The Player

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.