NBC’s ‘Crisis’ takes on hostage formula
Hostage dramas should be among the easiest television shows to create. After all, it stands to reason that as long as one or several characters are held captive, you have a good chance at a captive audience as well.
Maybe because the formula looks so easy on the surface and because it’s such a staple of film and TV, there’s often a temptation to gussy it up one way or another – that’s what CBS has done with the limited series “Hostages,” for example. The problem is, the more stuff you add to the formula, the more you’re in danger of giving that captive audience reason to escape.
Creator Rand Ravich avoids some of those traps, but not all of them, in the first two episodes of his new thriller “Crisis,” premiering Sunday on NBC. Clichés abound, but “Crisis” is moderately entertaining thanks of well-paced direction, some competent character development, and the presence of Gillian Anderson in the pivotal role as a take-no-prisoners corporate CEO.
A class trip for private school students in suburban Washington, DC, turns to mayhem when their bus is ambushed on a remote country road, a Secret Service agent is wounded and most of the kids are spirited away by masked bad guys. The reason rookie agent Marcus Finley (Lance Gross) and veteran Agent Hurst (Wyatt Andrews) are trailing the bus is that it’s packed with the children of D.C’s rich, famous and powerful, including Kyle Devore (Adam Scott Miller), the president’s son.
In the chaos of the ambush, Finley manages to get away with one of the students, chubby, brainy outcast Anton Roth (Joshua Erenberg), while the rest of the class and parent chaperone Francis Gibson (Dermot Mulroney), a former CIA analyst, are taken away, knocked out and wake up in a large room in an empty mansion.
Gibson was never rich or powerful, even before his career as a CIA analyst blew up. But his daughter, Beth Ann (Stevie Lynn Jones), is a scholarship student at the school and he says he’s volunteered to chaperone the trip in order to spend some time with her to repair their relationship.
In spite of its shaky construction, “Crisis” gets our attention, at least in the first two episodes. The action is so quick, you probably won’t notice the fragility of the overly-complicated premise.