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Everyone loves thrillers these days. With hit mini-series like “Run Away” and “His & Hers” making waves on Netflix already this year, it makes sense that the broadcast networks would try to reclaim some of their lost viewers by giving them the kind of anti-hero that used to be reserved for cable TV. The latest such effort is an adaptation of a Belgian film/novel named “De Zaak Alzheimer,” the story of an assassin with Alzheimer’s who is trying to do one last job before dementia overtakes him. If that concept sounds oddly familiar, it was recently adapted into the dismally awful Liam Neeson vehicle “Memory,” one of the lesser films from a star who sometimes makes questionable choices. Have developers Ed Whitmore & Tracey Malone, and showrunners Aaron Zelman & Glenn Kessler, cracked the story in a way that makes it worth remembering week after week?
“Grey’s Anatomy” star Patrick Dempsey steps into the tailored suits of Angelo Ledda, an ordinary guy in one half of his life and a hired killer in the other. He’s convinced everyone in his “normal” life, including his very pregnant daughter Maria (Odeya Rush) and son-in-law Jeff (Daniel David Stewart), that he’s just a suburban everyman with a boring job and simple life. What Maria doesn’t know is that his work trips to the city are not for sales pitches as much as cold-blooded murders. In the premiere, he sets up in a sniper position on his target, only to have to improvise when the victim doesn’t take the window seat as predicted. He’s set up as a character who has maintained dual lives, although there’s a strong suggestion that the dangerous one might have led to the death of his wife, Maria’s mother.
We meet a few other people in Angelo’s sphere in the first two episodes, including the man who gives him his assignments (Michael Imperioli) and that man’s nephew (Richard Harmon), who serves as Angelo’s right-hand man, although one of the issues with the show is that this program and its universe feels surprisingly contained and even slight. There’s too little world-building, almost no setup for Angelo as a character outside of his descriptors like “assassin,” “father,” and “patient.” That last one surfaces when it becomes clear that Angelo is starting to succumb to the dementia that has forced his brother into a condition where he barely even recognizes him. When he can’t remember the alarm code on his New York apartment, that’s a small problem; when he puts his gun in the fridge instead of his safe, that’s a big one.
Of course, judging a weekly network series after two episodes is a bit of a folly in that “Memory of a Killer” could find its personality mid-season and reveal these chapters to be just growing pains. I have my doubts. There are fundamentally lazy aspects to these episodes that feel like pervasive issues that can’t be easily overcome. Most of all, the writing is uninspired, with clunky dialogue and character details that don’t really tell us anything about who we’re watching or what they’re doing. And while the premiere is well-made enough—directed by the great TV vet Daniel Minahan, who also helmed last year’s underrated “On Swift Horses”—the follow-up is depressingly visually flat. There’s a shootout around a pool that is one of the most haphazardly edited things I’ve seen in a long time, as if someone is trying to hide that they didn’t get the right coverage.
The amateur craft of a scene like that wouldn’t matter if we cared about what was happening. And while it’s tempting to say, “give it time,” two episodes of network TV is about the length of a feature film, and we’ve all seen shows that get their hooks in you from jump. To be fair, if this show does end up working, the arrival of the great Gina Torres (“Firefly”) in the second episode as the cop who starts to sniff around Angelo’s life after a shooting will likely be one of the main reasons. But will anybody care by that point? With so much competition out there, it feels increasingly difficult to preach patience with a show that has so little personality. After all, first impressions are often all that we remember.
Two episodes screened for review. Premieres on January 25, 2026.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/g2GIdn4
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