Stalker Series Premiere Review: Run and Hide
This fall marks my third year of writing episodic television reviews for TV.com. In that time, it seems I've earned a reputation within the TV.com community for approaching the medium in a way that's often identified as "objective." Apparently, that's a hotly desired mentality for TV reviewers to have, as if there were such a thing as an objective review in which a person offers his or her opinion on a piece of culture. After all, it's not like opinions are in any way determined by our personal biases, life experiences, and so on. (And yes, that's just a sarcastic way of stating that there's no such as an objective review/opinion.)
I suspect that one of the reasons my reviews are perceived as objective is that I rarely make black or white declarations regarding an episode's merits; as a result, they're often considered "balanced," which may actually be a more accurate term, since "objective" implies that we've all agreed on some rubric by which to score any given episode of television. I rarely write reviews that are overwhelmingly negative or overwhelmingly positive, a style that sometimes confounds people because it increases the chances that, if two people read the same review, one of them comes away believing I liked the episode and the other comes away thinking I hated it. Still, I think it's always important to address both the good and the bad, and to approach each new TV series or episode—or any piece of art, for that matter—on its own terms. What is it trying to do? What is its purpose? Then, based on my sense of its aims, I can attempt to evaluate it, taking all sorts of parameters into account: Have I seen this premise before? Are the characters believable within the context of the world they inhabit? Did the episode hold my attention? And if I come away feeling disappointed or unimpressed, who's to blame for that—me or the show?
The point is, different people have different opinions, and if my opinion of a TV show doesn't match yours, that doesn't mean either one of us is wrong, or that one of the two opinions is invalid. As I've long maintained in comments sections all around the site, differing opinions are important to any discussion of culture; if we all had the same opinion of every show on television, there wouldn't be much point to getting together and talking about them every week. Collectively, we tend to rely on art to help define ourselves, to provide a sense of our identities, and sometimes it can feel like a personal affront when someone disagrees with us—especially on the internet, where there's so much anonymity shrouding the proceedings. That kind of a situation isn't good for the discussion, and it's not good for culture.
All of which is to say that what I'm about to write is not a judgement on you if you enjoyed Stalker's debut. I think Stalker is bad. Stalker offends me in a way that very few shows ever have, which I suppose is something of an achievement. The pilot was violent for the sake of exploitative shock; it didn't offer commentary on stalking or violence in American culture, televisual or otherwise. I found it to be a vile, seemingly endless stream of trash that almost made me understand the people who like to brag that "Oh, I don't watch television."
So here's the good: Stalker stands out from this season's other pilots in its confidence and in knowing exactly what it wants to be, and as a procedural, Stalker is very finely put together. Episode 1's search for the stalker who liked to set women on fire had three potential suspects, each of whom was questioned, interrogated, and eventually eliminated until only one remained. It chugged along nicely, as if the show had already been solving crimes for years. Stalker is so well-oiled that it even contained some classic (and annoying) procedural tics, including a shoddy justification for why the Threat Assessment Unit would be assigned a homicide case (it involved stalking, that's why!) and the disappearance of the killer's mask once we learned his identity (he was played by Michael Grant Terry, demonstrating that he's more than just an adorable intern on Bones), because the mask was there just to stretch out the mystery, not because it was a motivated part of his murder ritual.
Liz Friedlander's direction in the pilot operated very much in a procedural vein, with the shot coverage mostly there to illustrate what was being said as opposed to adding extra layers. So far, Stalker's few stylistic flourishes draw from standard thriller aesthetics, like Kate being surprised by a jogger during the cold open or the camera acting as a voyeur by filming characters through windows. None of them were particularly innovative, and given how well-worn they are, it would've been odder if Stalker had opted not to use them.
The two supporting detectives, Ben Caldwell (Victor Rasuk) and Janice Lawrence (Mariana Klaveno), had next to nothing to do in the pilot, but that didn't detract from the pace, as the episode was understandably more concerned with setting up its leads—Maggie Q's Beth Davis and Dylan McDermott's Jack Larsen—and their dynamic. Q is giving Stalker her best, imbuing Davis with a TV cop's no-nonsense attitude; Q/Davis's reactions, or rather lack of reaction to McDermott/Larsen's attempts to be the good old boy homicide cop, may've been the best part of the episode, mixing occasional jabs of dry humor and a believable sense of empathy to give Stalker's hideousness a humane core it doesn't deserve.
McDermott continues to excel at choosing terrible projects. He's livelier here than he was on Hostages, but the Larsen character is a borderline parody of a TV homicide detective; I mean, he apologized for staring at Davis's chest, asked her why she wears sexy clothes, and and then dismissed her reasons for doing so. He's an HR disaster waiting to happen that will never ever happen.
One place where Stalker has fundamentally stumble is in giving both Davis and Larsen connections to stalking. Davis is a former victim, though the details of her experience weren't revealed in the pilot. Her house is organized in a way that's designed to make difficult—as was helpfully explained to us via the investigation of a different home in an earlier scene—for someone to stalk or assault her. She lives in fear, having accepted that fear as part of her daily life. When she talked about Lori, the pilot's the second would-be victim, she was also talking about herself. Stalker's intention is clearly to give Davis an additional layer of complexity, but I don't know that the show is equipped to handle that complexity in a meaningful way, at least based on this first episode.
Larsen, of course, represents the opposite side of the stalking equation. He IS a stalker, having transferred to Los Angeles from New York not only to escape the scandal of having sleept with a deputy police commissioner's wife, but because LA is where his estranged and/or ex-wife and son live. If his gentle caressing of the photos on his Stalker Wall are any indication, he's actually stalking his son instead of his wife, so he's a jerk cop and a sad dad who has boundary issues in both instances. I'm not sure if Stalker wants me to feel conflicted about Larsen—"Aw, he just wants to see his son! But he's creepy!"—but it obviously wants to explore the ramifications of stalking from both the stalker and stalkee perspectives, and while that could be interesting, nothing about the pilot suggested the show is capable of pulling that off. In fact, it's oddly tone-deaf about its own goals.
I say it's tone deaf because of B-plot, which centered on one college-aged man, Eric, being stalked by his former roommate, Perry. First off, it felt like a very transparent attempt to anticipate and circumvent criticism of Stalker's treatment of its female victims by including a "males are stalking victims, too!" storyline right off the bat. However, it only managed to highlight those criticisms, not least of all because it saved all the truly violent and horrific stuff for the women.
More egregiously, it allowed Eric to be assertive by giving him the opportunity to break the cycle of victimhood. Eric went to Davis seeking help, but Davis turned him down because there was no hard evidence of Perry stalking Eric and because she had no jurisdiction in the matter; because they were both college kids, she would've needed the dean's approval to do anything. Contrast this with Davis's assessment of why Lori never asked for help: "Lori is a strong, ambitious professional. Being a victim is a sign of weakness, so she chose to ignore her fears." Society had failed Lori, and the law and Eric's educational institution had failed Eric, but Eric was allowed to be angry at this failure, perhaps all the more so because he was male. Meanwhile, Lori was kidnapped from her home—in which her stalker had installed a trap door under a rug—and then she was duct-taped to a spin bike and doused with gasoline before being saved at the last moment.
It's just more women-in-peril tripe. Stalker seems to think that as long as it addresses the fact that stalking can affect men, it can evade exploitation claims on the grounds of giving "equal time" to both genders. But the pilot failed to realize that merely victimizing both and women doesn't make the representations of those victimizations equal, and that makes all the difference. Of course, it also doesn't help that by episode's end, Perry appeared to have turned his stalking focus to Davis instead of Eric, continuing the episode's cycle of women in danger.
There are people out there who will like Stalker (I honestly would not be surprised if the show becomes a hit for CBS and Warner Bros. TV), or who will dismiss negative reviews of the show as being out of touch (Stalker has an embarrassingly low rating on Metacritic). There are people out there will say that Stalker's detractors should sit back and enjoy it, because it's just a TV show. But when the show's creator insists Stalker is, in part, intended to raise awareness about stalking—and the pilot's speech about stalking statistics was clearly intended to serve, in part, as a crash course in stalking from a crime-fighting perspective—saying "it's just a TV show" is somewhat disingenuous, because it has goals that extend just beyond entertainment. And if the show's idea of "entertainment" is a woman being trapped in a burning SUV as it rolls down a hill, crashes into a utility pole, and then—after a moment's reprieve in which it appears that she might be able to escape—explodes with her in it while her attacker tilts his head in fascination at the fiery wreck, then it's not successful in either of its endeavors. After watching the pilot, I felt neither more aware of stalking nor remotely entertained.
If you did like the show, that's fine; we can and should discuss our differing opinions. Mine is pretty straightforward: Stalker isn't a show I want to watch. It doesn't display any self-awareness of its nature (indeed, it thinks it's something it's not), and it doesn't offer any interesting commentary on stalking as a crime. The pilot hinted that Stalker wants to explore stalking through both Davis and Larsen, but I find it difficult to take that notion seriously because Larsen (who is expected to talk to potentially traumatized stalking victims) and most everything else in the pilot was so tired, cliched, and generally awful. If Stalker evolves into a more nuanced study of stalking as a crime, then I'll be keen to give it another chance, but that's not what Stalker is at the outset, and based on the pilot's confidence in what the show is already doing, it isn't worth watching.
What did you think of Stalker's series premiere? Based on the pilot, do you think the show is better or worse than I made it out to be in the preview I posted earlier this week? Will you be back for Episode 2?
