Remote Patrol: Are The Slap and Allegiance foreign affairs to remember?
American network TV has long been running out of fresh ideas for primetime dramas. The proof can be found in the fact that CSI is launching its third spinoff (CSI: Cyber, starring Patricia Arquette, who might not have signed on had she known she was almost certain to win an Oscar for Boyhood), and Dick Wolf is attempting to spawn another Windy City series after Chicago Fire and Chicago PD: Chicago Med.
So the broadcast networks are looking abroad for drama formats that can be translated for US audiences, and some have been more successful (like the CW's Golden Globe-winning Venezuelan-telenovela adaptation Jane the Virgin) than others (such as Fox's needless Americanization of Broadchurch, the graceless Gracepoint).
Now NBC is launching two versions of foreign series in an effort to shore up its once-mighty Thursday lineup: The Slap, based on an Australian saga (as well as a best-selling novel) and Allegiance, inspired by the Israeli thriller The Gordin Cell. Once again, one is much better than the other.
The Slap delivers a cold shot of much-needed reality, despite its literary trappings (including snooty-sounding narration by Victor Garber). Hector, played by the always-mesmerizing Peter Sarsgaard, is a New York City government official on the eve of his 40th birthday and suffering from a midlife crisis. Unhappily married to a doctor (Thandie Newton, for once being allowed to use her real British accent), he begins to fantasize about his kids' nubile babysitter (pouty-lipped Makenzie Leigh).
But an incident at Hector's backyard birthday party, in which his smug-yuppie cousin (Zachary Quinto, perfectly cast) smacks the free-range brat son of a hippie chick (Melissa George) and hot-tempered husband (The Newsroom's Thomas Sadoski), threatens to tear the family apart.
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Smartly penned by playwright-turned-TV creator Jon Robin Baitz (Brothers & Sisters) and well-directed by Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are All Right), The Slap benefits from its stellar cast, which also includes Uma Thurman as Hector's TV-writer sister, Gossip Girl's Penn Badgley as her actor boytoy, and Brian Cox as the family's old-world Greek patriarch.
Every detail of upper-upper-middle class life in Brooklyn, from the moms who breastfeed kids way beyond their sell-by dates to the meticulously kept Miles Davis LPs, is perfectly captured. Too bad The Slap is only an eight-episode limited series, because I could see these characters carrying many more hours.
I wish I could say the same for the denizens of Allegiance, which pales by comparison to its startlingly similar FX competitor, The Americans. Yes, it's another show about Russian spies forced by their government overlords to try and turn their child into an anti-American agent.
In this case, the story is set in the present (as opposed to The Americans' eerily accurate evocation of the '80s), and the child in question is a grown man (Gavin Stenhouse) working for the CIA instead of a confused teenage girl. This renders the central conflict much less poignant.
But the biggest problem with Allegiance is the casting of Stenhouse; the little-known (at least on US shores) London-bred actor possesses no discernible charisma. He's supposed to be some kind of a genius, but he seems more like an idiot savant. He can't convincingly play Red or red, white and blue; he's just painfully green.
This is a shame, because the show has assembled an impressive ensemble in support of this cipher, including the amazing Hope Davis (In Treatment) and reliable Scott Cohen (Necessary Roughness) as his conflicted sleeper-agent parents and standouts Kenneth Choi (Sons of Anarchy) and Robert John Burke (Person of Interest) as CIA bigwigs.
The dialogue, by showrunner George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau), doesn't do the cast any favours, either. "This operation will answer American aggression forcefully, collapsing their economy in a single blow," a Russian nogoodnik proclaims in a Boris Badenov accent. "We're calling it... Black Dagger!"
It's warmed-over Cold War rhetoric like this that leads me to declare my pledge of allegiance to The Slap.
Bruce Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
