PILOT REVIEW: In the Dark

IN THE DARK

Starring: Perry Mattfield, Rich Sommer, Brooke Markham, Casey Deidrick, Keston John, Morgan Krantz, Thamela Mpumlwana, with Derek Webster, and Kathleen York

Created by Corinne Kingsbury
Written by Corinne Kingsbury, Directed by Michael Showalter

IN SHORT: What?

THE PREMISE:
Murphy (Perry Mattfield) is a blind woman in her twenties who spends her life drinking, smoking and having one night stands. That's all well and good until she discovers a corpse that she believes to be a teenage drug dealer she befriended but the body has disappeared by the time she reports it. But that's only part of it. Much of the pilot just basically dealt with us meeting Murphy as we met the many people she encounters in her life, none of whom could really be considered close friends.

THE REVIEW:
Well, I got whiplash from the wild jumping around that happened in the pilot and I'm left here trying to figure out what the show's intention was and what kind of show it wanted to be. I mean it was literally all over the place. There was broad comedy, dark comedy, depressing sadness, suspense, and sentimentality. And none of it was particularly effective. I'm all for a show that has different layers to it, but this was like they threw all those layers into a blender and just whipped up something that didn't work.

Perry Mattfield is intriguing in the main role, but she was a little too brooding and unlikable for the first part of the show and that kind of got things off to a bad start. I am a big fan of the dog though. The rest of the cast was hard to get to know with a wide variety of characters each with only a little bit to do. This was poor storytelling on the writers' part because they introduced so many different avenues of Murphy's life and they couldn't even develop any of them. Perhaps the best developed side story was with Chloe's dad, Dean (Rich Sommer) but that's not saying too much.

I guess I just don't get the point of this all. I think it's interesting to put a blind woman at the forefront of a TV show, it's an underrepresented group of people on TV, but this is not the vehicle to push things forward. There also seemed to be some attempt to make this a little bit of an antihero show with a very flawed protagonist at the center. But the attempts were a little too blatant to do so and Murphy's character oscillated too much to really be a true antihero.

BOTTOM LINE:
Well, I am not going to watch this again. It's a misguided show on a network where it seems to be an ill fit. I wouldn't be surprised if we see some record low ratings with this one.