Blood & Oil

Blood and Oil, harkens back to the best elements of “Dallas” and “Dynasty.”

It’s confidently economical in its goal of pure, late-night, soapy entertainment.

Blood feels excessively earnest, even in its best attempts to be trashy.... In its current form, Blood is a throwback to a quainter time in primetime soap history, when a simple, well-told story of family intrigue was enough.

The pleasantly fresh setting is the North Dakota oil boom, but the tone is very "Dallas," and the storytelling is as melodramatic as the show's title.

Blood & Oil is not a realistic drama but an out-and-out soap opera.

This show will run on poisonous rivalries, hidden agendas, and unbridled ambitions. And something about a Mormon temple. Blood & Oil doesn't dig deep enough.

Well, the play’s the thing in this one, but Johnson is the hammer and tongs. At age 65, he still seems up to the challenge of stirring up this little petroleum potboiler. The kids are all right but he’s the man.

Hap and Carla are certainly a great-looking couple, standing in the shadow of the North Dakota Rockies. What they're not is a heightened version of Blake and Alexis Colby Carrington, the sort of heights I was really hoping for here.

Don Johnson, who’s worth his weight in gold or oil--anchors the show as North Dakota tycoon Hap Briggs.... You can bet the first hour climaxes with some of the main characters rolling around in oil, punchin’ and brawlin’. But the show could develop its own mythology of contemporary wildcatting.

After one episode, it’s not at all clear that this show will be ambitious enough to take good advantage of the real-life goings-on in North Dakota.

This new "Dallas" could be coming a bit late, as declining oil prices threaten to turn the Bakken boom into a bust, but the story's timeless enough, if maybe a little tired.

If Oil isn't explosive, it also isn't repulsive.

Alas, pretty much everything in Blood & Oil, created by Josh Pate and Rodes Fishburne, has that kind of on-the-nose quality, with nary a surprise in the first hour.

You see where all of this is going, of course, but no one is out to surprise viewers with Blood and Oil. This is a soap opera. It may not last as long as either “Dallas,” but it’s working the same territory.

The first hour spends so much time setting things up it may not have been indicative of what's to come. But the drama needs to ramp up quickly if this is going to have any chance at all.

Both Johnson and Valleta recognize the script for what it needs--a quirked eyebrow here, a glower held a bit longer than usual there--and tip the story in their favor as the down-and-dirty version of Frank and Claire Underwood. Crawford and Rittenhouse are so busy trawling for sympathy that they barely register.

Soap operatic machinations and narrative plausibility need not necessarily be bedfellows. But there’s little in Blood & Oil that compels in the way of the best trash TV. Crawford and Rittenhouse are uber-bland romantic leads.... It’s up to the very pretty landscape photography (lots of mist-strewn and buffalo-bedecked vistas), as well as the old pros among the cast to pick up the slack. Johnson brings his usual rakish menace and charm (he’s one of the few reasons you could see returning each week).

It has the aggressively prettified look, rather, of an ad for beer or a new Ford truck, and you sense that you are being sold something, rather than told a story, let alone the truth.

It too often feels like a variation on “Dallas,” right down to an obsession with profits from oil. Johnson is fun but Crawford is flat and dull, too unengaging to really be a lead on a show like this one.

Blood & Oil offers only musty melodrama befitting its already dated premise.

So far the storytelling on Blood & Oil has been crude and obvious.

Aside from Don Johnson’s canny oil baron, and as we found with the “Dallas” revival, one savvy old dude can’t always carry an entire show on his back, especially when the rest of it is so mechanical.