The Player

It's an efficient if mass-produced engine--every week a different race against crime and time--made a bit more interesting by the most dangerous game gone digital.... But it's the chemistry between Cassandra and Kane that ignites The Player.

The Player is fun, and doesn’t really try to be anything more than that.

It's hard to see where this all might be going. A nebulous nefarious cabal betting on the outcome of crimes may be the strangest of some of the strange premises for shows this fall, but Winchester is good at being the action hero. If you enjoy that, you might enjoy the show.

Because The Player is wandering into such well-explored territory, it feels limp at its liveliest.

"The Player" has the potential to be enjoyable even if the premise seems like a high-risk, low-reward gamble.

Winchester is a solid enough presence as Kane.... Although this isn’t a flat-out terrible series, don’t bet on NBC having a winner opposite fearsome time slot competition from CBS’ Thursday Night Football and ABC’s How to Get Away with Murder. No one likes those odds.

Sure, Thursday's pilot is junk, but it's pretty, diligent junk, essentially The Whopper of action TV, heaped high with mayhem condiments.

For its combination of silliness revved up to a furious pace, The Player is, as I said at the start, watchable--the kind of visual junk food that you find yourself consuming for an hour before you realize 60 minutes have passed.

The Player is pulp trash with an admirable sense of its own disposability, running through gimmicks nearly as efficiently as Alex plows through requisitely faceless thugs.

The show does not inspire confidence.

The show’s version of Vegas is all sin and no city, with basic, glaring geography errors (a character runs through the distinctive sights of Fremont Street and in the next scene refers to it as the Strip). Its narrative and dramatic errors are even less forgivable.

Too many NBC dramas are now all about conspiracies and secret societies. That’s getting tiresome. Case in point, NBC’s The Player.

Without a steady spray of sawdust coming from Snipes’ direction, there’s too much time to focus on the show’s loony premise and unspeakable morals.

The Player does stand out. Just not in a way that is likely to make anyone want to watch.

Phillip Winchester gets tangled up with Wesley Snipes in Las Vegas in a muddled scenario that involves predicting crimes and seeking vengeance.

The concept in NBC’s The Player is lamentably simple and might have been better off as a video game.

The action sequences are cool. Unbelievable, but cool. Fast forward through the rest of this drivel and just watch those, if you must.

The Player is flashy nonsense.

Though it has some slick car chases, The Player lacks the wit, ingenuity and originality to inspire curiosity about what’s going to happen next.

The Player is basically absurd with a dollop of stupid on top and a whole bunch of empty tossed in for filler. Yes, empty can be filler.

A new action series from NBC with a ludicrous plot full of unlikable characters played by not particularly likable actors.

It’s hard to see the series blossoming into much of anything, based on the thudding nature of the premiere.... Even without the absolutely tortured nature of the premise here, the characters are stiff to the point of being laughable.

I might have tried harder to get past the bad taste that situation left in my mouth, had the rest of the show not been fairly paint-by-numbers and generic, but as escapist hours go, there's not a lot of meat on the bone here.

Everything on the screen has been played out, ad nauseam, in other series--we’ve seen dozens of brooding-hero-with-a-dead-wife narratives and omniscient-organization-secretly-saving-the-world backdrops in the past few years alone, but it’s entirely possible that none of those other shows have left as bland a taste in the mouth as this one.