Should You Swear Fealty To Allegiance?

What Is This Thing?

Scary-smart Alex O'Connor has just gotten a very important job at the CIA, specializing in operatives of the SVR, the new-style KGB. What better time for that very same SVR to call in a chit with his parents, who are Russian spies living covertly in America, themselves?

When Is It On?

Thursdays at 10 PM on NBC.

Why Was It Made Now?

Someone at NBC saw the critical success of The Americans on FX and decided there might as well be an NBC version of it. Also, it's based on an Israeli show, and in the age of Homeland, I guess those are still hot.

What's Its Pedigree?

Series creator George Nolfi is the screenwriter behind The Bourne Ultimatum and one of my favourite/least-defensible movies, The Adjustment Bureau, but this seems to be his first foray into television; he's supported by Amit Cohen, creator of The Gordin Cell, the Israeli series on which Allegiance is based. The cast includes Hope Davis as Katya O'Connor, the spy family's matriarch, Scott Cohen as its patriarch Mark, and Margarita Levieva as their eldest daughter Natalie, who knows about their spy secret. Alex is played by relative unknown Gavin Stenhouse. Morgan Spector -- Boardwalk Empire's Frank Capone -- plays the SVR liaison putting pressure on Katya and Mark to turn Alex into a double agent.

...And?

Hope Davis is a treasure and she sure is doing her best. It's always nice when New York gets to play itself. And the pilot opens with a grisly scene of SVR reprisal for one of its operatives that a bloodthirsty viewer (hi) might interpret as a promise of more violence -- as graphic as you can see on a broadcast network at 10 PM (like NBC's own Hannibal, for instance) -- later in the episode and, if she hangs in long enough, the series.

...But?

You saw above where I said this was the NBC version of The Americans? If you watch any NBC series in 2015 -- and you probably don't, or won't until Hannibal comes back -- then you know what that means: it's sloppily written, ill-conceived, confused, and really fucking boring. It really hopes that you will be attracted by its Americans-esque similarities, but they are so superficial that if that's your reason for tuning in, you are going to be extremely disappointed. For starters, Allegiance is set in the present day, and while obviously Russia is more of an enemy of the U.S. now than it was in the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall or whatever, it's hard to feel like American freedom is really that imperiled by this foe right now.

The show also stumbles in terms of its protagonist. Alex is extremely smart and observant, but what we hear exposited about his childhood (he didn't speak at all until he was eight, for instance) suggests that he might be on the spectrum, and while he's obviously high-functioning now, he's still a pretty opaque character to hang a whole show on. (I guess it's fortunate, though, that Alex doesn't talk a ton, since Stenhouse is British and his clench-jawed American accent shows it.)

"But aren't the parents the protagonists?" I mean, I guess? But unlike Philip and Elizabeth on The Americans, we learn hardly anything about their motivations or their mission from this first episode, so by the time they've decided to weasel out of their latest assignment by not bringing Alex into their secret but instead spying on him themselves, it's hard to get on board with their unnatural choice of country over child. But then again, it's just as hard to root for Alex to discover their treachery because it's so boring that it's impossible to care about any of it. The SVR agents who don't survive the pilot are sketches. Alex is a blank. I've never given a single fuck about any character played by Scott "Charisma Void" Cohen and Mark is definitely not breaking his off-putting streak.

"But at least it doesn't have an irritating young teen kid in the spy family!" WRONG, there's also a know-it-all puke of a daughter. (Not Levieva -- Alexandra Peters, the off-brand Abigail Breslin, as the extremely extraneous Sarah.)

...So?

Do not watch this show. If you insist upon doing so, know there's no way it makes it to a whole season; even on NBC, airing its whole first season might be a long shot. Anyway, we should all root for its cancellation so that Davis and Levieva can be airlifted to a nice half-hour Showtime dramedy. Davis is menopausal: it's PAST time.