First Impressions: Deception ‘Pilot’ – You Scratch My Balls, I Scratch Yours

The pilot of a drama is an exciting thing: with an hour to introduce us to a new world and a wide array of characters, dramatic pilots have the benefit of a long running time to initiate the show’s rhythm and narrative. Some shows will struggle finding that narrative early on, but if the characters are interesting and the show has some semblance of personality, it’s worth giving a shot.

Deception has none of these things. It’s a bland tale, placed in a color-by-numbers world full of cardboard stock characters, packed to the brim with twists and nuggets of information, never really creating a narrative beyond “white rich girl gets killed, former best friend (who is black) comes to find her.” A pilot that suffers greatly from breaking the cardinal rule of “show, don’t tell” in EVERY SINGLE SCENE, Deception is not a show worth watching a second time.

This joke of a mystery show stars Meagan Good as Joanna, a hard-nosed San Fran detective who punches meth head bitches and runs back to NY when her rich friend Vivian Bowers dies of an “apparent” drug overdose. Of course, she smells foul the moment she crosses her siblings: former boyfriend Julian, his older, rapey/murdery brother Eddie, and their sister (who’s not their sister, but actually Vivian’s daughter) Mia. These characters are all revealed through ham-handed details and lots and lots of cheap exposition, where facts and personality traits are defined by characters basically holding up place cards with bullet points of information about the character.

Joanna moves back to NY to live with the Bowers family, infiltrating the family’s secrets from within by playing with Julian’s penis (not in the pilot, though) and digging into the cancer drug conspiracy, family alcoholism, and other ‘juicy’ story lines with the help of FBI agent Will, who Joanna OF COURSE has sex with before the end of the pilot – when its revealed that its not their first time, which means Will isn’t happy when Joanna volunteers to bang Julian and hang out with the Bowers because she “has to do this.”

The pilot really isn’t much more than a mishmash of scenes thrown together in rapid succession to introduce everything and anything that’s important about the show. The first ten minutes of the episode introduce rich families, two different conspiracies, multiple drug addictions for different characters, hints towards the obvious bad guys (ANY MALE in the Bowers family), and enough Vivian/Joanna flashbacks to last an entire season. It’s all rushed in favor of getting to the ‘exciting’ and ‘juicy’ parts of the plot, which have all the dramatic impact of a feather floating to the floor.

What’s worst about it – past the simple-minded misogyny, and terrible over-acting by some characters – is the script’s lack of creating any emotional connection between any of its boring characters. The only interesting character (Remy) is dead by the second commercial break, after one funny line and hinting towards the bigger conspiracies surrounding Joanna’s death. It’s amazing how everyone on the show automatically accepts this family would kill their own daughter/sister without a second thought, but nobody except this one police woman/ex-friend have any suspension about Joanna’s death. Of course, that same friend turned Vivian away when she was pregnant (the first time with Mia – I forgot to mention that she died pregnant, a fact we get from a sex tape Joanna finds where Vivian used to hide her weed in high school).

Deception tries hard to copy the styles of many other popular modern dramas – many of them mediocre to begin with. But the show lacks confidence in its own material and therefore can’t ground any of its characters or premise in anything tangible for us as viewers to be interested in. And plot wise, the pilot is so on-the-nose and predictable (not to mention way too fast-paced), it becomes a mundane slog after the opening credits roll. An uninteresting show, full of paper-thin, good-looking actors walking through material we’ve seen on too many other soapy dramas.

Grade: D

Other thoughts/observations:

– The promos for the season feature Eddie (Tate Donovan) joking about raping and killing a girl!

– do all female cops have to be whores in real life to get big cases? Outside The Wire, this is all I see. Or its Linden from The Killing, who is just bad at everything in life.

– Too …. many… holes… in ….. logic…..

– Ed’s wife conveniently leaves him the day after Vivian gets killed… because she just can’t live with the blood of TWO dead girls on her husband’s hands. Seriously… who is writing the female characters on this show?

What did you think of the pilot? Feel free to leave your thoughts/comments below!