The Unusuals (season one overview)

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Rating 2½


Created by Noah Hawley

Written by Noah Hawley (three episodes), Alexi Hawley (one episode), Robert De Laurentiis (one episode), Sarah Watson (one episode), Gary Lennon (one episode), Treena Hancock (one episode), Melissa R Byer (one episode), Jorge Zamacona (one episode) and Danny Zuker (one episode

Directed by Stephen Hopkins (one episode), Constantine Makris (three episode), Jamie Babbit (one episode), Peter O’Fallon (one episode), Matt Earl Beesley (two episodes), Rosemary Rodriguez (one episode) and Edward Bianchi (one episode)

Starring Amber Tamblyn (Detective Casey Shraeger), Jeremy Renner (Detective Jason Walsh), Adam Goldberg (Detective Eric Delahoy), Harold Perrineau (Detective Leo Banks), Kai Lennox (Detective Eddie Alvarez), Joshua Close (Detective Henry Cole), Monique Gabriela Curnan (Detective Allison Beaumont), Terry Kinney (Sergeant Harvey Brown), Ian Kahn (Davis Nixon), Susan Parke (Dr Monica Crumb) and Kat Foster (Nicole Brandt)


Rookie police detective Casey Shraeger is pulled off Vice and transferred to the NYPD’s second Precinct to become the new partner of Detective Jason Walsh, on the same night that his old partner is murdered. Secretly, she is being recruited by Sergeant Harvey Brown to look for possible corruption within his team, each of the various detectives harbouring his or her own secrets.

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‘The Unusuals’ was made by Sony Pictures Television and broadcast on the ABC network between 8 April and 17 June 2009. Ten episodes in total were made. Viewing figures reached a high of 6.8 million for the pilot episode and a low of 2.9 million for episode eight. In was announced in May 2009 that it would not return for a second season. The show was created by Noah Hawley, a former staff writer on the Fox network show ‘Bones’ and was promoted as a comedy-drama, a police procedural in the style of ‘M*A*S*H’. The influence is evident from the very start, but ‘The Unusuals’ fails almost entirely to emulate the brilliance of that much lauded, multi award winning series.

‘The Unusuals’ had a likeable cast, but seemingly it never decided what it wanted to be. None of the characters progressed much beyond being the vaguest of sketchy outlines and the initial premise seemed to fizzle out before going anywhere in particular. Although there was some humour, it wasn’t a comedy, even though it clearly drew inspiration from ‘Barney Miller’, a much loved comedy series that ran for eight seasons and 168 episodes between 1974 and 1982.

Each character was given a quirk, but then very little was done with it. Casey Shraeger was the daughter of extremely rich and powerful society parents and had a multi-million-dollar trust fund, but she kept this secret, wanting to be treated like everyone else and live like a “real person”. After the first few episodes, we barely ever saw her parents and when, halfway through the season, she admitted her background to her colleagues it made no difference whatsoever. Eric Delahoy was suffering from a brain tumour that he kept secret. This storyline never went anywhere, much as his relationship with the medical examiner proved to be an inconclusive dead end. His partner Leo Banks had a germ phobia and was convinced of his impending death. This seemingly reached a head in the eighth episode (‘The Dentist’), which was modelled on the classic Alfred Hitchcock film ‘Rear Window’, but there was no sense of an epiphany or any consequence seen afterwards. The same desperate lack of focus and depth affected all the other regular lead characters.

Perhaps most inexplicable is the storyline involving Henry Cole, a born-again Christian who hides a criminal past. That seems to catch up with him and results in this partner being shot. He is also indirectly implicated in the death of the partner of Jason Walsh, but although Walsh discovers the truth, he seems perfectly ready to cover it up because the force always looks after its own. I thought this storyline was a mess that became increasingly unbelievable. More so than that, ultimately there simply did not seem to be any point to it, a problem that affected so many things in the show.

‘M*A*S*H’ worked so brilliantly because the characters were memorable and the show achieved a perfect mix between comedy and making a serious statement about the reality of war. In the ten episodes of ‘The Unusuals’ the characters didn’t go anywhere and the show had nothing much to say. This meant that the implausible nature of many of the cases investigated was brought into sharp relief and instead of being quirky and humorously idiosyncratic they just ended up being silly and too far-fetched. Of course, ten episodes is not long enough to really establish a great deal and perhaps had the show survived into a second season many of these early problems would have been resolved.

In its favour, ‘The Unusuals’ had a more than competent cast who made it very easy to watch. Adam Goldberg is always very watchable and Amber Tamblyn is surely one of the best actresses of her generation. There was the grain of a good idea here and it is quite possible the show could have ironed out some of the early flaws given more time. However, the nature of American network television these days means that very few shows are given more than a handful of episodes to prove themselves – we need only to think back to ‘Wonderfalls’, a show that premiered on the Fox network in March 2004 and was cancelled after just four episodes, even though it showed obvious promise.

I have been critical of it, but I enjoyed watching ‘The Unusuals’ and its early demise is disappointing, although not at all surprising and probably not unwarranted.

Review posted 21 June 2009



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The Unusuals (pilot episode)

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Rating 3

Created by Noah Hawley

Written by Noah Hawley

Directed by Stephen Hopkins

Starring Amber Tamblyn, Jeremy Renner, Adam Goldberg, Harold Perrineau, Kai Lennox, Joshua Close, Monique Gabriela Curnan, Chris Sarandon and Terry Kinney

Detective Casey Shreager is pulled off Vice and assigned to the New York Homicide squad following the murder of a possibly crooked cop. She is teamed up with his former partner Detective Jason Walsh (Jeremy Renner).

She quickly discovers that the squad is made up of a collection of decidedly oddball characters; Walsh seems to operate a run-down diner as a sideline that he opens sporadically as the mood takes him. Detective Eric Dalahov (Adam Goldberg) has a brain tumour that he is keeping a secret. It might explain his tendency to cry constantly, his sudden outbursts of temper and his decision to give his moustache a name. It doesn’t explain why he seems to be impervious to danger – in this pilot episode he survives falling in front of a subway train and being shot at close range with both barrels of a shotgun. His partner Detective Leo Banks (Harold Perrineau) is obsessed with germs and convinced that death is waiting around the corner for him. He permanently wears a bullet-proof vest, even in bed. Detective Eddie Alvarez is an egotist who always refers to himself in the third person and is mocked by his colleagues. Detective Henry Cole (Joshua Close) is a born again Christian who hides a delinquent past. They all have something they seem to be hiding, including Casey Shreager, who is, in reality, a “Park Avenue Princess”.

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‘The Unusuals’ is a police procedural, promoted as a comedy-drama. This pilot episode was broadcast on 8 April 2009, the first of ten episodes commissioned by the ABC Network. The viewing figures, just 6.8 million, which seems very low for the opening episode of a brand new show, and the fact that ABC has only committed to ten episodes suggests that the series may well be doomed, even at this early stage.

It is being promoted as a kind of up-dated cousin of ‘MASH’ and the similarities are evident immediately, right down to the quirky tannoy announcements. It has an old-fashioned feel that put me in mind of ‘Hill Street Blues’ and ‘Cagney & Lacey’. The planned format will have a main investigation each episode, shadowed by a second quirkier one. In this pilot, Shreager and Walsh investigate the murder, a case that Alvarez is put in charge of, while Dalahov and Banks are assigned to investigate the killing of a cat and find themselves on the trail of a serial cat killer. Dalahov and Banks are, it would seem at this early stage, likely to become quickly established as particularly popular characters with viewers. Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau (who played Michael Dawson in seasons one, two and four of ‘Lost’) work very well together.

Amber Tamblyn is a favourite actress of mine and has been excellent in everything I have seen her in. She is the reason I first became aware of this show when it was being cast. However, as good as she is, I could not help but have a suspicion during the pilot episode that she might be miscast here. She doesn’t seem to be a perfect fit for the character, whether as a police detective working vice and homicide, or as the “spoilt princess” daughter of rich society parents. Time will tell if this becomes more or less apparent.

I think the pilot episode was trying too hard at times and some of the humour and quirkiness was rather too obviously forced. However, it was very enjoyable and this is clearly a show with promise, although it seems unlikely to be around long enough to have sufficient time to find its niche and iron out the crinkles.

Review posted 14 April 2009



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The Prophecy

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Rating 5


Written and directed by Gregory Widen

Starring Christopher Walken, Elias Koteas, Virginia Madsen, Eric Stoltz, Viggo Mottensen, Adam Goldberg, Amanda Plummer, Steve Hytner and Moriah Shing Dove Snyder


Thomas Daggett (Elias Koteas) trained to be a Catholic priest, but he was plagued by horrifying visions of Heaven plunged into an eternal war and lost his faith on the day of his ordination. He is now a detective with the LAPD. When he is called in to investigate a bizarre murder, the trail leads him to a small desert town in Arizona where the Archangel Gabriel (Christopher Walken) has come down to Earth in search of the soul of a recently deceased soldier who had been charged with horrific cannibalistic war crimes during the Korean War.

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Released into American cinemas in September 1995, ‘The Prophecy’ is a horror film with a central theme drawing on various Judeo-Christian biblical teachings. Following the first celestial war, ending when Lucifer (played here by Viggo Mortensen) and his followers were cast out of Heaven, a second war erupted when God elevated man over all other creatures. Gabriel and Simon (played by Eric Stoltz) had stood side by side at the head of the army of angels that defeated Lucifer, but are now on opposing sides. Simon has come to Earth to stop Gabriel from getting the soul he seeks.

The Archangel Gabriel is sometimes referred to as the Angel of Death. The name Gabriel translates as “The Strength of God”.

I saw this film several times when it was first released, but it had been a long while, maybe as long as ten years, since I had last watched it, before recently buying a copy on DVD for the first time. It had been one of my favourite films and I approached it again with a small degree of trepidation, wondering if it would prove to be a anti-climax in retrospect. It probably isn’t quite as spectacularly good as I remembered, but I wasn’t disappointed. Is it deserving of a “5” rating? Possibly not, but it is a five-star film for me.

The premise really works very well. I like horror films that draw on religious imaginary and I think this is a particularly good example, taking the very inhuman nature of angels as they are described in biblical texts as a starting point and building a story around that. As Thomas says at one point in the film, “Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?”

There is one particularly effective moment in the film when Thomas asks Gabriel, “If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why didn’t you just ask Him? Why didn’t you ask God?” Gabriel replies, almost wistfully, “Because He doesn’t talk to me anymore.”

Christopher Walken is not an actor often given to subtlety (with one or two exceptions, such as his Oscar-winning performance in ‘The Deer Hunter’), but he is one of the most compelling and memorable American film actors of his generation, if also one of the weirdest. He is in particularly impressive barnstorming scenery-chewing form here, but he is given a good run for his money by Viggo Mortensen, who gets to deliver lines of dialogue like, “I could lay you out and fill your mouth with your mother’s faeces,” when talking to Virginia Madsen’s small-town teacher, Katherine Henley. It’s always good to see Virginia Madsen, who like Mortensen is a past Academy Award nominee.

Eric Stoltz is an actor not shy of adding quirks to his performances and Adam Goldberg and Amanda Plummer, both playing characters on the cusp of death who are kept from dying by Gabriel to do his bidding, are well established oddball actors and scene stealers. With this level of over-the-top acting competition, the Greek-Canadian actor Elias Koteas does rather get trampled and disappears into the background, but that is perfect for the character he plays, the would-be priest who suffered a crisis of faith and now finds himself in the middle of this extraordinary scenario.

Writer/director Gregory Widen is probably best known as one of the co-writers of the 1986 film ‘Highlander’. He also wrote the 1991 Ron Howard film ‘Backdraft’. Widen was employed as a fire-fighter for three years, using that experience as the basis for his screenplay.

‘The Prophecy’, which is also known as ‘God’s Army’, had a production budget estimated to have been in the region of $8 million. It grossed $16.1 million at the box office in America. Nineteen reviews are collected at Rotten Tomatoes, resulting in a 42% rotten rating. There have been four sequels to date, plus the crossover addition to the franchise ‘Hellraiser: Prophecy’.

The fifth season ‘X Files’ episode ‘All Souls’ draws on a vaguely similar theme.

Review posted 13 March 2009



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