Kidnapped 1.1 Review

When I caught the first promos for NBCs new show Kidnapped, I marveled at how similar the production seemed to Ransom, the Mel Gibson/Ron Howard vehicle from some years past. Rich couple's young son is abducted and taken to a seedy apartment with piss-stained walls while robot man calls rich couple to set up exchange. And of course, robot man warns rich couple not to call cops, but cops are called anyway, etc. In a somewhat shocking twist Delroy Lindo, who played the FBI agent who helped Mel Gibson hunt down his son, here is played by... what what? Delroy Lindo? Not the best first step in setting yourself apart.

Still, I heard good things about the show, and they've certainly put together a solid cast (even with Lindo recycling a part he played ten years ago). So, it was high on my list of new shows to check out. Well, thanks to a special agreement between Netflix and NBC, I got an early peek at the pilot for both Kidnapped and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (more on that show at a later date), and I'm a little sad to say that Kidnapped has slipped rather precipitously down the TiVo priority chain.

With 24 and Lost making serial television all the rage, the networks are requiring a huge investment of time for all these miss-an-episode-and-you're-lost programs, and for shameless serial television addicts like myself, there are only so many hours one can pencil in for TV while still keeping some sense of a life. In a given season some shows just aren't going to make the cut, and unfortunately, as with last year's Invasion, a slow start is an immediate death sentence. Invasion was in my top three favorite shows at the end of last year (with Lost and 24), but because of its slow and deliberate pacing over the course of the year, by the time the tremendous finale came down, nobody was watching. Point being, if a show wants to get ahead in a crowd of demanding new programs, it has to come out of the box like a bolt of lightning. Kidnapped fails to do that. Sure, it doesn't exactly trip over the starting line, but rather casually saunters, or moseys, if you will, out of the blocks.

The show wastes no time setting up the major plotline. After a superficial breakfast with the Cain family -- frosty and superficial parents Conrad and Ellie (Timothy Hutton and Dana Delany), precocious young daughter Alice (Lydia Jordan), and awkward, intelligent son Leopold (Will Denton) -- Leopold heads out for his day, sharing a handful of words with the enigmatic bodyguard Virgil (Mykelti Williamson) before a handful of mysterious men attack in a bluntly staged abduction.

The abduction, cold and abrupt, is the most compelling moment of the pilot. Unfortunately, the rest of the episode doesn't give us much desire to follow the story through. Despite a tremendous cast, the script doesn't bother to dredge up much humanity from its performers. Stoicism seemed to be the rule on-set, as if the director yelled "GRAVITAS!" before every take. Aside from one scene on the balcony between Ellie and rebel lawman Knapp (Jeremy Sisto), the cast walks around like lock-jawed zombies. I guess this is so everybody can have their moment in the suspect circle throughout the season, but it only serves to keep us at a distance from everyone on the screen.

So, if we can't get invested in the characters, how about the plot? Well, even that is fairly uninspired. Nearly everything in the pilot weve seen before. The two detectives -- one outside the law (Sisto) and the other by-the book (Lindo). The pregnant pauses when the phone rings so the detectives can run a trace. The robotic voice. "Don't call the cops." Blah blah blah. Kidnapped needed desperately to set itself apart from the hundreds of other kidnapping stories that have been done over the years from Law and Order to Ransom to Fox's Vanished. Unfortunately, its staging was fairly pedestrian, and even a little stupid. In the final act, the detectives bungle an exchange so badly its mind-boggling. Viewers could see it was a set-up from the word go, but that didn't seem to occur to anyone within the story. This was stupid stupid, on the level of the prom queen walking into a dark room in a slasher picture.

After the exchange, I expected some nasty twist or cliff-hanger to close out the episode, something that might leave me itching to know what happens next. Instead, we get a contemplative montage of Knapp staring out the window. Not exactly 24 level thrills here. Nothing I'm dying to revisit either.

Grade for Kidnapped 1.1: C