Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The 200 Word Knee-jerk Review for CW's Reaper

EW called the pilot episode "outrageously entertaining". I wouldn't go that far, but Reaper held my interest from beginning to end. The premise: a slacker becomes Satan's bounty hunter with help from his friends. Bret Harrison, who was excellent in The Loop, is effectively meek and insecure as "Sam", whose soul the devil now owns. Sam's sidekick "Sock" (Tyler Labine – one of the only redeeming qualities of ABC's short-lived Invasion) comes off as an ersatz Jack Black, however.

Most encouraging is the performance of Ray Wise as Satan, himself. It would've been easy to play up the comedic elements of his character, but he's written as the embodiment of evil (death by zamboni!) with a smirk. Missy Peregrym is Sam's love interest (she kind of looks like a female Hillary Swank) but didn't have much to do in the pilot. There's action, drama and comedy here, though the premiere clearly struggled to be a little bit of everything to its audience. My biggest beefs: (1) Sam's first assignment was practically paint-by-numbers, even by "pilot episode" standards. (2) Valerie Rae Miller's "Josie" character is absolutely useless. Please kill her next, Satan.

Verdict: Good opening act, but it's got work to do.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Always the black character first.

Anonymous said...

Hey! That's my line.

I hope she doesn't die before we get some backstory on how she and Sock got together (and grew apart) in the first place.