Agent X

The biggest secret in the history of the United States (!!) is that the vice president has ...one (yes only one) agent (!) to send for secret missions! I really can't imagine what might be the ...smallest secret in the history of the United States!!!

Anyway the secret agent has no ...identity while his name is ...John Case! and his first mission (with the current vice president played by Sharon Stone) is to find another man with ...no identity (!) whose name is Nicolas Volker!

Soooo...the plot is ludicrous, just an excuse for a new 007-ish agent with all the skills and some of the witt of his British colleague.

This is not a series to take seriously and the question is if it is fun to watch. Well, This is a genre we have seen a million times. If some producers decided to produce such a series, they must surpass previous installments. Unfortunately this is not the case here. Even with a secret agent named ...Case.

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I enjoyed the first 7 or so episodes - entertaining, and most importantly FUN to watch. A nice break from the 'ever so gritty' style of more or less every other action series.

Sure, it's a semi-believable premise if you analyse it, but the point is not to analyse it. If you analysed James Bond, the whole idea is ludicrous, but it's still great.

Unfortunately, the believably really stretches in episodes 9 and 10. I found my self saying 'what?! that's ridiculous!' on more than one occasion, to the point of cringing. By the end of episode 10 I was playing with my phone instead. They lost me.

The other thing that went missing was the fun. By trying to be 'more gritty' in the later episodes, they lost the point. I'm sick to death of 'gritty TV'. The reason I liked this is because it had humour and warmth in it amongst the explosions and fight scenes. Is nobody else just utterly bored by long humourless fight scenes?

Might watch the next series but only for long enough to see if they've learned their lessons or not.

It has more cheese than the brilliant 'Our Man Flint' movies which starred cool dude James Coburn. It has more plot holes than the TV series Batman.

(Watch the moving splat of blood on the white jacket. It has more life than the bored actors, moving from left to right and dancing a merry jig in it's quest for added camera time.)

It has the beautiful, classy and highly intelligent Sharon Stone... although I don't know how or why! She must have seen Calista Flockhart make an arse of herself on Supergirl and thought... I can be a much bigger arse than she can!

Let's face it, this madness was a long TV tribute to the Roger Corman Sci-Fi movies of the mid to late 50s.

It's as if the producers bought a job-lot of rejected scripts from other crap shows and decided to make a series out of them.

Remember Cop Rock on ABC in 1990? Yeah, well this is MUCH funnier than even that!

Question. If you spend 40 minutes of your life watching a show, then spend another 40 minutes writing a review about how your not going to get those 40 minutes of your life back. Have you then lost 80 minutes and should you have cut your loses?

Sharons obviously broke (and does have form on some dubious material) but that doesn't excuse this.

It also doesn't excuse anyone watching it from their guilt: You read the cast list, you read the plot synopsis you likely saw the trailer and you saw the channel it was on.

Be honest, did you really expect Sherlock?

Well then, don't blame the broke girl - its all your fault

Im writing in support of Jeff Hephner.. Olga Fonda and Gerald McRaney.. they act just fine.. they come across as likable and watchable in the series.. i think we should give these actors a chance because they are not the problem..

the problem is Sharon Stone.. She overacts.. and if she is the executive producer i am not sure how much she was involved in the show turning out the way it did..

Do not get me wrong.. she may be a really nice lady in RL i do not know but commenting about the series i get this irksome feeling when watching the show that somehow its all about Sharon Stone herself and not really about Agent X.. which is a shame..

it also annoys me that a number of scenes that she is in there are those special filters or wotcha might call it to soften her age lines.. something feels off because its an action video for goodness sake and not some social event that we are trying to capture the moment of with a filtered photo ..

Sorry Agent X.. to give this series a chance you guys gotta decide if this show belongs to Agent X or is this just a vehicle for Stone to promote herself..