2015-2016 police procedural, 23 episodes. A woman is found in a bag in
Times Square: she's alive, naked, totally amnesiac, and covered with
tattoos. The FBI investigates.
Well, at least they didn't do too much of the whole dwelling on
the sexy naked tattooed female body thing… after the first episode, at
any rate. But mostly this ended up being a generic modern series:
about 80% crime-of-the-week where Good Cops kick down doors and shoot
the bad guys, and about 20% arc stuff about how "Jane", as she decides
to call herself, got into that bag in the first place.
For that to work, the arc material has to be compelling, and it just…
isn't. As the season went on and secret groups inside and outside the
US intelligence community proliferated, I just got a feeling of
undirected foreshadowing, like a J. J. Abrams series where the writers
are at liberty to invent whatever they like – because buildup makes
for good drama, and the producers have no overall answer because the
show will probably be cancelled before they have to reveal it anyway.
The only stand-out among the cast is Marianne Jean-Baptiste as the
local FBI boss, trying to be smart and stay on top of the deep
political games while everyone else is having fun running around and
shooting people. Anghenyyl fur qvrf orsber gur raq bs gur frnfba.
Acting is very flat. Plots are uncompelling. This is filler TV for the
age when TV drama has got a bit smarter: it uses the minimum amount of
smartness to be credible, spreads it as thinly as possible, and aims
its appeal at the mouth-breathers in the audience. Naturally it was
renewed for a second season.
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