It’s been two seasons since last I checked in with the NCIS team out in Los Angeles. And when last I did, I recall finding it unfortunate that a show with so much promise would do such a poor job of drawing me in. All sorts of things just weren’t clicking. Was that nothing more than freshman jitters? Last week I endeavored to find out.
It was nice to see Drew Fuller doing a guest spot as Connor, the dishonorably discharged Marine the team was investigating for murder. It looks like CBS is out to keep the cast of Army Wives working while their show is on hiatus; Sterling Brown was just on The Good Wife.
It took me a little while to acclimate myself to the differences between the East Coast and West Coast NCIS versions. I enjoyed the distinct difference that was the naval personnel being alive and not a dead victim; that makes for a nice change. And the team isn’t bad, either.
Chris O’Donnell makes a good team leader. He’s had a long career that didn’t necessarily hint at his winding up on this type of procedural, but I see a lot of similarities between Callen and his vet, Finn Dandridge, from Grey’s Anatomy, a character that I found a good fit for the once-upon-a-time Robin.
Kensi (Daniela Ruah) is cool, and while her partnership with Deeks (I can’t watch Eric Christian Olsen anymore without thinking of The Loop … which for him is not a good thing) is probably always a secondary option, she gets a fair amount of opportunity to shine. And when she and Deeks are going at it, she even makes him enjoyable.
Eric’s (Barrett Foa) cool as well, and I liked the fact that he got to go out into the field and not just be some tech nerd stuck in a back room. If he regularly gets that chance, the show made a really great choice.
But not everyone’s quite as fun. I didn’t like Hetty (Linda Hunt) in the first place, and I liked her even less this time around. What’s the point of her character in office hierarchy? Considering that Vance runs both offices, she’d have to be in the Gibbs role … which obviously she’s not, because she’s not a field agent. I’m not sure that Callen’s quite “team leader” in the same respect as Gibbs, but he’s a lot closer to Gibbs’ role than she is. It felt like she was meant to be an oracle, and I really wasn’t a fan.
Nell (Renée Felice Smith) was neither here nor there … not around enough this past episode to make a distinct impression. And Sam? I like LL Cool J, and I remember liking his performance on NCIS: LA the first time around, but last week he was stiff all over the place. His Semper Fi speech was predictable, lacking in sincere passion, and completely blown out of proportion for what was happening with Connor’s case. Strange, because even sixteen years ago on In the House he did better as an actor.
The weirdest thing about the episode was how out of place the goings-on felt set in their surroundings. There was something odd about the less than professional atmosphere in an office where such important things like murder investigations are taking place. I know that’s part of the show’s style (and charm?), but to me it kept the episode slightly askew the entire time.
Which isn’t to say that I minded the forty-four minutes I spent watching the episode, but my impression was of a show still failing to do certain things that it failed to do after season one episode two. Other than jettisoning a couple of characters, have they made any significant adjustments in fifty episode?
Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Nov 08, 2011 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
I finished two years plus one episode cliffhanger resolution before bailing. I never connected with the characters to any degree, except the two they wrote out of the show, and felt they only became more smug and entitled as time went on. And I could believe Sam as a Marine, but not a SEAL.
It does have the distinction of always going one better than the parent show. If one person would turn in their badge on NCIS, here the entire team lines up to drop their badges on Vance’s desk. Gibbs goes to Mexico to kill one criminal. The OSP flies to the Balkans to wipe out an entire crime family that was trying to kill Callen, storming two separate strongholds to do so (probably would have been a diplomatic incident if the local police had ever caught them), then comes home and picks up their badges, no harm, no foul. Ducky has charming stories from his long and varied career. Hetty is better than James Bond: more languages, skills, identities, houses, weapons, cars, etc., and has a cool story with every international celebrity in the past fifty years.
This is a show that Brennan built from the ground up, rather than taking over. I didn’t care for it.
*POST AUTHOR*
Based on that spirited review … why did you hang around as long as you did??? :)
That’s not long at all (and I have trouble quitting in the middle of a season unless a show is exceptionally bad). I watched HIMYM for two seasons too many. :)
*POST AUTHOR*
Funny, I think we’ve been hanging on about four seasons past How I Met Your Mother‘s til good date! :)
Because there’s more than one approach to TV than “drop in for one episode and then bailing on it”?