4 out of 5

Created by: Roberto Orci, Andrew Orci, Dan Dworkin, and Jay Beattie

covers season 1

Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey station’s first original program, ‘Dusk Till Dawn,’ was an interesting but very uneven expansion on the director’s film of a similar name.  But the style and general quality of the show was enough to prove that RR could do this TV thing, and besides, I like the director, warts and all.  Even so, I approached ‘Matador’ with low expectations, especially given that it’s soccer-themed plot hook seemed suspiciously timed to coincide with World Cup fever.  I mean – ‘a CIA agent goes undercover as a soccer player to root out the bad guy’ sounds like too many 90s straight-to-video flicks.  And yet it works.  It works way better than it possibly could, and our experienced TV creators apparently know their craft well enough to keep the plot expertly balanced between silly and serious until they’ve earned our trust enough to start getting heavy.  Once it does get heavy, the show somehow steps up a notch in quality, maintaining its writing and production chops without having to halt and wink at us to let us know it’s all in good fun.

DEA guy Tony Bravo (Gabriel Luna) is spotted by the CIA for being able to run fast and having a background in soccer, traits that are a perfect match for going undercover on person-of-interest Andrés Galan’s (Alfred Molina) soccer team, the LA Riot.  Bravo gets some quick lessons and some falsified documents and is on his way, soon earning the nickname ‘Matador’ after creating quite a spectacle at a tryout game.  Excepting action-lite hijinks while we have fun watching a fish-out-of-water relearn soccer?  Maybe.  Matador starts that way, with small little cat-and-mouse attempts to get Bravo on Galan’s side, but the script holds on to the fact that Galan is a bad guy and that Bravo is supposed to undercover due to his skills, and not in spite of them.  So more often than not, Tony succeeds where lesser shows would have him being a dunderhead, and we get to focus on a surprisingly compelling building plot about secret bosses and ancient idols and whatever else surrounding some ultimate evil around which Galan may be involved.  Luna is perfect in the role, not relying on charm or looks to carry him through the part but applying them in-character when it serves a need; similarly, Molina doesn’t revel in cheeky bad-guyness – he gives Galan an actual personality and presence, which helps to make the threat he represents more legit.  When the plot gets bigger, things threaten to topple into too-big britches, but the scripters know the right point when to peel it back to keep it on the level.

It’s not that Matador is the most exciting or freshest action show to ever hit TV; it is, essentially, just an action/comedy show, but it has an impressively settled sense of scope that keeps it engaging for the whole season, and a really well cast core group of actors that helps to give weight to an already capable script.