THE SKED 2013 UPFRONTS: CBS Featurette – “Intelligence”

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In the CBS featurette for its new midseason action-adventure INTELLIGENCE (it’ll take over the Monday 10PM timeslot from Hostages), the show is variously compared to Mission: impossible, Frankenstein, The Six Million Dollar Man and James Bond.  Curiously, the one they left out was Chuck, for which this show’s concept is virtually a dead ringer:  a government agent is implanted with a chip that allows him instantaneous access to all online or electronic signals and information in the world.  Of course, this time the agent is a hunk instead of a nerd, and it’s a straight-ahead thriller instead of an action-comedy, but you get the idea.

As all those references to earlier TV shows and movies indicate, there’s nothing very original about Intelligence–of course, CBS dramas don’t thrive on originality.  It seems like a reasonable substitute for Hawaii 5-0, although there’s nothing here to suggest a breakout hit.  Josh Holloway and Marg Helgenberger are solid TV names (and Meghan Ory, as this show’s version of Chuck‘s Sarah, comes over from Once Upon A Time), but their roles seem to be strictly functional here.  Its fate probably depends on whether NBC’s The Blacklist catches on–if that show has beaten down Hostages, it’s unlikely to be toppled by this one.