Will Your Interest In Limitless Be Commensurate With Its Name?

What Is This Thing?

After having a tiny amount of success in a band a while ago, Brian Finch is now the only guy left in his "project" -- in other words, he is a shiftless loser. But when he happens to get a temp job filing at his old bandmate Eli's investment bank, Eli hooks him up with a pill, called NZT, that lets him access parts of his brain he never could before: he's smarter, faster, more focused, and generally better. Unfortunately, this pill has some negative side effects: people at the bank who've been using it start turning up dead, and Brian becomes the prime suspect in their murders.

When Is It On?

Tuesdays at 10 PM on CBS.

Why Was It Made Now?

Hard to say! The movie it was based on came out four years ago and wasn't exactly a giant hit; it predated Silver Linings Playbook and, therefore, Bradley Cooper's hot streak and ascension to the A-list of actors. But CBS having had success with off-center crime procedurals set in New York, I guess it's looking for a companion to the likes of Person Of Interest and Elementary.

What's Its Pedigree?

As noted above, it's based on a 2011 feature film, though from what I can tell, the people who made that are only minimally involved: the film's director Neil Burger will, per IMDb, direct future episodes, but Marc Webb (Lone Star, the most recent Spider-Man movies, (500) Days of Summer) helmed the pilot, and if the IMDb credits are to be believed, screenwriter Leslie Dixon and novelist Alan Glynn (who wrote The Dark Fields, the book the film was based on) didn't even get courtesy producer titles. Instead, the series was created by Craig Sweeny, a producer on The 4400, Medium, and the aforementioned Elementary. Brian is played by Jake McDorman, much more likable here than in last year's short-lived Manhattan Love Story, but the real proof of the investment CBS is apparently making in this project is that his parents are played by Ron "Alias" Rifkin and Blair "Fringe" Brown. Also on hand are Dexter's Jennifer Carpenter as Rebecca Harris, an FBI agent pursuing Brian; and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Perfect Storm) as Nasreen Pouran, Harris's boss. I guess I should also mention that Bradley Cooper reprises his film role, writer-turned-Senator Eddie Morra -- which I thought might be a spoiler until I looked up the trailer from the upfronts -- and also serves as one of the show's Executive Producers.

...And?

I am really, really not a snob, but as of the end of Under The Dome, the number of CBS shows I watch is one: The Good Wife. I've tried with their various cop procedurals over the years, but I just find them kind of samey, and with old Law & Order Special Victims Units on USA all the time and Famous Original Law & Order marathons constantly running on four different cable channels I get, I just don't need to fuck with NCIS in any city. So the network affiliation made me pretty pessimistic about Limitless -- particularly since I'd just watched this fall's other sci-fi film adaptation and been deeply unimpressed. But Limitless gets one of the best responses any drama pilot can hope to get from me: it's not boring!

One very smart decision for this adaptation of the film's story is that it works as an extension rather than a reconfiguration. I guess Fox's Minority Report show does that too, but that show takes place a couple of decades after the events of the film; other than the three precog characters, it's a wholly new cast of characters and essentially an unrecognizable setting. Limitless isn't just contemporary: it's explicitly stated that its events are taking place four years after those portrayed in the film. And once the plot starts rolling, turning this premise into a TV show seems like a brilliantly obvious idea. We get a refresher on what NZT is, how it affects the user, and the inherent risks of taking it as soon as Eli dips into his supply to give Brian a dose, all exposition that gets delivered with elegance and efficiency and also gives us a lens through which to learn more about Brian's backstory. But it also suggests a means by which the series could refresh itself periodically: once Brian's NZT experience runs its course, he could initiate a different character into taking it, and we could follow him or her instead.

Anyway, that's just speculation (but it's a smart idea, right?). Back to the actual episode: McDorman came to my notice playing some real smarmos, not just on Manhattan Love Story, but also on Shameless and Greek and Lifetime's Original Movie about the Craigslist Killer, in which he played -- who else? -- the titular murderer. Here, he tones his WASPy felon attitude way down to play a slacker who regards the advent of NZT in his life as his means to impress his father. Said father, Rifkin's Dennis, also surprised me by being something other than the typical disapproving dad of a TV fuckup: Dennis knows Brian isn't doing well, but he plays along with his self-aggrandizing cover stories, to a point, to be kind. When Dennis is hospitalized with a mysterious and apparently undiagnosable ailment, and Brian offers to move back home to help, Dennis quizzically asks, "What would you do?...What are you offering, Brian? How would you help?" Brian's voice-over tells us, "He's not trying to be mean -- that's not my dad -- but he was saying a lot more than he meant to." A one-note dad is so much more expected under the circumstances, so I like that these characters get to have a complex relationship -- shot through with disappointment on Dennis's side and shame on Brian's, but still mutually loving.

And New York looks great. Like it always does.

...But?

It's good for the show that the father/son dynamic is written in an unexpected way, because the turn Brian's story takes is extremely rote. Pouran tells Rebecca (and also Rebecca's partner, Hill Harper's Spelman Boyle, who's basically undeveloped in the pilot) that the CIA knows about NZT -- though not where it came from -- but that running trials on human volunteers left them looking like Faces Of Meth afters within a year. So once Brian has met with Eddie Morra, gotten a shot of Morra's secret NZT inoculation and one more dose so he can solve the investment bankers' murders and clear his name, the FBI wants to keep supplying him with NZT not just so it can use him as a consultant -- working with Rebecca -- and benefit from his big, juicy chess club brain, but so it can study his physical responses to the drug.

So we've got a super-smart blond dude paired with a normal brunette federal agent? I guess I'm the only one who remembers Intelligence. But also, now Brian's just going to be a brainy and basically invulnerable superhero, and all he's going to do with that is fight crime? Yawn. What made the Limitless movie fun (in its, ahem, limited way) was that we got to see Eddie enjoy his new capacities, in ways that were not always totally upstanding. Even now, in the pilot, he shrugs off the idea of trying to take his juiced-up intellect to the Presidency because he gets so much time off in the Senate. That's my kind of genius! Anyway: I'm not interested in CBS crime procedurals, and if this becomes a case-of-the-week affair where the "twist" is that one guy trying to solve it knows BASICALLY EVERYTHING, it's not going to be for me.

Then there's the problem of Rebecca. Was anyone really missing Jennifer Carpenter post-Dexter? My recollection is that she didn't have a very rabid fan base then (understatement), and she still really can't act now. I got so much of her clipped, skeptical hostility as a cop on that show that I'm hesitant to invite more of it into my life.

Finally: you cast certified dreamboat Arjun Gupta and then make it so he's not going to show up after the pilot? LAME.

...So?

The, ahem, limitations of the procedural format and the Carpenter factor are both possible impediments to continued viewing, but I liked the first episode enough to be willing to sample at least one more, and it's very rare for me to say that about a network drama pilot. Give it a shot.