My Dragons
Amsterdumb
Please note that the following contains random spoilers for New Amsterdam. Read at your own risk!
Liam and I have been watching New Amsterdam, the show about the guy who has been living in New York since it was, well, New Amsterdam. I am not sure yet whether I like it, but the episode that ran on Monday made me less happy.
First of all, there's the Magical Indian who decides, for some reason, to bless/curse our hero with reasonably eternal life. He saves the woman from getting gutted (because "we don't kill women") while participating in a massacre of her tribe, and gets stabbed himself in the process; instead of sensibly deciding that not wanting to kill the women doesn't make up for wanting to kill the men, she works some kind of Indian mojo on him that makes him immortal until he finds his true love.
Leaving out the reasonably offensive Magical Indian1, that's got to be the stupidest magical working since they gave Angel a soul that would be taken away if he were ever happy. You give a person eternal life, what incentive does he have to go looking for the thing that ends it? Because, yeah, I suppose it's possible to get bored with living, but once Amsterdam hit the 20th century I'd think that got way less likely.
So the central angst of the show is kind of dumb: Amsterdam is apparently the only person in the world who does not, in fact, want to live forever. OK, moving on.
The requisite Wise Old Man of the show is actually Amsterdam's son. That's gotta make for some interesting dynamics right there, and puts rather an interesting spin on the scene where Omar (the wise old man) is introduced: he's been beaten up for not having the money to pay off a bookie, so Amsterdam makes a desk to sell as an antique to pay off his debt2. Knowing that the characters are father and son makes it much less cute, in my opinion; instead of "Aw, here's his buddy he wants to help out" it's "Geez, kid, you are sixty-five years old, stop playing the bloody horses!"
He's numbered his dog. Its name is Thirty-Six. Granted, dogs don't live long compared to even normal humans, but if I got to the point of numbering them (they're all the same breed, too) I think I'd just stop keeping pets.
Amsterdam goes out of his way to claim knowledge of things he looks too young to have done, to the point of flat-out telling people he "was there" for events in the 30s. Though I grant no one believes him, it makes him look like an asshole.
Speaking of which, they made a big deal in the pilot setting up that Amsterdam's a jerk and none of the other cops want to be his partner; the one assigned to him is set up as being kind of abrasive herself and we're all set for a season or so of Odd Couple before they settle down to being friends and respecting each other. Except that it's the third episode in and, well, they're already friends. She doesn't know his secret, but they work together well and don't even do much of the kind of Witty Cop Banter you get on Law & Order.
I guess this is my biggest problem: they do a lot of setting up without payoff. At the beginning of Monday's episode, the Victim of the Week is praying; Amsterdam arrives at the ER while she's being worked on and hears her, and they make a thing out of him drawing the ire of the ER doc to try to hear what she's saying. You'd expect that this would be a major plot point, but no: it's to set up him being a smart ass yet again and deducing that she was a nun. And that's all. She's never mentioned again except as "the first victim".
Or the fact that his True Love (who he discovered pretty much by accident) is married. At the end of episode two we find this out; at the beginning of three we, and more importantly he, find out that she's separated. And they get it on by the end of the ep. If the whole show's supposed to be about him finding his True Love, shouldn't they be, I dunno, drawing it out more?
I think part of the problem is the de rigeur flashback sequences. In this kind of show they function as the B plot for each episode, but in a regular show you can have threads from the A plot in B scenes and vice-versa. In a flashback show, all you can do is have them be thematically linked somehow. It makes for less development in both, and I think New Amsterdam has a pretty bad case of the syndrome.
I don't hate the show, and I'm probably going to keep watching it, but it's not drawing me in the way that the late lamented Journeyman did. It's possible it'll catch its stride, but if it doesn't I'm not going to cry.
1: To the best of my knowledge, I have not a drop of Native American blood in my veins and my most distant ancestor to be born on this continent did so in roughly 1890. It was still offensive. I can't imagine what an Indian would think.
2: Amusingly, this is not forgery; in a former "life", the man was a cabinet-maker and his work is collectable now, so whenever he needs some extra cash he can just whip one up to "discover". It's an authentic [Whatever His Name Was When He Was A Cabinet-Maker], it's just not really an antique.