Review – The Forgotten
The Forgotten – ABC – 10:00/9:00pm – USA
Jerry Bruckheimer is what we in the business like to call an “uber-producer”. He just fronts the cash for flashy procedurals that appear on CBS and are named things like CSI, or Without A Trace, or CSI: Miami, or CSI: New York. He also made a little show called Cold Case, about a team of investigators who solve cases that have never been solved. The Forgotten is absolutely one hundred percent nothing like that show, promise.
The Forgotten is a flashy procedural from uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer about a team of investigators who solve cases that have never been solved, but, and here’s the difference, this show is on ABC and not CBS. I told you they were nothing alike. They’re also nothing alike in the fact that the couple of episodes of Cold Case I caught weren’t mind numbingly stupid.
The Forgotten stars (is “stars” the right word?) Christian Slater as ex-cop Alex Donovan. Alex fronts a team of amateur detectives who get given closed cases where the victim’s identity could not be determined. Slater and his pals from The Forgotten Network (seriously, that’s what they call themselves) piece together the puzzles and come to some pretty obvious conclusions that say more about the state of the Chicago Police Department then they do about the skills of this team of amateurs.
I’d go through and name each of this crew but they lack so much personality it’s best just to go with their short character bio. Obviously there’s Christian Slater and his grating voice who is again looking for work after the craptastic My Own Worst Enemy got cancelled. As well as a school teacher, an office worker, a telephone repairman, and an artist who got arrested for tagging a court house and is on parole, also he can do really accurate sculpting work recreating people’s faces… which is handy.
In its only attempt to set itself apart from every other detective show out there The Forgotten has the dead person narrate the episode. Of course the dead person’s narration is so generic and obvious that it just adds to the whole ‘flash and no substance’ feel of the show. Why should we care about any of these characters, or these victims, if the producers of the show obviously don’t? I haven’t seen another show this year with the words ‘I just made this for the money’ stamped so hard on its forehead. You can almost see in the actors eyes that they know they’re going to have to start looking for work again when this gets cancelled.
I’m not saying we as the audience deserve anything better than what we’re given but just think about the montage where the gang wander around handing out missing person leaflets and think to yourself ‘why did I have to see that?’ Or listen to the scene where one random character tells another random character ‘You get a name when you enter this world so you should have it when you leave.” And think to yourself ‘why should I have to listen to that?’ Jerry Bruckheimer is slumming it and if he can’t be bothered with the show, why should we?
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
