Should You Watch Stalker (From The Street, Through A Gap In Some Curtains, Like A Creep)?

What Is This Thing?

Hot shot supercop Beth Davis leads the LAPD's Threat Assessment Unit, in which capacity she investigates stalking complaints in an attempt to apprehend perpetrators before unwanted surveillance and menacing escalates to violent crime. When Jack Larsen transfers into her unit from working homicides for the NYPD, she's wary due to what she already knows about his sketchy record -- sleeping with a superior officer's wife, from what we surmise -- but might he be so good at this particular assignment because he's...actually a stalker himself?!

When Is It On?

Wednesdays at 10 PM on CBS.

Why Was It Made Now?

As Beth notes expositorily, the growth in social media has coincided with and almost certainly contributed to an increase in stalking reports; only 10% of stalking cases involve celebrities; and if you're unlucky enough to be a woman, there's a 1 in 6 chance that you'll be stalked in your lifetime. (For men, according to the pilot, it's 1 in 19.) So the subject matter here is...depressingly timely.

What's Its Pedigree?

Series creator Kevin Williamson may still be best known for Dawson's Creek, but he started out in horror: he wrote the Scream movies, Teaching Mrs. Tingle (which he also directed), and currently has another horror hit on Fox in The Following. Our co-leads are veterans of recently cancelled shows: Beth is played by Maggie Q, late of Nikita; now playing Jack, Dylan McDermott has a long list of dead TV projects in his past, most recently Hostages.

...And?

Most people probably could be more attentive about how much they share on social media, and if watching the horrors suffered by the victims on this show leads anyone to exercise more caution online, that's probably a good thing.

...But?

But this show is terrible. This show is so grotesquely violent that CBS had to schedule it later than Criminal Minds, the previous title holder for CBS's Most Pointlessly Pornographic Portrayal Of Violent Crime. And look, I am not squeamish about violence at all: I enjoy a good '80s-style shoot-'em-up more than probably anyone you know. However, it's hard to watch Stalker without getting uncomfortable about how exploitative it is. Within the first minute, a young woman about whom the only things we know is that she has a car, a phone, and a craving for guacamole (does she have a name? Yes, but we'll only learn it when we hear a cop identify her...later) has been doused in gasoline by a masked assailant; another minute later, she's being burned alive in her car. So right from the start, the criminal is the only one in this interaction with agency or power -- the only one who's at all compelling, even though he just murdered someone. The victim is that and nothing else. This feels wrong?

And look, as both a woman and a person who lives in the world, I certainly understand that women have to be on our guard against all kinds of threats, including ones it never would have occurred to any normal person to fear, like that a crazy person might be in your attic watching you sleep through a hole in the ceiling or standing outside the elevator doors in your office's parking garage waiting to pour gasoline all over you and set you on fire, both of which (duh) happen in this episode. But the lesson is perfectly clear, ladies! If you want to keep yourselves safe, just don't take elevators, don't take phone calls, don't break up with men, don't take spin classes, and don't have an attic! What could be more simple?! I understand that this show isn't the first to try to spin entertainment out of some of the worst things that men in the real world really do to women (cough SVU cough), but somehow it's the most hopeless I can recall having seen in a long time. I mean, even the head of the TAU can't escape getting stalked herself? Fuck this.

OH, AND then there's the whole thing where even before we find out Jack is a detective about to join the TAU, we see him following and spying on a woman and her young son (and not well, by the way). So when we see him at the crime scene with Beth, walking through all the markers that show that the woman set on fire in her car was very afraid of her stalker and had been for a while, obviously we're supposed to think he's so good at detectiving because his real job is stalking. But THEN, at the end of the episode, the woman he's been following confronts him. No surprise, she's Jack's ex, but when it comes out that he's legally barred from seeing their son (we don't know exactly why, but given what an aggressive lech he is with Beth, HIS BOSS, I'm sure legal action was warranted), it kind of seems like we're supposed to feel bad for Jack that he has to go to these lengths just to clap eyes on his child, and also be relieved that he's not like that other BAD stalker team with the gas? Fuck THAT, TOO.

...So?

You don't have to take my word for it! You can read the account of Williamson's very hostile reception by critics at the TCA press tour this summer, or Google "cbs stalker" and see how many results call it the season's worst new show. Guys? It's bad.