Separate Pairs

You have to feel bad for Steve and Ginger, who have both had substantial stints at great characters in their individual careers, who finally get a shot at lead roles and have to settle for this cowchip script that their agents should have steered them far, far away from. But it checks all the boxes, and when that happens, the only thing this chippery is good for is peeling the wax off your florsheims. Absolute unoriginal codswallop. Overblown narcissistic buffoonery. Splash over substance. Without the substance. When a train wreck is this toxic, for pete's sake, avoid it for the plague that it is.

You really have to suspend disbelief when you watch this show. The writers want you to believe that two international spies are risking their lives, disrupting and endangering their children's lives and living a lie for decades in exchange for the meager income of a computer salesman.

Apparently the government wants them to live frugally in order to bolster their cover as an average family . Other spies, like James Bond, were able to live extravagantly while undercover.

Also, the government can afford to staff a full time operative next door, posing as a friendly neighbor, tasked with surveilling the kids, yet they are too cheap to offer hazardous pay to the spies?

Shake my head.

As someone who has lived in Austria, I can tell you for a fact that, while the overhead aerial shots of Salzburg are accurate, the "streets" used in the chase scene, etc., are definitely not anything you will see in Austria. In fact, they are definitely American. (Case in point: - - as they are chasing the bad guy at the end, you see them turning a sharp corner, and if you look, there is a DO NOT ENTER sign, which is distinctly American; not to mention the basic layout of the streets, etc. I'm sure this was filmed in California, and I understand that. My only suggestion is to take more care in the accuracy of the settings, backdrops, and surroundings. ( I WILL say that the undercover van did have the correct German words on it.) I look forward to seeing what the series hold in the future.

As noted here by those whose German is better than mine, this episode's location filming (except for some beautiful tracking shots which might have been purchased from Shutterstock) suffered conspicuously from budget constraints; the Omega Group's headquarters have also gone notably down-market. The casting of the Taskers' bosses suffered from ideology as well as thrift; both of them together do not add up to the original film's Charlton Heston as Spencer Trilby.

But at least the show spent its budget for writers unusually well. The now-mandatory denigration of straight males is handled with wit and charm. And (perhaps because of Executive Producer James Cameron's clout), the series is allowed to take marriage seriously. While maintaining a high stylistic tone, it injects an interesting (at least to those of us married to professors and living with imperfect plumbing) note of realism (at least compared to, say, the James Bond films), into a genre which normally economises on nothing except intelligent writing.