‘The Endgame’ on NBC: TV Review
The storyline is superficially similar to NBC’s long-running series The Blacklist and Blindspot. Morena Baccarin, the show’s star, is an Emmy contender with a long list of fan favourites. Ryan Michelle Bathé, a co-star, seems to be the kind of up-and-coming young talent you want to get before they reach the “Yeah, I’d rather do streaming” tier. And in pilot director Justin Lin, you have someone with a proven track record of polishing up even the most mundane broadcast programmes.
However, the wasteful broadcast pilot process is built such that when you actually construct the pilot and find that none of the traits that may have led the pilot to make sense showed through in the actual pilot, you’re simply expected to go on. The Endgame pilot is terrible, and the second episode shows no signs of things getting better, so I’m ready to move on, even if NBC isn’t.
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The storyline is superficially similar to NBC’s long-running series The Blacklist and Blindspot. Morena Baccarin, the show’s star, is an Emmy contender with a long list of fan favourites. Ryan Michelle Bathé, a co-star, seems to be the kind of up-and-coming young talent you want to get before they reach the “Yeah, I’d rather do streaming” tier. And in pilot director Justin Lin, you have someone with a proven track record of polishing up even the most mundane broadcast programmes.
However, the wasteful broadcast pilot process is built such that when you actually construct the pilot and find that none of the traits that may have led the pilot to make sense showed through in the actual pilot, you’re simply expected to go on. The Endgame pilot is terrible, and the second episode shows no signs of things getting better, so I’m ready to move on, even if NBC isn’t.
The Endgame, created by Nicholas Wootton, is a classic cat-and-mouse game. Elena Federova (Baccarin), a curiously overdressed Russian mercenary, is transferred to a guarded military installation in Long Island. The strange thing is that I’m not sure why they brought her in or where she came from, but practically soon after she arrives, everything goes wild. That comes as a shock to the all-star bureaucratic team questioning Elena, which includes the attorney general (Kelly Aucoin), the FBI director (Mark Espinoza), and the secretary of homeland security (Jenna Stern). New York is attacked by a series of daring bank robberies with no obvious link other than Elena, who is being held in detention, grinning as if she knows something.
Val Turner (Bathé), an FBI agent who met Elena in Gambia when Elena’s army-for-hire took out a local warlord and then Elena sought to take out Val, is called in on the first case.
Val understands that with Elena, every strategy has layers, which we learn about since Val repeats it a half-dozen times in the first couple of episodes to everyone who would listen. That means Val is constantly a step ahead of the game, which is exhilarating if you haven’t watched a thriller since Day of the Jackal. Although not every cat-and-mouse novel involving a bright criminal and a tenacious law enforcement officer is the same, Elena and her master plan — much less her, well, endgame — are in no way alike. When Elena and Val collide, it’s two individuals telling each other how much they have in common and how incredibly intelligent they are, rather than the writer showing us how much they have in common and how impressively clever they are.
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It’s not like The Blacklist or Blindspot were ever really brilliant shows, but they each had their strengths.
Blindspot had a built-in tat-of-the-week framework with its appealing tattooed-woman-in-a-duffle-bag hook that enabled viewers play along at home, at least to some extent. Because the whole idea of the Elena/Val interaction is that they have Googled each other, the Endgame audience is forced to sit back and watch them discover that the solutions to their questions are things they already know. It’s a dreadfully crafted play.
Even at its worst — before I quit watching — Blacklist was always anchored by James Spader’s scenery chewing, which became predictable but never dull. Elena is meant to play a similar role in Endgame, and Baccarin is having a blast smirking, but she’s got an inconsistent Russian accent — partly her fault, partly the fault of the narrative that promotes it — and a clever character who can’t convey her intelligence in an amusing manner. Madame Smirksalova isn’t humorous or delightfully nasty, but the process of exposing to viewers that our nemesis could simply be a second protagonist smooths out any rough edges. You don’t want her to succeed, yet you also don’t want her to fail. Most of the time, I was simply hoping for something amusing to happen.
Val is, at the very least, persistent, which is a quality. Val’s FBI coworkers are wary of her since her husband, a fellow agent of some kind, was imprisoned on corruption charges. But since the programme doesn’t want viewers to have any doubts about her, she’s just dogged, virtuous, and uninteresting, even if she’s portrayed well within those constraints.
The remainder of the cast is almost non-existent. They’re cardboard cutouts who say things like, “She’s a criminal, and criminals by definition are stupid, else they wouldn’t be criminals,” or “She’s a criminal, and criminals by definition are dumb, otherwise they wouldn’t be criminals.” That tautology is neither truthful nor entertaining, yet it is emblematic of all of The Endgame’s discourse. The one notable exception is Costa Ronin, who plays Elena’s “late” — he’s not dead, but many believe he is — husband Sergey, but you’re not watching this programme for him.
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Finally, there’s Lin’s weak engagement, which is a letdown. Lin provided pilots for Scorpion, S.W.A.T., and Magnum P.I. visual pzazz on a CBS budget, despite his notable TV credentials like episodes of Community and True Detective. There isn’t a single spectacular set-piece or stunt in The Endgame’s pilot. Even when Val receives a call to drive to a second bank heist in the first episode and decides that rather than turning around at the next light, she’ll put her vehicle in backward, there’s no joy escaping oncoming traffic and definitely no continuous amusement.
There are no visual concepts, narrative ideas, or core performances to keep you watching while you wait for the other qualities to appear. I’m not sure what Elena’s goal is, and it doesn’t matter to me. However, the goal of my review is to do what NBC’s creative process failed to do: protect viewers from an apparent flop.
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source: hollywoodreporter
