3 out of 5

Created by: John Rogers, John Fox

covers season 1

Aw.  Confine this to the realm of poor marketing, perhaps, or maybe it really was just a show out of its time: co-creator John Rogers (I think, or maybe it was John Fox) had pre-hyped the show by mentioning it was an attempt to bring back the mustached-winky action charm of 80s television and movies, and while it wasn’t exactly Magnum P.I. – it was better than that, in my opinion – it’s true that there was something rather testosterone fueled about The Player.  And I’m not sure if primetime TV is the place for that right now.  Get all tizzy sexist about that statement if you want, but there’s not many solo male led shows in those slots at the moment, so while The Player might’ve easily found an audience wowed by its stunts and gusto ten or fifteen years ago, it’s just not quite the market right now.  And what’s unfortunate is that it’s not a sexist show, at least in the sense that lead Alex Kane, played by Philip Winchester – following up the indeed sexist Strike Back with a show highlighting the chops he gained on that series – is on the hunt for his ex-wife, not a girlfriend, and the female lead, Cassandra King (Charity Wakefield) is often seen in formal attire, not underwear or bikinis, and doubly unfortunate in that the show wasn’t just that mustache-wink stuff but actually had a pretty interesting plot going on…

Let’s also skip past the simplicity of my statement suggesting that girlfriends and bikinis are the only qualifiers for making a show sexist.

The Player is about security specialist Alex Kane getting roped into a secretive “club” in which mysterious bidders gamble on the outcome of real world situations.  The game is run by the “pit boss,” Mr. Johnson – Snipes, his drollness effectively cast here – with tech and information handled by Cassandra, the “dealer.”  Alex is the wild card thrown in to high risk situations – Can He Capture the Killer in Time? – and etcetera, to raise the bets.  This idea is plenty for some good TV drama, exploring the club itself, as well as what’s keeping Alex involved, but the writers decide to maybe over complicate things with the missing ex-wife angle; juggling the angles of that plot with the main one unfortunately splinters most episodes into two, severely cutting the momentum.  Both parts are good, just the mash-up is uneven, and it means that for every impressively staged and executed action sequence – the kind of stuff some movies don’t do nearly as well – we know we’re going to have to leave some buffer room for Alex to run around clue-sniffing.  And news of early cancellation – though the show seemed to continue production as usual up until its ninth episode – prevented these aspects from having any weight, at least for me, as I knew they’d either be wrapped up way earlier than planned or left dangling.  (Spoiler: it’s the latter.)

If, like me, you loved Strike Back but could’ve done without all the sex, The Player is the followup: it’s a perfect action show, with the major network limitations requiring the scuttling of all the grunty excess of that Cinemax series.  Modern twist-a-minute television had the writers trying to juggle too much instead of just doing thrills a week, but the thrills are visually spectacular nonetheless.  So let’s join hands and collectively blame the rest of the world for not watching the show that should’ve been renewed and somehow allowing things like Under the Dome to go on for three seasons.