simpy-17435

Allegiance is just bad. It feels less like a cop show and more like some kid's Wattpad story. Cheesy dialogue, boring camerawork, and plot holes galore. I won't fault it for trying to push a moral in each episode, whether it's about safe supply or gun control, but the execution is so crude it just comes off as either propaganda or a kids show. The way the show tackles its issues is so shallow and one-sided, we might as well be reading the local NDP candidate's Twitter threads. Whereas earlier Canadian police procedurals like Rookie Blue and Flashpoint gave us a reason to care about the guest character of the week, this show seems to use them as props for our main character to pontificate about the week's social issue. If you're looking for chase scenes or action sequences, look elsewhere. Our Mary Sue main character can't run worth anything, conveniently letting the bad guy get away every time. Every action scene consists of people pointing guns at each other, somehow not getting extra ventilation holes, and being completely charmed by our main character's cheesy recycled pseudo-profound BS speech. The acting is overwrought, but it's hard not to be for dialogue like this (and most of it is exposition). The only character with any believability is the male rookie's training officer, Gabinski, for the few scenes he appears.

There are YouTube Originals that are better than this. If CBC wants to keep its funding under a more hostile government, it needs to do better.

The pilot is like if you told a bunch of first year film students to adapt a high school social studies textbook into a cop show. Bad writing, bad camerawork/editing, overwrought acting.

The pilot has poorly executed world-building. Our MC is a Punjabi-Canadian rookie constable for not-the-RCMP in Surrey whose father is a federal cabinet minister accused of treason. None of this is unbelievable, even if it riles some folks because of current events. The show's setting, Surrey, BC has a large South Asian population. Punjabi-Canadians have a long history of service in Canada (the current IRL Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Harjit Sajjan, is both Punjabi and a former municipal police officer). The loyalty of immigrants is contantly being questioned due to current events. This show does little to explore any of these, instead opting for cheesy over-acted one-liners that just tell us these things exist. The moment the main character got up on a podium and started giving a speech about UN peacekeeping (at a police academy graduation of all things), I started tuning out. There's plenty of missed opportunities. The Canadian Federal Police Corps, the stand-in for the RCMP, has all the regalia of a municipal police force despite being the federal police. The show misses the opportunity to explore the raging debate around police devolution in Surrey and distrust of the RCMP after decades of repeated failures in municipal policing across the country. The RCMP itself has a storied and controversial history that a public broadcaster like the CBC would do well to incorporate into a series. But this show makes no attempt. When a bunch of people in "National Security" jackets walked in to arrest the MC's father for treason, I started scratching my head. Canada's spy agency has no police powers. For a show attempting to showcase its Canadian setting, this is particularly jarring.

The show's realism is poor. When the MC's family lawyer starts going on a visibly angry tirade about racism in front of the media, I wondered why the hell the MC's father, a federal politician no less, hired this idiot. The next scene with the lawyer, he berates the crown attorney over the phone for not giving him all the disclosure. The writing doesn't make it clear what's happening, but what is clear is that the lawyer character is extremely unprofessional and an idiot because most of it would be useless for a bail hearing anyway. In any case this scene is completely unnecessary because we don't learn anything new or interesting. When the MC goes in for the shift briefing, we see the MC and her male friend get assigned their training officers...and her female friend is a "tech expert" so she gets some high tech hackerman job? Apparently the job of a dispatcher, civilian crime analyst, and just a normal police officer is now a single high tech magical police woo role. And where the real police are hurting for bodies, the CFPC is staffed enough to pull two supervisors, a sergeant and a corporal, into training officer roles. Where the real police take hours to show up if you report a missing person, the CFPC shows up with lights and sirens. And when our heroes narrow down their greasy suspect and find his mother's house, he's conveniently left a single bullet rattling around in a toolbox (that our MC is searching without a warrant) to let our characters know he has a gun; which he points at our heroine MC at point blank range and somehow doesn't get filled with holes. Incredible.

The camerawork and editing alternates between bland and frustrating. There's nothing better than the MC asking "What's that?" and never getting to get a good look at what she's looking at. Or having the camera hold on a character's face while someone else is talking.

I will give them credit for the way they portrayed the proliferation of surveillance and bodycams. It didn't seem too forced and was actually realistic. The negotiation between our MC and the suspect was alright for realism, but I'm not sure it fits in a TV show.

Overall, from the pilot, this show seems like another insipid piece of CBC schlock. It's a shame because the premise is very interesting.