During many times watching “Countdown,” I reminded myself that I liked TV. “It’s a good medium with lots of good shows,” I kept saying to the heavens. “It’s not all like this.”
“Countdown” doesn’t have a lot of power. But it did have the power to give this TV critic — this TV watcher, this TV fan — an existential crisis, a feeling of overwhelming doom. I guess that’s something!
“Countdown” begins with a Homeland Security agent getting killed in broad daylight, sparking FBI Special Agent Nathan Blythe (Eric Dane, reliable) to create a broad-reaching task force to find the murderer. This includes members of various law enforcement agencies, including and especially maverick LAPD detective Mark Meachum (Jensen Ackles, beyond his depth), who does police work like a bull in a china shop and has “mysterious issues.” As this eclectic task force searches for the truth, they uncover a global conspiracy that just might put the entire city of Los Angeles at risk.
The show is very bad, to be clear. It’s bad at being suspenseful, it’s bad at providing emotional investment and it’s bad at being memorable. It feels cynical and uninterested in itself. It provides the bare minimum of every element, digs no further, then loudly insists it’s providing a service.
Scenes of the task force planning are almost comically formulaic and staid; everyone stands around as Blythe lists a group of law enforcement acronyms, then says something like “Get to it,” then everyone walks away in opposite directions. Why opposite directions? Aren’t their desks all in the same general direction?
Characters get maybe one trait to play, and most of them are “things that happen to them,” rather than any sort of interiority or guiding philosophy. One character gets a family, one character gets an addiction, one character gets a health issue. These are big things that happen to us human beings; they are treated with a single sledgehammer bonk on the head before moving on. “Is this good enough?” the show screams at us. “Is the box checked, do you like these characters now?”
The dialogue tends to be creaky and on-the-nose. The actors force their way through exchanges without any subtext, playing the greatest hits of cop drama cliches with overworked muscle. I don’t believe any of them, and I don’t blame them, as the scripts are unrelentingly repetitive and single-minded, not giving any room for interpretation or play. Some performances started to make me laugh because I felt the actor crank things up into melodrama, because how else do you play some of this stuff? Maybe I would’ve preferred the whole thing if it was an explicit parody of the cop genre.
The needle drops are somehow both the most obvious choices in the world and the most nonsensical choices in the world. The action sequences are shot and cut without clarity or immersion, using choppy, handheld camera work and chaotic editing rhythms to flatten stunt work into noise. But you know it’s intense and interesting because a licensed blues-rock song will just blare at you, its musical qualities throttling and suffocating the viewer, its lyrics providing no relationship to anything. One action scene, in which we’re watching our hero chase down a bad guy, is scored to The Hives’ “Bogus Operandi,” a song from the perspective of a nihilistic serial killer. What are we saying about our hero, here? Do we hear electric guitars and think “good enough” and slot it into the timeline?
Is there anything worth recommending in “Countdown,” any modicum of juice to be found? Sometimes, when it brushes away all the loud plot machinations and focuses on how the characters feel about each other, you feel some heat and intrigue; there are a couple of “will they, won’t they” dynamics that I rooted for. A villainous character is given revealing scenes that provide welcome textures of complexity. And late in the 13-episode season (10 of which were provided for review), the show seems to introduce a brand new main character and a brand new, different premise — both of which are immediately more interesting than the claptrap that came before.
“Countdown” comes from creator and showrunner Derek Haas, the man behind the “Chicago” empire of successful network procedurals (“Fire,” “P.D.,” and “Med”). I admit I am not familiar with this well-established, Midwestern world. Perhaps all of these elements I loathed are his stylistic stock in trade; perhaps criticizing them is like criticizing a Lichtenstein for “looking like a comic book.”
I wasn’t initially attracted to “Countdown” as a fan of Haas but as a fan of its genres — the investigative procedural, the espionage thriller, the crime drama. And at all of these, no matter Haas’ previous work, no matter the change in cities from Chicago to LA, and no matter the change from network to streaming, it fails, over and over and over again, until you’re counting down the minutes of its runtime, mercifully hoping for its end.
“Countdown” premieres Wednesday, June 25, on Prime Video.
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