Review – Unforgettable
Unforgettable – CBS – 10:00/9:00pm Tuesday – USA
CBS has spent the last decade churning out crime procedural after crime procedural. If there’s a person with a unique ability solving crimes they’re probably solving crimes on CBS. Whether they’re whispering to ghosts or getting inside the minds of criminal they’re going to have that crime solved by the end of the episode – except in the case of a special two-part episode that usually appears once a year to shake things up. CBS have made so many of these shows that when a new one comes along it can sometimes just slide right in and feel like it’s been around forever. Unforgettable is a crime series about a woman with the unique ability of ‘remembering everything’, and it’s yet another shiny crime procedural for CBS.
It should be noted that Unforgettable was originally titled The Rememberer, which is so hilariously awful that it’s genuinely surprising it took them so long to change it the wholly unremarkable and not funny at all Unforgettable. Unforgettable stars Poppy Montgomery (Without A Trace) as former police detective Carrie Wells, a woman who suffers from hyperthymesia, a condition that allows her to recall every specific detail of every event she’s ever experienced. To the shows credit they manage to introduce this completely ludicrous plot device without it coming across as all that stupid, which isn’t the same as saying that watching a woman remember things to solve crimes is interesting, it just could have been a lot sillier.
Joining Poppy Montgomery in her quest to stand around remembering details of a crime is a reasonably solid trio of actors including Dylan Walsh (Nip/Tuck) as her ex-boyfriend and former partner Al Burns, Kevin Rankin (Friday Night Lights, Justified) as Roe Sanders, and Michael Gaston (Rubicon, Terriers) as Mike Costello. While it’s great to see Rankin and Gaston getting work on shows that are bound to find them in front of bigger audiences, it’s not as great seeing them stuck in a by-the-numbers crime-of-the-week series. Montgomery is the weakest link in the cast as she’s forced to spend most of the episode staring off into the half-distance having flashbacks. Unforgettable faces a pretty large hurdle in figuring out how to seamlessly integrate Carrie’s remembering into the show without it dragging everything to a screeching halt. It hasn’t yet succeeded as stopping the action for lengthy flashbacks where Carrie walks around inside of her memory is not the way to make the remembering interesting.
For a pilot to work often it just needs to establish what tuning into the show will be like and for the most part Unforgettable does that. Now, that’s not to suggest that what Unforgettable shows us in this first episode is a show that’s worth watching, it just appears to be a show that knows what it wants to do and does it. Unforgettable is a competent crime show, nothing flashy, it manages to hit all of its marks whilst establishing a sliver of an ongoing mystery that will probably be ignored for most of the season. The problem with Unforgettable is that it’s incredibly sombre and really drags in parts, especially when Carrie starts remembering things; it’s a series in desperate need of some light comic relief. There is nothing going on in Unforgettable that you haven’t seen before, and what really lets the show down isn’t the daffy premise but the fact that it just doesn’t try very hard to be anything more than a murder-of-the-week delivery system, and if that’s what you’re looking for there are better versions of this exact show that already exist on CBS.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
