PicoBusiness

Mondays at 10 on NBC
Starring: Christian Slater, Madchen Amick

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this show. The concept is simple enough – a secret agent (Edward) has a double life as a boring, run-of-the-mill family man (Henry). This is standard True Lies stuff. But there’s a twist – Henry (the family man) isn’t aware of his secret agent personality. The secret agent Edward runs his missions, goes home, and then Henry takes over, with a cover story implanted in his brain.

The acting is good – as one would expect from Christian Slater. He does an incredible job of showing the switch between the two personalities – the soft, weak face of Henry giving way to the hard-jawed certainty of Edward in a moment.

The story has some interesting plot twists and some minor puzzles. There was a neat gun fight, and some clever deception, but at the end of the show, I’m left with a couple of questions.

1. What benefit is there to creating the Henry (family man) personality? (Other than the obvious one – it gives shlubs like me the chance to imagine that we really are spies, instead of the mundane life we lead now). That is to say – why would a secret agent deliberately weaken himself like this – deliberately crippling himself half the time.

2. Where can this show go? True Lies had a very similar plot, and was wrapped up in 2 hours. Presumably, they’ve made 20 episodes of this – how are they going to string this plot along for 19 more episodes?

I’ll watch a few more, since I enjoyed the first one, but I’m not expecting it to blow me away. Not like Heroes, season 3, which is much more exciting than I expected.