‘Countdown’ Review: Amazon’s Los Angeles-Set Law Enforcement Thriller Offers Ample Action but Zero Urgency or Logic

‘Countdown’ Review: Amazon’s Los Angeles-Set Law Enforcement Thriller Offers Ample Action but Zero Urgency or Logic

The 10th and last episode of Countdown that Amazon sent to critics is head-scratchingly bad — a cavalcade of anticlimaxes and improbable choices so tone-deaf on every level that I was convinced the show was about to unleash a doozy of a twist as part of what I assumed to be its season finale.

Were the characters in this mediocre 24 knockoff that might have run on TNT circa 2007 actually going to turn out to be ghosts? Or aliens? Or poorly programmed artificial intelligence navigating a politically denuded simulacrum of 21st-century Los Angeles? Would the twist be that this race-against-the-clock drama without any clocks to race against was taking place in the mind of a small child with no nuanced understanding of human behavior? Or perhaps in the mind of a large manatee with no understanding of human behavior?

Alas, no.

The twist of the 10th episode of Countdown turned out to be that this was not, in fact, the finale of the first season of Countdown. There are, in fact, three additional episodes that weren’t sent to critics, at least one of which could still utilize one of my predicted twists. I’ll never know.

The truth is that if Amazon had only given critics up until the eighth Countdown episode, which ends on a cliffhanger that the ninth episode resolves fairly stupidly, my review would have been tepid but probably not negative. Until that point, Countdown was generic and blandly reactionary, but not flagrantly so. And, although it made me appreciate the taut proficiency of even third-tier 24 anew, I was never bored and I was willing to give the show credit for its effective use of varied L.A. neighborhoods. I couldn’t ignore, though, how dumb the ninth episode was and how much worse and more peculiar the 10th episode turned out to be.

Some viewers will absolutely be able to. In addition to capitalizing on the ample fandom for several of the show’s stars — Jensen Ackles, mostly — Countdown could practically be retitled “Thing to Watch on Amazon Before New Seasons of Reacher, Alex Cross, Terminal List and the Next Bosch Spinoff Premiere.” After all, as I already said, it isn’t like there’s any actual counting down going on in Countdown.

Created and written in its entirety by One Chicago mastermind Derek Haas, Countdown begins entertainingly with a recognizable television favorite discovering something at the Port of Los Angeles. Soon, a race through Downtown L.A. ensues. The character, who works for the Department of Homeland Security, doesn’t last long, raising the dual questions: Who killed this short-lived character and what did he learn that necessitated having him killed?

These questions must be answered by Nathan Blythe (Eric Dane), a law enforcement and task force veteran who has pulled together, for very specific reasons, this team: Meachum (Ackles) is LAPD, coming off of nine months undercover at a prison in Palmdale and harboring a secret. Oliveras (Jessica Camacho) is DEA, coming off of several undercover stints with various cartels and maybe harboring a secret. Bell (Elliot Knight) is an FBI counterterrorism expert, while Shepherd (Violett Beane) is an FBI cyber-investigations expert, but neither has a secret. Finau (Uli Latukefu) has been working gangs and narcotics for the LAPD for 18 years, and while it’s initially suggested he has some history of involvement in police violence, it’s never mentioned again. There’s also Drew (Jonathan Togo), from Homeland Security, who has one character detail and no secrets.

Within the confines of the pilot, we learn that the season-opening murder was related to some quantity of nuclear material transported through the docks, an arsenal that could turn L.A. into Hiroshima or Chernobyl (a comparison made by one character, even though those two circumstances are not actually analogous).

By the start of the second episode, we learn that the man behind the conspiracy is Boris (Bogdan Yasinski), a wannabe Belarusian oligarch with the most nebulous all-purpose grudge ever devised for television. Shows like 24 and Homeland have proudly boasted about the research that allowed them to create villains who gave the impression that theseries had their finger on the geopolitical pulse. Boris appears to have been created to remain as far away from any sort of geopolitical pulse as possible. At no point did I find him scary or intriguing or well-played.

For nearly eight hours, Blythe and his task force go around L.A. following up on leads, almost always a name that Shepherd is able to find in some database. They go to almost every neighborhood in Los Angeles County and the surrounding environs, generally preceded by a gigantic chyron telling us that we’re in Inglewood or Culver City or Pacoima or High Desert.

It is my highest praise for the city that, for the most part, Countdown gives the impression of shooting in every neighborhood that they name-check, occasionally even capturing hints of the personality of those neighborhoods. There are times that those neighborhood references and acknowledgements of local freeways turn Countdown into the action-thriller equivalent of the SNL sketch “The Californians,” which would have made more sense as a title than Countdown.

Somebody in Los Angeles has the makings of a nuclear weapon that could obliterate the city. That’s established immediately. But the “where” doesn’t become clear until the ninth episode and the “when” is never a part of the equation, which means that you have a show called Countdown that even includes the sound effect of aticking clock without the necessary urgency of a specifically upcoming attack. Haas and the team of veteran directors just assume that because they’ve said something bad is possible, that’s as concrete as viewers will require to experience building tension.

It’s not! At no point in the episodes I’ve seen do any of the characters seem to experience urgency themselves. They’re just puttering around Los Angeles like heavily armed Uber drivers, or like they’re playing a game of Where in L.A. Is Carmen Sandiego. But I can’t tell you how much time passes in the first season. Nor can I explain why there’s a whole episode in which, with a pending threat of nuclear attack, two characters have an ongoing debate about whether to get a third character cake or cupcakes for a surprise birthday. Nor why, when one character is seriously wounded, every member of the task force goes to sit in a hospital waiting room looking glum, rather than continuing the job of SAVING LOS ANGELES FROM A NUCLEAR ATTACK.

In line with the series’ lackadaisical approach, every piece of information has to be repeated multiple times for the benefit of distracted viewers — a response to second-screen viewing that is infiltrating television in general, but Amazon shows especially egregiously. Fully half of Blythe’s dialogue is sending different permutations of characters to these different locations, so that the rhythm of the show goes like: “I think Boris might be in Azusa!” “Oliveras, you and Meachum go to Azusa!” “TITLE CARD: AZUSA.” “So this is Azusa?”

None of the characters is all that interesting, though the cast is up to the general task. Dane conveys gruff, admirable authority with every barked command. Ackles, who spent 300+ episodes making glib smartassery likable on Supernatural, is impressively able to win affection for a character who, if you stop and think about it for even a second, is closer to dangerously narcissistic than rascally heroic. Ackles and Camacho have a combustible chemistry that the show steers into to the detriment of every other member of the ensemble, rendering Beane, Latukefu and Knight decidedly secondary pieces of the cast. They’re all still better than Merrick McCartha’s smarmy Los Angeles DA Valwell, who shows up every episode to make trouble for our team as a one-dimensional adversary.

Still, at least for some of the time, there’s a muscularity to the series’ direction, which pairs one chase after another with punk or metal needle-drops. I’m not so emotionally callused that I can’t enjoy a pursuit set to Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades.” There’s nothing to the aesthetic that you haven’t seen in dozens of broadcast police/SWAT/alphabet agency procedurals (and that shows like Southland didn’t do better), but it’s mostly taut and occasionally breathless.

The last two episodes I’ve seen are, unfortunately, neither taut nor breathless. They’re dumb and illogical, and while I’m sure a twist could have spackled over the abrupt unraveling, I’m doubtful it would have made Countdown good. Where things concluded after the tenth episode was not a place I’m interested in going.