‘The Company You Keep Review: Milo Ventimiglia And Catherine Haena Kim In A Frothy ABC Drama With A Hint Of Potential
It may not be the second issue of Friday Night Lights or The Good Wife , but ABC's Will Trent is probably my favorite TV drama of the year. What I appreciate most about Karin Slaughter's adaptation is how quickly she creates characters, locations, and elements from relatively different places. The show became what he aspired to be.
None of the excitement comes with ABC's new drama The Company You Keep . Fast forward two episodes and The Company You Keep promises to be a promising romantic comedy with thrillers and an interesting family backstory;
The company you keep
The backline chemistry between songs carried the show through its rocky start.
The kind of show she wanted to basically be was The Catch , the Shonda Rhimes-produced heist-comedy romance that ABC picked up, renewed, and renewed for two seasons in 2016-17. But if no one at ABC has the corporate memory to remember that they ever made this show, who am I to hold them accountable?
This version will be adapted from the South Korean series My Fellow Citizens by Julia Cohen and Phil Clemmer.
Our hero. Charlie Nicoletti (Milo Ventimiglia) is a very talented con man in an evil family. He works with his overprotective sister ("Birdie" by Sarah Wayne Callies) and parents (Leo by William Fichtner and Fran by Polly Draper) to score big points, but only big points against the people who really deserve them. because they're con artists working in movies? and television programs. They also think of an "ultimate trick" that will fix it, but a profitable bet on an Irish gangster goes pear-shaped.
Emma Hill (Katherine Haena Kim) is part of a family that dreams of becoming an Asian-American Kennedy. I know this because the characters in Episode 2 said that Emma's mother (Freda Foh Shen) wanted them to be Asian Americans. His father (James Saito) is a former governor and his older brother (Tim Chiu) is a senator. I know this because in the pilot, someone approaches Emma at a party and says:
Everyone thinks Emma is in data logistics, but she actually works for the CIA, albeit in a strange secret CIA outpost, hidden behind a front called Pattern Logistics, but you know that it's actually CIA, because someone nearby added an inset frame. - with a very prominent "CIA" symbol. Why does he keep his job a secret even from his family and why is his job/skill so unique that he has to work in a mysterious secret office? I don't have the weakest.
anybody!
Emma has problems in her personal life which result in her failure at work leaving her sitting alone in the hotel bar where she meets Charlie. They flirt (joking about how they lied about their identities). They spent 36 hours together. there is a feeling
But Charlie is a fraud. And Emma is a CIA agent. How can they find a way to seduce attractively while maintaining a proper professional facade?
The Company You Keep is a very, very sloppy delivery of vanity that is clearly busy but decidedly immature.
My previous suggestion was that it takes You Keep Company too long to figure out what its current structure and pace is, but probably not long enough either. Character after character speaks of Charlie's genius, but I've seen two episodes and nothing he does comes anywhere near clever, let alone brilliant. Emma's own brilliance is evidenced by quick outsider readings of Sherlock Holmes, but the series does not address the elements of her personal life leading up to her encounter with Charlie in the hotel bar, and it does not. Please believe the psychology of this game.
These are things the show needs to introduce and move past moving forward, as is a very weak attempt to figure out where this show is going. I think it's part Baltimore and part Washington, and neither of them have anything to do with the look or feel of what Baltimore and DC actually look like. It's just Generic Glossy American City accompanied by Generic Jaunty Heist Music and Generic Jazzy Editing. I've never found myself hating The Company You Keep , but I certainly found myself reeling from the flow of information and wishing that almost every background detail, as the kids say, could be an email.
Around the middle of the second episode , The Company You Keep uncovers all of this. Well, not all. There are still many performances to be presented. But the show that confirmed it was worth it, or as I keep saying potentially worth it because I only watched 20 minutes of it.
What is interesting is the parallelism between the two families and hence the parallelism between legal and illegal scams. Obviously, more detail is needed. I already mentioned how awful Nicoletti's first parody was, and while the second episode parody is much better, it's more of an opportunity for Fichtners to dress up than anything else, while Hills is a politician in a vaguely TV way, which is complete. . unilogical boundary and therefore useless.
But I love the care it takes to give their families and relationships a similar shape. And I love the seed of the performances and the characterizations, especially the warmth of the older generation of actors, all of whom are good enough to add to the tone of the page. With both families, the role of the unimaginative brother is least developed, although Callies Bird does at least have signs of a meaningful relationship with the deaf daughter (Shailey Mansfield), which intrigues me.
What works best is the overall chemistry between Ventimiglia and Kim. It's not the kind of steamy chemistry that fueled the short-lived Whiskey Cavalier , one of ABC's last attempts to mix a bubble-like drink, but it's great for banter and pulls together in a nice, sophisticated way. so that everything is presented in the first two episodes. They are much more interesting as performers when they are together than when sharing a scene with either actor. For a show like this, that's what you want. If you're not a bit disappointed that Charlie and Emma don't flirt or dress up, both jobs that require a lot of clothes, then you haven't invested in a show like this. .
It remains to be seen whether The Company You Keep is sustainable in its second season. As a long term device, you can only have this week's version if the drawbacks are better than they are now. You might expect viewers to care about trivial political contests. Emma's senator's brother is running for re-election if politics have any substance. And more than anything, relationships built on key secrets can endure tension and uncertainty for a time, but not forever. We just need to give it a little more time here.
