preslopsky

It is hard enough to make a comedy where just one of the themes is someone cheating on and leaving his or her spouse, but utterly impossible if that is the only theme. How is that remotely funny to begin with? It is not even fun or funny in a dry, grim sort of way.

Piper Perabo's brief internal struggle with deciding to leave her husband for her lesbian lover whom she has more or less just met is overcome with as much difficulty as a runner tearing through the tape at the finishing line. And all of this is rectified with such ease and no hard feelings whatsoever. I am not making any moral judgments, but I found that appalling rather than funny.

Piper Perabo once again wields her earnest pouting that is supposed to be cute throughout this movie. So nauseating; please try other emotions.

In such an odd, extreme situation as was presented in the movie, I would have expected at least one person to have gone stark raving mad. That, at least, would have presented a pretext on which to base comedy. But as it is, it's as if we are being asked to laugh as someone is cruelly murdered, while the victim smiles and says "Jolly good show".

Late night cable is full of soft-core B-movies about wives turning to lesbianism that are more compelling than this movie.

I get the feeling that my wife and I were the only two people watching this show. The characters were very likeable, and Mr. Doe himself Dominic Purcell was great. I hope that at least something good for his career comes out of this show.

A man appears seemingly from nowhere with total amnesia but possessing the total knowledge contained in the Library of Congress, and then some, turns up in Seattle. While he tries to figure out who he is and where he came from, he becomes a private investigator helping the police with its most difficult cases. The running subplot are hints of his past and a cult organization that either created him or is trying to control him.

This makes for a very interesting show with the normal episodic suspense of a detective show, but with the bonus with ongoing suspense about the detective himself. The cast and their roles were great. This show was simply begging you to like it. What failed was the writing. The premise of the series and the plots of each episode were great, but execution was terrible. In every episode there was some completely absurd part that made you cringe. The writers never seemed to figure out what it meant to know everything. Doe not only is smart, but also has instant muscle memory and can learn new physical tasks instantly. In one episode, he even predicts the weather. And sadly, some of Doe's knowledge is totally absurd. For example, in the first episode, Doe recites the entire binary code (in ones and zeros) for the original version of MS DOS in front of a crowd of astonished spectators in a matter of hours (the crowd sticks around to hear it all).

The idea that this guy knows everything is pretty incredible but leaves an huge area to work with, but this concept was totally abused. As much as I would have liked the series to work, I was left only with the impression of the pretentiousness of the writers. It's pretty hard to create an almost omniscient character when you yourself are pretty dumb. I think that under more capable hands, this show could have been great.