I had a real reaction to the latest episode of New Amsterdam on Fox as well as the trailer highlighting next week’s “season finale”. If you’re not familiar with the show, it is a new show that launched this season starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who you may remember from Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, and a variety of other films. He’s a fantastic actor from Denmark and I was excited to see him cast in this lead role. He plays John Amsterdam, a man who is immortal until he finds his true love thanks to a spell cast on him by a Native American woman whom he helped many years before. He is also a homicide detective and the show is about both his life and memories and about the cases he is working on as a detective. This plotline might sound far-fetched, and with the wrong writers or actors could have been really cheesy, but it WORKS. The writing and acting are great and the show is intriguing.
If you’ve been watching, you know that John thinks he found this true love he’s been searching decades for, the one that will make him mortal, and her name is Sara. He has developed a relationship with her. I always thought this plotline of him and her was too “easy.” She was married (separated) when he met her, but an episode later got a divorce for him. She dumped him because she didn’t believe his story, but then took him back, again, in one episode’s time. John’s tireless quest to find the woman he is searching for, I always felt, was paramount to his story, and finding “her” so quickly cheapened the show, I felt… BUT now he has died and revived, and based on a teaser of next week’s show his son Omar is telling John that Sara cannot be the one, because he is still immortal. If I was writing this show – here’s how I’d have it go down. He’d keep searching, and find some different women who might be it, but they wouldn’t be…. and all this time “the one” would be the woman who’s been right under his nose all along who he never considered: his detective partner. Just the fact that she never occurs to him is exactly why she’s perfect for it. In fact, he views her strictly professionally and brushes her off quite a lot. The fact that Sara’s not it is a good start to showing that chemical attraction and crushes do not necessarily translate into a soul mate. I am really rooting for Eva, John’s partner. I don’t know how the story will ultimately turn out, but Sara being the one is just way too much of a copout, so I am glad to see the new twist.
I was really surprised to hear that next week’s show is the season finale. It will only be the 8th or 9th episode. Most seasons last twice that long. Sometimes they take a break for several weeks, but the last show before the break is never called the “season finale”. And I really, really hope this is not an indication that the show will not continue. It’s an excellent show I would really miss. I don’t watch many TV shows and this is one of the rare few I think is worth watching.
One more thing I wanted to touch on… Another one of my favorite new shows (which is on CBS and is on break until April 25) is Moonlight. This show stars Alex O’Loughlin, who you may remember from The Shield, as another kind of immortal: a vampire. Again, in the hands of the wrong writers or actors this type of story could be really cheesy, but not in this case. It’s a deep, convincing, serious show. This is one of the best shows to come out in a long time. But the reason I bring it up now is a comparison it has with New Amsterdam in that in both cases the immortal feels as though their immortality is a curse, and they long to be mortal. This completely goes against everything instinctive about people and it’s really hard to digest, no matter how many explanations they give (and they do give them). Is it just me, or is there nothing worse than getting old and dying??? Almost makes you resent them for having this gift and not even wanting it. But I realize this is used to provoke exactly this kind of emotional response in the viewer and get a rise out of them. It gives the viewer a greater emotional investment in the show. And because the characters’ lines are so well written and the actors are so great, you care about these characters, so you feel sorry for them even though their despair seems misplaced.
If you haven’t had a chance to catch these two shows I highly, highly recommend you do so. If you can’t catch them on TV they are both available from the iTunes store.
