Should You Let Zoo Hold You Captive This Summer?

What Is This Thing?

The opening voice-over lays out the premise in a manner that prepares you for the subtle, confident storytelling yet to come: "For centuries, mankind has been the dominant species. We've domesticated animals. Locked them up. Killed them for sport. But what if, all across the globe, the animals decided, 'No more'? What if they finally decided to fight back?"

When Is It On?

Tuesdays at 9 PM on CBS.

Why Was It Made Now?

I wish I could tell you it was a sharp, chilling, prescient drama jumping off from today's most terrifying headlines. Alas, I think it's more likely that the (incomprehensible!) ongoing success of Under The Dome indicates it should invest in another adaptation of another sci-fi novel from another airport author.

What's Its Pedigree?

The source novel comes to us from thriller author James Patterson and has been adapted by Alias alumni Jeff Pinkner, Josh Appelbaum, and André Nemec, joined by Scott Rosenberg, who worked with the latter two on Happy Town and Star-Crossed. Our lead is poor old James Wolk, who -- after Lone Star, Political Animals, and The Crazy Ones -- has apparently taken over the title of "Handsomest Show Killer" from Ted McGinley; he plays Jackson Oz, a safari guide in Botswana trying desperately to forget the shameful legacy of his naturalist father Robert (thirtysomething's Ken Olin), who apparently recorded his video manifesto about alarming developments in the animal kingdom and then killed himself. Jackson talks through his feelings about his dad with his boss at the camp, Abraham Kenyatta (Dracula's Nonso Anozie). The rest of your opening credits cast is Kristen Connolly (House Of Cards, The Whispers) as newspaper journalist/secret blogger Jamie; Reid Scott (Veep) as her colleague/sometime slampiece Ethan; Billy Burke (24, the Twilight movies) as a veterinary pathologist Mitch. (We also briefly see SVU's Tamara Tunie as Jamie's boss, but it seems like it might be a one-and-done guest shot.)

...And?

No hour one spends gazing at the lovely face and butt of James Wolk is ever entirely wasted. There's also the pleasure of watching scenes set in Botswana, a landscape that isn't exactly a standard location for TV shows. Except, just kidding, according to IMDb the whole show was shot in Louisiana.

...But?

"What if...the animals decided 'No more'?" is a line a character on this show speaks and that no one working on said show cut from the script for being just a little bit on-the-nose. How could they: it would require anyone in the production to trust the audience to understand what's going on without having our hands held the whole time. See also: "Oh, you're one of those...One of those scientists who prefers animals to humans." Show, don't tell! (Though I guess they had to tell since two lines earlier they had Mitch, the scientist in question, uncovering the corpses of a couple of lions whose brains he's removed and apologetically telling Jamie he knows it's "kind of gross." GEE, DOC, IS THAT A TECHNICAL TERM?)

For me, the biggest issue with the show is its premise. Between lions exhibiting non-standard behaviour by attacking a safari camp and getting the jump on the humans by approaching in single file and another couple of zoo lions in Los Angeles suddenly killing their trainer and escaping their enclosure (after which they kill another couple of guys peeing in an alley), it seems as though Jackson's father's crazy theories about animals rising up to destroy humans might be right: Jackson never knew what Robert meant by a "defiant pupil," until one of the rogue lions gets close enough and he sees a kind of drippy effect from its left pupil into its iris that makes him suspect it's the physical marker of some kind of mental switch's having been flipped. But if that is true, my feeling is that the animals have put up with human bullshit long enough. Call me "one of those" if you will, but I rarely take the human side in any human/animal skirmish. Grizzly Man? Leave grizzlies alone. Anaconda in that (falsely advertised) Eaten Alive special last year? You were cruelly denied a tasty person meal. The show makes sure, at least in the pilot, only to let us meet victims we will feel deserved to be killed -- the guys in the alley are not only publicly urinating but discussing, sexistly, whether it's okay for the one guy's girlfriend to have proposed an open relationship if it means she gets to pursue other partners too, and I feel confident that, in Botswana, the man Jackson stops from shooting a rhino even though he paid $200,000 for a hunting license has an ironic punishment in his future. But a case could be made that the zoo trainer who dies offscreen before we meet him is not blameless either, given his part in keeping animals in captivity. (I am not a crackpot.)

But that's not the only issue. I can already tell the character of Jamie is going to be A Problem. I'm sure it's due to exposition purposes, but wasn't there some other way to convey the danger of her running a muckraking blog about a corporation called Reiden -- which she believes is responsible for the zoo lions' attack since it started supplying their feed eight months earlier -- without having her publisher call Jamie into her office to tell her that both Reiden and her paper (under the circumstances, hilariously named L.A. Telegraph) are owned by the same parent company? WOULDN'T A JOURNALIST KNOW THAT? That is, I assume it's Jamie's publisher, given that she says connected Jamie to the anonymous blog due to its author's use of the word "pettifogger," a term Jamie has also used in her past work at the paper: "I know, because I had to look it up." Even on this dumb show, I would hope that's a word an editor knows, or could at least puzzle out from context.

I almost want to believe the show knows how silly it is when one of the last images in the episode is this example of non-standard behaviour in the domesticated animals of Los Angeles...

"This is an elementary school," she chokes. "Yeah," Mitch confirms. "But in the summer it's a day camp. Camp starts tomorrow." Jamie:

What is THAT face for? Is she scared one of the kids might get nuzzled to death? THEY'RE KITTIES.

...So?

If you would like to spend your summer making fun of a dumb CBS drama and you've burned out on both Under The Dome and Extant, this is a great option. Everyone else: just go to bed early.