'Allegiance' Premiere Review: Another Family, More Spies
If you thought you didn’t want to watch State of Affairs, Katherine Heigl’s bold but flopping current-events quiz, wait’ll you get a load of Allegiance, more international huggermugger, premiering on NBC Thursday night at 10 p.m.: It will probably vault quickly to the top of your “Yeah, no thanks” list.
A spy drama about the parents of a CIA agent who doesn’t know his mom and dad are doing espionage work for Russia, Allegiance’s first episode has so little action, the producers stage a car chase in which the husband chases the wife — the stakes in that scene could not be lower.
Allegiance has an intriguing cast headed up by Hope Davis (In Treatment and a slew of good performances in film and the theater) and Scott Cohen (he’ll always be Gilmore Girls’ Max Medina to me) as the parents, Kayta and Mark O’Connor; and the always interesting Kenneth Choi (Sons of Anarchy, Wolf of Wall Street) as the CIA’s New York station chief. The breakout star is supposed to be Gavin Stenhouse as Katya and Mark’s son, Alex, who’s meant to be some kind of genius analyst with behavioral quirks that the pilot is coy about revealing. (A supporting player says he lacks “social graces”; when was the last time that was suggested as a desired trait for a TV hero?)
Related: 'State of Affairs': The CIA Speaks Out on Its Twitter Affair With the Katherine Heigl Drama
Some reviewers have compared Allegiance to FX’s The Americans, suggesting it’s a rip-off. I don’t see it that way: Allegiance, set in the present-day, is an attempt to be a thoughtful drama about the differences between loyalty to family and loyalty to country, but its atmosphere is as drab as an early John LeCarre novel, without the prickly dialogue or tricky plotting. The premise of the new show hinges on whether, or how soon, Alex will tumble to the knowledge that his parents work for the SVR, Russia’s modern successor to the KGB. In the meantime, we’re supposed to be spellbound as people are burned alive or wiretapped. I imagine Choi had a hard time keeping a straight face delivering a climactic line of dialogue about Moscow’s “operation to bring America to its knees.”
Meanwhile, I’m left with questions:
Can Allegiance possibly get any better in its second episode? How many of us will tune in to find out?
And: We lost Parenthood to this?
Allegiance premieres Thursday, Feb. 5 at 10 p.m. on NBC.
