Legends

If you can get past the clichéd writing and appreciate Legends as a force of sheer cast magnetism and hyperactive camera tricks, it’s a solid distraction from the problems of the real world.

Darker and less escapist than TNT’s other new summer entry, “The Last Ship,” Legends offers a down-and-dirty hero with rough edges but surrounds him with a cadre of cleaner, less sullied colleagues, making for somewhat of a tonal mish-mash.

To its credit, Legends goes a bit beyond the expected stings, as a shadowy figure prompts Martin to doubt everything he knows and question whom he can trust. For the most part, though, almost everything here feels culled from earlier variations on this theme.

The outlook for his head and neck here is much better; Legends, though, is on wobbly legs.

And yet, after watching the first two episodes, it's a shame that Legends (and TNT) weren't a bit more ambitious with the show. The pilot is splashy and action-packed, but overall the lack of complexity--and yes, I know I cited that as a plus earlier--makes it less satisfying.

The show is off to a rocky start, but there's the chance each week that it might redeem itself because a well-tailored script could rectify most of its issues.

The story sort of has a “Bourne Identity” element to it. The pilot is an eye-roller, with the main storyline featuring Bean infiltrating a survivalist camp.

The potential of that longer story arc, as well as having Bean back on screen with his head reattached to his torso, may be enough to make Legends work despite the familiarity of that crime-solving-team template.

Legends wants you to take it very seriously, but throughout the two episodes I've seen, it plays like a parody of the kind of show it wants to be.

Legends makes a grand show of setting up a tortuous, vaguely Don Draper–like interior journey for our lone-wolf hero--in the pilot, he's stalked by a shadowy figure who intimates that Martin doesn't know all there is to know about his true self--but the character is such a pile of overworked cop-show and spy-show elements (he's in too deep, he's a cranky and sarcastic maverick who resents authority, his work destroyed his marriage, etc.), that there's not much to him beyond the charisma that Bean naturally brings.