TV is FOREVER Making Procedurals (but this one's good!)

Article first published as FOREVER Review on Seat42F.

Make no mistake about it; ABC’s new drama FOREVER is a crime-of-the-week procedural. Those of you who regularly read my reviews will now expect a scathing tear-down of the show. Yet, for some reason, I absolutely love it, or at least, I love the pilot. I expect I’ll probably turn on FOREVER at some point in its freshman season, as many episodes are likely to feel repetitive. However, it sucks me in with terrific characters and an extremely intriguing premise that I really want to know more about.

On the surface, FOREVER could be seen as Castle: Immortal Style. It features a very intelligent, charming non-law enforcement investigator, Dr. Henry Morgan (Ioan Gruffudd, Ringer, Fantastic Four), who begins helping out a tough, independent, smart, at-times-annoyed-by-him female detective, Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza, Do No Harm, Law & Order). The hook is not that Henry is a writer; he’s an immortal that wakes up naked in the water every time he is killed. And it sure seems like he’s been killed a lot.

Now, Henry is a medical examiner, the type of man who looks at dead bodies and determines their cause of death. This makes him a little more relevant and his involvement a little more appropriate than his counterpart on sister show Castle, which airs on the same network. But I doubt many medical examiners are usually out walking the beat and hunting for clues. The ones shown in other TV shows are usually small, recurring parts, other than in Body of Proof, which is a unique case.

There is a third player who is equally important to the mix, Henry’s friend Abe (Judd Hirsch, Taxi, Numb3rs). The only person Henry has entrusted with his secret, they obviously have been close for a very long time. Abe encourages Henry to help the pretty Jo and tries to get him to engage in life, something Henry has struggled with since the death of his wife. Might now be the time and the place Henry will come out of his shell? Of course it is. Otherwise, there’d be no television show.

When considering why FOREVER stands out above the pack, this central trio, especially the two men, as Jo’s character is pretty stock at this point, are more interesting and colorful than in other programs. Henry has the brains of Sherlock Holmes, but is more centered and calm, having learned much through hard-won experience over hundreds of years. Abe’s role is a bit more murky, but who doesn’t love Hirsch? He brings to the table an engaging personality.

The larger arcs, Henry’s origin and a guy who keeps calling threatening to expose the secret, are dealt with in the first episode, quickly establishing there will be an ongoing story in addition to the procedural. It may just be because this is a pilot, but FOREVER seems to give almost as much weight to this as it does to the weekly case, which makes the hour go down better.

There’s also a heck of a twist at the end that I cannot spoil, and I’m surprised at how surprised I was to see it. But it’s very cool, and I cannot wait for the implications of it to be explored.

The supporting cast includes Joel David Moore (Bones, Avatar), Donnie Keshawarz (The Wolf of Wall Street), and Lorraine Toussaint (Orange Is the New Black). Each plays a co-worker of one of the two leads, and none really stand out much in the initial installment. But that’s par for this type of show. At least they’ve cast people who can handle better material, should it be given to them.

There are a great many crime shows on television, and there are very few I pay attention to, pretty much just Bones, Castle, and Elementary. Somehow, FOREVER seems at least on par with those, a couple of notches better than the Law & Order or NCIS franchises. It strikes a balance between the standardized format and something interesting, and as long as it keeps serious weight on the latter, it could be a show worth watching.

FOREVER premieres Tuesday, September 23^rd at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.

Do No Harm doesn't harm, nor heal

Article originally published as DO NO HARM Series Premiere Review at Seat42F

Grade: 82%

NBC’s DO NO HARM premieres this Thursday at 10 p.m. ET. It’s a Jekyl and Hyde story about a doctor who turns into a psychopath for twelve hours every day. The medical aspect is played up, with much of the drama set in the hospital, making DO NO HARM a hybrid between a classic good vs. evil tale and a case of the week procedural.

In some ways, DO NO HARM reminds me of Awake, which was canceled after a single season. Both have two distinct realms, but the big difference in DO NO HARM is, instead of the other characters changing around the protagonist, the protagonist changes in the midst of everyone else. But they both dwell in mythology and mystery, to make the series just a little better than the standard network flare.

Does this signal the end of the straight cop or doctor show? We have so many flooding the air waves that any new show needs a gimmick to get attention. In the case of DO HARM, the hook is the personality shifts of the lead. This could be the future of the genre, using the tried and true formula that has worked for so many other shows, but including a little extra to trick the critics and discerning who would write off such a procedural without a second thought into sticking around.

In the pilot of DO NO HARM, Doctor Jason Cole (Steven Pasquale, Rescue Me) treats a man who has a cluster of blood vessels in his head. It’s a tricky surgery, one Cole has not performed before, but he soars through it, giving the man his life back. Cheesy goop, the same kind of story you’d see on any other medical procedural. This is the part of the episode we do not need.

What’s much more enticing is that Jason turns into a man named Ian (also Pasquale) at night, and since Jason has been using drugs to repress Ian for five years, Ian isn’t too happy. Now that Ian has built up a resistance to the regimen, he is bent on revenge. This could be a disaster for the surgeon, except that Jason is smart enough to put safeguards in place to keep Ian from actually performing surgery. For now, anyway, until Ian figures out a way around them.

There is a second villain in the form of Jason’s co-worker, Doctor Kenneth Jordan (Michael Esper, A Beautiful Mind). Jordan isn’t much of a threat, at least not yet, since he’s clueless about Jason’s condition. But we don’t need Jordan to be all that bad, since Ian is the real antagonist of the series.

Now, a big leap of faith has to be taken in that Jason is the head of a surgical department at what looks to be a major hospital. His boss, Dr. Vanessa Young (Phylicia Rashad, The Cosby Show), is extremely understanding of his unspecified medical condition, which does not allow him to work at night. But considering what long hours surgeons work during their training, it’s odd that he would reach such a level, especially at such a young age, without being able to fully commit to his job. And as a doctor herself, shouldn’t Vanessa have more questions? She clearly doesn’t know the extent of Jason’s struggle, and I find that very odd.

We also have to believe that Jason has a buddy named Dr. Ruben Marcado (Lin-Manuel Miranda), who not only just happens to be a brilliant researcher, but who is willing to continuously risk his career, using the hospital’s resources to try to find ways to control or cure Jason of Ian. I’m sure that the writers can spin a backstory that justifies the relationship between Jason and Ruben, but explaining how he does all of this work for Jason and still keeps his job will require quite a bit of a stretch.

That’s the issue with DO NO HARM: it stretches reality too much. I really love the interplay between Jason and Ian, the struggle for control over each one’s own life, and how the actor handles both parts, but some things don’t make sense.

For instance, Jason is apparently a very bad liar; at least, that’s what we’re told during his interactions with Dr. Lena Solis (Alana De La Garza, Law & Order), the obligatory love interest. Yet, he lies all day, every day in his normal life, to almost everyone, and even thinks he can lie to Ian in video form. How does that work? Is he a bad liar or isn’t he?

I did think it was interesting that this pilot begins with Jason’s flirtations with Lena, and then reveals a history that includes an ex, Olivia Flynn (Ruta Gedmintas, The Borgias), whom Ian is still obsessed with, and who has been keeping a secret from both men. Olivia seems like the sort of plot that would begin in season one, and then be revisited later, with Lena introduced much later in the series. To enter at this point is a choice I find intriguing, though not unlike what ABC’s Scandal is currently doing.

I enjoyed this episode for the most part. I like the premise, and the cast, which includes John Carroll Lynch (Body of Proof) as Jason’s confidant and Samm Levine (Freaks and Geeks) as Jason’s competent assistant, is great. Yet, the nagging plots holes did infringe on my enjoyment. Plenty of good shows start with some uneven storytelling and work it out, which is what I hope will happen here.

One last complaint. While the image of Jason writing Do No Harm in a foggy mirror, and Ian erasing the message, works great for promos, it feels completely ridiculous in the episode. This should not have been included.