PILOT REVIEW: Deception

DECEPTION

Starring: Megan Good, Laz Alonso, Tate Donovan, Wes Brown, Katherine LaNasa, Ella Rae Peck, and Victor Garber

Created by Liz Heldens
Written by Liz Heldens, Directed by Peter Horton

Deception is a new Revenge-style drama from NBC about the murder of famous socialite Vivian Bowers. When it is ruled as an overdose but suspicion arises, Her childhood friend and current cop Joanna Loscato (Megan Good) returns to the family to try to get to the bottom of things. The family is made up of pharmaceutical CEO Robert Bowers (Victor Garber), his second wife (and ice queen) Sophia (Katherine LaNasa), shady oldest child Edward (Tate Donovan), bad boy and younger brother Julian (Wes Brown), and youngest daughter (is she his daughter?) Mia (Ella Rae Peck). Also in the main cast is Joanna's ex-boyfriend and FBI agent Will Moreno (Laz Alonso).

THE GOOD: The show is visually pretty from the setting to the characters - it is one of the many ways it copies Revenge, the look of the show is very upscale. There are some good performances - Tate Donovan is interesting as the older brother and Katherine LaNasa seems like she could be a decent lite version of Madeleine Stowe's Revenge character. And of course Victor Garber is solid as usual. The show was light on big moments but it did have one nice and surprising moment which I won't spoil for those who haven't seen it.

THE BAD: I feel like I might be overusing the comparisons to Revenge but then I realized I'm not because it's such a blatant copy. I wouldn't knock it so much if it could capture the magic of season one of Revenge but it couldn't at all, it was actually quite boring from the underwhelming opening and murder to the general feel of the show. The flashbacks were used early and often but failed to add much to the story. Also, while Megan Good was ok, her character isn't that intriguing and doesn't seem to care nearly as much as Emily Van Camp's character on Revenge. The set up for Joanna to infiltrate the family was too convenient and isn't it a real stretch even for a show like this that they don't already know she is a cop? It's not like she's pretending to be someone else.

BOTTOM LINE: I might give this show another week to see if it gets more twisty but I'm real doubtful. It seems like the cast is solid but the writing just isn't there to make this a good murder mystery. It's hard to care who murdered Vivian Bowers when you don't care about the characters. The previews at the end of the episode looked slightly more promising but we'll see. I'm already getting tired of Revenge, I certainly don't need a weaker version to watch.