Criminal Minds: Suspect Behaviour
Mar. 4th, 2011 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thelibraniniquityI tried. I really did.
I gave up after about 8 minutes. There was just nothing interesting about the plot, the characters or the way either were handled or presented to the audience. I always assumed the point of a spin-off was to present a variation on a theme, such as NCIS spinning off from JAG, or Frasier from Cheers.
Suspect Behaviour showed me absolutely nothing that Criminal Minds hasn't already done a dozen times over with much more urgency.
The new team consists of Forest Whitaker, a British dude, an ex-con, a Token Chick and a second Token Chick seemingly brought in to help even out the gender balance. Without the backdoor pilot from CM to guide me, all I know about this team is that Forest Whitaker is pretending to be some guy named Sam Cooper, there's an ex-con who is Special Agent Pending Simms, and that one of the chicks is named Griffith. Personality-wise, the ex-con is big on righteous vengeance, and Call Me Sam wears a leather jacket and stick fights. I can't remember exactly, but by roughly this point in CM we'd been given a roll call of the team's names and individual specialities, an idea of Gideon's mental state (which would influence a majority of the episodes with a focus on him) and a gripping plot - gripping because it was something new. Something that hadn't really been done before, except perhaps as an occasional gimmick in other procedural shows. Worse, the characters are bland from the get go.
I'm not intrigued. I'm not pulled in. I know the spiel and the techniques and the procedure already. This isn't a new show, it's just Criminal Minds but with a different aesthetic.
And not for me.
I gave up after about 8 minutes. There was just nothing interesting about the plot, the characters or the way either were handled or presented to the audience. I always assumed the point of a spin-off was to present a variation on a theme, such as NCIS spinning off from JAG, or Frasier from Cheers.
Suspect Behaviour showed me absolutely nothing that Criminal Minds hasn't already done a dozen times over with much more urgency.
The new team consists of Forest Whitaker, a British dude, an ex-con, a Token Chick and a second Token Chick seemingly brought in to help even out the gender balance. Without the backdoor pilot from CM to guide me, all I know about this team is that Forest Whitaker is pretending to be some guy named Sam Cooper, there's an ex-con who is Special Agent Pending Simms, and that one of the chicks is named Griffith. Personality-wise, the ex-con is big on righteous vengeance, and Call Me Sam wears a leather jacket and stick fights. I can't remember exactly, but by roughly this point in CM we'd been given a roll call of the team's names and individual specialities, an idea of Gideon's mental state (which would influence a majority of the episodes with a focus on him) and a gripping plot - gripping because it was something new. Something that hadn't really been done before, except perhaps as an occasional gimmick in other procedural shows. Worse, the characters are bland from the get go.
I'm not intrigued. I'm not pulled in. I know the spiel and the techniques and the procedure already. This isn't a new show, it's just Criminal Minds but with a different aesthetic.
And not for me.