Okay, so here's the thing: there are times when credibility and credulity should be readily dismissed. In the theater arts it is called "the willing suspension of disbelief." At the onset of a performance the audience and performer enter an unspoken contract where the audience agrees to happily follow wherever the narrative may go, provided the artists don't betray the parameters of the story they have set in the mind of the audience member. This last point is key. All stories happen on two planes: the one that artists tell and the one that the audience hears. If the artists betray the story the audience hears, then the audience will no longer be willing to suspend their disbelief that the pretense happening in front of them is actually happening.
In TV this happens all the time ususally towards the end of a series: the Brady's take in Cousin Oliver; Fonzie waterskis over a shark pen; Roseanne gets rich; Bobby Ewing steps out of the shower; Mulder leaves Scully. Sometimes a new series squanders all of the audience's suspension of disbelief in the pilot. Either the premise is too ridiculous to follow (think NBC's Animal Practice) or the performers are incapable of pulling it off (think NBC's Guys With Kids). ABC's Last Resort will be a show, like the early seasons of 24 or last year's Homeland, that will constantly and happily dance on the line between belief and disbelief; the premise is so outlandish (the writing's a little creaky at times, as well) that you know at any moment the show could crater. Likewise several of the performances fail to deliver the challenging material as well as they should. What is fascinating to me is that regardless of the potential pitfalls, Last Resort's series creators Shawn Ryan and Karl Gajdusek show no fear in tempering the emotional or intellectual components of their series. Perhaps they simply trust the ace in the hole they have with the incomparable performance of Andre Braugher.
Last Resort is about the captain and crew of the USS Colorado; this is a competent group of navy men and women who understand the proper chain of authority, even when they don't agree with it. While on a routine patrol in the equatorial Indian Ocean, they get orders through a seldom-used back channel to launch a nuclear warhead at Pakistan. They fail to secure a secondary confirmation through proper channels and refuse to follow orders; they are immediately fired upon by their own government. Reeling from their renegade status, they decide the only appropriate course of action would be to commandeer their 18 nuclear missiles and take over a nearby island. I want to avoid too many specific spoilers except to say that soon they unquestionably make their presence known as a nuclear power to the world. No one can say that the premise is derivative.
I wish the same were true down the line with the scripting. This is a huge cast and a lot of them are white. Aside from Braugher, there is the Asian navigator, the Hispanic crew woman, the NATO worker with the French accent, the black mayor/crime lord of the island and the Asian hottie bartender. I don't particularly like to use those descriptors, but there is little in the script to differentiate the cast from each other. There's also a painfully obvious sexism plot at play here. This doesn't make me uncomfortable as much as sad; it culminates in the first hour with the line said by the female lead of the show: "It's "You, little bitch, Lieutenant.'" Many of the stinger lines you can easily script while you sit on your couch. But I can forgive all this. There is only 42 minutes to set up a long term action story; it therefore relies heavily on the stereotypes, easy visual signifiers and facile scripting of the action genre to keep our subconscious distracted while it makes a play for the high emotional pay offs and headier ideas inherent in the concept. And there are some great payoffs and heady concepts to be mined here. There's really only one bit I find egregious in the pilot. Now stick with me: Han Solo enters a tropical bar to have a drink and forget the mess he's now in/created and instead of shooting Greedo (and I know the character in Last Resort is really Jabba), he intimidates the bad guy and his handful of goons through his words and the promise of his badassery. It's a great scene, but in his next one, he's inconsolably crying in front of the hottie bartender. Han Solo is crying. Han doesn't cry; that's almost akin to Batman giving up. Granted I have no idea the stakes that the character is truly reacting to, but here, in this series, in this world, tears does not humanize the man it neuters him.
Fortunately that is the only sequence that really threatened my suspension of disbelief, mostly because Andre Braugher believes every single second of what is happening. You can never underestimate the power of a great performance. In all theatrical situations you have to rely on the actors to carry their belief in the material to the audience. It's what allows the audience to believe a girl can go to OZ or zombies have taken over the world or a man can turn into a giant green monster. Here you believe that the only course of action for these men and women to take is to turn rogue and set up a dictatorship on a remote island, because Braugher sells it. At one point his XO, played by an almost unrecognizable Scott Speedman, say, "Just crazy enough, sir," and it's a great line compact with all kinds of meaning.
The rest of the cast is a mixed bag. Speedman (Felicity) is good but given little to do except pine over his wife in the US, played by Jessy Schram (Falling Skies, Once Upon a Time). Robert Patrick (T2, The X-Files, The Unit) plays Chief of the Boat Prosser; Patrick brings his blue collar realism to the fore as a man capable of more than his station will ever allow him to play. Unfortunately he's on the whipping end of the sexism plot stick. I hope that plot gets resolved/dropped quickly; he and the show will be better served with him as the voice of measured reason. He being a sexist pig undermines any credibility they will need going forward. Daisy Betts plays his superior officer, Lt. Grace Sinclair and the less time spent with her the better. I can't imagine how rising to that position of authority may change a woman, but right now the brittleness is coming off as cliched and hackneyed. Autumn Reesner (The O.C.), on the other hand, plays a high-level defense contractor, and she is sassy and sexy and fun. I'm concerned about her role being stuck in DC, but perhaps we will be exploring the government conspiracy through her eyes. Bruce Davison (X-men, X2) plays Admiral Sinclair, a navy big wig in DC and Grace's father, but he's still a patrician blank slate at this point. The only other actor to make an impression is Australian actor Daniel Lessing, who plays the enigmatic, and Han Solo-esque, James King. The material let him down a bit, but I was engaged by him up to that point. The other performers and there are at least 6 other characters of considerable import make either no impression or a bad one by being too enthusiastic in their line delivery. They very much remind me of the minor players in Falling Skies and that's not a good thing.
It seems like I didn't like the show, and nothing could be farther from the truth. I really, really liked it. It may be my favorite new series of the fall. It's a tight, taut hour filled with great action sequences and even some surprises. It masks itself in the action/adventure tropes, but underneath there's some fascinating kernels of a story there. What does it take to create a society, and what are the stakes of legitimacy? Can a well-oiled machine versed in the chain of command set up a military oligarchy when is already in place. At the close of the episode, Braugher's Captain Chaplin says, "What happened to the country I grew up in? They made it all a mess. We can do it better...right here. Start from scratch." That series is a series I want to see. I'm hopeful they can deliver and won't betray my investment.
Last Resort will air Thursdays at 8:00 on ABC, starting on Sept. 27. You can watch the pilot online now, including in the player below.
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