Notorious is guilty of being fun!

8 Nov

Much earlier than usual, I am able to declare my guilty pleasure show for the fall 2016 season- Notorious. I’ll be honest, I basically only watch my genre (superheroes/supernatural/fantasy) shows these days. I’ve stopped watching all my dramas or cop shows in the last few years since working at the prison- I’m tired when I get home and the comic book heroes don’t require a ton of thinking on my part. Bonus- they are better popcorn for the mind! So it’s weird to say that a show about a news program and a couple of lawyers is now something I look forward to.

First of all, I have to be honest- I only agreed to give the show a chance because one of the main cast is J. August Richards. And well… he’s fabulous. Now that’s out of the way- until recent episodes he has not been in enough of the show. More Bradley! More pizzazzy suits! More more more! But as much as I enjoy Richards, he’s not enough to keep me coming back.

So how did this show make the cut as my guilty pleasure (with absolutely no guilt, by the way)?

Simply put the show caught me with the opening scene in the pilot. The energy of the scene- dialogue moving quickly from character to character, the movement of the actors from one space to another made sense and was like watching a choreographed dance. And there were the characters themselves. The scene introduced most of the main characters in such a way that the audience is forced to want to know more about them. I’m still waiting for backstory on Jake and Julia, but in a recent episode we finally got some history on Jake and Bradley.

It was intriguing.

A look behind the scenes at a news show as news happens and how it gets presented. Now, I have my personal views about media and the “shock” stories that are put out (remember where I work) but in fiction – it is damn entertaining to see the producer get information and decide how it is handled. And to see how those decisions effect the characters… I recent episode had Julia, the producer, decide to run a story about a man being beheaded by an ISIS-like group. She had been asked not to run it by the star of her show, Louise (Kate Jennings Grant), but she choice to run it for the ratings. And Louise, besides being blindsided by the decision, has to explain to Julia the personal impact the story has for her- she’d lost a boyfriend in a similar matter years before when she was an embedded journalist. Quite the wake up for Julia- and very humanizing for a character who up until that moment has appeared to only be a shallow playgirl.

Piper Perabo and Daniel Sunjato play Julia and Jake with a chemistry that makes the audience almost desperate to find out more about them. Which, by the way, I’m still waiting for solid backstory. They keep teasing me. The “second stringers”, Ella (Aimee Teegarden), Ryan (Ryan Guzman), and Megan (Sepideh Moafi), keep the main characters going. Seriously, if anyone of them was absent from their jobs for a day, I’m pretty sure Jake & Julia would curl up on the floor and cry. And they are such fun- Ryan and Ella had brilliant chemistry and rocked it, even giving me character backstory! And Megan… I need to know more about her past work. But even the tidbits she’s dropped have made me giddy. Formerly a prostitute? But how did she get to this position on a news show? HOW? What is the path from A to B??? I need to know.

The first several episodes follow an arc about Oscar, one of Jake’s clients, and the murder of his wife. But the less said about that slimy Oscar, the better. It was a solid arc, though.

Anyways… I have to go watch the season again on my DVR because I need to find the clues I missed…