Saved Premiere

Notice the lack of both excla­ma­tion point and Macauly Culkin in this series. TNT just wanted you to know that the air­waves aren’t quite yet lit­tered with doc­tor dra­mas, so they pulled this one out of their arse­nal of orig­i­nal pro­gram­ming. It’s a nice start, but I don’t see how it can last. It’s your run of the mill EMT drama, if that is even run of the mill any­more There are def­i­nitely some inter­est­ing things hap­pen­ing: use of stills/wide angle lenses.

This show was shown with­out com­mer­cials thanks to Dodge, but only filled the stan­dard 44 min­utes of air­time. I man­aged to step out before the 16 min­utes of Dodge ads that may have fol­lowed the air­ing. Perhaps it was my lack of com­mer­cial breaks to stretch my legs, but the show felt very long. It slows down con­sid­er­ably just as it picks up pace, which is con­fus­ing. In other words, and this seems to be Television’s usual MO, as soon as a rela­tion­ship or sit­u­a­tion becomes inter­est­ing, they pull back and instead show a grue­some acci­dent or gra­tu­itious skin.

Tom Everett Scott does a nice job in the lead. I want to see him crack out some sun­glasses and a drum­set and give us a lit­tle “That Thing You Do” flash­backs. By the way, for those who for­get as it is so easy, he plays a gam­bler on the show. Apparently that has some­thing to do with his char­ac­ter. And appar­ently he needs to be…wait could it be?…saved! Well, per­haps an Aaron Sorkin or other god­send will make his way over to the script meet­ings and save Scott’s char­ac­ter from flatlin­ing (med­ical puns can be fun) before the series does.

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Reading:

Philip Roth

The Plot Against America