Cable and premium cable have produced a lot of anti-heroes over the years, but, so far, broadcast TV has preferred to keep their heroes/heroines unrealistically/squeaky clean and moral. ABC tried to push things a little more towards the dark side with their new drama, Red Widow, which concluded its first (and likely only) season last night. But ultimately failed in every possible way.
For one thing, the heroine (Radha Mitchell, looking more like a Lilith Fair singer than anything close to a dangerous mind) was supposed to be the wife of a drug dealer and daughter of a Russian crime boss who has to take over the family business once her husband is gunned down. A better show would have had her secretly relish the added adrenaline and kick to her life (a la Breaking Bad). But this one kept hammering us over the head with the fact that “she’s not a criminal” and wasn’t allowed to enjoy it. Then she kept doing everything in the world to prove that, including making some of the stupidest decisions on a TV show this year. Example: destroying a million dollar cocaine package when she could have given it to either of two crime bosses or sold it herself…why did she destroy it? Her feelings were hurt. It was a “crime scene” staged like a Lifetime movie, with emotionally-charged music playing in the background.
I liked Goran Visnjic as smooth criminal Schiller, but the show’s idea of a cliffhanger is having Mitchell’s woefully unthreatening daughter hold him at gun point. Even Schiller looked bored with this ending, as he was rolling his eyes with a gun to the back of his head. It was the perfect image to symbolize this show’s chronic lack of tension. [Although points to me for correctly guessing that it was her father who had her husband killed…all the way back in episode 1, not much of a shocker really.] Grade for the show: C…Grade for season finale: C…Grade for Authenticity of the Criminal World: F+