Amazon’s Countdown suggests a cop show from the early 2000s. After a cold open featuring the murder of a Homeland Security officer by a group of somewhat incompetent assassins, Special Agent Nathan Blythe (Eric Dane) is tasked with amassing a team to bring the killers to justice. The series then barrels straight into an old-fashioned getting-the-gang-together montage as Blythe draws from different law enforcement agencies seeking out the best cops that L.A. has to offer—or at least the most archetypal.
Among them is L.A.P.D. officer Mark Meachum (Jensen Ackles), who doesn’t follow orders, but, damn it, he gets results. Meachum immediately butts heads with the D.E.A.’s Amber Oliveras (Jessica Camacho), whose straight-talking style doesn’t gel with his glib attitude. Then there’s Evan Shepherd (Violett Beane), the obligatory computer dork, and her F.B.I. cohort Keyonte Bell (Elliot Knight), who rarely makes it through a conversation without dropping some pearl of wisdom passed down by the cops in his family. Rounding out the team is Lucas Finau (Uli Latukefu), Special Agent in Charge of Smiling Pleasantly and Being Extremely Large.
The series abounds in awkward exposition (like when Blythe explains another character’s backstory directly to that character’s face) and one-liners that don’t quite land (like when Blythe chastises a member of his team for trying to go it alone, reminding them that they’re a task force, not “a task individual”). The initial murder is quickly revealed to be part of a larger, sillier plot that the team must foil by chasing down leads across a series of cliché-riddled assignments.
The team employs a good-cop-bad-cop routine to get information out of suspects, gets dressed up to infiltrate fancy parties, and always seems to arrive on the scene just in time to see a perp high-tailing it away. There’s not one but two foot chases in crowded marketplaces, with the suspect toppling shelves behind them in a bid to slow their pursuers down.
The feeling that Countdown, created and written by Derek Haas, is a series out of time in 2025 is never more apparent than in its obsequiously uncritical depiction of police work. Nice-guy Finau, for one, humblebrags about how many times he’s been suspended while the rest of his team engage in just about every form of police malpractice imaginable, from planting drugs to turning off their recording devices so they can break out enhanced interrogation techniques.
These actions are always presented unambiguously: that these cops are good guys doing whatever needs to be done to get justice. Combined with the show’s reverence for the armed forces and its willingness to invoke 9/11 at the drop of a hat—Blythe stoically reveals that he left a promising law career behind to sign up and serve his country the day after the Twin Towers fell—Countdown feels like a series from an older, more conservative era of television.
Still, the way the series weaves together highest-stakes drama (an overarching plot involving a nuclear bomb) and no-stakes office frivolity (the team has to get Filau a birthday cake without him finding out) isn’t without its pleasures. Watching telegenic people crack wise and chase bad guys in a sun-soaked location was a pleasant enough way to spend 40-or-so minutes back in 2001—and it still is today. And the show’s got a soundtrack that never makes you wait more than five minutes to hear someone shred the hell out of a guitar.
But rock songs and sunshine only get you so far, and Countdown starts to run out of steam around episode seven, closing out its main plot in extremely anti-climactic fashion. It’s ultimately such a strangely constructed series that you’d need a team of whip-smart detectives to figure out how things went so badly wrong. Sadly, L.A. seems to be fresh out of those.
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