THE PLAYER isn't our cup of tea but it's failure is still surprising.
And make no mistake, Wesley Snipes' NBC action show is a failure.
That's right, Wesley Snipes.
An African-American actor?
Yes, but apparently that's all so fall 2014 as there's been no significant press interest that an African-American is a lead in an hour long show.
Or, for that matter, that a film star -- the Blade trilogy, WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, RISING SUN, The MONEY TRAIN, WAITING TO EXHALE, WILDCATS, DEMOLITION MAN, MO' BETTER BLUES, JUNGLE FEVER, THE WATERDANCE, PASSENGER 57, NEW JACK CITY, MAJOR LEAGUE, THE EXPENDABLES 3, THE EXPENDABLES 4, and TOO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING -- is coming to TV.
Maybe if Snipes had been willing to whore himself the way Sharon Stone has for Hillary (is it to make up for the affair with Bill -- sorry, the 'rumors' of her affair with Bill?), he'd get attention from THE DAILY BEAST, et al?
Snipes plays Isaiah Johnson ("The Pit Boss"). He's running the bets.
Bets?
A group of wealthy people bid on the outcome of crimes.
Philip Winchester plays Alex who is the player who will try to stop the crimes with the assistance of Charity Wakefield's Cassandra ("The Dealer").
The cast also includes Richard Roundtree as a judge who's also involved in the intrigue which includes how Alex's ex-wife Ginny was killed or 'killed.'
Roundtree's an actor who first came to fame playing the lead role in SHAFT and its two sequels.
He's considered to be film's first Black action hero and Snipes' own career has been in a variety of action films so there was a hook the press could've pursued but chose not to.
Damon Gupton rounds out the main cast playing Detective Cal Brown who is trying to figure out exactly what Alex is up to.
With everyone in the press avoiding the show, it must be pretty awful, right?
Wrong.
In terms of action shows, it's miles ahead of AIRWOLF, the rebranded HAWAII 5-O, SLEEPY HOLLOW, BURN NOTICE, DOLLHOUSE and any combination of NCIS.
In fact, it could have been NBC's SCORPION -- if it had been on another network.
What idiot decides to air a new action show opposite CBS' Thursday football line up.
Men and women predisposed to like this show were not going to switch off in the last hour or so of a football game to watch a new show.
It was a boneheaded move on the network's part.
They should have shoved one of their lousy Chicago shows in that time slot and waited until after CBS stopped airing Thursday night football (last Thursday) to debut the show.
THE PLAYER, repeating, is not our type of show.
There aren't a great deal of action shows we enjoy.
But for an action show, it was fast paced and always entertaining.
The long running elements were in place to build a very interesting arc.
But with NBC cancelling the order for 13 episodes (it's now only going to be nine -- of which seven have aired), it's one more show that was never given the chance to find an audience.
Which brings us to binge watching.
As we've noted before, it's nothing new.
Neither is
Aziz Ansari's new sitcom MASTER OF NONE.
The sitcom debuted on Netflix Friday, all ten episodes.
It's not a bad show.
But if you've seen Aziz's stand up -- which he's already milked for the book MODERN ROMANCE (which tried to dress up comedy as sociology and let down both fields in the process) -- you've seen this show.
Only the visuals you provided for Aziz's word play was much better than what streams at Netflix.
That a single-camera series could feature such bad camera work and bad lighting is really shocking.
Maybe that's a budget constraint?
We don't know. We just felt we were seeing raw footage and not an edited and assembled episode of a series.
We'd love to say it got better as it went along but that's not the case and even the scripts grew iffy as the episodes passed.
Aziz is great.
He's funny.
And we hope season two features some strong improvements.
THE BOB NEWHART SHOW was not a smash in season one but the elements for a good show were there. That's true of MASTER OF NONE. But a second season of the show really needs to give characters a purpose.
Yes, even supporting characters need to have a drive that's greater than setting up the next joke for the lead actor.
Friday, when we realized we'd be binge watching (something we loathe) again thanks to Netflix, we mentioned it to a producer friend. He told us he'd just seen Fitz murder Verna.
Of course, he was talking about SCANDAL.
Season two to be precise.
We were surprised he'd never seen the show before.
But he explained he really didn't watch shows the networks were airing anymore.
And he explained why.
Every time he got into a show, the network tended to cancel it.
Binge watching, he explained, was a much safer and satisfying way to discover a show.
As NBC gears up to toss THE PLAYER, someone might want to remind them that the belief that they would always be needed at least as content providers ended when Netflix, Crackle, Hulu and Amazon Prime began making their own TV shows, movies and specials.
