ABC’s mobster mom story full of shortcomings
Do you have to believe everything happening in a TV show to like it? How about just a couple of things?
Anything?
“Red Widow” staggers into an already listless mid-season Sunday on ABC (9 p.m.) with a premise borrowed from Dutch TV, a second-tier cast and consistently unconvincing writing throughout.
Based on a Dutch drama called “Penoza,” by Pieter Bart Korthuis and Diederik van Rooijen, “Red Widow” is about a young homemaker whose family is part of the Russian mob. Her husband gets killed, and she has to become a mobster to keep a drug kingpin from killing the rest of the family, including her three children.
That’s about it.
It takes two hours to lay all this out and about a minute to get that it’s a snooze-fest.
The concept could have worked if attention had been paid by writer Melissa Rosenberg (“Dexter”) to making the characters believable, especially Marta Walraven (Radha Mitchell, “Finding Neverland”), the red widow.
To paraphrase “The Sound of Music,” how do you solve a problem like Marta? One minute, she’s a Marin County mom, turning a blind eye to the family business. The next she’s dressed like a truck stop hooker ready to bed a hapless sap so she can surreptitiously receive a “delivery” that may or may not appease the drug lord, Christian Schiller (Goran Visnjic, “E.R.”).
One telling moment occurs when Marta asks Schiller why he wants her to do the job for him instead of her brother’s best friend, Mike Tomlin (Lee Tergesen), who is actually part of the family business.
“You seem to be far more capable,” Schiller answers.
This kind of writing is so bad is because it’s convenient and not at all credible. Why would Schiller think a stay-at-home mom is going to be “more capable” of pulling off a drug delivery when the most she’s probably ever delivered are her three kids to private school?
But of course, it’s all about advancing the plot. We have to make her the “Red Widow,” and that means not only bending and twisting her character like a blob of Silly Putty, but trying to sell it to viewers through equally unbelievable dialogue by other characters. Now, if Schiller had said something along the lines of, say, “You have more to gain if you pull this off for me. And much more to lose if you don’t,” we might have bought it, or at least tried it on a few times. But don’t tell us she’s “capable” when there is no empirical evidence to that fact.
You’d think that, over two hours, Rosenberg could have built the character to the point where we’d believe this other side of her, but she treats Marta’s conversion as a Lifestyle Lift. And it just sags.