American Gothic (2016)

This is a good summer mystery to take your mind off the heat.

It is a chillingly enjoyable whodunnit for a lazy summer evening. The biggest danger is that the ratings are good and CBS tries to extend it past the 13 episodes scheduled for this summer. There's a reason Agatha Christie never tried to turn Murder on the Orient Express into a TV series.

While you shouldn’t look for American Gothic to enter the Emmy conversation in the history of ever, that’s simply not the point of it. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for a weird, sometimes eerie distraction that won’t require rewinding if a few lines of dialogue get downed out by the air conditioner, CBS’ newest offering might be a summer series that slays.

Whodunit? After screening the first two episodes, I have no idea. But I'm engaged enough to keep watching to find out.

Whether Gothic has enough energy to go the distance remains to be seen, but as it stands, the show isn’t urgent except for people who have a bottomless appetite for this kind of story, or those who have yet to taste it.

The two episodes made available for review are not without pulling power. But how much staying power will American Gothic have over a long haul of 13 episodes ordered for Season One?

The TV equivalent of a murder-mystery novel, the kind you can read in between swims and nods on the beach. You know it’s going to be predictable, illogical, and a little trashy, and you don’t mind if the book jacket gets wet or torn, and if the book got stolen you’d forget about it almost instantly, but still, you kind of want to find out who done it.

Intrigue doesn’t exactly catch fire. The characters don’t elicit much drama because their circumstances feel so staid and overdone.

It's summer, and this is a scripted, first-run network TV series. That's something. And maybe everyone hasn't seen a dozen dramas with similar troubled-family plots, many (Netflix's "Bloodline," for instance) much craftier.

Madsen works hard to deliver an intimidating matriarch, but the dialogue is flat and merely functional.

After a convincing opening episode, American Gothic turns soapier and more florid in Episode 2.

There are some intentionally light-hearted, even funny moments squeezed in here and there. The show's concept offers nothing really new for TV but it executes the wealthy, murderous family drama well enough for low-stakes summer programming.

Clearly, American Gothic has enough plot for a summer murder mystery, but it doesn’t quite have the style or cast to pull it off with the flair that this kind of guilty pleasure needs.

American Gothic eventually reveals itself to be a pedestrian murder mystery that slowly dies on the vine for want of interesting characters.

Gothic is either afraid of being too gothic or just doesn't know what gothic is. [24 Jun 2016, p.53]

[A] glacially paced yawn of a yarn. [27 Jun - 10 Jul 2016, p.15]

A lack of originality isn’t its only weakness. Overacting--and at least one abysmal attempt at a Boston accent--results in a soapy atmosphere. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it becomes one as the series fails to grasp its tone.

This American Gothic remains strictly paint-by-numbers.

It's not clear whether American Gothic is meant to be campy or whether it just plays that way, but as cold cases go, this one's lukewarm. And as the coincidences pile up, the murder mystery gets more and more muddled.

The new project’s creation is credited to Corinne Brinkerhoff (The Good Wife; Jane the Virgin), whose previous work seems too smart for what’s going on in American Gothic. I will prefer to think that, like the people in another CBS show created by her former employers, her brain has been momentarily invaded by BrainDead’s alien ants.

American Gothic is badly written, which means that the actors don’t have enough to work with to achieve anything more than fleeting credibility.