Standoff S1e1
Nov. 7th, 2006 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catalyst2It's a good idea for a TV programme - a highly skilled crisis negotiation team, distracted and (maybe) driven apart by powerful personal relationships. Unfortunately, Standoff isn't about that because the two leads Matt Flannery (played by Matt Livingstone) and Emily Lehman (Rosemarie DeWitt) have all the chemistry of a wet piece of soap. Somehow we are to believe that these two are just so passionate about each other than they will place hostages' lives on the line. Matt and Emily don't even look like they believe so why should we?
Cheryl Carrera (the wonderful Gina Torres) looks like she wants to run a mile from this and so she should. In the space of one episode, Matt and Emily break just about every rule in the book about hostage negotiation (according to the progamme's own vision of that, not mine), and yet there are no consequences for them. At least add tension by breaking up the team and finding that each is a crap negotiator on their own but together they are brilliant despite the unorthodoxy of their approach. You have put them back together but you know you should. What to do? What to do? See - more tension there than in this entire episode.
And as for the gun-happy "just shoot them so me and mah buds can get back to the paintballin' and Coors and locker room high jinks" SWAT team leader?
*sigh*
Cheryl Carrera (the wonderful Gina Torres) looks like she wants to run a mile from this and so she should. In the space of one episode, Matt and Emily break just about every rule in the book about hostage negotiation (according to the progamme's own vision of that, not mine), and yet there are no consequences for them. At least add tension by breaking up the team and finding that each is a crap negotiator on their own but together they are brilliant despite the unorthodoxy of their approach. You have put them back together but you know you should. What to do? What to do? See - more tension there than in this entire episode.
And as for the gun-happy "just shoot them so me and mah buds can get back to the paintballin' and Coors and locker room high jinks" SWAT team leader?
*sigh*
