Tension and Meaning: Not Quite The Same Things.

It's been a travel-filled couple of weeks, which means I'm now facing more of a backlog than I'd like to.  But the backlog is now one show shorter...

Hostages (CBS, new.  Suspense/drama.)

Watched: First two episodes

Premise: A surgeon and her family are taken hostage by an FBI agent who demands she kill the President in the process of conducting his upcoming surgery.

Promise:  The series begins with a lot of setup, but very little substance.  We’re given very little to go on about the main characters’ motivations.  As the series progresses, we’re definitely supposed to believe that the hostage-takers have explicable (and perhaps even laudable) motives, but we’re very intentionally given incomplete information about them.  Who wants the President dead?  Why?  Is the President a good President?  Is country better or worse off with him alive or dead?  Of course, it makes sense that the surgeon would want to save her family, but why is her family so willing to acquiesce to the hostage-takers’ blackmail?  There’s no shortage of drama—each episode involves unimaginably difficult moral dilemmas and life-or-death decisions.  But without knowing more background, the result is as meaningless as it is tense.  I assume that the lack of known motives is supposed to be the core mystery, and we’ll learn more over the course of the series, but it’s hard to care about characters’ decisions when their motivations and consequences are so unknown, and it’s hard to care about the mystery when we don’t understand the stakes.  There is some potential there—the characters are, for the most part, multi-dimensional, and watching the lives of the hostages and hostage takers’ lives become intertwined might create some interesting character development—but we aren’t given quite enough about the characters to know whether it’s worth caring about their development.

Verdict: I don’t care enough about the characters to put myself through the tension of more episodes.

On the DVR:   The Blacklist, Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, Lucky 7 (canceled), Masters of Sex, Betrayal, Hello Ladies, Ironside, Super Fun Night, The Millers...and, if I turn my back for a moment, no doubt more will appear...