Take Two

Take Two is a light crime procedural that's here to give you some pretty people to look at, some quips to chuckle at and a mystery to solve in a tidy 43 minutes. Nothing more, nothing less. It's weird that something so familiar and formulaic can feel like a breath of fresh air, but here we are.

For fans of darker, soapier TV fare, the light-as-a-feather “Take Two” will be a hard pass, but for a light drama it’s entertaining enough, thanks to producers poking fun at TV procedural cliches (while also embracing them) and Ms. Bilson’s likable performance.

Take Two is honest advertising. It’s the second grab at a winning premise, for the same network, no less. You deserve more.

Created by the producers of "Castle" -- and conceptually just birthed from its rib -- Take Two is the slightest of crime procedurals, one that will live or die on the appeal of its stars. Fortunately, they're both adorable, which might not be enough to sustain an ABC series that might as well have been titled "Castle 2."

As with Castle, this one will sink or swim on the banter and appeal of the two leads. Bllson grades a bit higher on these curves while Cibrian sucks it up and regularly swallows hard. ... Take Two comes nowhere close to matching the glories of ABC’s Moonlighting or NBC’s Remington Steele, both of whose odd couple crime solvers really rocked. Castle also fell well short of those two, but did pass ABC’s endurance test.

Light as air, not much more substance, "Take Two" is a genial "Castle" redo.

The trouble with Take Two is with neither the concept, retread though it may be, or the stars. It's the dreadful scripts. The crime-of-the-week stories are like little video Rubik cubes; with a lot of time and effort, you could figure them out, but why bother? And the jokes all tend to revolve around genitalia, including a truly startling number of variations on the old Mae West is-that-a-gun-in-your-pocket routine.

[Take Two] goes beyond light mystery to the realm of weightlessness. [25 Jun - 8 Jul 2018, p.11]