'The Catch': Not Quite Catchy Enough
I really like the idea of two good actors — The Killing’s Mireille Enos and Parenthood’s Peter Krause — portraying a glamorous duo involved in crime-solving and crime-committing, but so much of what surrounds them in The Catch prevents us from really enjoying them. The new series, a Shonda Rhimes production that’s momentarily taking the place of How to Get Away With Murder on ABC’s Thursday night schedule, is so aggressively Shonda-ed — with fast cutting, split-screening, long romantic looks, and pop music competing with the dialogue in an attempt to boost your energy to keep watching — that it very nearly plays like a parody of a Shonda Rhimes show.
Enos is Alice Vaughan, a Los Angeles-based private eye and head of a corporate security firm. At the start of the premiere episode, she’s after the man she’s dubbed “Mister X” — a guy who turns out to be (this is no spoiler) her fiancé, Christopher (Krause), a con man who’s redefining the term “long con.” Christopher — whose real name is Benjamin — is so willing to wait until he’s got his victim on the hook, he first woos and then gets engaged to Alice. If a plot-turn didn’t force his hand, you wonder how long he would have waited before he fleeced her: Maybe after the birth of their second child, but sometime before committing to a condo in a Pasadena retirement community?
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The Catch arrives with a checkered but intriguing history. Conceived from an idea by the novelist Kate Atkinson, it lost its original writer and showrunner, shed its original two stars, and has been given over to a Shondaland functionary, producer Allan Heinberg; further re-casting and shifts in occupations of some of the characters continued.
So is what we’re seeing on Thursday damaged goods? It’s hard to think of it that way when the hour is swaddled in such expensive, streamlined ravishment. (Never has L.A.’s Century City gleamed so brightly.) Enos and Krause are, individually, good — but you’d never mistake their longing glances and goo-goo eyes for the sparkings of romance. And as far as intricately-plotted con games go, the writers on this show might want to page through the novels of Donald Westlake, Elmore Leonard, and even P.G. Wodehouse for more adroit examples of fun scamming.
I wish Sonya Walger — whom most of you know from Lost but for some of us will always be remembered for her role in HBO’s heart- and appendage-tugger Tell Me You Love Me — was given something more to do than play Krause’s huffy boss and second-string bedmate. The series depends upon the extent to which we become engrossed in Alice and Christopher/Ben’s attraction to each other, with special emphasis on Alice, who’s the latest version of a Rhimes woman: super-smart, super-efficient, super-cynical except when it comes to matters of the heart. My guess would be that viewers aren’t going to give Enos and Krause too many weeks to establish the kind of playfully combative sensuality that keeps ’em coming back for, say, Kerry Washington and Olivia Pope’s paramours on Scandal.
The Catch airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on ABC.
