New Amsterdam

The underlying theme here, once the fantastic elements are stripped away, is loneliness. That (plus the interesting face of its star) gives New Amsterdam a true and very tender heart.

The resulting series features trick photography, murder, romance, and--much like the Fox "Terminator" series--more clever ideas and witty jokes, not to mention cool jazz, than the audience expects or deserves.

New Amsterdam is smart and far more original than most of the new series this season, which warrants it becoming a Monday habit.

Eight episodes or not, don't count this show dead before it's born.

This relatively entertaining fantasy has one obvious viewership advantage over many of its strike-bound scripted competitors: new episodes, and not bad ones at that.

The premiere teleplay from Christian Taylor does a capable, if slightly workmanlike, job of setting the stage for what's to follow, while Coster-Waldau paints a beguiling portrait of a brooding, conflicted, undeniably charismatic soul.

New Amsterdam is worth keeping an eye on as it develops. It could become consistently engaging television.

The procedural stuff is mostly drab, but John's institutional memories of the Big Apple (dating back to when it was still a big jungle) make New Amsterdam more intriguing than it initially appears.

Coster-Waldau makes John so alien and distant as to be annoyingly inscrutable. But in Thursday's episode, we begin to learn more particulars about John's history, and how he maintains his secret. And that's when Coster-Waldau becomes more vivid and the show begins to rise above its silly murder-of-the-week plots

The filmmaker Lasse Hallstrom has directed the pilot with cool, almost metallic tones, as if trying to conceal the show’s distorted bedrock sentimentality. He can’t.

This new drama has bad dialogue to spare, too, which mars an otherwise distinctive, better-than-average police show.

New Amsterdam's pilot, directed by Lasse Hallstrom, who's also one of the show's executive producers, is as well-executed as any I've seen this season.

[New Amsterdam's premise] is not the greatest thing since the invention of the tin can, which came along right in the middle of our hero's life, but it turns out to be much less stupid than it sounds.

The debuting metaphysical cop drama comes on like a randy high schooler, dumping too much backstory too fast. [7 Mar 2008, p.88]

What we have in a sense, then, is another boy-girl dance playing off against the tension of lethal crime in New York. But the premise is novel enough that maybe John won't be just tilting at windmills.

This Fox series is smartly written and acted, and it's even evocatively filmed in New York locations that lend it a gritty city flavor. But.... Less persuasively entwined is a heavy-handed romance whodunit.

The 1642 scenes look downright silly. There are a lot of flashes of humor, too, and they help spice up this loopy premise.

The shaman contrivance is surely tedious, but it appears that New Amsterdam uses the immortal design not as a way to Forrest-Gump its protagonist into a set of trite historical situations, but more cleverly, to ask questions about those situations.

In Tuesday's pilot, New Amsterdam reveals itself as a pedestrian cop show with a vampire-like lead character

Easy to dismiss at first glance, the series does exhibit some possibilities in its second episode, though it's still a relatively uninspired time-killer for those of us with just one life to live.

Such a concept seem ripe with delicious possibility. The show, unfortunately, is not. Played out as a cop procedural, it has a predictable narrative structure that at times resembles nothing so much as a prison.

New Amsterdam is essentially three shows in one: Amsterdam flashing back on all the exciting things he's done in the last 366 years; Amsterdam trying to find The One, and Amsterdam and partner Eva Marquez (Zuleikha Robinson) solving murders like the leads on some kind of supernaturally-charged "Law & Order" spin- off. But only the first of those shows is remotely interesting.

The whole enterprise is very shoddy and predictable, and I can’t imagine that anyone involved did this for anything but a paycheck.