There’s a little more life to Boreanaz’s character than there was before and he starts to become more than a cypher. A new serial element gets injected into the show that is moderately interesting (spoiler: (spoiler alert) Boreanaz’s dead buddy had a burner phone for communicating with a woman who may have been his girlfriend – or perhaps something more nefarious, so Boreanaz is investigating with the help of his NSA-trained buddy/colleague). The action scenes, while still a bit too ‘Medal of Honor’, show variety. There’s even a bit of humour. It’s still all “Americans, probably women, are in trouble somewhere in the world – let’s go save them” but to a certain extent, that’s the nature of the beast.

And the winner is?

Oddly, ignoring the execrable Six, there’s no clear winner in the special forces shoot-out raging between the networks, although SEAL Team probably just edges it through simple competence of production and not constantly looking like it’s shot in Canada/LA. They’re all reasonably good, but none is great. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, each has its own USP and there’s not a huge overlap in what they’re doing.

So, if you like character relationships, a strong female lead and serial storytelling, you’ve got Valor. If you like special forces skulking around being spies, you’ve got The Brave. And if you want glossy verisimilitude and firefights, you’ve got SEAL Team. Take your pick!

Barrometer rating: 2

In the US: Mondays, 9pm, The CW

Valor arrives to a crowded schedule. The US Fall season for 2017 has already welcomed some military special forces shows, with CBS and NBC delivering us SEAL Team and The Brave. Each network has its own characteristics and each of the two shows has largely embodied those characteristics. However, The Brave, while cheaper-looking, less authentic and less sure of itself than SEAL Team, turned out to be a far more engaging show than its shiny cousin.

So what then should you expect of this third effort, given it’s coming from The CW – the network of superheroes, the supernatural, soaps and supernatural superhero soaps? Something in a similar vein but wearing a uniform or something a whole lot better?

Steady on, soldier. Let’s not get carried away. But certainly Valor sits somewhere in the middle of the two shows rather than lingering behind on latrine duty.

Christina Ochoa (Blood Drive) plays an army pilot, who’s also one of the first women to be a member of the US special forces. She and her senior pilot Matt Barr (Hellcats) are involved on a mission in Somalia that goes wrong. They get shot down and are forced to survive until their rescue. Unfortunately, the rest of their team aren’t so lucky.

When they get back, they’re awarded medals and lauded with praise. However, there’s something that they’ve not told anyone about their mission, which becomes apparent when one of the soldiers they said had been killed turns up as a hostage to some Somalian terrorists.

What happened on the mission? Why are their superiors lying to them? Will their captured buddies escape from the Somalian terrorists? What was the mission really about? And will our hero and heroine find out before the CIA learn what they’re up to? Or even before they start some illicit, court-martiable shagging?

Forced

For a CW show, it’s far harder edged and bigger budgeted than you might imagine. They even manage to get a proper Black Hawk to fly around for a bit and do some manoeuvres, which is more than The Brave ever managed. It also feels more authentic than The Brave, and everyone talks the talk in a more superficially believable way than The Brave does. The helicopter side of things is even up to speed, with people knowing the difference between collective and cyclic, as well as how to auto-rotate.

Better still, it’s far less reverential than SEAL Team and The Brave, making our heroine a pill-taker, since she can’t deal with her post-mission PTSD otherwise. She’s also the centre of the show’s attention and isn’t there just to add a bit of diversity. We get to know who she is as a person and even when the inevitable “I had to work twice as hard to get here…” speech comes along, the show earns it. Sometimes it tries a little too hard to give her personality, such as making her a drummer as that helps her relax, but you can’t fault them for trying. I’d rather they did more than less in this instance.

Inevitably, there’s shagging and relationship issues, since it’s still The CW, but the show spends a commendable amount of time focused on the army side of things and its thriller plot, even if it has to break off for a little light librarian bondage for some R&R from time to time.

Stuck up against SEAL Team, though, Valor does look like it’s filmed in a Canadian field bulked out with some pre-rendered CGI helicopters it bought off eBay. Everyone’s just a little bit too pretty and clean for comfort and Somali is surprisingly damp for East Africa.

Ochoa and Barr are reasonably committed to their roles, even if they both feel like they’ve come straight from basic training, rather than heroic missions behind enemy lines. Dialogue’s a little wooden and “tell don’t show”, but you’ll have heard far, far worse on both The Brave and SEAL Team. At least there aren’t any desperate attempts to eulogise God, country and country music to win over the flyover states.

Valorous

So Valor isn’t terrible. In some ways, it’s better than both the alternatives. Its characters are more personable than both of those shows’. Its attention to military detail is greater than The Brave‘s, it has more to say than SEAL Team and it somehow still manages to look better than The Brave most of the time.

However, it isn’t great. It’s less exciting than both The Brave and SEAL Team, and its story arc is so minimally engaging that I doubt more than two members of the CIA would have to get demoted and get docked a couple of weeks’ pay if all the terrible secrets ever come out.

I doubt I’ll go further than the first three episodes, if that, but I’m pleasantly surprised by how well The CW has done here.