"The Blacklist" and "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."

I briefly had some hopes for "The Blacklist." James Spader plays Raymond "Red" Reddington, on the FBI's Most Wanted list for being the "concierge of crime," who facilitates the misdeeds of others. When he surrenders himself at FBI headquarters, offering information on an upcoming crime, FBI Assistant Director Harold Cooper (Harry Lennix) and his team are understandably wary of their old foe, but Red is convincing. Spader chews the scenery with everything he's got, and the pilot's biggest problem is that there's not enough of him in it.

You see, Red insists that the only person he'll talk to directly is brand new FBI Special Agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone), who turns out to be our real main character. Boone is about to adopt a child with her husband Tom (Ryan Eggold), and displays a personality entirely too open and cuddly to take very seriously. When she describes herself as a "bitch" with a tendency to be remote, I wondered if the role had been recast at the last minute. It was as though someone had hired Jewel Staite to play warrior woman Zoe on "Firefly" instead of sunny sweetheart Kaylee. Boone herself appears to be a pretty competent actress, but the mass of contradictions about her character was too distracting to take.

Otherwise, "The Blacklist" is a fairly typical crime drama. It's big distinguishing characteristic is a of those hammy mastermind characters who would be utterly insufferable if the actor playing him weren't so charismatic. There's slightly more intense violence than the norm. The good guys run around trying to solve the mystery and avert a major crime, relying on a lot of convenient contrivances and well-timed reveals. There's a lot of series mythology set up, and it's all to easy to conclude that Red's interest in Agent Keen points to him being her father. On a better show, I'd assume this is a red herring, but "Blacklist" isn't good enough yet to earn that much benefit of the doubt from me. It's too slapdash, spending way too much time on action set-pieces and sinister hints of a big backstory, and not enough on characters. Poor Diego Klattenhoff plays an agent whose job seems to be to run around playing the gullible patsy to everyone else in the show.

I can certainly see "The Blacklist" improving with time, but there are too many similar shows out there already for me to stick around to see how things pan out.

Now on to Marvel's "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.," one of the most anticipated shows of this season because it shares continuity with the Marvel cinematic universe. And indeed, Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) from "The Avengers" stars as the leader of a new global response team set up to deal with incidents involving superhumans, and there are references to Iron Man and the Hulk tossed out left and right. Joss Whedon directed the pilot, and wrote it in collaboration with showrunners Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen. And as with all Whedon shows, the best parts are in the dialogue - the little quips, the self-aware moments of superhero meta, and the characters' banter. This is in spite of Marvel and Disney clearly spending quite a chunk of change, paying for lots of fancy special effects, fight sequences, crazy vehicles, and a big finale sequence at the crowded Union Station in Los Angeles.

I wasn't expecting much more than the razzle dazzle and some character introductions, but the pilot does set up some interesting themes. Along with Agent Coulson, the ensemble includes black ops hard-case Agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), the bruiser with the past, Agent Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), nerdy techies Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) who are regularly lumped together as "Fitzsimmons," and the newest recruit to the team, Skye (Chloe Bennet), an anarchic super-hacker who spends much of the hour actively working against "S.H.I.E.L.D." The secret government agents are the good guys, but viewed with great suspicion by people who often have good reasons to be wary of them. The complications of working for Big Brother could yield some good things, and the best bits of the hour involve Coulson and Ward trying to convince civilian characters why they're worthy of their trust. One could draw parallels to Whedon's employment by the Disney empire.

But that's beside the point. The show is light and fun to watch. It's family friendly and cheesetastic, but the humor is sharp when it needs to be. The characters are not yet fully formed, but they have loads of potential. Whedonverse regular J. August Richards shows up here as a guest star, playing a sympathetic sad-sack whose superpowers lead to a lot of trouble. He makes such a great impression, I think it's a shame that he's not going to be a regular. Still, I'll be sticking with "S.H.I.E.L.D." for at least a few more weeks to see if they can keep the quality up.

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