Screens: CBS
There are only so many angles it's possible to take on a procedural drama, and with each passing season, fewer and fewer remain unused. Is your protagonist a cop, or a marshal, or an FBI agent, or a CIA agent, or a crime scene investigator, or whatever they are on NCIS? Is he or she avenging the murder of a loved one or endowed with near-supernatural powers of observation or socially awkward or secretly a murderer himself? Is he or she in a foreign land or the past or the future? My guess is that, just reading that list, you thought of fifteen examples for each, because TV — particularly network TV — looooooves procedurals. Even I love procedurals; I would tell you how many hours of SVU I watched in the form of USA marathons when I was sick last week, but I'm scared of what the total actually is. There's nothing wrong with wanting to create a show where someone commits a crime and then someone else solves it. The problem is that attempting to distinguish a new crime procedural from the rest by attaching some gimmick or other almost always feels forced, and detracts from the fun of watching...you know, the crime and its solution.
Which brings us to Intelligence. Here, the gimmick is that Gabriel Vaughn, formerly of Delta Force and now with U.S. Cyber Command, has been outfitted with a chip that gives him all the capability of a computer. He can pick up Bluetooth signals, search databases in seconds, and even reconstruct crime scenes based on the sketchiest of trace evidence. As the pilot begins, we join him in the Himalayas, where he's trying to track down evidence surrounding a terrorist attack in which his wife Amelia, also a government agent, apparently participated. He's found and apprehended, of course, but he wriggles out of custody and before we know it is back in Washington, where his boss, Lillian Strand, is about to introduce him to his new full-time bodyguard — because you can't just wander around wherever you feel like, without backup, when you have billions of dollars' worth of highly classified hardware in your head.
Strand has recruited Riley Neal, a Secret Service agent, and it's so so so easy to write her off on appearances alone. You're not going to believe it, but this hardass law enforcement agent — whose job basically consists of nothing more than determining who wants to murder someone important and then getting in between the attacker and the target — is single and tough and has severe eyebrows and a clenched jaw and long, dark hair pulled into a no-nonsense ponytail and the tightest, boringest dress pants you ever did see. You've seen a law-enforcing lady with this look dozens of times before; she fell straight out of the Build-a-Procedural kit, with a set of civvies (dark bootcut jeans, white tank top, and a pastel cashmere hoodie).
But then, almost immediately, Riley starts defying expectations. She's not awed by the Cyber Command offices or particularly interested in Gabriel's unique upgrade: she's satisfied with the job she has (protecting Sasha and Malia Obama, so duh, of course she is) and thinks Gabriel's a cocky dick. She and Strand argue over who needs or deserves Riley's protective talents more, and it's clear that Riley thinks the President's daughters are more worthy than this one jagoff who happened to be picked for this implausible science experiment.
Early in their acquaintance, Gabriel also announces that he's come across Riley's sealed juvenile record, though he says he has enough class not to read it. This kicks off a runner through the episode as Gabriel "charmingly" tries to guess what a young Riley may have been arrested for: at first, he assumes it was shoplifting, which is typical of girls, and then when he sees her matter-of-factly open a van door with a screwdriver, he changes his guess to car theft. And just when it's starting to seem like the truth about Riley's juvenile arrest is going to be the Dark Secret that doesn't get revealed until a climactic moment in sweeps, she tells Gabriel in the episode's waning moments that her mother got together with an abusive man, and that Riley killed him. There's no further information about how this changed Riley's relationship with her mother or that she's still remorseful about it; this guy was a bad guy, and Riley did what needed to be done.
But by far the best moment for Riley comes when Gabriel follows a lead to an alley behind a paintball place and is soon set upon by some thugs. Gabriel and the head thug have words, and then said thug draws on Gabriel. Of course, Gabriel draws too, but Riley hip-checks Gabriel out of the way and takes over.
Does she get shot? Sure. As she tells Gabriel, that's her job. And watching this moment, which happens in just a few seconds, I realized how much I've become accustomed to seeing TV's lady cops hesitate or dither or otherwise waste time being scared. It's fine to be scared, of course. But you also have to get the package out of the way and start returning fire.
As I watched the ultimately unsatisfying Intelligence, I couldn't help thinking about why a show like Alias was fascinating straight out of the gate while Intelligence already feels tired and sad. And I don't want to say it's only because it's about a swaggery guy as opposed to a lady who can get shit done even while having a backstory that makes her interesting rather than "wounded" or "vulnerable" or whatever the hell...but I feel like that might be the case! If the government's weapon were Riley and not Gabriel, it would immediately be more compelling to me: I can imagine an alternate-universe version of the series where she went into the chipping with her eyes wide open because she wanted to be great at fighting all crime, and not because she had her own personal axe to grind. I think I'd even like the show more if Gabriel were Gabrielle, a cocky dick like Amanda Peet in her How I Met Your Mother role, clashing with Riley in ways and for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they want to sleep together although maybe they do. It's just that the guy/girl procedural dyad feels so played out. We need more Rizzolis, more Isleses, and definitely more Sydney Bristows.
Anyway, I'm probably done with Intelligence. But I'll follow Meghan Ory — who almost made me want to stick with it — wherever she goes next.