'The Player': This Is The Best Of The Worst New Shows

There are some TV shows you can find yourself watching knowing they’re bad, yet something about them keeps you gazing at the screen. In the case of The Player, that allure is rather easy to pinpoint. Philip Winchester is the Player — that is, he plays Alex Kane, the ruggedly handsome, well-muscled central figure in this cheerfully absurd adventure series.

The premise, in case you haven’t been watching and judging from the ratings it’s pretty likely you’re not: Kane works with a Las Vegas organization headed by Wesley Snipes’ Mr. Johnson that predicts crimes before they happen, and a clientele of wealthy bettors who put up cash based on whether or not Alex can solve the crime before the bad guys.

In this effort, Alex and Johnson — who refers to himself as the “pit boss” — are aided by a “dealer” named Cassandra (the shimmering Charity Wakefield, and am I the only person in the country who has seen her in both this piffle and PBS’ Wolf Hall?). Cassandra presides over a vast, Vegas-poor-taste-decorated control-room filled with gigantic computer screens. A tech wizard, she taps into cameras all over the country, guiding Alex through danger remotely (sample example of her voice, in his earpiece: “Alex, someone’s in the kitchen with a gun — move!”). She also keeps track of the ever-shifting odds for or against Alex winning each week’s crime-case “bet.” But mostly, Cassandra is there to purr in a British accent and move quickly across the control room in tight outfits — in this, she’s a 2015 update of Diana Rigg in the old Avengers TV series.

So, we have a network drama with a loony premise, to which is added a poignant one: Alex wants to find out who killed the love of his life, Ginny, whom we see in flashbacks and who died before the series began. There are a lot of shootings, explosions, assassination attempts, and ludicrous dialogue, most of it falling to Snipes to recite: “Crime is everywhere,” he’ll say with a throaty flourish. “We go where the action is!” Or, fingering the absurdly huge Windsor knot of his expensive tie, he’ll murmur in an almost-British accent, “The game stays in play but the gamblers are going to demand consequences.”

I wonder whether Winchester looks over at his Strike Back co-star Sullivan Stapleton in the same network’s Blindspot and says, “Dang, wish I was in that show!” Blindspot is a ratings success, while The Player has sunk a bit more each week. Certainly Wakefield deserves more of an acting challenge, and if The Player does nothing more than bring her to the greater attention of American TV producers, she’ll probably consider this dicey show a good bet. As for Snipes, he occasionally gets to continue his career-long interest in martial arts, even if he has to get to it by delivering a line such as “Are you familiar with the principles of jiu-jitsu?” with a threatening murmur shortly before choking someone out.

For its combination of silliness revved up to a furious pace, The Player is, as I said at the start, watchable — the kind of visual junk food that you find yourself consuming for an hour before you realize 60 minutes have passed. Which is more than I can say for this season of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.

The Player airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on NBC.